#Media
Internews
Paul Greenberg is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller Four Fish and, most recently, A Third Term. A regular contributor to the Times, Mr. Greenberg graduated from Brown University with a degree in Soviet Studies and spent his twenties directing media training and production programs in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia for the nonprofit Internews. He currently teaches in New York University’s Animal Studies graduate program and lives at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where he produces (to his knowledge) the only wine grown south of 14th Street.
Internews
Paul Greenberg is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller Four Fish and, most recently, A Third Term. A regular contributor to the Times, Mr. Greenberg graduated from Brown University with a degree in Soviet Studies and spent his twenties directing media training and production programs in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia for the nonprofit Internews. He currently teaches in New York University’s Animal Studies graduate program and lives at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where he produces (to his knowledge) the only wine grown south of 14th Street.
Daniel Satinsky: So, I would be interested in, as I understand it, you were heavily involved with the Internews training of journalists and construction of this network so independent journalists and… So, I’d be interested in talking to you about that. How you got interested in Russia, how you got pulled into it, and then your experience in that period.
Paul Greenberg: Okay, sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Does that work for you?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Fire away.
Daniel Satinsky: First of all, how did you get started? How did you get interested in Russia? Is it a family connection or…?
Paul Greenberg: No. I mean, very much like you, my family is from the Pale of Settlement, from that turn of the century emigration, so three-quarters of my family are from Russia — from Ukraine and Poland and that whole area. So, there’s that, but as your family probably indicated, Russia was more a place to run from than it was a place to run to, and —
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: And I’m sure you got a lot of guff from people in your family — why would you want to go back there?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, my mother called me, when I was going the first time in 1984, she called me up and she said, “Don’t get brainwashed.”
Paul Greenberg: That’s right. Well, I always think of — I have a good friend named Debra Javeline, who you might want to talk to, too. She’s at Notre Dame. She’s a Russian person, I mean, she’s a Russian studies person that I was with at Brown. But her grandfather, when she told her grandfather — she asked her grandfather why did you leave Russia, and he said, “‘Cause they was killing everyone.”
Daniel Satinsky: One of the people I interviewed told me that his grandfather said if you go to Russia, I’ll never talk to you again. He went, and then the grandfather never talked to him again.
Paul Greenberg: Oh, interesting. Hm.
Daniel Satinsky: So strong feelings.
Paul Greenberg: Strong feelings, yeah. So, nobody gave me that sort of degree of admonition. I went to Brown University. I matriculated in 1985. My university career more or less overlapped with Gorbachev. And so, you know, it was kind of an exciting time to look at Russia. And what was interesting is that at Brown the Russian Studies department just wasn’t really ready for Russia to get big. It was this usually — I don’t know if you’ve ever read the novel “Pnin” by Nabokov, but Pnin — have you read the novel?
Daniel Satinsky: No, not that one, no.
Paul Greenberg: It’s just about a Russian studies professor at an obscure college and how the Russian studies department is contained within the German studies department, and he has a little tiny corner desk while the German has the giant huge desk. So that was kind of the nature of the Russian studies department, or the Soviet studies department at Brown. But I started studying it because a friend of my brother’s had gone to the Norwich Russian immersion program and found it kind of exciting and interesting.
And also, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was about as Republican as you could get, and there was a certain kind of anti-hegemonic thing about studying Russia that appealed to me, I think, at the time. So, I did that. And then also at a certain point just momentum hit. It turned out that Russian studies was kind of a dud major at Brown, and there were many other things I wanted to do at college, so…but before I knew it, I had half the credits I needed to get the major, so I just sort of stuck with it.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were studying Russian language as well?
Paul Greenberg: I was studying Russian language, but there was an intensive track that was taught by a very famous teacher named Barbara Monahan, who was also colloquially known as babushka*. But I didn’t take that. I just took the regular easy Russian, so I never did any serious Russian immersion. And then I decided, I’d always had a pretty strong interest in environmental studies, so I ended up writing — I didn’t have to do this—but I ended up doing an honors thesis on the Soviet environmental policy.
And again, my Russian was…I didn’t have very good reading Russian, so I depended mostly on the Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Brown had a good archive of that. And I did an undergraduate thesis that was called — I think it was called “Efficiency Planning and the Soviet Environment.” It was sort of about how the Soviet bureaucracy was trying to kind of hide behind environmental rules, or environmental awareness as a way of cutting bureaucratic fat. And it wasn’t that great a thesis, but that’s what I did.
So, when I graduated, I never had done — at the time you might remember that the only way to get to Russia, the Soviet Union, as a student, there was the CIEE program. And I never applied to that, but by the time 1990 came around when I graduated, things were really opening up quite a bit, so there were a lot of different programs that started appearing. And I applied, I paid for a program to go to Leningrad for a few months to ostensibly study the Soviet environment, but what I really did is I brought a camera along with me, a Hi-8 camera, and interviewed different environmentalists with the idea of doing an independent documentary about the Soviet environmental movement.
So, I interviewed a lot of people. There was a big issue going on about building a dam across the Finnish gulf, which I think eventually got built.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. You know, I just spoke to Liz Hasse this morning, who also mentioned the same dam.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And it was, you know, my colleague Moira McDonald, who you might also want to talk to at the Walton Foundation, she and I were both at Brown at the same time, and we both were kind of fascinated with the idea of the way that the environmental movement got used as a way of expressing dissent and also ethnic specificity, let’s say. Because the Baltic states, the early independence movement there circled around ecological movements.
So, in Leningrad — I can’t remember the name of the guy right now—but there was a guy who led a little bit of a protest group about the dam, and I got to know him a bit. There were other academics there that I met. And I was sort of within like what was some sort of like geophysical department within LGU* at the time. So, I did that for a few months and then I came home. And then I was invited again to the Soviet Union, this time by something funny — and this will ring a bell with you — this thing called the Cooperation Project. I mean, it will ring a bell, just the zeitgeist of it all.
It was just an American woman who had fallen in love with a Russian man, and they got a project together. And the idea was to make a documentary about Lake Baikal and the pulp mills that were going up along Lake Baikal. So, I was invited along as one of the cameramen. There were two camera people brought. And we went to Lake Baikal, and we spent a month on Lake Baikal, mostly on a boat, filming different communities about what was going on there. And we actually got caught in the ’91 coup, and we were really terrified, and we thought that we were going to basically never be allowed to leave the country.
Daniel Satinsky: What do you mean caught? You were there while it went on?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. We were in Siberia near Irkutsk when it happened, so we were actually talking about kind of escaping through Mongolia at the time. Because remember when the GKChP* took power, for a few days it was true that all the regular scheduled programming went off the air, there was a lot of Swan Lake, and you saw those old drunken men on camera talking about bring the old days back, etc., etc. But within a few days the coup was over, and we went to Leningrad, and that was sort of what seemed like the big opening, and everything was going to be great from then on. And then a little bit—sorry if I’m going on a little long on the introduction.
Daniel Satinsky: No, no. Long is fine. Did this film get made?
Paul Greenberg: Oh, we had hours and hours and hours of footage, and it never came to anything. And if you want, I can put you in touch with the woman who was sort of responsible for trying to get it edited is an old friend of mine named Rebecca Dreyfus, and she’s in New York. She probably still has the footage. But I remember it was this, you know, it was a very Russian concept because the director, in that very sort of Russian artist way, he wasn’t making a documentary, he wasn’t making a feature film, it was something entirely new.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s so Russian, yes.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. But there was something interesting about it. One thing that was interesting is that the motif—do you know the song, “Slavnoe More, Svyashenniy Baikal?”* It’s like [sings].
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay.
Paul Greenberg: And it’s like a soft shoe national anthem of Russian nationalism. But it focuses on Baikal. So, we would have these random choruses singing the song in different parts around Lake Baikal. So, it could have been interesting if we hadn’t been so sort of scattershot. So anyway, the film never really came to light.
And I was sort of in my 20s and at loose ends. And then I was hired by Whittle Communications. You might recall in the early ‘90s there was this effort called Channel 1, which was this idea of getting TV into classrooms. This was pre internet. And we were doing a series of international high school assemblies where we would link — and this is where the Space Bridge comes in — we would link an American high school with a different high school in another county. And the pilot one was with Russia. And this is how I met Evelyn. Internews was kind of the producing partner on it on the Russian side, and I was hired to be just kind of a production assistant on that project. And I think Tom Brokaw hosted it, and it was a big success for Whittle. The program was called “Sharing Freedom.”
And we’d have these audiences of high school kids in the audience, and then we’d select a few of them to be the sort of communicators in the group. And we connected with the high school in Russia — it was a special English school, obviously, because the Americans weren’t going to find any Americans who spoke Russian. Which in a way really laid the groundwork for the ongoing miscommunication between Russians and Americans in that there was never really a good faith effort to meet the Russians in their own language. So anyway, so we did that. That show went pretty well.
And then eventually Evelyn and Internews circled back to me about a year later because they had started this training program in Russia. They’d done one series of seminars. They got a huge amount of money from USAID, huge money at the time. My predecessor, Molly Allen, had been hired away to produce a feature film, and so they needed somebody to take over the program, and gave me very little lead time. I think I got the “email,” because remember email was new, in early September for a project that I had to launch for November.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa. And what year was this?
Paul Greenberg: This was 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: ’92. Yeah, okay.
Paul Greenberg: So very quickly, like I was 26 years old — 25 years old, I think. I was young or felt young anyway. I guess nowadays people get going quicker. But I remember David Hoffman— I don’t know if you’ve — have you interviewed David?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes, I have.
Paul Greenberg: So, David sort of dumped his Rolodex on my desk and said here, call these people, you can hire them to be trainers. And my mission was to find three trainers from America who we’d bring over, and then my colleague Manana Aslamazyan would sort of handle all the Russian logistics, and I would bring my crew over, and then we’d do this whole thing.
So, the first person I called was actually Sandy Socolow, who was Walter Cronkite’s producer at CBS News. And Sandy had recently retired, and I called and left a message. And he immediately called me back because he thought I was another Paul Greenberg. There’s a Paul Greenberg at the Arkansas Press Democrat who’s a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist. He thought I was he. And I said no, I’m this Paul Greenberg. And he’s like, what? And I said well, I wanted to take you to the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, I thought maybe you’d want to come, but anyway, don’t — forget it. He said no-no-no, wait a second, stay on the line, I’ll go.
So, Sandy agreed to go. And then I hired a few other people. I hired a couple of journalists, and I hired a cameraman editor to come. And then we went to these three cities in the former Soviet Union. We went to Kyiv, we went to Volgograd, and we went to Samara, formerly Kuybyshev. But it was very slipshod and difficult. At the time there was no jet fuel, so our flights kept getting canceled. And so, we often ended up —
Daniel Satinsky: From the U.S.?
Paul Greenberg: No, no, the U.S. was fine. It was the internal air flight that kept getting canceled.
Paul Greenberg: So, we did our first seminar in Kyiv, and then we couldn’t fly from Kyiv to Moscow to get to Volgograd, so we ended up taking—we bribed an Intourist bus that was just a local tour bus to drive all the way to Moscow on this shitty road. And I remember we—I said to Manana and my colleagues what are we going to do when we get to the border? She says there’s no border, it’s Ukraine and Russia, that’s one country. And like I think there’s a border.
And we got to the border, and the border was a GAI* post that in normal times would have just been like a highway post, but it was the border now. And we got to the border. I always remember the people at the border were like what do we do? Nobody knew what to do. And then Manana said how about we make coffee. And we had a nice coffee machine and nice coffee, and we went in the GAI post and we just made coffee, and that was the border crossing.
Daniel Satinsky: And that was the border crossing.
Paul Greenberg: So anyway, so that was that. And it happened again. The flights kept getting canceled. The other funny thing that happened was that when we went from Volgograd to Samara, like Manana was convinced we were going to be able to get a flight. I knew we weren’t going to. And at the last minute, of course, we couldn’t, and we ended up renting an Ikarus bus which was even shittier than the Intourist bus. It was super, super uncomfortable. It was a 12-hour drive, and we were so uncomfortable.
In the middle of the night, we were passing through…what was the name of it? It was a town in between Volgograd and Samara — Saratov. And in the distance, I saw this huge, illuminated sign that said ‘podushki’, pillows, and it was a pillow factory.
And I was like what is — and weirdly, like in that Soviet way, it was open in the night. And we rushed in, and for a few bucks Manana bought like 30 pillows, and we covered the entire Ikarus bus with pillows, and we all slept on it. And meanwhile in Samara they’re waiting for the great American journalists to arrive. And of course, they were shitty Soviet pillows, and they exploded, and we were all covered in feathers so that when the door opened to the Ikarus bus and the American journalists marched out we had literally been feathered—not tarred but feathered. And we developed that.
Daniel Satinsky: Fantastic.
Paul Greenberg: So anyway, things improved from there, like the logistics. I did a number of these kind of seminars. The original concept of the seminar was kind of based on Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov’s idea was that the center was always going to re-exert dominance over the provinces unless you empowered the provinces, and that you needed to develop an exterior network of communication that didn’t go through Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Now who is he? Who was this person?
Paul Greenberg: Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov was the son of the famous Simonov who was one of the famous Russian radio presenters during the Second World War. But Aleksei Kirillovich founded this thing called the Fond Zaschita Glasnosti*, and he was just, you know, he’s a dissident—well, not dissident, but he was a real Russian democrat of that era. And unlike I think a lot of us he could see the brewing retraction that was coming were we not to seize this moment.
Daniel Satinsky: And he was involved with Internews?
Paul Greenberg: Well, he was kind of an advisor. Manana, our administrator and who eventually became head of Internews Russia, she was Aleksei [Kirillovich] sort of No. 2 at the fund, and then David hired Manana away from—like basically he used to joke, I think, that he bought Manana from Aleksei Kirillovich for a computer, you know, a bunch of computers, I can’t remember.
But Manana clearly liked the job, and she was really the heart of the Internews Russia operation. She’s like a real Russian or Soviet intellectual. She’s Armenian by birth and by heritage, speaks Armenian. But she was the administrator of the Malaya Bronnaya Theater under, I’m forgetting, but under a very famous director [Anatoly Efros]. So, she was very artistically inclined and stuff, but also extremely capable, big talker, the kind of person who just made things, like the logistician that any Russian operation needed to happen.
So anyway, so through Manana, with her acting as the sort of fulcrum, we then launched a series of programs that were these local journalism seminars that we would do. I did several of them. We also did management seminars. We started to elaborate on them and do advertising seminars, different things like that. And they all took their different forms.
Daniel Satinsky: Who came to them? And how did you get people?
Paul Greenberg: From the Russian side?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: So, at the time there were several hundred quote/unquote “independent” television stations, and they had all appeared — and again, I’m not the most expert on this. There are a couple of people I can send you to who can give you the sort of technical background. But as far as I understood, after the fall of the Soviet Union there was liberalization of broadcast laws which suddenly allowed you to either buy time on a transmitter or even build your own transmitter. And I think that there probably was some kind of public auction of local frequencies.
So, these different stations came about through different means. Some of them started as little cable operations in apartment complexes. Like basically you could hook up your VCR to the communal antenna of a large apartment complex. You know, Russians were always, as you know, vey technically minded. They figured out a way to allow or disallow subscribers onto their network. So, the first, the truly independent television stations that I knew started as these kind of micro cable operations, and then they got enough money to go on to the next level.
But then there were these kind of quasi, you know, I think they were called RTTsP* – Regional Television Central, ...whatever broadcasting is. I can’t remember. But anyway, everyone was claiming to be independent and democratic. So sometimes you’d have a truly independently minded thing that grew out of a cable operation or maybe somebody cobbled some money together to buy a frequency or rent a frequency. But then there were these regional parts of the state broadcasting network that were kind of trying to break away, not necessarily for ideological purposes, but because everything was being privatized, and everyone was sort of reaching out for their sort of slice of the pie.
So, the person who was really under the gun was Manana Aslamazyan because she had to…she was the one choosing the participants, and contacting the stations, and getting everyone to be sent there. And the idea was to get 12 or so journalists to each seminar. And we would purposefully mix them up. So, if a cameraman and a journalist arrived from, say, Akhtubinsk, we would break them up and pair them with different people, because the idea was to get them outside of their little insular, you know —
Paul Greenberg: Okay, sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Does that work for you?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Fire away.
Daniel Satinsky: First of all, how did you get started? How did you get interested in Russia? Is it a family connection or…?
Paul Greenberg: No. I mean, very much like you, my family is from the Pale of Settlement, from that turn of the century emigration, so three-quarters of my family are from Russia — from Ukraine and Poland and that whole area. So, there’s that, but as your family probably indicated, Russia was more a place to run from than it was a place to run to, and —
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: And I’m sure you got a lot of guff from people in your family — why would you want to go back there?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, my mother called me, when I was going the first time in 1984, she called me up and she said, “Don’t get brainwashed.”
Paul Greenberg: That’s right. Well, I always think of — I have a good friend named Debra Javeline, who you might want to talk to, too. She’s at Notre Dame. She’s a Russian person, I mean, she’s a Russian studies person that I was with at Brown. But her grandfather, when she told her grandfather — she asked her grandfather why did you leave Russia, and he said, “‘Cause they was killing everyone.”
Daniel Satinsky: One of the people I interviewed told me that his grandfather said if you go to Russia, I’ll never talk to you again. He went, and then the grandfather never talked to him again.
Paul Greenberg: Oh, interesting. Hm.
Daniel Satinsky: So strong feelings.
Paul Greenberg: Strong feelings, yeah. So, nobody gave me that sort of degree of admonition. I went to Brown University. I matriculated in 1985. My university career more or less overlapped with Gorbachev. And so, you know, it was kind of an exciting time to look at Russia. And what was interesting is that at Brown the Russian Studies department just wasn’t really ready for Russia to get big. It was this usually — I don’t know if you’ve ever read the novel “Pnin” by Nabokov, but Pnin — have you read the novel?
Daniel Satinsky: No, not that one, no.
Paul Greenberg: It’s just about a Russian studies professor at an obscure college and how the Russian studies department is contained within the German studies department, and he has a little tiny corner desk while the German has the giant huge desk. So that was kind of the nature of the Russian studies department, or the Soviet studies department at Brown. But I started studying it because a friend of my brother’s had gone to the Norwich Russian immersion program and found it kind of exciting and interesting.
And also, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was about as Republican as you could get, and there was a certain kind of anti-hegemonic thing about studying Russia that appealed to me, I think, at the time. So, I did that. And then also at a certain point just momentum hit. It turned out that Russian studies was kind of a dud major at Brown, and there were many other things I wanted to do at college, so…but before I knew it, I had half the credits I needed to get the major, so I just sort of stuck with it.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were studying Russian language as well?
Paul Greenberg: I was studying Russian language, but there was an intensive track that was taught by a very famous teacher named Barbara Monahan, who was also colloquially known as babushka*. But I didn’t take that. I just took the regular easy Russian, so I never did any serious Russian immersion. And then I decided, I’d always had a pretty strong interest in environmental studies, so I ended up writing — I didn’t have to do this—but I ended up doing an honors thesis on the Soviet environmental policy.
And again, my Russian was…I didn’t have very good reading Russian, so I depended mostly on the Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Brown had a good archive of that. And I did an undergraduate thesis that was called — I think it was called “Efficiency Planning and the Soviet Environment.” It was sort of about how the Soviet bureaucracy was trying to kind of hide behind environmental rules, or environmental awareness as a way of cutting bureaucratic fat. And it wasn’t that great a thesis, but that’s what I did.
So, when I graduated, I never had done — at the time you might remember that the only way to get to Russia, the Soviet Union, as a student, there was the CIEE program. And I never applied to that, but by the time 1990 came around when I graduated, things were really opening up quite a bit, so there were a lot of different programs that started appearing. And I applied, I paid for a program to go to Leningrad for a few months to ostensibly study the Soviet environment, but what I really did is I brought a camera along with me, a Hi-8 camera, and interviewed different environmentalists with the idea of doing an independent documentary about the Soviet environmental movement.
So, I interviewed a lot of people. There was a big issue going on about building a dam across the Finnish gulf, which I think eventually got built.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. You know, I just spoke to Liz Hasse this morning, who also mentioned the same dam.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And it was, you know, my colleague Moira McDonald, who you might also want to talk to at the Walton Foundation, she and I were both at Brown at the same time, and we both were kind of fascinated with the idea of the way that the environmental movement got used as a way of expressing dissent and also ethnic specificity, let’s say. Because the Baltic states, the early independence movement there circled around ecological movements.
So, in Leningrad — I can’t remember the name of the guy right now—but there was a guy who led a little bit of a protest group about the dam, and I got to know him a bit. There were other academics there that I met. And I was sort of within like what was some sort of like geophysical department within LGU* at the time. So, I did that for a few months and then I came home. And then I was invited again to the Soviet Union, this time by something funny — and this will ring a bell with you — this thing called the Cooperation Project. I mean, it will ring a bell, just the zeitgeist of it all.
It was just an American woman who had fallen in love with a Russian man, and they got a project together. And the idea was to make a documentary about Lake Baikal and the pulp mills that were going up along Lake Baikal. So, I was invited along as one of the cameramen. There were two camera people brought. And we went to Lake Baikal, and we spent a month on Lake Baikal, mostly on a boat, filming different communities about what was going on there. And we actually got caught in the ’91 coup, and we were really terrified, and we thought that we were going to basically never be allowed to leave the country.
Daniel Satinsky: What do you mean caught? You were there while it went on?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. We were in Siberia near Irkutsk when it happened, so we were actually talking about kind of escaping through Mongolia at the time. Because remember when the GKChP* took power, for a few days it was true that all the regular scheduled programming went off the air, there was a lot of Swan Lake, and you saw those old drunken men on camera talking about bring the old days back, etc., etc. But within a few days the coup was over, and we went to Leningrad, and that was sort of what seemed like the big opening, and everything was going to be great from then on. And then a little bit—sorry if I’m going on a little long on the introduction.
Daniel Satinsky: No, no. Long is fine. Did this film get made?
Paul Greenberg: Oh, we had hours and hours and hours of footage, and it never came to anything. And if you want, I can put you in touch with the woman who was sort of responsible for trying to get it edited is an old friend of mine named Rebecca Dreyfus, and she’s in New York. She probably still has the footage. But I remember it was this, you know, it was a very Russian concept because the director, in that very sort of Russian artist way, he wasn’t making a documentary, he wasn’t making a feature film, it was something entirely new.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s so Russian, yes.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. But there was something interesting about it. One thing that was interesting is that the motif—do you know the song, “Slavnoe More, Svyashenniy Baikal?”* It’s like [sings].
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay.
Paul Greenberg: And it’s like a soft shoe national anthem of Russian nationalism. But it focuses on Baikal. So, we would have these random choruses singing the song in different parts around Lake Baikal. So, it could have been interesting if we hadn’t been so sort of scattershot. So anyway, the film never really came to light.
And I was sort of in my 20s and at loose ends. And then I was hired by Whittle Communications. You might recall in the early ‘90s there was this effort called Channel 1, which was this idea of getting TV into classrooms. This was pre internet. And we were doing a series of international high school assemblies where we would link — and this is where the Space Bridge comes in — we would link an American high school with a different high school in another county. And the pilot one was with Russia. And this is how I met Evelyn. Internews was kind of the producing partner on it on the Russian side, and I was hired to be just kind of a production assistant on that project. And I think Tom Brokaw hosted it, and it was a big success for Whittle. The program was called “Sharing Freedom.”
And we’d have these audiences of high school kids in the audience, and then we’d select a few of them to be the sort of communicators in the group. And we connected with the high school in Russia — it was a special English school, obviously, because the Americans weren’t going to find any Americans who spoke Russian. Which in a way really laid the groundwork for the ongoing miscommunication between Russians and Americans in that there was never really a good faith effort to meet the Russians in their own language. So anyway, so we did that. That show went pretty well.
And then eventually Evelyn and Internews circled back to me about a year later because they had started this training program in Russia. They’d done one series of seminars. They got a huge amount of money from USAID, huge money at the time. My predecessor, Molly Allen, had been hired away to produce a feature film, and so they needed somebody to take over the program, and gave me very little lead time. I think I got the “email,” because remember email was new, in early September for a project that I had to launch for November.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa. And what year was this?
Paul Greenberg: This was 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: ’92. Yeah, okay.
Paul Greenberg: So very quickly, like I was 26 years old — 25 years old, I think. I was young or felt young anyway. I guess nowadays people get going quicker. But I remember David Hoffman— I don’t know if you’ve — have you interviewed David?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes, I have.
Paul Greenberg: So, David sort of dumped his Rolodex on my desk and said here, call these people, you can hire them to be trainers. And my mission was to find three trainers from America who we’d bring over, and then my colleague Manana Aslamazyan would sort of handle all the Russian logistics, and I would bring my crew over, and then we’d do this whole thing.
So, the first person I called was actually Sandy Socolow, who was Walter Cronkite’s producer at CBS News. And Sandy had recently retired, and I called and left a message. And he immediately called me back because he thought I was another Paul Greenberg. There’s a Paul Greenberg at the Arkansas Press Democrat who’s a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist. He thought I was he. And I said no, I’m this Paul Greenberg. And he’s like, what? And I said well, I wanted to take you to the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, I thought maybe you’d want to come, but anyway, don’t — forget it. He said no-no-no, wait a second, stay on the line, I’ll go.
So, Sandy agreed to go. And then I hired a few other people. I hired a couple of journalists, and I hired a cameraman editor to come. And then we went to these three cities in the former Soviet Union. We went to Kyiv, we went to Volgograd, and we went to Samara, formerly Kuybyshev. But it was very slipshod and difficult. At the time there was no jet fuel, so our flights kept getting canceled. And so, we often ended up —
Daniel Satinsky: From the U.S.?
Paul Greenberg: No, no, the U.S. was fine. It was the internal air flight that kept getting canceled.
Paul Greenberg: So, we did our first seminar in Kyiv, and then we couldn’t fly from Kyiv to Moscow to get to Volgograd, so we ended up taking—we bribed an Intourist bus that was just a local tour bus to drive all the way to Moscow on this shitty road. And I remember we—I said to Manana and my colleagues what are we going to do when we get to the border? She says there’s no border, it’s Ukraine and Russia, that’s one country. And like I think there’s a border.
And we got to the border, and the border was a GAI* post that in normal times would have just been like a highway post, but it was the border now. And we got to the border. I always remember the people at the border were like what do we do? Nobody knew what to do. And then Manana said how about we make coffee. And we had a nice coffee machine and nice coffee, and we went in the GAI post and we just made coffee, and that was the border crossing.
Daniel Satinsky: And that was the border crossing.
Paul Greenberg: So anyway, so that was that. And it happened again. The flights kept getting canceled. The other funny thing that happened was that when we went from Volgograd to Samara, like Manana was convinced we were going to be able to get a flight. I knew we weren’t going to. And at the last minute, of course, we couldn’t, and we ended up renting an Ikarus bus which was even shittier than the Intourist bus. It was super, super uncomfortable. It was a 12-hour drive, and we were so uncomfortable.
In the middle of the night, we were passing through…what was the name of it? It was a town in between Volgograd and Samara — Saratov. And in the distance, I saw this huge, illuminated sign that said ‘podushki’, pillows, and it was a pillow factory.
And I was like what is — and weirdly, like in that Soviet way, it was open in the night. And we rushed in, and for a few bucks Manana bought like 30 pillows, and we covered the entire Ikarus bus with pillows, and we all slept on it. And meanwhile in Samara they’re waiting for the great American journalists to arrive. And of course, they were shitty Soviet pillows, and they exploded, and we were all covered in feathers so that when the door opened to the Ikarus bus and the American journalists marched out we had literally been feathered—not tarred but feathered. And we developed that.
Daniel Satinsky: Fantastic.
Paul Greenberg: So anyway, things improved from there, like the logistics. I did a number of these kind of seminars. The original concept of the seminar was kind of based on Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov’s idea was that the center was always going to re-exert dominance over the provinces unless you empowered the provinces, and that you needed to develop an exterior network of communication that didn’t go through Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Now who is he? Who was this person?
Paul Greenberg: Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov was the son of the famous Simonov who was one of the famous Russian radio presenters during the Second World War. But Aleksei Kirillovich founded this thing called the Fond Zaschita Glasnosti*, and he was just, you know, he’s a dissident—well, not dissident, but he was a real Russian democrat of that era. And unlike I think a lot of us he could see the brewing retraction that was coming were we not to seize this moment.
Daniel Satinsky: And he was involved with Internews?
Paul Greenberg: Well, he was kind of an advisor. Manana, our administrator and who eventually became head of Internews Russia, she was Aleksei [Kirillovich] sort of No. 2 at the fund, and then David hired Manana away from—like basically he used to joke, I think, that he bought Manana from Aleksei Kirillovich for a computer, you know, a bunch of computers, I can’t remember.
But Manana clearly liked the job, and she was really the heart of the Internews Russia operation. She’s like a real Russian or Soviet intellectual. She’s Armenian by birth and by heritage, speaks Armenian. But she was the administrator of the Malaya Bronnaya Theater under, I’m forgetting, but under a very famous director [Anatoly Efros]. So, she was very artistically inclined and stuff, but also extremely capable, big talker, the kind of person who just made things, like the logistician that any Russian operation needed to happen.
So anyway, so through Manana, with her acting as the sort of fulcrum, we then launched a series of programs that were these local journalism seminars that we would do. I did several of them. We also did management seminars. We started to elaborate on them and do advertising seminars, different things like that. And they all took their different forms.
Daniel Satinsky: Who came to them? And how did you get people?
Paul Greenberg: From the Russian side?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: So, at the time there were several hundred quote/unquote “independent” television stations, and they had all appeared — and again, I’m not the most expert on this. There are a couple of people I can send you to who can give you the sort of technical background. But as far as I understood, after the fall of the Soviet Union there was liberalization of broadcast laws which suddenly allowed you to either buy time on a transmitter or even build your own transmitter. And I think that there probably was some kind of public auction of local frequencies.
So, these different stations came about through different means. Some of them started as little cable operations in apartment complexes. Like basically you could hook up your VCR to the communal antenna of a large apartment complex. You know, Russians were always, as you know, vey technically minded. They figured out a way to allow or disallow subscribers onto their network. So, the first, the truly independent television stations that I knew started as these kind of micro cable operations, and then they got enough money to go on to the next level.
But then there were these kind of quasi, you know, I think they were called RTTsP* – Regional Television Central, ...whatever broadcasting is. I can’t remember. But anyway, everyone was claiming to be independent and democratic. So sometimes you’d have a truly independently minded thing that grew out of a cable operation or maybe somebody cobbled some money together to buy a frequency or rent a frequency. But then there were these regional parts of the state broadcasting network that were kind of trying to break away, not necessarily for ideological purposes, but because everything was being privatized, and everyone was sort of reaching out for their sort of slice of the pie.
So, the person who was really under the gun was Manana Aslamazyan because she had to…she was the one choosing the participants, and contacting the stations, and getting everyone to be sent there. And the idea was to get 12 or so journalists to each seminar. And we would purposefully mix them up. So, if a cameraman and a journalist arrived from, say, Akhtubinsk, we would break them up and pair them with different people, because the idea was to get them outside of their little insular, you know —
Daniel Satinsky: It must have been a trip with Russians who don’t like strangers.
Paul Greenberg: Exactly, yeah. And that was difficult. And then what we would do — yeah, so those would be the people that would come. And we would create a little newsroom for the week where they would have to produce — everyone would have to produce a two- or three-minute news story, and then we would put it all together into a TV show at the end of the week.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, it was a technical production, but also business training as well?
Paul Greenberg: They were of two flavors. It’s not really technical. It was really more journalistic. The idea was to really train them in the fundamentals of objective reporting. And that’s the journalistic side of things. The management seminars, those were completely different, and with the management seminars we would do a similar kind of thing where I’d bring some Americans over, but we’d bring them to Moscow. We would bring the television station managers to Moscow and then we’d do like a three- or four-day workshop on the fundamentals of local television broadcasting.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, the meta overview was to strengthen regional TV that wasn’t subsumed by Moscow.
Paul Greenberg: Right, right. And then there was this other element which my colleague Vince Malmgren really was in charge of — who you could speak to, too. But Vince was in charge of the Moscow office, and he was the one really in charge of — there was this program called Vremya Mestnoye*, and that was really the essence of it, because like remember back in the day — I don’t think they still do this — but it was like you could be anywhere. You could be in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, and you’d hear boop-boop-boop, “Moskovskoya vremya dvenadtsat chasov.”* And you’re like why do I need to know what time it is in Moscow when I’m nine time zones away?
So Vremya Mestnoye was the idea that — that was the name of the news exchange, and the idea is that we were going to emphasize local news, local perspectives. But what you ended up getting was a—so the theoretical concept, the idea was we were going to train all these stations to do local news and then they were going to do a news exchange, having been trained, and then we were going to disseminate that news exchange amongst all the TV stations.
Daniel Satinsky: I see, okay.
Paul Greenberg: So, it would be like the provincial and —
Daniel Satinsky: You were going to have content that you produced independently, reporting on all different parts of the country that various stations could use as they chose.
Paul Greenberg: Well, yeah, and the stations themselves would be producing it, in other words. So like if you were in Sverdlovsk or whatever it’s called, Yekaterinburg, you’d throw four minutes into it, and Tomsk would throw four minutes into it, and Krasnoyarsk would throw four minutes into it, and altogether you would get what I think the Russians called a kapusta* like it was just sort of a salad thrown together.
And that was part of the problem, is that the program never really had an organizing principle. But I always remember that the more liberal Muscovites that watched the show liked that, that it was kind of…even though it was imperfect, the fact that it was made independent of… I remember a Russian friend of mine described it as a little bit like a buffet—like oh, I think I’ll have some carrots, and I’ll have some beans. But at the same time there was always this very deep Muscovite prejudice against the provinces that even Manana had shared. Even though she herself was from Yerevan she had a Muscovite’s perspective on things and always found it to be… I mean, she recognized the importance of it, but she also, you know, it was like they were like children.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. What channel did this appear on?
Paul Greenberg: It would just — so literally at first the news exchange arrived cassette via train, and then we would edit it and mix it in Moscow and then send it back out to them, and then they would just put it up on their channel. They would put it up on their local channel.
Daniel Satinsky: On their local channel, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: But of course —
Daniel Satinsky: There wasn’t a national channel. There was no national network in the sense of a national channel.
Paul Greenberg: Well, so there was this thing called…that they tried to get together called NVS, and I think it was Nezavisimyi*, I think it was called NVS*. But that was the goal, was to try to get an independent network going, and that the news exchange would be the sort of first baby steps towards that. And eventually there were moves towards making the network a real network. And I believe a guy named Andrei Vdovin was the first chair of NVS.
But yeah, everywhere you went, the problem was everywhere you went everyone wanted to be the center. Every station I went to they’d be like oh, if you look at the map, Tomsk is clearly the center, and all the other [radius], if you look at the map you can read, we’re clearly the center. So, everyone was trying to be that. But they did make some progress, and there were some genuinely interesting, enlightened people that saw it as having some potential.
The biggest problem came when USAID, in their own kind of Soviet way, was trying to kind of, from the top down, impose this idea of capitalism, so how was this thing that we were doing going to be self-sustaining. And so, the way that — you know, I frankly didn’t know anything about the television business. I had taken some filmmaking courses at Brown and stuff like that, but I didn’t know anything about the weird way that TV works or worked at that time. But we eventually got involved in trying to — what we realized is that most of the TV stations, what they really needed was programming, and what they really wanted was licensed programming. But none of them could afford that.
So it turned out that there’s this whole scheme of acquiring programming where you can basically, if you have somebody who pre-sells the content — well, except, say, to use a very popular example of the time, say TV2 in Tomsk would like to show “Bay Watch,” so they can’t afford “Bay Watch,” but what they can provide is an audience of 500,000 people that would also like to watch “Bay Watch.” So, what they can do is you can buy the programming, but leave advertising holes in it so that then the dealer in Europe or America can then slap in, go and shop the programming around, say look, I’ve got 500,000 people in Tomsk who want to watch this program, do you want to sell them Snickers? So, they say of course. So, then they would go sell the Snickers, da-da-da, so it was still profitable.
It’s funny, all these old Russian pribylno*, right? There would be a few holes left for TV2 in Tomsk to put in their local advertising. And if you want to talk about this in more detail, my colleague Rebecca Dreyfus, who I went to Baikal with, but who I later brought in — or I didn’t really bring in, I said somebody could make some money off of this and she came in and did make some money off of this. She started a business. And I can’t remember what the name of the business was. But she started a business where she literally did that — brought programming in and did all that. So, you know —
Daniel Satinsky: So, AID’s goal was a self-sustaining business of independent stations. It wasn’t any particular interest in content of how the news was covered or —
Paul Greenberg: No, I disagree there. No. First and foremost it was part of a democratization initiative. And I think whether they were acting on their own internal initiative or, you know, David Hoffman was a very good salesman of the concept, and his idea, or what he had been led to believe and what he pushed in the halls of Congress was that the engine of democracy is independent media, and in particular local news. What AID really wanted was local news. They wanted people investigating, doing investigative reporting on a local level, bringing people “the truth” on a local level.
But what we quickly learned as people regularly in contact with these local TV stations was that it’s all well and good to want to do news, but if you can’t afford to run your station, then what’s the point to it? So, it was kind of trying to balance financial infrastructure with news infrastructure. I mean, just to give an example, there was this TV station in Krasnoyarsk called Afontovo. And Afontovo, we really liked the TV station manager, Sasha Karpov — he’d be a great guy to interview, actually, if you want. He’s in Spain now. Sasha, he was one of our early students. He loved the idea of doing independent news. So, he somehow got investment from the local aluminum factory, and he built up this whole extensive news team, like news team Krasnoyarsk, and it was like graphics and American style da-da-da. And meanwhile, as he’s getting his news team ready, he was putting on the air reruns of this Mexican soap opera called “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut.” Remember this one?
Daniel Satinsky: I know this one. I’ve seen it, yes.
Paul Greenberg: “The Rich Also Cry.” So “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut” was on like every day while News Center 2 Afontovo was getting ready. And then, so finally News Center 2 Afontovo was ready to launch, and they launched it, you know — “doo-doo-doo.” And the old ladies who had become addicted to “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut” stormed the television station demanding that “The Rich Also Cry” be reinstalled as soon as possible.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s our time, right?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. So, I think — by that point, remember, this is ’93/’94 so glasnost had already been going on for quite some time. You already saw a certain exhaustion with democracy and like that phrase “my ne zanimaemsya politikoi”*, you know, “nas ne interesuet politika”*. You know, like that kind of undercurrent was already there. And we’re like no-no, it’s not politics, it’s news. And they’re like news, it’s politics. So, the idea that there could be an objective news exclusive from politics really never fully took root. It was always like who’s really paying for this, why are you doing this, etc., etc.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Paul Greenberg: But, you know, to my mind the infrastructure, like the very…it was sort of like building a railroad. We cut down the trees, in a good way. Or let’s say we put the hole through the mountain to make the tunnel, we laid down a couple of rails, we drove an occasional train through that tunnel, and it kind of worked. My colleague Vince will probably say…he might not agree. But from my perspective I thought it was interesting. I thought that some progress was being made.
But I think — and this is where a certain deafness to the Russian idiom affected the program’s effectiveness. Just because I think…well, actually, I don’t know. I think we did an okay job. I tried to find Russian speaking trainers when I could, and increasingly we tried to do this effort of like training the trainers so that we could have Russians doing the work. I think given a few more years — like I always remember, when was it, in 2002, 2003 there was a huge “yubiley”* for Internews. It must have been ten years of Internews Moscow. And it was a vast venue. It was some sort of opera house or something.
But there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people there. It was like, you know, it was very, like, celebratory, like look, we’ve got 300 stations from coast to whatever, from border to border, it’s growing, it’s profitable, to some degree, it’s getting profitable. Some of the TV station managers that we knew were making real money, to the point where I remember Evelyn saying what are we still supporting these people for? They’re making more money than we are. So yeah. And then that’s when—when does Putin come in, what year?
Daniel Satinsky: In 2000.
Paul Greenberg: 2000, so this was just the beginning. It was before the screws got put on.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, what was your understanding of independent? What did independent mean?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, that’s a good question. If we’d had the resources to do a thorough audit, then we would have cast a much narrower net, I think. AID was big on numbers. Did you do any work with AID over the years?
Daniel Satinsky: No, I never did.
Paul Greenberg: You know, AID was always interested in benchmarks. And I always remember we were always saying over 300 stations. And my colleague Anthony Garrett always remembers that I used to say this thing of like “if you waved a magic wand in front of an independent journalist or touched them on the head and ‘poof,’ your’re trained.”
Like thousands of people “trained,” you know. So, there was a pressure to rack up numbers, I think, rather than kind of vet and make sure that we were getting the right people. But that said— and also there was a complicated political dance going on that Manana was doing that I wasn’t even really… Like when Manana would get on the phone and start speaking rapidly in Russian, and I knew she was talking some nonsense to some station, I was like oh, whatever. I don’t even know what’s going on, I don’t want to know. And so, there was a certain kind of local appeasement.
Like I always remember there was this guy in Samara. The station was clearly one of these RTTsPs that was part of the state system that was trying to be “independent,” but was not. And I always remember — I can’t remember. It was like…I wish I could — Nikolai Panteleevich was the head of the station, and he was like this classic Soviet bureaucrat, you know, like white hair and da-da-da. And he was so impressed with Sandy Socolow, that he had come, and he was Walter Cronkite’s producer.
And I remember we had this blowout banquet where he gave Sandy this bottle of brandy that literally was four feet tall, like it was just vast, and then Sandy shocked him by opening it and starting to pour. Because Nikolai Panteleevich had this fantasy that Sandy was going to bring this four-ton bottle back to New York and it would sit on his shelf as a — but he poured it out. Anyway, just that kind of thing. And I also remember we were there for Thanksgiving, and Manana was panicking that the Americans were going to not have turkey at their Thanksgiving, and Nikolai Panteleevich made the turkeys appear out of nowhere, and we had a whole Thanksgiving thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Part of the reason I’m asking you about this independence is that — and I think it was in Kokh’s memoirs that I was reading. I’m starting to read some of the memoirs of the reformers, and they talk about how the early oligarchs, Berezovsky and Gusinsky, used the media, their control of the media, for political means to help set the stage for their acquisition of real assets. And it would seem to me that locally there were people who were emerging in all these different regions with money, how they got it and whatever, but that the media might have been a place for them to also have a say.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, you know, it’s funny because there were different flavors, right? So Afontovo, as I told you, in Krasnoyarsk, they had the backing of a major aluminum factory, and they were always sort of in the background. And I was always trying to — you know, I was a young person myself, so I didn’t really actually even know the way the American media worked. But at a certain point in the American media there’s lots of money splashing around of various “oligarchs” if you will, controlling things. And so, to some degree I saw the role of the independent television station manager as a kind of balancing act. And then I —
Daniel Satinsky: But for this kind of thing, yeah?
Paul Greenberg: Well, you know, in an American newsroom, let’s say pre the horrible consolidation that’s happened in recent years, the idea is that there would be a business office and there would be a news office, and the idea is they wouldn’t overlap. They were kind of separate entities, and they would do their own thing because this idea of independent news was enshrined in American consciousness. And we were trying to kind of get that kind of thing going.
But because capitalism itself was…it’s not that it was new, it’s just that the borders of it were hazy, and the idea of it flowing into influencing the news department, I mean, you know, they would give lip service to that when we would talk to the station managers about that, but realistically, was that really possible? I mean, I used to use the example, like you could send one of these young reporters out for a story, and she’d go out into the field, and she might come back with a story, or she might come back with an advertisement for a tire manufacturer, or she might actually come back with tires.
You know, it’s like you just… And that was the thing. You couldn’t just put this exoskeleton of capitalism on this very wounded place and expect things to fall in line according to how we hoped that they would fall in line. There was really much more of a basic — well, the problem was that while capitalism, while these ideas were being sort of spread around everywhere there was also the people who were really, truly wily, the Russian gangsters, the Mafia, all these kind of people, they knew how to make a deal, and they knew how to make a deal much better than a person who would have been tagged an honest businessman, so they just beat those people to the table. And because there wasn’t very much in the way of rules, and very much of a kind of “might is right” way of doing things, I think that what would have been truly independent never got quite a chance to take root. I mean, is that your sense?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Being independent, if it meant opposing that local Mafia guy, was a hazard. You weren’t going to do that. If you had any brains you weren’t going to do that.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. And we did have a couple of very…you know, it’s a personality type, right? Like there are people who are ready to do that kind of work, and they will do it. And we did have a couple of people. There was a guy named Innokenty Sheremet at the Yekaterinburg station who was a really hard-nosed reporter. And there were just a couple of people out there, you just recognized them. It’s like the International Society of Investigative Journalists, like oh, this is a guy who’s not afraid, will get into all sorts of shit, probably get killed in the end. But they existed and they wanted to do that kind of thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But also, in those days the regional governors were the real centers of political power. It must have been very hard to go against them.
Paul Greenberg: I think so. And resources were thin on the ground. You know, it’s funny, I always remember — this was a very common advertisement that you would see on local television stations. It would just be this camera panning all over stacks of various goods, like a pile of Snickers bars, and a pile of pens, and a pile of electronics, and then a number would flash, a telephone number would flash on the screen. And that was the advertisement.
And I was like, well, what is that? And I guess that what it was just people, through Turkey or wherever, got a bunch of shit into the country and then were just trying to move it fast, and they used local television as a way of moving it.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And so, these local stations were kind of… And they were looking to you to professionalize their operations?
Paul Greenberg: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: So that they would be more competitive, right? Or why?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, there were — you know, the flavors varied. There were people who were true democrats, and among them I would consider Sasha Karpov from Krasnoyarsk, and a guy named Arkady Mayofis from TV2 in Tomsk, both of whom have emigrated. But they were two younger truly democratic people who saw the idea of democracy in their hearts and were trying to build a business around that, so there were those. And there was the flavor of really the small-timer cable guy who didn’t really have much ambition other than trying to make a buck. And then there was, as I say, the fragments of the Soviet broadcasting system seeing chaos and anarchy and trying to shore up what they had and figure out and jockey for position and really didn’t have any strong desire for any kind of political thing, they just wanted to survive, to some degree, but survive and live well.
Daniel Satinsky: So, 1993 and Yeltsin’s standoff with the parliament, and the shelling of the White House, were you physically in Russia then?
Paul Greenberg: I was. So, I think I was in Kyiv coming back to Moscow. I think I was on a train overnight at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: And how, as a media organization, did you respond to that? Or how did you respond to it in terms of how you saw, maybe, the future of your work in Russia?
Paul Greenberg: You know, others might recall it differently. It didn’t seem as astoundingly important as it did from the American side. It just seemed like more chaos. That was Khasbulatov, right?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right. And Rutskoi.
Paul Greenberg: And Rutskoi. Yeah, it just seemed…you know, it was like the revanchment rearing its head. It seemed like… You know, it’s interesting looking at it from this angle now, where everything seems to be headed more and more in the direction of dictatorship and autocracy. But at the time the world really seemed like it was opening up for democracy, and so that just seemed like one step back, two steps forward. Technically how we organized everything I am not quite the person to ask. Are you going to talk — so I don’t know if she’d be willing to do it, but again, Manana Aslamazyan, who is in Moscow now —
Paul Greenberg: Exactly, yeah. And that was difficult. And then what we would do — yeah, so those would be the people that would come. And we would create a little newsroom for the week where they would have to produce — everyone would have to produce a two- or three-minute news story, and then we would put it all together into a TV show at the end of the week.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, it was a technical production, but also business training as well?
Paul Greenberg: They were of two flavors. It’s not really technical. It was really more journalistic. The idea was to really train them in the fundamentals of objective reporting. And that’s the journalistic side of things. The management seminars, those were completely different, and with the management seminars we would do a similar kind of thing where I’d bring some Americans over, but we’d bring them to Moscow. We would bring the television station managers to Moscow and then we’d do like a three- or four-day workshop on the fundamentals of local television broadcasting.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, the meta overview was to strengthen regional TV that wasn’t subsumed by Moscow.
Paul Greenberg: Right, right. And then there was this other element which my colleague Vince Malmgren really was in charge of — who you could speak to, too. But Vince was in charge of the Moscow office, and he was the one really in charge of — there was this program called Vremya Mestnoye*, and that was really the essence of it, because like remember back in the day — I don’t think they still do this — but it was like you could be anywhere. You could be in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, and you’d hear boop-boop-boop, “Moskovskoya vremya dvenadtsat chasov.”* And you’re like why do I need to know what time it is in Moscow when I’m nine time zones away?
So Vremya Mestnoye was the idea that — that was the name of the news exchange, and the idea is that we were going to emphasize local news, local perspectives. But what you ended up getting was a—so the theoretical concept, the idea was we were going to train all these stations to do local news and then they were going to do a news exchange, having been trained, and then we were going to disseminate that news exchange amongst all the TV stations.
Daniel Satinsky: I see, okay.
Paul Greenberg: So, it would be like the provincial and —
Daniel Satinsky: You were going to have content that you produced independently, reporting on all different parts of the country that various stations could use as they chose.
Paul Greenberg: Well, yeah, and the stations themselves would be producing it, in other words. So like if you were in Sverdlovsk or whatever it’s called, Yekaterinburg, you’d throw four minutes into it, and Tomsk would throw four minutes into it, and Krasnoyarsk would throw four minutes into it, and altogether you would get what I think the Russians called a kapusta* like it was just sort of a salad thrown together.
And that was part of the problem, is that the program never really had an organizing principle. But I always remember that the more liberal Muscovites that watched the show liked that, that it was kind of…even though it was imperfect, the fact that it was made independent of… I remember a Russian friend of mine described it as a little bit like a buffet—like oh, I think I’ll have some carrots, and I’ll have some beans. But at the same time there was always this very deep Muscovite prejudice against the provinces that even Manana had shared. Even though she herself was from Yerevan she had a Muscovite’s perspective on things and always found it to be… I mean, she recognized the importance of it, but she also, you know, it was like they were like children.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. What channel did this appear on?
Paul Greenberg: It would just — so literally at first the news exchange arrived cassette via train, and then we would edit it and mix it in Moscow and then send it back out to them, and then they would just put it up on their channel. They would put it up on their local channel.
Daniel Satinsky: On their local channel, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: But of course —
Daniel Satinsky: There wasn’t a national channel. There was no national network in the sense of a national channel.
Paul Greenberg: Well, so there was this thing called…that they tried to get together called NVS, and I think it was Nezavisimyi*, I think it was called NVS*. But that was the goal, was to try to get an independent network going, and that the news exchange would be the sort of first baby steps towards that. And eventually there were moves towards making the network a real network. And I believe a guy named Andrei Vdovin was the first chair of NVS.
But yeah, everywhere you went, the problem was everywhere you went everyone wanted to be the center. Every station I went to they’d be like oh, if you look at the map, Tomsk is clearly the center, and all the other [radius], if you look at the map you can read, we’re clearly the center. So, everyone was trying to be that. But they did make some progress, and there were some genuinely interesting, enlightened people that saw it as having some potential.
The biggest problem came when USAID, in their own kind of Soviet way, was trying to kind of, from the top down, impose this idea of capitalism, so how was this thing that we were doing going to be self-sustaining. And so, the way that — you know, I frankly didn’t know anything about the television business. I had taken some filmmaking courses at Brown and stuff like that, but I didn’t know anything about the weird way that TV works or worked at that time. But we eventually got involved in trying to — what we realized is that most of the TV stations, what they really needed was programming, and what they really wanted was licensed programming. But none of them could afford that.
So it turned out that there’s this whole scheme of acquiring programming where you can basically, if you have somebody who pre-sells the content — well, except, say, to use a very popular example of the time, say TV2 in Tomsk would like to show “Bay Watch,” so they can’t afford “Bay Watch,” but what they can provide is an audience of 500,000 people that would also like to watch “Bay Watch.” So, what they can do is you can buy the programming, but leave advertising holes in it so that then the dealer in Europe or America can then slap in, go and shop the programming around, say look, I’ve got 500,000 people in Tomsk who want to watch this program, do you want to sell them Snickers? So, they say of course. So, then they would go sell the Snickers, da-da-da, so it was still profitable.
It’s funny, all these old Russian pribylno*, right? There would be a few holes left for TV2 in Tomsk to put in their local advertising. And if you want to talk about this in more detail, my colleague Rebecca Dreyfus, who I went to Baikal with, but who I later brought in — or I didn’t really bring in, I said somebody could make some money off of this and she came in and did make some money off of this. She started a business. And I can’t remember what the name of the business was. But she started a business where she literally did that — brought programming in and did all that. So, you know —
Daniel Satinsky: So, AID’s goal was a self-sustaining business of independent stations. It wasn’t any particular interest in content of how the news was covered or —
Paul Greenberg: No, I disagree there. No. First and foremost it was part of a democratization initiative. And I think whether they were acting on their own internal initiative or, you know, David Hoffman was a very good salesman of the concept, and his idea, or what he had been led to believe and what he pushed in the halls of Congress was that the engine of democracy is independent media, and in particular local news. What AID really wanted was local news. They wanted people investigating, doing investigative reporting on a local level, bringing people “the truth” on a local level.
But what we quickly learned as people regularly in contact with these local TV stations was that it’s all well and good to want to do news, but if you can’t afford to run your station, then what’s the point to it? So, it was kind of trying to balance financial infrastructure with news infrastructure. I mean, just to give an example, there was this TV station in Krasnoyarsk called Afontovo. And Afontovo, we really liked the TV station manager, Sasha Karpov — he’d be a great guy to interview, actually, if you want. He’s in Spain now. Sasha, he was one of our early students. He loved the idea of doing independent news. So, he somehow got investment from the local aluminum factory, and he built up this whole extensive news team, like news team Krasnoyarsk, and it was like graphics and American style da-da-da. And meanwhile, as he’s getting his news team ready, he was putting on the air reruns of this Mexican soap opera called “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut.” Remember this one?
Daniel Satinsky: I know this one. I’ve seen it, yes.
Paul Greenberg: “The Rich Also Cry.” So “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut” was on like every day while News Center 2 Afontovo was getting ready. And then, so finally News Center 2 Afontovo was ready to launch, and they launched it, you know — “doo-doo-doo.” And the old ladies who had become addicted to “Bogatie Tozhe Plachut” stormed the television station demanding that “The Rich Also Cry” be reinstalled as soon as possible.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s our time, right?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. So, I think — by that point, remember, this is ’93/’94 so glasnost had already been going on for quite some time. You already saw a certain exhaustion with democracy and like that phrase “my ne zanimaemsya politikoi”*, you know, “nas ne interesuet politika”*. You know, like that kind of undercurrent was already there. And we’re like no-no, it’s not politics, it’s news. And they’re like news, it’s politics. So, the idea that there could be an objective news exclusive from politics really never fully took root. It was always like who’s really paying for this, why are you doing this, etc., etc.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Paul Greenberg: But, you know, to my mind the infrastructure, like the very…it was sort of like building a railroad. We cut down the trees, in a good way. Or let’s say we put the hole through the mountain to make the tunnel, we laid down a couple of rails, we drove an occasional train through that tunnel, and it kind of worked. My colleague Vince will probably say…he might not agree. But from my perspective I thought it was interesting. I thought that some progress was being made.
But I think — and this is where a certain deafness to the Russian idiom affected the program’s effectiveness. Just because I think…well, actually, I don’t know. I think we did an okay job. I tried to find Russian speaking trainers when I could, and increasingly we tried to do this effort of like training the trainers so that we could have Russians doing the work. I think given a few more years — like I always remember, when was it, in 2002, 2003 there was a huge “yubiley”* for Internews. It must have been ten years of Internews Moscow. And it was a vast venue. It was some sort of opera house or something.
But there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people there. It was like, you know, it was very, like, celebratory, like look, we’ve got 300 stations from coast to whatever, from border to border, it’s growing, it’s profitable, to some degree, it’s getting profitable. Some of the TV station managers that we knew were making real money, to the point where I remember Evelyn saying what are we still supporting these people for? They’re making more money than we are. So yeah. And then that’s when—when does Putin come in, what year?
Daniel Satinsky: In 2000.
Paul Greenberg: 2000, so this was just the beginning. It was before the screws got put on.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, what was your understanding of independent? What did independent mean?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, that’s a good question. If we’d had the resources to do a thorough audit, then we would have cast a much narrower net, I think. AID was big on numbers. Did you do any work with AID over the years?
Daniel Satinsky: No, I never did.
Paul Greenberg: You know, AID was always interested in benchmarks. And I always remember we were always saying over 300 stations. And my colleague Anthony Garrett always remembers that I used to say this thing of like “if you waved a magic wand in front of an independent journalist or touched them on the head and ‘poof,’ your’re trained.”
Like thousands of people “trained,” you know. So, there was a pressure to rack up numbers, I think, rather than kind of vet and make sure that we were getting the right people. But that said— and also there was a complicated political dance going on that Manana was doing that I wasn’t even really… Like when Manana would get on the phone and start speaking rapidly in Russian, and I knew she was talking some nonsense to some station, I was like oh, whatever. I don’t even know what’s going on, I don’t want to know. And so, there was a certain kind of local appeasement.
Like I always remember there was this guy in Samara. The station was clearly one of these RTTsPs that was part of the state system that was trying to be “independent,” but was not. And I always remember — I can’t remember. It was like…I wish I could — Nikolai Panteleevich was the head of the station, and he was like this classic Soviet bureaucrat, you know, like white hair and da-da-da. And he was so impressed with Sandy Socolow, that he had come, and he was Walter Cronkite’s producer.
And I remember we had this blowout banquet where he gave Sandy this bottle of brandy that literally was four feet tall, like it was just vast, and then Sandy shocked him by opening it and starting to pour. Because Nikolai Panteleevich had this fantasy that Sandy was going to bring this four-ton bottle back to New York and it would sit on his shelf as a — but he poured it out. Anyway, just that kind of thing. And I also remember we were there for Thanksgiving, and Manana was panicking that the Americans were going to not have turkey at their Thanksgiving, and Nikolai Panteleevich made the turkeys appear out of nowhere, and we had a whole Thanksgiving thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Part of the reason I’m asking you about this independence is that — and I think it was in Kokh’s memoirs that I was reading. I’m starting to read some of the memoirs of the reformers, and they talk about how the early oligarchs, Berezovsky and Gusinsky, used the media, their control of the media, for political means to help set the stage for their acquisition of real assets. And it would seem to me that locally there were people who were emerging in all these different regions with money, how they got it and whatever, but that the media might have been a place for them to also have a say.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, you know, it’s funny because there were different flavors, right? So Afontovo, as I told you, in Krasnoyarsk, they had the backing of a major aluminum factory, and they were always sort of in the background. And I was always trying to — you know, I was a young person myself, so I didn’t really actually even know the way the American media worked. But at a certain point in the American media there’s lots of money splashing around of various “oligarchs” if you will, controlling things. And so, to some degree I saw the role of the independent television station manager as a kind of balancing act. And then I —
Daniel Satinsky: But for this kind of thing, yeah?
Paul Greenberg: Well, you know, in an American newsroom, let’s say pre the horrible consolidation that’s happened in recent years, the idea is that there would be a business office and there would be a news office, and the idea is they wouldn’t overlap. They were kind of separate entities, and they would do their own thing because this idea of independent news was enshrined in American consciousness. And we were trying to kind of get that kind of thing going.
But because capitalism itself was…it’s not that it was new, it’s just that the borders of it were hazy, and the idea of it flowing into influencing the news department, I mean, you know, they would give lip service to that when we would talk to the station managers about that, but realistically, was that really possible? I mean, I used to use the example, like you could send one of these young reporters out for a story, and she’d go out into the field, and she might come back with a story, or she might come back with an advertisement for a tire manufacturer, or she might actually come back with tires.
You know, it’s like you just… And that was the thing. You couldn’t just put this exoskeleton of capitalism on this very wounded place and expect things to fall in line according to how we hoped that they would fall in line. There was really much more of a basic — well, the problem was that while capitalism, while these ideas were being sort of spread around everywhere there was also the people who were really, truly wily, the Russian gangsters, the Mafia, all these kind of people, they knew how to make a deal, and they knew how to make a deal much better than a person who would have been tagged an honest businessman, so they just beat those people to the table. And because there wasn’t very much in the way of rules, and very much of a kind of “might is right” way of doing things, I think that what would have been truly independent never got quite a chance to take root. I mean, is that your sense?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Being independent, if it meant opposing that local Mafia guy, was a hazard. You weren’t going to do that. If you had any brains you weren’t going to do that.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. And we did have a couple of very…you know, it’s a personality type, right? Like there are people who are ready to do that kind of work, and they will do it. And we did have a couple of people. There was a guy named Innokenty Sheremet at the Yekaterinburg station who was a really hard-nosed reporter. And there were just a couple of people out there, you just recognized them. It’s like the International Society of Investigative Journalists, like oh, this is a guy who’s not afraid, will get into all sorts of shit, probably get killed in the end. But they existed and they wanted to do that kind of thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But also, in those days the regional governors were the real centers of political power. It must have been very hard to go against them.
Paul Greenberg: I think so. And resources were thin on the ground. You know, it’s funny, I always remember — this was a very common advertisement that you would see on local television stations. It would just be this camera panning all over stacks of various goods, like a pile of Snickers bars, and a pile of pens, and a pile of electronics, and then a number would flash, a telephone number would flash on the screen. And that was the advertisement.
And I was like, well, what is that? And I guess that what it was just people, through Turkey or wherever, got a bunch of shit into the country and then were just trying to move it fast, and they used local television as a way of moving it.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And so, these local stations were kind of… And they were looking to you to professionalize their operations?
Paul Greenberg: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: So that they would be more competitive, right? Or why?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, there were — you know, the flavors varied. There were people who were true democrats, and among them I would consider Sasha Karpov from Krasnoyarsk, and a guy named Arkady Mayofis from TV2 in Tomsk, both of whom have emigrated. But they were two younger truly democratic people who saw the idea of democracy in their hearts and were trying to build a business around that, so there were those. And there was the flavor of really the small-timer cable guy who didn’t really have much ambition other than trying to make a buck. And then there was, as I say, the fragments of the Soviet broadcasting system seeing chaos and anarchy and trying to shore up what they had and figure out and jockey for position and really didn’t have any strong desire for any kind of political thing, they just wanted to survive, to some degree, but survive and live well.
Daniel Satinsky: So, 1993 and Yeltsin’s standoff with the parliament, and the shelling of the White House, were you physically in Russia then?
Paul Greenberg: I was. So, I think I was in Kyiv coming back to Moscow. I think I was on a train overnight at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: And how, as a media organization, did you respond to that? Or how did you respond to it in terms of how you saw, maybe, the future of your work in Russia?
Paul Greenberg: You know, others might recall it differently. It didn’t seem as astoundingly important as it did from the American side. It just seemed like more chaos. That was Khasbulatov, right?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right. And Rutskoi.
Paul Greenberg: And Rutskoi. Yeah, it just seemed…you know, it was like the revanchment rearing its head. It seemed like… You know, it’s interesting looking at it from this angle now, where everything seems to be headed more and more in the direction of dictatorship and autocracy. But at the time the world really seemed like it was opening up for democracy, and so that just seemed like one step back, two steps forward. Technically how we organized everything I am not quite the person to ask. Are you going to talk — so I don’t know if she’d be willing to do it, but again, Manana Aslamazyan, who is in Moscow now —
Daniel Satinsky: So how long did your training program go on?
Paul Greenberg: It was ongoing until Internews Moscow got shut down. I left Internews in 1988. I stopped doing Russia stuff —
Daniel Satinsky: 1998.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. I’m trying to think, actually, when did I leave Russia proper?
Daniel Satinsky: Before the ruble collapsed?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, so I switched over from Russia stuff to Yugoslavia stuff in 1996, so I was doing Yugoslavia stuff from Paris from ’96 to 1998. And then I gave my job to a woman who sadly passed away a few years ago named Persephone Miel. And they kept going, and I can’t remember when Internews Moscow got shut down. But I want to say it was like ’04, ’05.
Daniel Satinsky: It was right around Khodorkovsky’s arrest.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, right, because Khodorkovsky actually did a little bit of work with Internews.
Daniel Satinsky: He apparently gave a million dollars.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, that’s right.
Daniel Satinsky: So, they were implicated of being too much independent.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Well, or whatever. I mean, it was oligarchs fighting for who was going to run the show, and you want to call it democracy, you could if you’d like, but…
Daniel Satinsky: I want to stay away from the big labels. I really…one of the people I talked to said that mostly people don’t get it right as to how history really happens, and there’s a lot of little things that add up as part of a wave or a general tendency that gets focused around a particular person. And I think there’s a lot to that.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Well, what I will say about Internews is that I think that we made a good faith effort to meet the Russians with an attempt to understand their culture and their particular local challenges. We always worked with local partners. In that sense I think that we were amongst the better of the things out there. But the couple of times that I made flubs as a coordinator of all this really stuck with me. I always remember the very first management seminar that I did, one of the people I hired was great and the rest of the people I hired were terrible, and it was mostly just me flapping around as a 20 something trying to round up good people and not finding the right match. But I remember there was this guy that I hired from WPIX in New York to talk about — he was an accountant. He was like a business manager. To come teach this seminar. And somebody asked him a question, said how do I know if an investment is a sound investment. And this guy said, well, I ask my accountant. And it’s like…
And there was a certain, you know, because of, I think, the ideology that most Americans carried around in their heads about the Soviets, there was always a condescension towards them, and it was always Americans coming to Russia saw the pathetic infrastructure that was there in the darkest times of the Soviet Union, and they sort of laughed and thought geez, these were the people that we were afraid of for so many years, and isn’t it amusing that it turns out that they’re a bunch of yokels and quacks who don’t really know what’s going on. And this grated tremendously against the Russians, even though publicly, in their common interactions, they would of course never, you know, they were always very polite with the American trainers and stuff like that. So, it was hard.
And I think if I were to do it again what I’d say is that you would almost need like a year’s training of Americans before they got sent over. Like they should have gone into intense language instruction so that they could truly be fluent, that there needed to be a really deep understanding from Russian instructors telling them what were the underlying political conditions. Because generally speaking there was just too much assuming going on. And a kind of almost like not really thinking of the Russian reality as a reality. It’s just like, you know, just a bunch of nonsense, blah-blah-blah going on, when really there was a lot going on and it was really complicated and hard.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And do you think…what was AID’s role in that? Were they culturally kind of deaf and dumb as well?
Paul Greenberg: I mean, they had a couple of people who spoke some Russian. They had experts. They were not completely deaf and dumb. But I remember there being a particular tension around, they wanted to do elections training, like how to cover elections and how to form political parties and things like that. And that, to me, seemed to me something of a fool’s errand, because if you’re going to have a political sensibility it’s got to come out of…it’s got to be home grown, to some degree. And it seemed a little bit like the tail wagging the dog.
I was trying to think if there were some anecdotes I could tell you. I guess it’s gone. But yeah, I mean, there was also always this idea that — oh, I remember what I was thinking. Like one thing that always really rankled me, which to me totally encapsulated the whole problem with the whole situation was — do you remember, have you been talking to people at the NDI and IRI? Do you know what those are?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Paul Greenberg: So, there was this nonprofit — there were two nonprofits. One was called the National Democratic Institute.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. I know what they are.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. And it was so stupid because they were both, their missions were supposedly the same, but one was Republican and one was Democrat. And it’s so stupid because like why do you need two organizations doing the same thing? It’s not like… I mean, in an ideal world they shouldn’t have different ideas of what democracy is.
And in fact, the IRI people and the NDI people in Moscow, you know, they’d go to the same bars and hang out and stuff like that. It wasn’t like there was a huge ideological divide between them. And that, to me, was just symbolic of the pork and silliness of some of the decisions that AID made. I think overall what was lacking was a sense of urgency, like that people didn’t realize what a small window we had. Like it just seemed like it was going to endlessly expand. When really, you know — have you seen, do you watch “The Bureau?”
Daniel Satinsky: The what?
Paul Greenberg: Have you seen the TV show “Le Bureau,” the French show? Oh, it’s really, really worth watching, especially the later seasons that take place in Russia, but it’s about the French intelligence service. And there’s a whole section in Moscow that flashes back to your time period here.
Daniel Satinsky: And it’s called “The Bureau?”
Paul Greenberg: “Le Bureau,” yeah. And particularly Season 5 has a great flashback to an auction of Soviet companies in 1994 that really captures the mood of that moment. But yeah, I mean, what you get from that show, and I think looking back on it, is that the only institution of…the only continuous institution that lasted from the Soviet period to the post-Soviet period was the intelligence service, which contained and maintained a super high degree of organization and discipline. And meanwhile, the democrats were so diverse and diffuse that they were just who knew. Again, retrospectively, they’re sitting ducks for what was one of the most powerful services in the world. And of course, unless that was going to be taken on, they were going to win.
Especially since there is an interrelationship between the intelligence services and the Mafia.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But that was not something that was obvious to you at the time?
Paul Greenberg: No, but it was interesting to see how quickly they moved on the Internews Moscow office. But again, as an American I may not have been privy to that. I might not have heard — like there are certain kind of like just… I mean, I consider myself pretty, you know, much more culturally sensitive than the average American, but nowhere near sensitive enough to understand the signals and… It’s like I always remember there was once…we had to our office a group of dissidents, like old school dissidents, like the kind that came over in the ‘70s from Russia to America, and they just like…these guys, they just seemed like so tired and old, and just like smoking papirosa, and you know, just like euh. And it just, the sight of those people just turned my stomach, but meanwhile those were actually the true democrats, you know what I mean?
But the people that appealed to the average American were these young, polished, new-seeming people that quite often were the much more compromised and less democratic. Americans were very won over by aesthetics. And if you looked smooth, and you could speak passable English and stuff you got through the filter in a way that probably wasn’t the right filter. Because what you really needed was balls to the walls, f*** you, Soviet power people who had the backbone and the will to stand up to it.
Of course those were very difficult people to work with, but those were the people that would have been prepared to defend a democratic situation. Like Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov I found to be a very difficult man. Every time he saw me, he blew papirosa smoke in my face. He always questioned and challenged me on everything I said. And I didn’t really like hanging out with him. But he’s the kind of guy we needed.
Daniel Satinsky: Interesting. And did you hang out with the expat community while you were there?
Paul Greenberg: A little bit. It was pretty insular. I should also, full caveat, like I only…I would spend a couple of months at a time there. Like I wasn’t a full-time Moscow resident. My colleague Vince was much more like that. But yeah, when I was there, I mean, the Internews people, we would hang out a bit. I didn’t go to big… I mean, frankly I was often on the road when I would come to Russia, so I’d be in Kazakhstan, or Georgia I’d spend a lot of time in, like that.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you weren’t part of the expat sort of community life exactly?
Paul Greenberg: Not so much.
Daniel Satinsky: So, were you aware of what the other AID programs were, and how they approached things?
Paul Greenberg: Sometimes. I mean, AID sometimes would call groups of contractors together, and we’d have like a security briefing — not like an intelligence briefing, but like how to keep safe in Moscow, and so we’d see those people. And of course, I’d always feel like there was a certain — I continue to have friends who lived in Russia at the time. It was almost like we were camp survivors. You could almost imagine us comparing camp tattoos — proof that we’d lived through those times.
Daniel Satinsky: I have it, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: So, there was an expat phenomenon. People called it sort of the second lost generation. And I’m sort of more in contact with those kind of people now, like authors like Arthur Phillips and Gary Shteyngart, to some degree. Well, Gary’s more like Russian Russian.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I actually like his books, but there’s an absurdity in there that captures what you’ve seen, and if you haven’t ever seen it, it sounds like exaggeration.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. No, it was a pretty absurd time.
A random anecdote that I feel like I should tell you. I remember once being at a dinner party with a bunch of local TV station people at somebody’s mother’s house, and we were all eating and drinking and so forth, and there had been one cutlet left on the plate, and all of a sudden it was gone. And somebody said who took the last cutlet? And this young reporter said, privatizirovala, I privatized it. With a certain irony, you know.
Because, I mean, that was the thing also about the times, is that privatization and stuff, it was also deeply counter current not just to people’s experience, but also just culturally. Culturally, I think if you’d exposed this kind of raw capitalism to pre-revolutionary Russia, most Russians would have found it distasteful. I think there’s something in the Russian psyche that is communal, that is sharing, that doesn’t like this kind of, you know, the inherent theft contained within capitalism. I think by now people are used to it in Russia, but at the time it was definitely a cultural shock.
Daniel Satinsky: So have I covered everything?
Paul Greenberg: I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think the only other thing that’s true of that generation of local TV station people is that there were a lot of what they called entusiasty*, you know, people who were not necessarily getting a salary from what they were doing, but they were very excited to be doing what they were doing. And if we think back to who we disappointed the most, it would be those people.
Daniel Satinsky: And how do you mean disappointed? You think that they lost their independence, or they lost their potential because of us?
Paul Greenberg: Well, not because of Internews, but I think… You’ve heard the word “dermocratia”*, right?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: I think that there was a lot of dirty capitalism that went on, some of which was seeded by AID, unwittingly, I think, largely. But it was like…again, you don’t know if it was perhaps an insurmountable obstacle having the intelligence operatives against this thing from the beginning. But there was I guess maybe… I mean, I don’t know how things could have gone differently, but I think a little more wisdom, a little more strategic investment, a little less prodding to just privatize everything could have won over a few more hearts and minds.
Paul Greenberg: It was ongoing until Internews Moscow got shut down. I left Internews in 1988. I stopped doing Russia stuff —
Daniel Satinsky: 1998.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. I’m trying to think, actually, when did I leave Russia proper?
Daniel Satinsky: Before the ruble collapsed?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, so I switched over from Russia stuff to Yugoslavia stuff in 1996, so I was doing Yugoslavia stuff from Paris from ’96 to 1998. And then I gave my job to a woman who sadly passed away a few years ago named Persephone Miel. And they kept going, and I can’t remember when Internews Moscow got shut down. But I want to say it was like ’04, ’05.
Daniel Satinsky: It was right around Khodorkovsky’s arrest.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, right, because Khodorkovsky actually did a little bit of work with Internews.
Daniel Satinsky: He apparently gave a million dollars.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, that’s right.
Daniel Satinsky: So, they were implicated of being too much independent.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Well, or whatever. I mean, it was oligarchs fighting for who was going to run the show, and you want to call it democracy, you could if you’d like, but…
Daniel Satinsky: I want to stay away from the big labels. I really…one of the people I talked to said that mostly people don’t get it right as to how history really happens, and there’s a lot of little things that add up as part of a wave or a general tendency that gets focused around a particular person. And I think there’s a lot to that.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. Well, what I will say about Internews is that I think that we made a good faith effort to meet the Russians with an attempt to understand their culture and their particular local challenges. We always worked with local partners. In that sense I think that we were amongst the better of the things out there. But the couple of times that I made flubs as a coordinator of all this really stuck with me. I always remember the very first management seminar that I did, one of the people I hired was great and the rest of the people I hired were terrible, and it was mostly just me flapping around as a 20 something trying to round up good people and not finding the right match. But I remember there was this guy that I hired from WPIX in New York to talk about — he was an accountant. He was like a business manager. To come teach this seminar. And somebody asked him a question, said how do I know if an investment is a sound investment. And this guy said, well, I ask my accountant. And it’s like…
And there was a certain, you know, because of, I think, the ideology that most Americans carried around in their heads about the Soviets, there was always a condescension towards them, and it was always Americans coming to Russia saw the pathetic infrastructure that was there in the darkest times of the Soviet Union, and they sort of laughed and thought geez, these were the people that we were afraid of for so many years, and isn’t it amusing that it turns out that they’re a bunch of yokels and quacks who don’t really know what’s going on. And this grated tremendously against the Russians, even though publicly, in their common interactions, they would of course never, you know, they were always very polite with the American trainers and stuff like that. So, it was hard.
And I think if I were to do it again what I’d say is that you would almost need like a year’s training of Americans before they got sent over. Like they should have gone into intense language instruction so that they could truly be fluent, that there needed to be a really deep understanding from Russian instructors telling them what were the underlying political conditions. Because generally speaking there was just too much assuming going on. And a kind of almost like not really thinking of the Russian reality as a reality. It’s just like, you know, just a bunch of nonsense, blah-blah-blah going on, when really there was a lot going on and it was really complicated and hard.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And do you think…what was AID’s role in that? Were they culturally kind of deaf and dumb as well?
Paul Greenberg: I mean, they had a couple of people who spoke some Russian. They had experts. They were not completely deaf and dumb. But I remember there being a particular tension around, they wanted to do elections training, like how to cover elections and how to form political parties and things like that. And that, to me, seemed to me something of a fool’s errand, because if you’re going to have a political sensibility it’s got to come out of…it’s got to be home grown, to some degree. And it seemed a little bit like the tail wagging the dog.
I was trying to think if there were some anecdotes I could tell you. I guess it’s gone. But yeah, I mean, there was also always this idea that — oh, I remember what I was thinking. Like one thing that always really rankled me, which to me totally encapsulated the whole problem with the whole situation was — do you remember, have you been talking to people at the NDI and IRI? Do you know what those are?
Daniel Satinsky: No.
Paul Greenberg: So, there was this nonprofit — there were two nonprofits. One was called the National Democratic Institute.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. I know what they are.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. And it was so stupid because they were both, their missions were supposedly the same, but one was Republican and one was Democrat. And it’s so stupid because like why do you need two organizations doing the same thing? It’s not like… I mean, in an ideal world they shouldn’t have different ideas of what democracy is.
And in fact, the IRI people and the NDI people in Moscow, you know, they’d go to the same bars and hang out and stuff like that. It wasn’t like there was a huge ideological divide between them. And that, to me, was just symbolic of the pork and silliness of some of the decisions that AID made. I think overall what was lacking was a sense of urgency, like that people didn’t realize what a small window we had. Like it just seemed like it was going to endlessly expand. When really, you know — have you seen, do you watch “The Bureau?”
Daniel Satinsky: The what?
Paul Greenberg: Have you seen the TV show “Le Bureau,” the French show? Oh, it’s really, really worth watching, especially the later seasons that take place in Russia, but it’s about the French intelligence service. And there’s a whole section in Moscow that flashes back to your time period here.
Daniel Satinsky: And it’s called “The Bureau?”
Paul Greenberg: “Le Bureau,” yeah. And particularly Season 5 has a great flashback to an auction of Soviet companies in 1994 that really captures the mood of that moment. But yeah, I mean, what you get from that show, and I think looking back on it, is that the only institution of…the only continuous institution that lasted from the Soviet period to the post-Soviet period was the intelligence service, which contained and maintained a super high degree of organization and discipline. And meanwhile, the democrats were so diverse and diffuse that they were just who knew. Again, retrospectively, they’re sitting ducks for what was one of the most powerful services in the world. And of course, unless that was going to be taken on, they were going to win.
Especially since there is an interrelationship between the intelligence services and the Mafia.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But that was not something that was obvious to you at the time?
Paul Greenberg: No, but it was interesting to see how quickly they moved on the Internews Moscow office. But again, as an American I may not have been privy to that. I might not have heard — like there are certain kind of like just… I mean, I consider myself pretty, you know, much more culturally sensitive than the average American, but nowhere near sensitive enough to understand the signals and… It’s like I always remember there was once…we had to our office a group of dissidents, like old school dissidents, like the kind that came over in the ‘70s from Russia to America, and they just like…these guys, they just seemed like so tired and old, and just like smoking papirosa, and you know, just like euh. And it just, the sight of those people just turned my stomach, but meanwhile those were actually the true democrats, you know what I mean?
But the people that appealed to the average American were these young, polished, new-seeming people that quite often were the much more compromised and less democratic. Americans were very won over by aesthetics. And if you looked smooth, and you could speak passable English and stuff you got through the filter in a way that probably wasn’t the right filter. Because what you really needed was balls to the walls, f*** you, Soviet power people who had the backbone and the will to stand up to it.
Of course those were very difficult people to work with, but those were the people that would have been prepared to defend a democratic situation. Like Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov I found to be a very difficult man. Every time he saw me, he blew papirosa smoke in my face. He always questioned and challenged me on everything I said. And I didn’t really like hanging out with him. But he’s the kind of guy we needed.
Daniel Satinsky: Interesting. And did you hang out with the expat community while you were there?
Paul Greenberg: A little bit. It was pretty insular. I should also, full caveat, like I only…I would spend a couple of months at a time there. Like I wasn’t a full-time Moscow resident. My colleague Vince was much more like that. But yeah, when I was there, I mean, the Internews people, we would hang out a bit. I didn’t go to big… I mean, frankly I was often on the road when I would come to Russia, so I’d be in Kazakhstan, or Georgia I’d spend a lot of time in, like that.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you weren’t part of the expat sort of community life exactly?
Paul Greenberg: Not so much.
Daniel Satinsky: So, were you aware of what the other AID programs were, and how they approached things?
Paul Greenberg: Sometimes. I mean, AID sometimes would call groups of contractors together, and we’d have like a security briefing — not like an intelligence briefing, but like how to keep safe in Moscow, and so we’d see those people. And of course, I’d always feel like there was a certain — I continue to have friends who lived in Russia at the time. It was almost like we were camp survivors. You could almost imagine us comparing camp tattoos — proof that we’d lived through those times.
Daniel Satinsky: I have it, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: So, there was an expat phenomenon. People called it sort of the second lost generation. And I’m sort of more in contact with those kind of people now, like authors like Arthur Phillips and Gary Shteyngart, to some degree. Well, Gary’s more like Russian Russian.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I actually like his books, but there’s an absurdity in there that captures what you’ve seen, and if you haven’t ever seen it, it sounds like exaggeration.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. No, it was a pretty absurd time.
A random anecdote that I feel like I should tell you. I remember once being at a dinner party with a bunch of local TV station people at somebody’s mother’s house, and we were all eating and drinking and so forth, and there had been one cutlet left on the plate, and all of a sudden it was gone. And somebody said who took the last cutlet? And this young reporter said, privatizirovala, I privatized it. With a certain irony, you know.
Because, I mean, that was the thing also about the times, is that privatization and stuff, it was also deeply counter current not just to people’s experience, but also just culturally. Culturally, I think if you’d exposed this kind of raw capitalism to pre-revolutionary Russia, most Russians would have found it distasteful. I think there’s something in the Russian psyche that is communal, that is sharing, that doesn’t like this kind of, you know, the inherent theft contained within capitalism. I think by now people are used to it in Russia, but at the time it was definitely a cultural shock.
Daniel Satinsky: So have I covered everything?
Paul Greenberg: I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think the only other thing that’s true of that generation of local TV station people is that there were a lot of what they called entusiasty*, you know, people who were not necessarily getting a salary from what they were doing, but they were very excited to be doing what they were doing. And if we think back to who we disappointed the most, it would be those people.
Daniel Satinsky: And how do you mean disappointed? You think that they lost their independence, or they lost their potential because of us?
Paul Greenberg: Well, not because of Internews, but I think… You’ve heard the word “dermocratia”*, right?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: I think that there was a lot of dirty capitalism that went on, some of which was seeded by AID, unwittingly, I think, largely. But it was like…again, you don’t know if it was perhaps an insurmountable obstacle having the intelligence operatives against this thing from the beginning. But there was I guess maybe… I mean, I don’t know how things could have gone differently, but I think a little more wisdom, a little more strategic investment, a little less prodding to just privatize everything could have won over a few more hearts and minds.
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