Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so Bernie, you’re one of the well-known people in the expat community of Moscow and Russia from the mid ‘90s. There’s lots of things that I want to talk to you about of your various business interests and experiences there. But let’s start with just if you could give me sort of a brief personal background, and how you got interested in Russia, and what led you there to begin with.
Bernard Sucher: My grandmothers, their voices are in my head as I think about answering your question, because they both left Europe because of the Russians. They feared Russia. They were run out of their homes because of two wars, the First War and World War II.
Daniel Satinsky: And where were their homes, Bernie? Which countries?
Bernard Sucher: My father’s mother was living in what is now Western Ukraine, south of Lviv, a Jew. When the Cossacks came through there was one notably successful Russian general in the Czar’s service. I believe his name was Brusilov, and he had two invasions that went through the Jewish lands of Western Ukraine. And I remember my Jewish grandmother saying, “Oy, Bernard, what they used to do to the Jews in Russia.” But she told me of fleeing with her sisters in the snow from Cossacks. And they kept running, and they ran all the way to Detroit, Michigan.
And my mother’s mother was a Karelian Finn, so when the Red Army invaded Finland in late 1939 as part of Stalin’s understanding with Hitler about zones of influence, my Finnish family was in harm’s way. Unlike my Jewish grandmother, my Finnish grandmother, if we are to believe the stories, she did not run. She fought with a rifle. And she was proud of saying that as a sniper she had killed five Russian officers.
I don’t know whether these stories are true, but to my child’s mind they were very real stories, somewhat inspirational, and so I was thinking very much about the Soviet Union, Russia, in the 1960s as a little kid. And as I got closer to university, I just knew that I was going to be a soldier or a spy, and I was going to study Russian to know my enemy. So when I entered the University of Michigan in 1978 I did enroll in a Russian language program, and I did enroll in different forms of Soviet studies, and that’s what I thought I was going to do. That’s the deeper background.
Daniel Satinsky: And after you left University of Michigan, where did you go from there? Because you’re still in the early, mid ‘80s, right?
Bernard Sucher: Well, my story is a little different. In my sophomore year, first semester of my sophomore year, which was autumn of 1979, after well over a decade of what seemed to me to be a fatal curve of U.S. decline, background of everything that’s going on inside the country, Vietnam War, Soviet influence all over Africa, Central America, at that moment in time the United States supported ally, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown, and “Death to America” became not just something we’d see on our TV screens or read about in the
New York Times, but Death to America came to the campus of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean, like literally we had what seemed to be hundreds of Iranian students or their sympathizers gathering in the famous University of Michigan Diag in front of the undergraduate library, on the steps, holding up signs, chanting through bullhorns, shaking their fists, “Death to America.” And I just thought that was outrageous.
And in part as a reaction to that, the fact that we weren’t apparently going to fight back, I quit school in the middle of my sophomore year. I bought a backpack, and I did something that I never contemplated doing. That was I flew, a one-way ticket to Johannesburg, and started basically a backpacking trip that took me around the world.
Part of the trip, which I wasn’t sure I was going to do because I was also very interested in getting involved as a fighter against communism in Africa, but one of the plans I made as an alternative scenario was to go to the Soviet Union. And it was pretty cool. I was on my way to New York City. I met a man at a place called Anniversary Tours, and I left him $3,000 in cash. Anniversary Tours was an authorized representative of Soviet Intourist. And this man was meant to craft an individualized tour of the Soviet Union for me using this cash. And after leaving him an envelope of 30% of all of the cash I had in the world, I flew to Johannesburg.
Some months later I was actually in Kenya. I got a telegram at the Kenya General Post Office — Nairobi General Post Office — with the word that this gentleman had actually delivered, and that if I showed up at the Port of Athens Piraeus in late May I could go to the Soviet Union. They had a full month trip laid on, which would start with a boat ride from Piraeus to Odessa, and from Odessa I’d fly to Moscow, I would join a tour group that would cover Central Asia, places like Dushanbe and Samarkand. Then after a visit to Leningrad, back to Moscow, I would go on the Trans-Siberian train all the way from Moscow to Nakhodka.
In fact, I made that trip. I made it in late May for a month just before the 1980s Moscow Olympics. I was one of very few Americans in the country. We were asked not to be in the country by the U.S. government, but I wasn’t listening to anybody about much of anything then, and I went and had my first experience in Russia at that time.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And what followed that?
Bernard Sucher: I was surprised and really confused by what I saw in Russia. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but this was the Soviet Union at the height of its power. There was the Soviet army in Afghanistan. The Russians, as mentioned earlier, their influence was felt in Central America, all over Africa. They were hosting the Olympics. They had shined up Moscow to a blinding gleam. So, I just couldn’t understand how this incredibly powerful country that was on such a roll just couldn’t feed itself properly. I was a one-man army marching on my stomach, and I couldn’t get a decent meal with my hard currency, with this special tour that had been laid on for me and managed by the government itself, except of course in Tbilisi. My two or three days in Tbilisi were a wonderful respite from scarcity. The food I remember was very good in Tbilisi in June 1980.
And the interactions that I had with people were…I mean, people seemed to be almost pathetically curious about me, intensely interested in what was going on in the world outside, how was it even that I, as like a — I had long, sunburned blonde hair back then, and my blue jeans and t-shirt and a backpack. And people were like, what are you doing here? Like who are you? How could you get here? And these interactions were almost always friendly. As I said, the thing that struck me was people’s almost pathetic curiosity about everything that I guess I represented. I had a yellow plastic Sony — what were those things called? You know, before we had cell phones we had cassette players.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, you had a Sony Walkman.
Bernard Sucher: It was a Walkman, thank you. Sorry.
You know, like what is that? How could I have something so small that played music so well? And these interactions disarmed me, and the fact that people’s lives seemed to be so hard and so crimped, really constrained. I mean, I understood that on a theoretical level because of course that’s how I grew up and that’s what I was studying. And the actual contacts with human beings were really nice and apparently taking some risk even to talk to me. It confused me. In short, I said if I can’t get a — how dangerous can a country be if it struggles to feed itself, and the people here are so genuinely interested in a conversation with some 19-year-old — well, I turned 20, actually, in Moscow on that trip. How dangerous can it be? What am I missing here in this picture?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Bernard Sucher: I left the Soviet Union after taking the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Nakhodka, which was an unbelievable adventure of, I believe, nine nights and ten days. And I had trouble at the border getting out. They tried to take all of my cool stuff, like my music and my diaries that… So, it was a little bit of a dramatic ending. But I took the Soviet ferry from Nakhodka down to Yokohama, and I was already thinking that maybe this soldier stuff is just not appropriate for the threat that we’re facing, maybe I’ve got to rethink this.
And that was really tough for me because, you know, if you’ve ever had a kind of north star guiding you in your life, it’s wonderfully…it has a wonderful influence on you. It’s an organizing principle. Everything else slots in around that north star. Suddenly I didn’t have a north star. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So, I carried on studying Russian, but I ended up with a business degree. And with that business degree and another trip abroad after I graduated, this time to Eastern Europe, saw kind of the other side, the Soviet empire occupying Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, places that did not want the Soviet Union there. A very interesting counterpoint to what I had experienced in 1980. So still confused.
In 1984 I moved to New York and really stumbled unwittingly, with no ambition or real understanding whatsoever of what Wall Street was, I started working on Wall Street in 1984. And while Wall Street became my life, I still started every day thinking about what was going on in the Soviet Union. I would read first the
New York Times or the
Wall Street Journal. I’d look for articles about Russia and the Soviet Union before moving on to my real work. And this was also a time where we had quite a number of mostly Russian Jewish emigres or Ukrainian Jewish emigres working as taxi drivers in New York City, so I could practice, every couple of days, a little bit of taxicab Russian.
And when the Soviet Union entered its final phase after the fall of the Berlin Wall I was at Goldman Sachs, and I was at Goldman Sachs in London, and in Tokyo, and this idea had just gotten into my head that the greatest miracle of our time was happening. The people of the Soviet Union were largely, in a peaceful way, overthrowing their government. Like how was this happening? I’ve got to know more. I want to be part of it.
And a friend of mine, Robert Langer, got an offer he couldn’t refuse from the former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, who was then a senior partner at Chadbourne & Parke, the law firm. Edmund Muskie had agreed with Soyuz Advokatov, the union of Soviet lawyers, to set up a joint venture law firm in Moscow. And Edmund Muskie asked young Robert Langer, who had studied with me in my very first day at University of Michigan and then gone on to Tulane to study Soviet law, of all things, the senator, Secretary of State, asked Robert to go to Moscow and head up the Chadbourne end of this venture.
Robert had come through London on his way to Moscow, and we went out at a pub near my home in Hampstead in North London, and I remember thinking while I’m talking to Robert, who was going the next morning by plane, I think via Helsinki to Moscow, if this was like a hundred years ago he’d be taking a coach down to a ship in Portsmouth or something like that and getting on that ship, and sailing over the horizon, and I might not ever see him again. And I was thinking, you know, if this was a hundred years ago, I’d want to be on that ship with Robert the next morning. Like that’s all I could think about. He’s going to do something really important, and all I’m doing is going to work tomorrow to make some more money.
And at the end of 1992 I went to my bosses in Goldman Sachs, and I begged them to let me go to Moscow to open an office for Goldman Sachs. Of course, later Goldman Sachs did open an office and did very well in Moscow, but they said no to me then. And after I got paid a bonus, I resigned. Actually, I resigned before the bonus, and to their credit they paid me anyway, very well. And I went there to learn. So, my second…yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: 1992 was when you went?
Bernard Sucher: Yeah. I forgot an important point. Robert came through London. I believe that was at the beginning of 1991. And I went to visit him. I went to visit him —
Daniel Satinsky: In Moscow?
Bernard Sucher: In Moscow just before the coup against Gorbachev. So, I had gotten a second view of the Soviet Union after my 1980 experience, and that was in August of 1991. I think it was a week and a half before the coup against Gorbachev. So, to get the dates right again, Robert came through London, that was actually the late autumn of 1990, and at some point, after that he fell in love with a local girl, and they were getting married in the summer of 1991. I couldn’t make the wedding, but I came over for a long weekend just to see them anyway. And I saw how much it had already changed in Moscow in the 11 years that I had been absent. And I was just like wow, the world is changing, and it’s going to be better, and I need to be part of this.
Daniel Satinsky: And that’s what then led to your resignation and moving there. And as you were moving there — so you knew Robert, but what did you have in mind in moving there? What did you think you were going to do when you moved there?
Bernard Sucher: It’s a very good question. I think a lot of people who did leave the United States or other Western countries and went to Russia, I think a lot of them went for economic opportunity. They could see that there was great economic opportunity. I mean, I was working at the most exalted financial institution on the planet, and economic opportunity was just staying in my chair and doing exactly what I was doing.
I know it sounds incredibly naïve, but I wanted to find some way of helping. It was clear that this transition was going to be nightmarish for most people. It was clear that nothing like this had actually ever happened before, so there wasn’t even really an intellectual framework for how do you handle a transition. It’s a revolution from an autocratic, centralized, ideological nation-state — of course it wasn’t a nation-state, it was an empire, but I didn’t quite get that yet. I wasn’t…nobody had written a book for how do you go from that to something approximating a normal country, a country with an open economy, a country with a government that was in some way possibly enabling individuals to adapt to completely different circumstances in a rapidly globalizing world. So I just had this general notion that I would find some way of being helpful, that the need would be infinite, but I would play my small part and be useful.
Daniel Satinsky: So, what was your first, then — so you moved to Moscow — what was your first sort of activity, let’s say? I know that you — and we’ve talked previously, and I know that you founded a number of businesses to fill market niches that you recognized and for services that didn’t exist in the country at the time you arrived there. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about a couple of those early things that you did.
Bernard Sucher: Yeah, I mean, initially I didn’t have a specific idea. I used to laugh when people asked me what are you going to do. I said well, you know, I like my Guinness. If there’s not a bar where I can get a decent Guinness, then maybe that will be my first business idea, I’ll open a bar. And I meet Robert and Katya Langer at Sheremetyevo, and we’re driving in to central Moscow where they lived, actually, in this prestigious former Soviet nomenklatura
* building in central Moscow. They were actually neighbors of Khrushchev. Nikita Khrushchev’s son lived literally in the same landing. And the first thing we were talking about is like, you know, what are we going to do tonight. And I joked about my love of beer, and they said ah, two new Irish pubs have opened this year. And I was like, well, there goes that business idea, somebody’s already on it.
But I did enjoy those pubs. In fact, I was in a place called Rosie O’Grady’s almost every night throwing darts, drinking Guinness until very late, until they closed us most nights, which was about 2:00 in the morning. And 2:00 in the morning not always wanting to go back to the Langers’ place and find my spot on the floor where I was sleeping, we looked for food. And there was no food available in Moscow at that time in the morning. And very quickly I got it in my head that we needed a 24/7 restaurant in Moscow for people like me, and to me that meant a diner. And so in the first weeks of being in Moscow I was already thinking about what became the Starlight Diner. Later, after actually starting other businesses, I ended up joining with a…finding a group of guys to get together who actually knew how to build a restaurant. In short, gave them the idea, I financed it, and we did eventually have a Starlight Diner, and then some. So that was the first idea.
But the first business, actually, was quite different. I had been introduced via a Wall Street relationship to a local doctor named Maxim Osipov. And Maxim’s childhood friend, who emigrated, had gone on to work for a famous hedge fund in New York City, met with me before I left Goldman Sachs, hearing that I was actually quitting the firm and going to Russia, and he said to me you’re going to meet a lot of people, but if you meet this one individual who’s my childhood friend, I promise you you will find in him a character that you can trust, and a person who will be helpful to you. A lot of people will not have your best interests at heart, but I pledge to you that my friend Maxim will always look after you.
So, with that very powerful recommendation, in my first few days in Moscow I dialed the phone number that I had written on this piece of paper and introduced myself to Maxim Osipov. We met, actually, the first time at a café in the Patriarchs Pond area in central Moscow. And I’m bringing that up because for people who were in Moscow in those days, they’ll remember that there was a place called Cafe Aist
*. And Cafe Aist, in those days, was run by a Caucasian Mafia. I didn’t know that when I suggested to Maxim Osipov that we meet there, but it was obvious in short order that we were sitting in a place with a lot of guys with guns. And I believe it was three days later that the café was machine gunned and bombed, and that was —