The Satinsky Archive

The Oral History of Americans and other foreigners who participated in the historic dismantling of the Soviet economy by Russian reformers and who contributed to the creation of the Russian market economy in the 1990s.

‘When we talk about history, the behind the scenes setting of the stage is rarely understood or recorded. So, that’s very important, because this is an important period in the history of the world and for us to learn well from it, we really need to understand the biggest possible picture of perceptions that we can.”

James Hickman, director, Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program

The Satinsky Archive is an oral history of the impact of Americans and other non-Russian foreigners on modern Russia as it emerged from the Soviet Union. There is an old adage that “nothing comes from nothing.” Understanding current Russia depends on understanding where it came from not only its Soviet and pre-Soviet historical roots, but the formation of the social forces that created new economic and political structures beginning in the 1980s and developing into the 2000s. The interviews collected here give a firsthand, on the ground account of this period as an historical resource and as a collection of insights into the impact of Western market capitalism as it was adopted in post-Soviet Russia. 

The Archive is an outgrowth of the extensive interviews conducted for the book, Creating the Post-Soviet Market Economy: Through American Eyes. Of the 105 interviews conducted for the book, there was only space to include excerpts from 65. Even with these limits, the book is an important contribution to the study of Russia and US Russia relations standing on its own. The Archive expands upon the book as compilation of many of the original interviews, only slightly edited but presented in full, along with some more recent interviews.  

The interviews are intended to correct some mistaken commonly held assumptions about Russia and the lack of perspective on its evolution in the late Soviet Period and then through the formative years of the 1990s and 2000s. From the American and Western perspective, the years covered by these interviews were a time of neoliberal dominance and the Washington consensus. It was widely believed that the American neoliberal market system was the model for the whole world. It was an era of American triumphalism that reached its peak around the 2008 financial crisis and now is under siege, attacked from within by the forces of illiberalism and from without by the of collaboration of Russia and China and the ongoing emergence of the Global South. Russia is a big part of this story. It emerged from the Soviet Union with the Yeltsin-era romance with the neoliberal model in the 1990s and Russians rapidly assimilated the skills and structures of a market economy. Starting around the time of the 1998 Russian financial crisis, many Russians began questioning the wisdom of accepting the America and the Western version of the market economy and social values being introduced along with it. Around this same time, the traditional sources in Russia in the security services and the military that had been disoriented in the Yeltsin years regrouped and supported Vladimir Putin as the successor to Boris Yeltsin. With the rise in oil prices, consolidation of the Russian state, and taming of the Yeltsin era oligarchs, Russia gradually rejected first foreign political and social values and increasingly asserted the power of the state over the private sector. Russian intellectuals revised and refined Russian nationalism and Russian national interests and defined the universalism of the neoliberal economic model and social values of the West as a new form of Western imperialism. Romance with the West turned to outright rejection and conflict that only fully matured with the Ukraine crisis beginning in 2014. Many of the people interviewed lived through the whole of this evolution of post-Soviet Russia as witnesses and participants, with important observations, insights, and analysis to share.

Structure of the Archive

The Satinsky Archive generally supports the structure, emphasis, and conclusions of Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes. But the Archive also adds new interviews done subsequent to that book and broadens and deepens the perspective of the interviews that could only be summarized in the book. The interviews have been organized by major themes and then topics within those themes to clarify what types of information are available in each or in other words, why listen to or read the transcript of a particular interview. Each interview each has a brief biographical introduction of the person interviewed.

Citizen diplomacy in the 1980s.

It is impossible to understand Russia of the 1990s and 2000s without looking at some of the salient aspects of its Soviet past, particularly the Cold War. The Cold War was a conflict of two universalist systems trying to triumph over the other and impose their own values and institutions. Both systems arose from European ideas and history. Soviet universalism was linked with European Marxism and utilized anti-imperialism as weapon against the West, through alliance with liberation movements in former colonies. Cracks began in the so-called Iron Curtain on both sides for different reasons. On the US side, activists and organizations that grew out of the counterculture and peace movements of the 1970s began to focus on the existential danger of nuclear war and were searching for ways to prevent a nuclear exchange. On the Soviet side, intellectuals were looking for ways out from the stagnation of the late Soviet period through exploring human potential and with interest in new computer and information technologies being developed in the West. As groups on each side found each other and began to build working ties, a whole citizen diplomacy movement began that blossomed in the perestroika era. 

The citizen diplomacy movement believed that through breaking the communications barriers between the West and the Soviet Union and through people-to-people contact, war could be avoided. The activists of this movement broke new ground using new technologies like the satellite telecommunications that enabled the rock and roll concert exchange of the US Festival in 1982, supplemented by increasing personal contacts and travel by peace activists to the Soviet Union. This period was a prequel for the much broader and deeper interactions between Americans and Russians to follow in the 1990’s. It was a movement that sowed the seeds of American promotion of civil society organizations and American Soviet joint ventures as private sector prototypes that blossomed in post-Soviet Russia. 

In this section, there are extensive interviews with many of the pioneers of the citizen diplomacy movement, which was initially non-governmental private groups supported by wealthy individuals and peace organizations. There was a strong belief at the time that if Americans and Soviets could talk to each other and learn about each other a nuclear war could be averted. 

Topics in this section include the people to people exchange activities of the Esalen Institute and Project Harmony; space bridge TV shows between the US and the Soviet Union; sister city organizations; US musicians John Denver, Billy Joel and the Paul Winter Consort to the Soviet Union; Association of Space Explorers (both astronauts and cosmonauts) and perestroika era joint ventures, i.e. Dialog, Perestroika (commercial office space), and TrenMos, first American-style restaurant.

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THE INTERVIEWS