Daniel Satinsky: One of the reasons finance is interesting to me is that the Soviet Union's centrally planned economy lacked financial institutions with independent validity. When Russia began creating a market economy, finance was a major institutional deficit. Unlike oil and gas, which had an existing industry, finance had no foundation. It’s similar to the absence of pizza restaurants or gyms—certain gaps that Americans filled in. Finance is one of those areas.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, it definitely is. The early contacts we can discuss were Russian reformers educated in Western market reforms, trying to fill those gaps. That's an interesting area to discuss.

Daniel Satinsky: Yes. Before we get to that, I know you have a strong interest in Russia and Russian politics and history. Where does that come from?

Bob von Rekowsky: I studied political science at SUNY Albany and gravitated towards Soviet Union studies. I found it fascinating. I have a relative on my mom's side, a former U.S. ambassador, Edward Djerejian. He heads the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. I'm Armenian on my mom's side—she was born in France. His focus on that part of the world influenced me. I enjoyed my teacher, Eric Hoffman, and when I moved to Boston and started working, I went to grad school part-time, taking classes on Eastern Europe in transition. We were investing in transition economies at work, and I loved studying the region and its background.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you speak Armenian at home?

Bob von Rekowsky: No, my mom spoke French with her brothers. My dad discouraged her from speaking Armenian, so I listened to them speak French but didn’t learn it. My mom spoke Armenian with my grandmother and uncle during arguments. I learned some broken Russian to get by in meetings in Russia. I always preferred having a translator but managed some Russian.

Daniel Satinsky: When was your first trip to Russia or the Soviet Union?

Bob von Rekowsky: After graduating college, a friend and I did a Eurail pass trip and spent a week in 1988 in Leningrad and Moscow. That was my first trip, and I got to see the end of the Soviet Union. My first business trip was in the early '90s, probably 1992 or 1993, as Russia restructured its debt obligations and opened up the GKO market and loans for shares.

Daniel Satinsky: Was Fidelity interested in these developments in Russia?

Bob von Rekowsky: I would say our equity division and bond division were both interested. In the fixed income area, we focused on government obligations and the corporate sector. Within our global research team, we initially allocated time to developed Europe G7, and OECD countries. But as emerging markets opportunities started appearing, we dedicated research and portfolio management time to those regions, including Russia.

Bob von Rekowsky: We launched a new emerging markets fund, the New Markets Income Fund, and allocated research and portfolio management time towards basically building those products and getting up to speed in that area. So within a subset of our global research team, we had developed guys. I spent half my time between both until I went full time to emerging markets. We wanted to have a view and an investment recommendation for the fund managers. At that time, they would have been relegated to just the funds that were approved to invest in those higher-risk regions. My colleague at the time was launching the New Markets Income Fund from scratch. A lot of the funds went into that, but some of the other global funds were allowed to have a small piece of Russia.

Bob von Rekowsky: I always tried to explain to people I met in Russia that the firm didn’t necessarily care one way or the other about Russia, but within the groups, if we felt there were investment opportunities, you could allocate your time to it. I spent an inordinate amount of time because I was interested in it and felt there was a good reasonable risk-return profile. So if I said I needed to go to Russia, I hardly got any pushback. Bulgaria and Romania were the same type of thing. I tried to limit how many times I'd go to those other places because I felt I could come away with fresh information, but frequent travel to Russia made more sense.

Daniel Satinsky: How frequently did you travel?

Bob von Rekowsky: When I was based in Boston, it was probably just once per year. After relocating to London in 1996, I went at least once a quarter, sometimes twice in a quarter if something significant was happening. It would be based on an investment conference where many companies presented, allowing me to set up numerous private meetings and visit regions. It was a lot easier being in the same time zone, making phone calls much more manageable. So my visits increased significantly around the 1995-1996 period when I relocated.

Daniel Satinsky: How did you view the loans for shares program as investment opportunities?

Bob von Rekowsky: I had a healthy dose of cynicism. As a junior analyst, I worked with experienced economists and financial analysts. Portfolio managers wanted investment opportunities, but our legal and compliance teams were concerned about the lack of reliable infrastructure and registries. We couldn't invest in those early opportunities due to compliance issues. Even when investment banks structured some of these things, they didn’t pass our legal muster. We eventually invested in restructured debt, but I remained cynical about the sustainability of the program and the risks involved.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you interact with the people from Harvard who designed the loans for shares program?

Bob von Rekowsky: Some colleagues had connections with academic and government officials involved in the program. I met Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay through the privatization administration led by Anatoly Chubais. Chubais often emphasized the need to quickly transfer shares from communist managers to the market. We were critical of the program's sustainability and the potential market infrastructure issues. We didn’t invest early on, but many peers tried to capitalize on the opportunities despite the risks.

Daniel Satinsky: How were those shares trading initially?

Bob von Rekowsky: Competing registries or registrars in different regions and Moscow created chaos. Investment banks sent people with cash to buy shares from local sellers. Companies set up their own buying mechanisms. Before the first exchanges, shares traded on the streets and through makeshift arrangements.

Daniel Satinsky: So you were approached by investment banks with opportunities to gain control of industrial enterprises?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah, some of the investment banks would say, "We can grab as many shares as we can and package them into a note." For example, you would purchase a note, like a Credit Suisse note, giving you pass-through exposure to an underlying Russian company. So, if it was Lukoil, it would be a Credit Suisse-linked note to a Lukoil share that was somewhere in Russia. Our legal team would ask, "Which registrar is it? Can we have any DTCC settlement?" We all thought, "This is actually insane." If you held it and it went up, you could trade out of it, but if there was ever a push comes to shove and you tried to put the instrument back to the broker, they wouldn't guarantee a market in those early days. So, it was a one-way thing—they’d be happy to sell you the note, but there was no guarantee you could sell it back. It's like the Robinhood thing now; it's a one-way trade. You were stuck with it, and it just never passed muster. Our firm tended to be more cautious with these kinds of investment offerings. There were a lot of boutique emerging market funds that were happy with the risk and had different regulations, allowing them to move in and out of these investments. But we were more like a battleship—it takes a lot to move us.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, right. But you were interested enough. What time period are we talking about when they were interested enough to allow you to pay attention to it?

Bob von Rekowsky: Oh, definitely. And I think I probably spent an inordinate amount of time because I thought it was important to understand the whole journey of where they were going. We were lucky in the early days—I think it was '92 or '93. Some friends of mine worked at a company called Transnational Research. It's an investment boutique firm with a broker attached to it. They would go and find interesting people in different emerging markets and bring them to the US to meet investors instead of us always going there. Early on, we had Anatoly Chubais and Dmitry Vasilyev, his partner in crime. They came to the United States—they were in D.C., New York, and Boston. We had a very interesting meeting in the early days. Chubais came in with a pocket protector—my dad used to work for IBM, and I had one of those old IBM pocket protectors—short sleeve white shirt, very nerdy guy, lanky redhead with broken English, but very smart.

I had these staid New England portfolio managers trying to speak the same language. At one point, the manager asked, "What's the interest rate on a car loan?" Chubais laughed, and I answered, "The interest rate is, you know, ten years." He didn't understand because there was no concept of the time value of money there. Chubais laughed, saying, "There's no concept of the time value of money, and you're not going to buy anything." No mortgages or anything like that. It took a long time to get up to speed and speak the same language.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. So did that begin to change your perspective? I'll tell you a quick story of personal experience. I give you a chance to drink your drink. I had a Russian friend who was a lawyer for... Oh, God, I just blanked on it... GUM.

Bob von Rekowsky: Oh, okay.

Daniel Satinsky: And early on, they listed shares at the Frankfurt exchange. I think this must have been a few years later than what you're talking about, but not much later. GUM had a network of 17 stores and warehouses, plus the store there in Red Square. He figured out that he could, on the Russian exchange and the Frankfurt Exchange, if you did it right, you could purchase GUM for thousands of dollars, you know, because the shares were trading for pennies.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes.

Daniel Satinsky: We put together a proposal to do that. I came back and met with an investment fund here in Boston. They looked at it and said, technically, yes, we could do it, but we know that Rushkoff would never allow foreigners to purchase GUM. It was part of the spirit of that time—if you can imagine, you know, it's like a heist.

Bob von Rekowsky: Absolutely. I wonder, was it Batterymarch or...

Daniel Satinsky: No, I'm trying to remember the guy. It was a small firm. People I knew told me they thought he was a spook, but...

Bob von Rekowsky: Oh, really? Yeah. I wonder who that could have been and which firm it was. Maybe it will come to us.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it will come to us. I didn't take it any further after that because the logic of what he said made sense to me—that Rushkoff would never allow it to slip out of control. But the economics of it were such that logically, it could have happened.

Bob von Rekowsky: Oh, definitely. At one point, I remember I was still on the debt side of the investment world. I traveled with a colleague who looked at companies, and we went on an investment trip to Saint Petersburg. I'm going to forget the name of the engine and tractor works there, but we just did a random meeting. It turned out the market cap of this company was probably like $12 million, and it made no sense at all given the volume of output and its importance. A lot of those opportunities came up, but we couldn't really... we didn't have a chance to act on them.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, they wouldn't fit within your regulatory requirements, right?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah, we couldn't find a way to get access. We couldn't hold the shares directly—it would have to be through a broker. It was too circuitous for our compliance teams.

Daniel Satinsky: Right. So did things change when the exchanges started to be developed? What did change for you?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah, we also joined different investment alliances. Investors pooled their efforts to go and meet with officials and say, "Look, we all want to invest here. Here are the mundane back-office things we need: settlement, clearance, etc." One was the Russell 20-20 group, which included many firms in Boston, including ours. It wasn't so much lobbying as explaining what we needed and offering to facilitate conversations with our back-office people. A lot of those conversations went very well. Those groups and others, including the brokers, pushed to have ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) or GDRs (Global Depositary Receipts) established because those we could purchase. So, once there was a Lukoil ADR and a Gazprom ADR, then we were good because we worked with the Bank of New York to hold the depositary receipts.

Daniel Satinsky: I purchased ADRs, so I know.

Bob von Rekowsky: Great. That made it very easy. On the bond side, once things were traded in different markets and they were issuing new debt or repackaging it, then it just became about the analysis along the way.

Daniel Satinsky: Who were you talking to about that? Ministry of Finance?

Bob von Rekowsky: We had relationships with every relevant agency. The Central Bank, the Privatization Agency, and even a German advisor who worked in the Ministry of Finance at the time. We talked to them about top-line issues on the debt side. We also used resources from the IMF and World Bank. Brokers on the ground wanted to sell this stuff, so they helped get the Russians up to speed and put people in touch. The appetite was there from investors, and the logistics and relationship building came through the brokers. The Russian side had governmental contacts with the US SEC, to the extent that existed, and different exchanges. The exchanges themselves sent people because they wanted to do business. There were even a couple of scandals along the way, like with the Bank of New York and Russia, but everyone was trying to advocate for things to change. It just became easier over time. We never stopped pushing for improvements in terms of settlement days, the timing of foreign exchange settlement versus share settlement, etc. We usually pressed that through the brokers to make them change it. We would tell the Russians, "Until this changes, we can't really invest in it. We'd like to, but..."

Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, at that time, was it your sense that it was only a matter of time before Russia began to mirror Western investment regimes, integrating into the world financial systems on roughly similar mechanisms and terms?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah, I do recall there was a very heady zeitgeist around the whole thing. It felt like we were part of a private army trying to help extend the foreign government's embrace of Russia from a private angle. But we knew it was going to be fits and starts. There were many signs that things wouldn't be streamlined. We had the fights within the Russian government itself, including Yeltsin sending tanks against the parliament. Investing through all that was challenging.

And then, the 1993 elections went really badly for the reformers. We had Chubais and Vasily back in Boston, trying to explain what the outlook was. The Duma just became crazy. I remember going to the Duma a couple of times to meet different people. It felt like walking through the bar scene in Indiana Jones, with delegates from Omsk and people carrying guns into the Duma. It was crazy. The relationship was always about the Duma extracting as much pain and money from the government as it could. It was always a game of brinkmanship and prisoner's dilemma. We would meet with officials and Western interlopers like the German advisor and ask, "What's going on? What's the inside baseball?" I remember one particular vote that was important. The advisor said, "In the end, what's a few hundred laptops distributed among Duma members to get the vote to go the right way? We'll just bribe them." It felt extremely cynical and unsustainable. I heard people pleading, "Can't Yeltsin just do a decree?" But decrees last only until the next guy comes in. Even getting a decree to work its way through the system was a challenge. So, we heard the rhetoric at the top level, but on the ground, it was a different story.

And we were very concerned along the way about the fits and starts nature of it. That's why there would be sideways moves and then some reform enthusiasm. The bonds would rally from the low 30s and 40s up towards par, and equities would rise. It was definitely enthusiastic time, up and down like a roller coaster ride. But I was always very concerned. When I did political science research, we always tried to remember not to fall foul of normative bias. Just because it's like this in Boston, it doesn't mean it will be like this in Moscow. I would go there and say, "This US advice doesn't make any sense here. Why are we asking them to do this? Is it going to be sustainable? How much political capital can they burn through in Russia to get something done before they lose it?" If you lose all the pensioners, you lose the next election, right? You can't just chuck the pensioners out, and you can't devalue the ruble. We would hear all these conflicting pieces of information. Then we would go to meet the IMF resident rep or the World Bank resident rep and get their perspective. It was often really crazy.

Daniel Satinsky: So you were getting different kinds of advice from different Westerners and going to different parts of the Russian government.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, there were enthusiastic reformers in the government like Chubais and his team. Before I can say he became a bit more cynical later on when he ended up being CEO of Unified Energy Systems, he was very enthusiastic. He and Boris Nemtsov were obviously the golden boys working for Yeltsin. They felt a strong need to beat the communists because they had a window of opportunity. During the election when Yeltsin was trying to be re-elected, Chubais was relentless. He said, "We can't backslide; we have to win this at all costs." They were dedicated to the reform effort. Gaidar was less full of bravado but very intellectual. He would sit down and explain everything—what they were trying to do and the reforms they were trying to pass. I think Yavlinsky had perhaps failed to do that under the Gorbachev regime because he was a senior economic adviser or maybe deputy prime minister for a short time under Gorbachev.

Daniel Satinsky: He might have been. Yeah, you may be right.

Bob von Rekowsky: So, I felt like Gaidar was more market-savvy, less intellectual about how to do it, more practical. Those were good people you could ally with and talk to. They wanted investment and pressure from the outside to drive change in Russia. At the same time, they were very proud Russians. Dubinsky at the Central Bank, who was in the Ministry of Finance at the beginning and later became Central Bank governor, was definitely a proud Russian. He understood that there was a job to do, but many young Americans came in with their own market and political biases without appreciating the journey Russia was going through. They made a lot of demands, and the West always held high expectations but were late to deliver. It felt like a constant wooing of the Russians to get something done. There was always a fire drill—pass this law to get this money before something happened. It seemed like a treadmill. Until Putin came in, Yeltsin was just a political figure who meant well but became too destructive. Putin was more practical, good at controlling his emotions, and was very constructive towards the reform efforts in the early days, stabilizing everything. I think he became more cynical or less enthusiastic about engaging with the West due to various political decisions and misunderstandings, like NATO expansion.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. So, by the mid-90s—I'm still back in the mid-90s—did Fidelity actually begin to invest?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, in our emerging markets funds, we definitely held debt. In our new emerging market equity funds, which were specifically tailored to hold those risks, we held Russian shares. Initially, these were ADRs and GDRs, until later in the 90s when we could own local Russian shares in Russia and other emerging markets. We built the necessary infrastructure along with the brokers to trade and settle local shares. We always wanted to do local wherever we could.

Local markets were often more liquid, and it made more sense. In the early 90s, it was probably mid to late 90s when we started owning equities. The debt side was earlier because it was more straightforward.

Daniel Satinsky: I want to talk about the GKO (Russian Government Short-Term Bonds), but first, I want to ask you about Norilsk. When did you get involved with Norilsk, and can you talk about your visits and relationship with Norilsk?

Bob von Rekowsky: I got very involved in the corporate governance aspect of investing in emerging markets, which we could discuss later. Norilsk was a good case study in the restructuring of a Russian company and the risks and opportunities for an investor. Early on, our funds were not invested in Norilsk. Russian companies had a holding company on top of the production company. There was concern about management using the holding company to strip assets. So, companies restructured, moving the holding company under the production aspect. Norilsk did this transformation, and we were able to buy their GDRs. I believe Prokhorov was the CEO of the company at the time. I went on a trip with an investment bank and other investors to see the assets. We met the chief accountant, CEO, and other regular management. It was a closed city, so we needed FSB permission. We flew on a chartered plane with local FSB minders following us. We stayed at a local hotel and toured the copper smelter, mine, and other facilities. It was eye-opening, seeing both the potential and the challenges.

Daniel Satinsky: This was in the late 90s or early 2000s?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, around that time. We saw significant pollution and harsh working conditions, but also the importance of Norilsk to the local economy. They were paying well, attracting workers despite the conditions.

Daniel Satinsky: With Prokhorov and Potanin?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, exactly. So, Potanin was the CEO. You couldn't really meet with them because they would come and maybe speak at an investor conference, but they were a little bit standoffish. We always ended up meeting with the investor relations team. It was very difficult to meet an actual CFO or COO at the company. You met the IR team, whereas at Norilsk, we met the chief accountant, CEO, and other regular management people in addition to the IR team. They allowed us to do a trip because they wanted to have people invest in the company. Because it was a closed city, we had to get proper FSB permissions. They chartered a plane, and we flew up there with a bunch of other investors to learn.

Daniel Satinsky: And it was the broker that took you up?

Bob von Rekowsky: I think the first time might have been with Bernie’s Troika Dialog. That might have been the first trip I did up there. So Troika Dialog arranged the trip.

Daniel Satinsky: And this was in the mid-90s?

Bob von Rekowsky: This was closer to the late 90s or early 2000s, I think.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, all right.

Bob von Rekowsky: Maybe the late 90s. When we landed, we were met by a school bus, and our local FSB minders in a little black car followed us around. We went to the nearest hotel in town. The next day, we did trips to the copper smelter and the mine. We went down in the mine, and it was just unbelievable. You're walking through something like the Smithsonian Institute of Russian Industry. Many of us knew the sad legacy of Norilsk being a prison labor camp.

My Russian teacher in London, her father was sent there, and he died there after a number of years. So, I even had personal connections there. You could see the heavy pollution in the town, but people were flocking to Norilsk because they were paying cash. At some point, we could talk about the arrears in the system, too, if that's interesting or relevant to your story. But Norilsk could pay people, so people were trying to get in to work, even if it was $200 or $300 a month. It was a lot of money. We went around to all the different production facilities and met the managers. At the time, Norilsk was still under state secret in terms of their production because they had palladium and platinum. We were all working to get the Russian government to declassify certain parts of its palladium and platinum stockpile, so we could understand what the residual bit was still under this kind of umbrella. We had to reverse engineer, working with some people at the company, to figure out the capacity of their machines and how much they produced each year for copper and other metals. We made significant amounts of money in Norilsk because if you invested at the right time, when the holding structure situation was taken care of, you had clarity on what the company produced and its stockpiles' value. Then the metals themselves started to rally in the 90s, from copper and palladium across the board, including nickel. It became a great proxy as one of the largest nickel swing producers in the world. We traveled to the dock to see the ice-locked port, Dudinka. We got to see the nuclear icebreakers that come in and open up the port. It was just an amazing kind of legacy of Soviet investment and industry there. I ended up going back again for another trip, probably a year later, to see where things had changed. My last trip was to take a colleague who was going to take over being the person responsible for covering the metals and mining section of Russia. I didn't want her to go alone, so I went with her and a bunch of other people, and we did another one of these trips.

Daniel Satinsky: Right.

Bob von Rekowsky: To meet the same people and see where things were at. I spent a lot of time on that. But that kind of example is something we did for many companies in emerging markets. Fidelity's model was to go out and kick the tires of companies, whether it was people visiting Pep Boys when they first started in the US, and nobody would go visit them, or in Peter Lynch's era, going to the Arctic Circle to see Norilsk nickel to see if it's really there.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Norilsk, I remember, was of course a heavy polluter and dirty in all ways. But it was subject to all these restructuring and reform efforts with the idea of getting Western investment. It was pretty clear from the beginning. I remember the Harvard investment conferences. Did you go to those?

Bob von Rekowsky: Were they Boston-based? Yeah, I may have caught one before.

Daniel Satinsky: There was a Norilsk CFO who spoke there. He showed the progress of the shares, and I ran home and convinced my Schwab broker that I don't care what you say, I want to buy some.I want to buy someDRs, and I paid for some of my house with that.

Bob von Rekowsky: Fantastic.

Daniel Satinsky: But nobody would touch it. But early on, they were restructuring and eyeing Western investment. Is that your sense as well?

Bob von Rekowsky: I think they actually didn't need the Western know-how, so to speak, until some of the Scandinavian countries were willing to provide some of the technology on scrubbers and those things to deal with the acid rain. When I went there, I got a greater appreciation. They literally had these giant sulfur stockpiles of bricks of sulfur that would come out of the end of the process. But there was an issue of retrofitting the existing stacks with scrubber technologies. It was almost like the company was always financially on the edge for a long time. So, it became a question of how long do you run these assets to accumulate wealth until you invest in it? Is it sustainable enough to invest X amount of money in it? Or will the metal prices collapse again, and should we just cynically run this as much as we can and let the pollution go as it may?

Before the advent of ESG metrics of investing, we all said, "You really need to have a plan for this because there will be inter-governmental issues." You can't keep polluting up there because it's in this delicate ecosystem. You probably don't want to do it because Russian labor laws might change and all those things. They always had very good Scandinavian equipment. When I went to different parts of the plant, you'd see Russian processing machines and then the relevant Scandinavian ones. They had the energy situation sorted because they had natural gas and all those resources up there.

Norilsk was more about getting the company to become stable rather than lacking know-how. The problem was Potanin and then Prokhorov afterwards—they were so proud and the whole thing was so political. Potanin was involved in the loans-for-shares scheme, and it felt like they stole these companies. They had access and lobbying power. The government loaned money to them, then reneged on it, and they got the shares. They then acted as if they were the owners, and the benefits accrued to them rather than the workers or other shareholders at that time.

We went through that journey together. There were other companies like VSM, a smelting company in Russia. When I went to visit them, it was night and day in terms of safety and working conditions compared to Norilsk. You'd put on a hard hat and walk through the smelter area, but there was sulfuric acid in the air. The workers, including women, would be loading diodes into electrolysis sections while wearing regular clothes and kerchiefs. They were inhaling sulfuric acid all day long. One of the guys on the IR team, a Russian guy, refused to go through without a gas mask. I walked through for eight minutes, but the managers didn't care. Russians tend to think if you can't see it, it doesn't hurt you.

In contrast, other parts of Russia had strict safety protocols. If you went out on the floor without your hard hat, you were off the floor. They enforced these rules, and workers complied because it was necessary for their jobs. But in Norilsk, it wasn't enforced, so if you wore safety clothes, you were seen as a jerk. Management in Moscow was stuck, but the production managers were competent. When we went down the mine in the Nadezhda complex, we joked about the emergency kit containing a Bible and a flask of vodka. In reality, it had a breathing device that allowed you to breathe for 40 minutes, but it caused burns on your face. While we were down there, they were drilling and using explosives, and the air was filled with smoke. It gave me a good perspective on the toll of the Russian workers.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, but did it make you feel as an investor more willing to invest in the company that had better safety standards?

Bob von Rekowsky: For sure. The different levels of risk were clear. As Norilsk improved their standards, you would see a multi-lift in both the sustainability of the company and the returns. Companies with fewer accidents and better safety were more Western-oriented in terms of risk. If a company didn't invest properly in safety and there was a mine problem, it could become a political issue, leading to the CEO's arrest. Not investing in safety has long-term problems. Sometimes the difference was reflected in the share price, and sometimes not.

Daniel Satinsky: But it's interesting that they were oriented towards pleasing you and showing you things. They definitely wanted to become integrated.

Bob von Rekowsky: Oh, yes.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: Some of the oil companies were the most recalcitrant. They were very proud Russian companies. The Lukoil guys, for example. Bogdanov would only appear once in a while. One time, I went on a Russian regional oil trip, and we met with the CFO of Surgut in Moscow. We were going to fly all the way to Surgut to meet Bogdanov because he refused to come to Moscow. So we flew overnight, went to this giant auditorium, and waited. Eventually, the CFO announced that Bogdanov had been called to an important meeting in Moscow and left that morning. It felt like a personal slight.

So we ended up asking more questions to the CFO and the production manager. Some companies were better than others in trying to help you. At Surgut, they would take out reports and go through the numbers. We had no information—a year and a half old annual report published only in Russian accounting standards. We'd go to Russia, ask for a copy, write notes, and try to piece together the latest disclosed numbers. It was crazy. Now Russia has quarterly international accounting standards reporting and Russian accounting standards, which you can get online.

Daniel Satinsky: When did that begin to happen?

Bob von Rekowsky: It started to get much better in the early 2000s.

Daniel Satinsky: Early 2000s.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, it started to pick up in terms of availability of information.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: Investor calls made information more accessible. Before I forget, one other anecdote relates to the give and take experience` . I got to do a lot of things because senior management couldn't. Russia wasn't a priority, but the Russians would ask for our CEO, which would never happen.

So I went in their place. One time, our senior legal counsel in Boston was invited through someone in Washington to be part of an IFC trip to Russia. He couldn't go, so they asked if anyone in the London office could. I scheduled a trip around it and got to sit with Ira Millstein, who led the delegation. There were institutional investors and a couple of US pension funds. I knew all the Russian CEOs on the other side of the table. I felt like the IFC side was lecturing them about corporate governance in a condescending way, while the Russian side dealt with the realities of running a company in Russia. The Georgian guy who ran a major company spoke fluent English but chose Russian because he was annoyed.

He basically said, "I know you guys would like to come here and teach us heathens how to eat with a fork and knife and make sure we brush our teeth the right way. But I'm running this company in the rural mountains. My deputy CEO was shot in his car last month. We have mafia guys trying to get control of the company. We have all these things, a lack of law. I can't find a replacement for this deputy CEO. Wonder why? And, I actually have audited quarterly reports. And my share price is still pennies on the dollar where it should be to reflect the massive amount of output at my company. We have a corporate governance code, and we tried to get a foreign investor on the board of directors. We have an independent auditor." And he just, boom, laid it on the table. And I totally identified with that. They were sick of being lectured by each new wave of people that didn't do their homework to be ready for prime time for the Russian side. And that's what disappointed me. I felt like we just had endless waves of newbies from the West coming over, and the Russians eventually just got tired of it.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, I remember, and there was a sort of "stop telling us how to live" sentiment that developed during that backlash, you know?

Bob von Rekowsky: And I could understand it because I felt we go and ask a bunch of questions, and then... I got this from a colleague, but at the end of the meeting, I would always stop and say, "Do you have any questions for us?" And they were blown away. They were like, "Wait, you really?" So yeah, I do actually work. And they'd have a bunch of questions, but they said, "You know, many people don't care to even ask. You just come and interview us." In South Africa, the CEOs would say, "Yeah, you Yanks come with your notebooks and never your checkbooks." And I thought that was really funny. So after knowing the same people over and over again and coming, I felt like we could ask tough questions. But they knew where we were going, and we could have a kind of back and forth. Because of the level of involvement I was allowed to have, from my firm saying, "You do what you need to do to get an investment view," and my interest in it, finding competitors in the market who were similarly interested in getting governance things going. We kind of applied to do meetings with the government sometimes. And it culminated at one point with a meeting with Alexander Voloshin, the chief of staff for Yeltsin and Putin for a few administrations. He was the chairman of the board of several companies where the government still had a significant stake. And we brought our special plea to him: "We'd like you, the government as a shareholder, to be aligned with us as minority foreign shareholders to make sure that the company is not selling assets at depressed prices until they realize reforms." So what Chubais wanted to do was like, "You know what? We're not getting investment in these little regional utilities. So we're going to sell them to whoever the largest guy is in that region is. So we're going to sell this one to Lukoil, we're going to sell this one to this oil company, this one to this combination. And those guys are going to be interested in investing in electricity capacity so they have dependable and good enough output to run their things. And if I have to get her off the balance sheet at a depressed price, so be it. In the end, we'll have a higher share price. So we'll have a reformed Russian energy system." So that's a valid approach, that Chubais creative destruction approach. If we're holding the company, we're like, "Look, us as a holding company, and it's got really depressed prices because nobody knows what's going on underneath, and there's this risk of asset stripping." So we just went to the government, we said, "We just want you to be aware of it, and maybe you have a say on it or a vote on it so we could know." So there were some contentious meetings with these guys in the Kremlin for many hours. We were there till midnight at one point because Voloshin thought it was very interesting. He was coming up to speed on what was going on, like, "Who are these weird foreign investors? Why are you all in your 20s?" And Chubais on the other side, who was both an ally, but maybe also a pain in the neck from the government's point of view, and how can I use this group to make him do what I want? It was very interesting. And Voloshin agreed to a subsequent meeting a couple of months later to follow up on this. He never went against Chubais, but we felt things were aired and people better understood where we were. The reason I bring that anecdote was you really could get a lot of excellent access and insight if you put the energy into it. You didn't always win, but you could get your case across. In some cases, you did make a lot of money in the shares of these companies. Whether it was Gazprom, you know, you had multiple returns like 200-300% if you bought at the right time. In a subsequent conversation over a beer, maybe I'll tell you about the whole issue with Gazprom GDR versus local shares. I spent a huge amount of time on that, dealing with government officials, Gazprom employees, local brokers, on the whole discount rate between the two. And then they created this whole gray market where a lot of skullduggery happened.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, I do remember some of that as well. So, did Fidelity get involved with Gazprom shares?

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes. We could only buy the GDRs. I remember the spreadsheet I built for the company and the capital structure. The Russian government agreed to ring-fence, I think it was 8% of the company's free float, in the GDR structure that foreigners could buy. And that share price had nothing to do with the local share price that was on the market, as you recall. So if you got excited about Gazprom, the GDR could trade at a 100-200% premium to the local share. If you wanted exposure to Russia, you bought it. A lot of people played this game. I remember some of my clients, the portfolio managers, said, "Why would I pay a 100% premium for something?" And I'd say, "Well, you do the same thing in Taiwan. You buy Taiwan Semiconductor ADR shares, even though you can buy the local shares. When the US tech market rallies, for some reason, the ADR would go up faster and higher than the locals because US investors were buying them. There's only a fixed pool in Taiwan, so the premium would go from 5% to up to 20% sometimes for no reason. So you do that without arbitrage. In this case, you are prohibited from buying the local share." Then, as the whole thing reformed and more shares became available, people had multi-legged returns on the local shares. The Russian government tolerated foreigners buying the local shares when they weren't supposed to. The law said no foreign investment, but they knew it was going on. We'd always tell people, "You think it's an authoritarian government, totalitarian, whatever you want to call it. They actually tolerate foreigners breaking the law because they had bigger fish to fry." So when you get your hand slapped, you knew full well what you were doing. Brokers tried to sell us gray schemes all the time, and I would just say, "Absolutely not. We're not going to get a foul of any rule where someday it could come back, and you could have the shares confiscated, or there'd be some tax penalty you didn't know about, and then you could be prohibited from investing." I felt more akin to the Russian side of it in that regard. But a lot of hedge funds that we invested alongside didn't care. If they could buy local shares, they made giant returns. If they were selling to US investors, at the end of the day, they could do things we couldn't do.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, I know, I do remember that. And then GKOs—were you involved with GKOs?

Bob von Rekowsky: Thankfully, no. Because they blew up spectacularly. We did at one point, I think. In Turkey when they had a financial crisis. Some of their short-term, three-month T-bills were yielding 200% or greater. Wow. We did buy some of those because they had very short-term futures. But the GKO market, I think some of my colleagues, the more riskier ones, wanted to, but we just weren't able to. And I'm glad at the end of the day we couldn't. We stuck to, the euro bonds,

And corporate bonds when they became available. But, you know, the GKO market was just a crazy thing to watch.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Yeah. What did 1998 do to you? What was the impact of that on you?

Bob von Rekowsky: So it's interesting. I had both mentors and managers along the way who were very helpful and good relationships, and I had moved from being a debt analyst on Russia. I had joined the equity side of the business. So I was looking at companies. I came into the London office on Monday morning, August 17, 1998.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, and it was.


Bob von Rekowsky: I saw the news and it was like 8:00 in the morning in London. So I picked up the phone and called our emerging markets debt manager, John Carlson in Boston, who I had worked for in the debt team. And, and I kind of left his team to join the London equity team, which it was mixed emotions because I kind of left my boss. But, you know, he was a larger-than-life great guy. And we're fantastic friends still to this day. And I called him and woke him up at 3:00 in the morning like I have. I was like shaking when I called and he picked up the phone and I said, John, it's Bob. He's like, what happened? I said, the Russians devalued, defaulted and declared a debt moratorium. And I think he got some expletive. And he's like, thank you for calling me. A, you know, I'll call you back. Keep me updated. And then he got up, went downstairs, started calling some London brokers and was trading before Boston guys came in. So we're we're very lucky that we have a global firm that he could do a position in the portfolio in some some ways kind of get ahead of the thing.

Daniel Satinsky: But yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: We just sat there in shock because that whole summer I had been meeting with like some people from Goldman Sachs who were like the economists on Russia that got pulled over the Chinese wall to to help you remember, there was one last Eurobond that Goldman Sachs arranged to kind of bridge the Russian debt situation. I'm not sure if Soros had at that time also had a personal loan and maybe mixing up the years. But the argument was the West is not going to let a nuclear-tipped superpower go into default. They're going to they're going to help them. Right. And you know, so so much for that.

Daniel Satinsky: The fact that they're yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: But Russia did get caught up in the crisis that began in the east. So we had the Thai baht collapse, it broke its peg. And this emerging markets wave of defaults stemmed from U.S. monetary policy being very tight at that time. And it drained kind of a global dollar, liquidity and all the regimes that had pegged or managed their currency against the US dollar. Liquidity and access to finance was draining. And they had to abandon their peg. So it started in Asia, Thailand andIndonesia probably got hit at that time as oil prices were going down. Also came through Eastern Europe. The Czech koruna came under pressure. The Russians devalued and all that. So that set off an acrimonious set of relationships from the West to Russia. And I remember Chubais when we talked to him later. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he was like, you know. I'd do it again if I had to. We had no choice. They had that. They had that. I mean, it was the young guy, looks like a he's always a youthful guy. He was prime minister Kieran Kaminski.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh. Kiriyenko.

Bob von Rekowsky: Kiriyenko. Yeah. He he was in the meeting. He was in the meeting with Chubais and whoever else. And I think they made the decision and then just I think they told Yeltsin we're pulling the plug. Yeah. Right. So that was crazy. But that just led to like a really tough time. We owned Russian debt in the funds, and that caused some serious underperformance. And, my boss, John, spent a good 18 months, you know, restructuring the portfolio and getting back to outperforming. But it took a lot of our time, as with other competitors in the emerging markets debt crisis of those years. We mark the emerging markets investment calendar by which crises happened and by birth of our children and and when they correlated with crises that happened.

Daniel Satinsky: But yeah. Yeah. So did it cause you to then stay out of Russia for those 18 months?

Bob von Rekowsky: No,I, I definitely went back and met with people for sure and other countries in the region also where things happened. So we we definitely still stayed engaged. It was, you know, to try to find out what's going on. Of course, the devaluation completely resuscitated the oil sector because when oil prices collapsed, there were. And it was pegged to the dollar. It became really, really expensive to purchase equipment in rubles pegged to the dollar and to pay people at a low oil price. Oil prices fell to like 8 or 9 bucks. Whatever.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that. Yes.

Bob von Rekowsky: Front page of The Economist drowning in oil. My oil colleague had it on his door the minute they devalued. Suddenly the Russian oil companies could purchase equipment. Earning dollars and could pay devalued rubles to buy new oil and to pay people. So they flourished. Yeah. And once they came back online, then the government could start to earn, you know, tax revenue. And then that whole process of rebuilding their financial system based on that took place. So they were able. So equities definitely were in a better situation when you could earn foreign-priced asset revenues and then pay people with, your liabilities would be in Russian rubles.

Daniel Satinsky: Right. Did you pay a lot of attention to oil prices when you were looking at your Russian, debt and equity evaluations?

Bob von Rekowsky: Definitely. I spent a huge amount of time meeting with either oil analysts at brokerage firms or the Cambridge Energy Research Group. Thane Gustafson was a very interesting character there. His team was very good at CERA. We developed contacts with the economics teams at oil companies. My U.S. and European developed market colleagues had good relationships with the big CEOs of energy companies. We tried to find out what their insight was. We often had better insight than they did. That was very interesting, especially I remember a conversation we had with John Browne when he was running BP. I felt when oil prices were going up, getting over $100 at one point, he used to say something like, "Oil prices have always been at an inflation-adjusted $19 per barrel. That's where they'll go back to." It was something flippant like that. Obviously, he wasn't an oil guy. He had a different background, but we felt sometimes the oil majors just didn't have any better insight than we did. What we spent our time with was finding out what the sensitivities to these companies were. If you got that right, you made a lot of money or avoided losing a lot of money. In our models, we'd figure out if the local currency devalued in this matrix, and you could build these great little Excel models. A 5 to 10% devaluation added this much to the bottom line. Above this, it was destructive to the balance sheet if they had dollar debt, but it caused this much of a revenue bump. The same thing applied to the commodity price. It was really fun to learn as an analyst. As we trained new people, we had them go through this exercise: you're investing in a company that doesn't control the price of its commodity, but they're geared to it. If things are both moving in the same direction, like the ruble would go down while the price went up, you got giant returns. People really appreciated the different levels of sensitivity that these companies had. I spent a lot of time on it, and it was interesting—the history of it, the politics of it, the fight over the pipeline routes. I met a number of ex-KGB people; the brokerages hired a lot of ex-KGB people, by the way, so they had their connections. You'd meet, I'm sure, U.S. spooks in the region who were like the ambassador to the pipeline stuff, or some guy at an embassy who was an attaché who joined your meeting and looked like he left Washington in the 1970s and hadn't gone back. But we got fantastic access. We met ambassadors and their assistants, and anybody who had a view, we could interview them. It was really wonderful to do.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you were doing your independent analysis, but your purchases were through brokers, local brokers?

Bob von Rekowsky: Some European and U.S. brokers. They had a local counterpart. One example would be Credit Suisse, which had their European and U.S. desks, and then they had a local entity so we could purchase through Credit Suisse.

UBS ended up having a partnership with Brunswick. So UBS Warburg had their Russian Brunswick. Deutsche Bank and UFG (United Financial Group) where we could. We had independent relationships with local brokers so we could trade directly with them because often they had the better research. They had the young, interesting analysts on the ground. To pay them, you wanted to have a trading relationship. Like, you give us all this, you help us get this meeting set up, you have good research. The relationships that are developed between mutual fund companies and Wall Street research are very regulated in terms of what you pay for, which is great. In places we couldn't, Fidelity had a system where we could actually cut a check for research. So we got an internal budget to pay for emerging markets. If you had your broker in Russia, I could allocate on a quarterly basis a monetary amount that broker could use with trades with a Western broker. It was almost a barter system set up so we could remunerate people for good access and research. They were always frustrated, like, "We appreciate the payments, but we'd rather have a stable trading relationship." Well, of course you would, but...

Daniel Satinsky: Right.

Bob von Rekowsky: It's not going to happen right now.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: We had a very rigorous back office. We sent our back office teams to go meet with the brokers, and each broker had to be rated internally in terms of their balance sheets, their sustainability. If our custody guys said, "Absolutely not, you can only talk to them and send them a check for research, but we can't trade with them. It's too small, no balance sheet," stuff like that. So it was helpful to have a really good team.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Did you have an office in Russia?

Bob von Rekowsky: No. London, Hong Kong, and Boston.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay.

Bob von Rekowsky: We had distribution offices in Frankfurt, but there was no research there at the time. Now we have offices in Korea, Taiwan, smaller ones. Actually, the sister company, Fidelity International, or now called Fidelity Worldwide, they probably have more offices. But at the time, we did all of our research and investing out of the London office.

Daniel Satinsky: So, turning back in, I've kept... We're at about an hour and a half into this.

Bob von Rekowsky: I have time if you don't have another meeting.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, I don't. I just want to make sure we're okay.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah. And if we can do a follow-up one on Zoom or by email, whatever is easier for you.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. I would probably like to do that, but I want to... You saw this. You got past 1998. You stayed involved in the market. You stayed involved in it for some period of time after that. Did Russia develop more or less as you expected? And I'm not talking about politics. I'm really talking about how the markets and our relationship with Russia with the world market developed, and it became what we used to call a normal country, which was their aspirational goal from the beginning: "I want to live in a normal country."

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes. Wow. So that's a good set of questions to think about because I feel there was like a... I don't mean reflexive in the sort of sense of reflexivity, because I never really quite understood that whole proposition. But the reflexive nature of our involvement with them, that there's with us. And you made the reference that I'm glad you did about we had advisers on the ground trying to get Yeltsin reelected there, and it was okay and open. And this... It's almost like we're looking at a mirror with each other or a yin and yang, the Russians and the U.S. there. I feel like that's what causes a lot of the enmity between the two.

When we hit the 2008 global financial crisis, and the world came to a standstill in December, the banking system seized up. I was getting calls from the guys at Lukoil, and they're like, "We can't get a letter of credit on oil in the pipeline right now. The asset's there and can be seen just sitting in the pipeline. What is going on? What are you guys thinking?" They were turning to us with as many questions and frustrations as we were asking them questions. They realized that the Russian financial system and savings system was way too shallow. They looked at China with kind of aspiration and fear. I think the Chinese system may be fake in some ways, in terms of the allocation of capital from the Chinese government into state-owned entities and keeping zombie companies alive. But despite that, there's a deep savings pool that really can't escape the country very easily. So when the crisis hit, they had domestic liquidity. The Russians didn't. That thin market wiped out the banks, went to the wall, and a lot of them had to go to the government for bridge loans, of which some got paid back, and some resulted in stakes to the government.

They were very alarmed by this. I think they were like, "We need to get our act together." Is Nebulina still the central bank governor? She was fantastic. I got to meet her once or twice and a couple of her deputies. I thought she was market savvy and very good. She was there when they tried to build up the kind of reforms that would help the deepening of the financial system there. Then they also realized, as the U.S. became political on certain things, like the sanctions that came from the Magnitsky Act and other things that precluded Russian companies from issuing new shares, that we were putting them at risk. Sberbank could not issue any new shares that foreign investors could buy. They could do it in the domestic market. So we were actually putting them at a national security risk. I think they were like, "We can't have the U.S. turning SWIFT on and off with us. This doesn't make any sense. We have a relationship with Iran. We develop their civilian nuclear infrastructure. We're getting hit by stuff or we have to join these sanctions as well. Our export industry is going to build these things in Iran. We don't want them to have weapons either."

So just seeing it from both sides, I think the Russians got a wake-up call. Like we keep dancing with the West, but they just don't really care about our perspective on this. So I think they really tried very hard to figure out how to use this window of being shut off from the world to develop local industries. In a good way, food production industries flourished, and the retail sector, the stuff you're more familiar with from experience. I'm not sure how deep the financial system is now, but they kind of understand the situation. They floated, they got away from having the ruble be fixed. They let it float against oil prices, which makes a lot of sense. They've built up gold reserves and they have a better buffer. I think they're more practical in how they budget things. So I think it's like a spurned relationship. But they seem to be okay with it.

The problem is, I think the West doesn't care to listen to what Russia has to say. Unfortunately, the late Professor Stephen Cohen... I didn't realize he died last year.

Daniel Satinsky: Just last year, I believe. Yeah, he was pilloried.

Bob von Rekowsky: With a lot of criticism that he was some, like, apologist for Putin. And all he's ever been is an honest, critical analyst of whoever's in power. I learned a lot from reading him. I developed a friendship with former ambassador Jack Matlock, who was Reagan's ambassador. Just getting his longer-term perspective to understand these things. I had a chance in a forum to meet and greet with Mikhail Gorbachev when he spoke at the anniversary of perestroika in the U.S. Colin Powell showed up and Madeleine Albright and all these people. They were actually friendly. The enmity grew and grew. The Magnitsky Act kind of poisoned the whole thing. I have very mixed views on the whole thing, which we can share offline, and see what your thoughts are, too, because it's not... Yeah, yeah. It's not that particular to the interview, but it matters in terms of where the Russians go from here.

If people took the time to read the speeches or the presentations that Putin gives every year at the... not the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum, the other...

Daniel Satinsky: Valdai.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yes, the Valdai Discussion Club. Whether you agree with his worldview or not, he actually explains it. And then he gets challenged by European leaders who ask him questions. They're not staged questions either. He's had, like, Genscher ask him questions, or German officials. They're not asking canned questions. Over time, he expounds a little bit on what's the zeitgeist of the world and what's happening. I felt like if we just listened a little more, that would be good. We really should have a lot better, easier, less heated relations with Russia. If we ever get there, I'd be very happy for it. I think the Russians realize that the ship has not maybe sailed, but is elusive. They better be prepared for whatever wind is blowing out of the U.S. at any particular time. They better brace for it and just make sure they can go it alone so they don't have another financial crisis.

Nothing's been lasting in terms of what the Russians took away from their whole IMF years. They look back and think, "Oh, my God, what were we doing? We spent so much energy and effort, and destroyed our financial system multiple times for our own mistakes as well as getting involved." What did they learn from all that? I'm not sure they have many positives, except the U.S. changes its emotional state towards us on such a regular basis that we just don't know what's coming next. They're sanguine, realistic, pragmatic.

You seem to have as many Russian friends as I do. They're just nihilistic one day but nonplussed the next. I feel sometimes... A Russian friend of mine or somebody said it might be better if Russians were little green men. Because this way you wouldn't look at us and say, "We look the same. We should be European people with the same values," but we're actually not. We're Slavic and you look at us and expect us to be one way, but we come from another background and have certain overlapping values.And Velosin daid this once, when he came to Boston for a meeting, I took a meeting with him and was like, "Why do you doubt that we want to become a normal, functioning European-style democratic system with our own baggage, but that's not a bad thing? Why do people constantly doubt that it's genuine?"

Daniel Satinsky: Right, right. No, I've heard that several times from different people. The biggest mistake Americans make is because Russians look like us, we assume they think like us.

Bob von Rekowsky: Or they ought to.

Daniel Satinsky: And they ought to. Yeah, okay. But that's a different level.

Bob von Rekowsky: But when they don't, we're like, "How could you not? You should."

One time I took some colleagues on a trip to Ukraine, an investment trip. We went to Kyiv and then to the east, to Donetsk. In Kyiv, I took people around, and I'm like, "Okay, you see the way people look, the men and the women, the style, the streets. It seems like a little more poor Poland or something, but it feels similar to what you'd expect. You see the onion domes. Let's go to Donetsk." You land, and the men are all wearing leather jackets and jeans. They squat on their haunches when they're waiting for the bus.

In the same country, you have a difference in style. These are Asiatic Slavs. They're different. When you meet them, the level of machismo is a Russian version that is just there, whether you like it or not. It's on the table there. You expect them to be different. There are a lot of strange cultural shocks. People in different places in Russia are often super warm and friendly. When I learned to speak a little bit or thankfully was with people who spoke excellent English or were good translators, I met a lot of very kind people. One time we were going up to a plane that was delayed, and we got there at 2:00 in the morning. The hotel had prepared a meal for us because that's what you do when people come in late. They stayed up and wrapped up the dinner to make sure we had something. Half the people were like, "I'm just going to bed." I remember this really gentlemanly English investor from the UK said, "Well, I'm going to sit down. They bothered to prepare this and stay up. I'm going to tuck into this." I said, "I'll join you."

Daniel Satinsky: Right.

Bob von Rekowsky: Correct. Now I felt that. Personal level with the many Russian people that they were really would share everything with you. And then people would say always, no, don't you? Aren't you scared to go to Moscow? Like you can't do anything. And I'd say. What are you talking about? We go to a restaurant after a long meeting and it would be like midnight. It's closing, and you'd go and you'd say, come on, we're hungry. And they'd look and say, okay, an hour. They'd open back up, and then they'd bring you fresh ashtrays and they'd. You try doing that anywhere United States thing. It's close. Get out and we'll always go home.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, but.

Bob von Rekowsky: One time I had to get to the airport. I was going to miss my plane. And the driver that that I had arranged through the broker brokerage. He kept saying, what time is your flight? And I wasn't going to make it. And he just said, do you mind if I get you there? And he pulled out in the opposite direction of traffic and zoomed along and passed like a couple miles of cars, and until he passed a cop car and he pulled back in that we got pulled over. So he pulls over and he goes moment. It goes back as it gets in the car. As we chat, it comes back and I you know, I asked him like what happened? And they said, what the hell are you doing? Like, what are you in a rush for? And he's like, I have a client that is trying to catch his flight back to London, doesn't want to miss it. And they're like, okay, all right, you know, 20 ruble fine. Like, just just just be careful. And that instance, it wasn't like, shake down or something. And I said, can you imagine in the US you lose your license, they leave, they impound your car.

Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely.

Bob von Rekowsky: That you should be doing it. But that was a different level of freedom. Yeah. Crazy.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah yeah yeah. No, no. All true. Well, true. I've had many, many, similar experiences, you know, and, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And those are the hard things to explain. You know. Yeah. I mean, if a Russian person is your friend, they'll do anything for you.

Bob von Rekowsky: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And because that's what they expect you'll do for them. You know. Yeah. Yeah.

Bob von Rekowsky: I think that's true. There's a level of openness. And I saw people sometimes call me for advice, whether they live in the States now, who are, you know, formally from Russia. I have a lot of friendships that still keep from that time. And I feel they're very open, and direct. Yeah. Which is. Which is great. And it was nice to see Russia from different parts when I was there. I wish I lived there so I could experience a little bit more. But the whole thing with everyone, I felt we had very good access to information because we cared to ask questions and listened also. So it's not that we had better information than, you know, the intelligence agencies or governments. We had different information that sometimes helped us get to. The same quality of analysis that helped us because they were cut off from all the ways that we could have access. And of course, I didn't care so much about some secret cable. I could go and meet three oil companies on the same day. And here the information that they didn't know between themselves.

And sometimes it will be like, well, I just heard something that maybe they'll meet over drinks one day, but the Lukoil guys don't really want to talk to the Lukoil guys. Right? Right. They were the same. They were on the same street on opposite ends, like many have had this horrible building that they bought that quarter past. You put Lukoil into. And I remember we met with the Lukoil guys. They walk down the street, there's a restaurant in the middle, had lunch and then went to the Lukoil guys and they were like, oh, those guys in like all this stuff. And I realize they're not talking to each other all the time, but we're getting some really good information. We could put a mosaic together, right, of insight. And it was it was very, very good. But there were contentious meetings about Russian history and philosophy in there. You Americans think, you know, so much but like NATO's bombing the world. What are you doing in Serbia? And they were right on some of these things, you know, like, right. For the long run, of course.