About
Anya Kucharev has been engaged in US-Russia relations and cross-cultural communication from the age of four, when her Russian-Ukrainian parents, who had been captured and displaced to Austria during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, were resettled to New York City on a military transport ship. In 1971, she began to teach Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and became involved with the human potential movement that was instrumental in developing citizen diplomacy between the US and Russia.
In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s, she was an essential activist in the citizen diplomacy movement as an interpreter, consultant, and travel guide to numerous pioneering individuals and organizations, including the Esalen Institute, Internews Network, San Francisco-Moscow Teleport, philanthropist Henry Dakin’s diverse projects, Peace Child, Association for Humanistic Psychology, Armand Hammer Productions, etc., which caused her to be considered the “cross-cultural Sherpa.”
Since 2007, she has been collecting primary source materials that are housed at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.
In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s, she was an essential activist in the citizen diplomacy movement as an interpreter, consultant, and travel guide to numerous pioneering individuals and organizations, including the Esalen Institute, Internews Network, San Francisco-Moscow Teleport, philanthropist Henry Dakin’s diverse projects, Peace Child, Association for Humanistic Psychology, Armand Hammer Productions, etc., which caused her to be considered the “cross-cultural Sherpa.”
Since 2007, she has been collecting primary source materials that are housed at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.
Anya Kucharev: So, I moved along because I wanted to come to California. I wanted to leave that restricted, restrictive—in those days Russian Soviet studies was who taught there. This is to explain how I wound up with the Esalen group.
There were people who were interested in literature and very dedicated that way. I had a difficult time with them because they didn’t read Russian very well. They read things in translation. And I found it suspect that if you are studying a culture you… But some people, I learned, after teaching for so many years, some people are not capable of learning another language.
Yes, and so that was always, you know, I would say wouldn’t you read the Russian studies about this, and some of them didn’t. I got embarrassed about all of that and I thought do I really want to be with a group of people—not only was the Cold War mentality gripping everybody, I grew up feeling like I was the enemy because when I came at four years old from Austria—and this is one thing in the manuscript that Birgit [Menzel] sent you, she said my parents emigrated. They didn’t really emigrate because they wanted to. My father was a prisoner of war captured by the Nazis, taken to Poland. He walked back on foot to his native village.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Anya Kucharev: That took courage. But he was recaptured. This time, yes, he wound up in Austria, where he met my mother, who was taken as slave labor from Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine. She had a twin. I didn’t know this till I met her, the twin, in the Ukraine. And the local chief of police fell in love—his son fell in love with my mother, and she spurned him, would not marry him. So, when this chief of police was deputized by the Nazis who occupied the territory he said, “take her,” and that was my mother. It’s just—the story is amazing, because she wound up laundering and ironing Nazi uniforms in a camp in Austria, where she met my father, who by that time—and this I’m not clear on—he worked in the British zone, because Austria was divided, towards the end of the war, into all these different zones, so they met.
And when I look at the pictures, they didn’t want to talk about these things very much. But I do have lots of pictures, because they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, whether they were going to go back to the Soviet Union or go elsewhere. My mother, who was very bright, and had learned some German, and wanted to be a veterinarian, and the local farmer liked her, and so he would invite her over, and she said to my father they’re going to either shoot you or send you to the gulag*. And that’s what happened to many people who had been displaced because Stalin did not want them coming back with stories about how wonderful it was in the West.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. They were all distrusted and imprisoned partly because they had been captured, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: Exactly. And what can you do? Twenty years later, about 10 years later I saw video of Russian prisoners of war on YouTube, and I imagined what that was like. But my father was very traumatized, because that came on top of the fact that his father, who was a rich, prosperous peasant called a Kulak*, the land was taken away. My grandpa was sent to Siberia. The family was thrown out in the snow—go where you will. And the orchard was completely destroyed. And there was just a recent program about raskulachivanie, which is the…
Daniel Satinsky: The expropriation of the Kulaks.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Thank you. So, it’s emotional, and when I get emotional, kind of the brain says, oh god, that’s horrible. But this is an hour and a half program that is extraordinary. What happened was the entire backbone of agriculture was destroyed, and millions of people. I didn’t think it was that many, but millions. Like the Indian march here, the Trail of Tears, some of them were forced to walk, and their children froze, they froze.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you came with that traumatic family background into an environment where you were then suspect because you were members of the enemy.
Anya Kucharev: You’re a pinko commie. I didn’t know what a commie was, or, for that matter, when I came—so I was born in Klagenfurt, Austria nine months after the war. My parents could not get married. There was no orthodox priest. They were both kind of religious, so they wanted a traditional…so I was two when they got married. So, I realized that I was a celebration of the end of the war, that yes, it was traumatic, but there was…that passion that they had for each other—and they did. They weren’t very well matched in some ways, because my father was so traumatized, in a way, then being captured, then re-traumatized, which was a key—Kursk was a key battleground with the tanks, and his village is not too far, between Kursk and Belgorod. And he wanted to go back. My mother said no, we are leaving.
But they did have a wonderful circle of close friends in Klagenfurt. Some of them went to Venezuela, some to Brazil, some to Australia. We went to New York because there was a family that sponsored us. The Tolstovskii Fond [Tolstoy Foundation] would list in a local Russian newspaper, Russian language newspaper, Novoye Russkoe Slovo, so I still have that from the newspaper.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Anya Kucharev: A family of three, they named us, and total strangers. Total strangers said we will take them in until they find work and can settle themselves. Which my father did for his friends from Klagenfurt because they didn’t like living in tropical climates. It’s so interesting. They said we just don’t like it here. And they came with their children to our three-room apartment in Brooklyn, became the place of the whole refugee thing. I experienced it at another level. So, all this integration, how do you integrate into this country? There’re so many contradictions.
So, I escaped my—and this also Birgit didn’t know because she’s not familiar with the neighborhoods. There are prosperous neighborhoods in Brooklyn that I escaped to near the Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza Library, so I was always pulled toward culture. But what helped me was to…my parents weren’t very educated, but they wanted us to be educated, their children. And I was able, through Russian literature, I went to school on Saturdays.
Daniel Satinsky: A Russian school?
Anya Kucharev: A Russian school, a church school. The church stuff was—had to take it with a grain of salt because the priest would preach love thy neighbor, and be kind, and all this, and on Sundays as the kids were running around, he would come out and shake his fist, so I called him on it. And he said, you better watch out, I’ll tell your father. I said, I don’t care.
So, that energy that I got from understanding my parents’ culture, without them being able to convey it, and the horrible stories they didn’t tell us, I understood later, when I studied psychology, that it was too traumatic, especially for my father, because he was wounded physically. He was strong, he was very bright. He learned carpentry. He learned a lot of things on his own. But he wasn’t able… He drank on weekends.
My mother was very good about that. She realized that he got depressed during the week, and so he needed the weekend to relax with a few of his buddies, and some vodka, and she would cook. So, the atmosphere in the slums, even though it was horribly bleak, there was a warmth and a camaraderie, and a real cultural appreciation of one another, even though there were Ukrainians, some of those families were Ukrainians, and Belarusian. There were even Iranians who spoke Russian, so it was really…it was very vital. But I couldn’t bring that to class because I was a commie.
Not everybody. Some of the teachers, I knew when they were calling the roll the first time, they’d look at my name and they’d go bleu-le-la, I knew that this wasn’t going to be easy. In kindergarten I had two languages, Austrian German and Russian, and nobody knew what I was saying. I got terribly frightened. I got under the table, and I wouldn’t come out. They called my mother. Because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was horrifying. So, I became a linguist for a living, just to trace it back. Anyway. So, life is…
Daniel Satinsky: So, you got out in California, and how did you become involved with Esalen?
Anya Kucharev: I taught at the Army Language School, which was at that point DLI [Defense Language Institute], because all the armed forces were involved. And that was interesting. I had college students. I wouldn’t have been able—it was the Vietnam War—I wouldn’t have been able to teach there without the kind of guys—they were mostly guys, the women came in later—they were smart in college and they realized they don’t want to get their heads blown off in Vietnam, so they took the qualifying exams for language school.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
Anya Kucharev: So, the first three years there I had really good students, and I was able, even though there was a PA system, to talk about the topics you weren’t supposed to talk about, religion and politics. And then I would invite them to my home. We would cook. They were also very—it was an immersive, very good program at that point. Then a new commandant came in, and the volunteer army came in, and I got people that couldn’t speak English, let alone any other language, and women, and there was pregnancy. They would come to me with their—girls would come and say, you know—they were living in the barracks together. And I said I’ve got to get out of here.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Anya Kucharev: But in the meantime, I was getting saturated with…I don’t want to call it New Age. Part of it was New Age, but part of it was also the whole freedom of exploration in California of the psyche, of the body. And I went to Esalen. A friend invited me to go to the baths at night, because it was open, free to the public between midnight and 6:00, I think. Yeah, around that time. So, half the night. And I learned a lot of things from meeting the kind of people who would come there from town or from the south of Esalen, people that lived in the woods. At that time growing marijuana was very difficult and very dangerous. But I didn’t smoke a lot, but I understood that there was a real opening happening.
I even met someone from Pitkin Avenue, [Brooklyn] where we had lived. He went to—he said I am—well, you emigrated, I emigrated to Los Angeles. And so, I said what are you doing in the Big Sur woods? He said, you know, I love the ocean, I hate cars, this is the place to be. So, this is a boy from Pitkin Avenue. So, it was…yeah. It was mind expanding and emotionally very…also expanding. Esalen, not only the beauty of the place, but the natural environment is so overwhelming you—oh, I mean, aside from getting in the tubs people would leave their city personalities. But it just made you contemplate, naturally contemplate what is all this about psychologically, so there’s a Zen kind of thing that happened. So—
Daniel Satinsky: And then you ended up working for them?
Anya Kucharev: Okay, here’s what happened. I was talking to my friend Joe, the one from Pitkin Avenue, and he said, you know, you should talk to—oh, my car broke down. I was meeting his girlfriend, who was manager of the kitchen, and so she said oh, well, people go to town, you know, just get a ride and get the part that you need. So, I did, and the guy who was driving to town was Brian Lyke, who was…I don’t know what he was at that time. So, we got to talking, and I said I taught at DLI locally. He said what are you doing here? I said I’m visiting Joe. Oh, great. And of course, you know Russian if you were teaching there. And I said yes. He said, you know, Michael Murphy, who founded this place, and some of his colleagues are doing something with the Soviet Union, you should find out. I said well, why? He said they need you. So, he intuited that some linkage was possible.
And at that time, I had quit. I was doing a radio program, public radio there, local. And I remember that day, yeah, I came home from the program. I was all high from the music, playing LPs. It was so different then. And there’s a note next to the phone, “call Michael Murphy.” And I was kind of like ooh, what’s going on here? And I had been reading—I was working part-time at a bookstore—I was reading one of his books. I think it was Jacob Atabet, about the painter whose paintings change with his moods. They actually changed in real life. And there’s a KGB agent that visits him in his dreams. So, this was interesting to me. I picked it off the shelf at the store. And I thought this is all very interesting, but the women characters are terrible, you know. And some of the writing is really—you know, because all these psychic terms, and it was all new stuff. He had just been to the Soviet Union a few years before, so it was all percolating for him—
Daniel Satinsky: And that trip was the Tbilisi trip where they went, yes, the conference?
Anya Kucharev: This was before.
Daniel Satinsky: Even before that, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: Seventy…’74—yes, it’s before that trip. I’m talking about like in the ‘70s when he first started meeting them. They were getting ready to go. Jim [Hickman] and Mary were getting ready. And he said what do you know about Tibetan Buddhism in the Soviet Union? I go hello, you called. I said absolutely nothing. He said oh, well, for some reason—I said but I do know Soviets who are still teaching at DLI, Soviet immigrants, and one couple, she teaches, and he is a scholar of not just Tibetan, but other forms of Buddhism in the Soviet Union. I said yeah, I could—he said can you set up a meeting? I said sure. And who else do you think we should meet because we’re going.
I said, you know, you kept me up all night with this book that you just wrote. And he said that’s very interesting that you just read my book. And so, I began to see these kind of synchronicities, because I’d experienced them before. I had studied polarity therapy, which was a form of massage, at a local—we called it University for Man, and it was free. People would give free classes at Monterey Peninsula College. It was very advanced in some ways. Some of the people that wound up in Pacific Grove and Monterey, I don’t know, there was a feeling there. And when I read some of V.S. Naipaul’s memoirs he said Pacific Grove was the most spiritual place he’d ever lived in.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Anya Kucharev: And this includes India, you know, the Caribbean. There was something—and that, like the noosphere, the gestalt of what we were trying to do was already forming. It was the kind of aura that was attracting people who wanted to make peace. For God’s sakes, we had these nuclear weapons, we were wasting money, we’re not educating our children anymore. Oh, I was so appalled at the level of ignorance of my students at the language school. It was extraordinary.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m sure it would be worse today.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I mean, they couldn’t find the simplest places on the map. And I thought what are they putting in your brains? Or are you watching so much TV that you can’t remember anything that you’re learning? So, all of this. I had read also, and I came to Monterey, synchronicity, “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain,” Ostrander and Schroeder. That book came out talking about all the experiments in the Soviet Union and in Czechoslovakia. So, why was I reading it? I was already on that kind of psychic journey of what is our environment, what do we bring to it, what does it give us, those interpersonal, intercultural…
So, I knew what Michael had already, because he had read that book. And that’s why he went in the ‘70s. That was the first trip with Nikolaev and the remote viewing… So, Michael and Jim came to Monterey with their significant others, who went shopping half the time because Carmel is wonder—you know, it’s a quaint… But we got into some heavy conversations with the emigres that I invited. There would be either a huge lunch, a walk along the ocean and Carmel Beach. And that’s where we created the Soviet studies program.
Daniel Satinsky: Out of those conversations?
Anya Kucharev: After that week, yes. After that week because one of the guys was a real bear, but he was very knowledgeable about a lot of things. He had been an actor, he was a writer, and he challenged them, so they were very interesting people. One was a literary scholar who wrote the first dissertation about Brodsky. He knew Brodsky. So, there was an interesting mix. So, Dulce [Murphy], Michael, and Jim and Mary got a feeling for some of the types of people they might encounter in the Soviet Union. That was the purpose of that.
Daniel Satinsky: So, they met members of the Soviet intelligentsia who were consistent—
Anya Kucharev: That taught at DLI. And they had their refusenik*, you know, some of them were staunch and others said oh, you know, we got such great educations, we’re making our living well. There was one guy, Tennenbaum, he created a system of language learning that was so esoteric, it was like classic sign language kind of… They were…it was great because I too, at a distance, I knew these people, but I knew only one couple really well, so for me it was very interesting when I thought, god, our emigration was so different. We were forced out. And that also made me think of the Russian diaspora, which is huge.
Daniel Satinsky: So, that resulted in the—
Anya Kucharev: After which we had lunch, and Michael said, oh, we have got to have a Soviet studies center, this is so interesting. We’re going to invite scholars because something is trying to emerge. That early period of what is trying to emerge, and how do we do this. And Michael said to me do you want to be head of this? I said no, I don’t want to be head of anything. I’m not a good manager. But I will help you with translation, I’ll help you with cultural understanding. Because I don’t do well with telling people what to do, I don’t take orders well, so that’s not my area.
I’m very good in between, and that’s what I’ve done, is intermediate, because for me, growing up, I had these—you know, the Cold War was playing out for me on the world scale. I was thinking oh my god, so how do we get these two sides to get together. And I didn’t realize that. That was what was going on. But then it became more conscious, and all the different people that I took over to the USSR, like Joel and David Woollcombe with Peace Child, because I was interested in music, and children, Cynthia Lazaroff.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when was the first time you went to the Soviet Union, your first visit?
Anya Kucharev: Before Esalen. I went to the Soviet Union in 1968. In graduate school, when I was part of intensive language training at Indiana University.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. I went to the summer school of that language training.
Anya Kucharev: You’re kidding? Well, I taught in it.
Daniel Satinsky: Years later, but yeah, when I was in—
Anya Kucharev: So, you know what that was like.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I do.
Anya Kucharev: Immersive. And if we caught somebody speaking English, we didn’t punish them, but…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it was social pressure, yes.
Anya Kucharev: The pressure. But it also taught, from what I observed was that certain people have parts of personalities that only come out when they learn another language.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I think—this is a digression—but I think I have a different personality in Russia and when I’m speaking Russian, so—
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I totally corroborate that. I could see that with… Like one girl came to me and she said, you know, I’m studying this language, and I love all this literature, but I just can’t put the words together. I don’t know who I am when I’m saying these words. I said okay, don’t speak a lot. Give yourself time. You’re pressuring yourself, relax. Part of what the language learning—and Joseph Goldin1 2 3 —by the way, I took a lot of time the last few days looking for material about this.
Daniel Satinsky: Please, yeah. I’d like to hear about that.
There were people who were interested in literature and very dedicated that way. I had a difficult time with them because they didn’t read Russian very well. They read things in translation. And I found it suspect that if you are studying a culture you… But some people, I learned, after teaching for so many years, some people are not capable of learning another language.
Yes, and so that was always, you know, I would say wouldn’t you read the Russian studies about this, and some of them didn’t. I got embarrassed about all of that and I thought do I really want to be with a group of people—not only was the Cold War mentality gripping everybody, I grew up feeling like I was the enemy because when I came at four years old from Austria—and this is one thing in the manuscript that Birgit [Menzel] sent you, she said my parents emigrated. They didn’t really emigrate because they wanted to. My father was a prisoner of war captured by the Nazis, taken to Poland. He walked back on foot to his native village.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Anya Kucharev: That took courage. But he was recaptured. This time, yes, he wound up in Austria, where he met my mother, who was taken as slave labor from Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine. She had a twin. I didn’t know this till I met her, the twin, in the Ukraine. And the local chief of police fell in love—his son fell in love with my mother, and she spurned him, would not marry him. So, when this chief of police was deputized by the Nazis who occupied the territory he said, “take her,” and that was my mother. It’s just—the story is amazing, because she wound up laundering and ironing Nazi uniforms in a camp in Austria, where she met my father, who by that time—and this I’m not clear on—he worked in the British zone, because Austria was divided, towards the end of the war, into all these different zones, so they met.
And when I look at the pictures, they didn’t want to talk about these things very much. But I do have lots of pictures, because they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, whether they were going to go back to the Soviet Union or go elsewhere. My mother, who was very bright, and had learned some German, and wanted to be a veterinarian, and the local farmer liked her, and so he would invite her over, and she said to my father they’re going to either shoot you or send you to the gulag*. And that’s what happened to many people who had been displaced because Stalin did not want them coming back with stories about how wonderful it was in the West.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. They were all distrusted and imprisoned partly because they had been captured, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: Exactly. And what can you do? Twenty years later, about 10 years later I saw video of Russian prisoners of war on YouTube, and I imagined what that was like. But my father was very traumatized, because that came on top of the fact that his father, who was a rich, prosperous peasant called a Kulak*, the land was taken away. My grandpa was sent to Siberia. The family was thrown out in the snow—go where you will. And the orchard was completely destroyed. And there was just a recent program about raskulachivanie, which is the…
Daniel Satinsky: The expropriation of the Kulaks.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Thank you. So, it’s emotional, and when I get emotional, kind of the brain says, oh god, that’s horrible. But this is an hour and a half program that is extraordinary. What happened was the entire backbone of agriculture was destroyed, and millions of people. I didn’t think it was that many, but millions. Like the Indian march here, the Trail of Tears, some of them were forced to walk, and their children froze, they froze.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you came with that traumatic family background into an environment where you were then suspect because you were members of the enemy.
Anya Kucharev: You’re a pinko commie. I didn’t know what a commie was, or, for that matter, when I came—so I was born in Klagenfurt, Austria nine months after the war. My parents could not get married. There was no orthodox priest. They were both kind of religious, so they wanted a traditional…so I was two when they got married. So, I realized that I was a celebration of the end of the war, that yes, it was traumatic, but there was…that passion that they had for each other—and they did. They weren’t very well matched in some ways, because my father was so traumatized, in a way, then being captured, then re-traumatized, which was a key—Kursk was a key battleground with the tanks, and his village is not too far, between Kursk and Belgorod. And he wanted to go back. My mother said no, we are leaving.
But they did have a wonderful circle of close friends in Klagenfurt. Some of them went to Venezuela, some to Brazil, some to Australia. We went to New York because there was a family that sponsored us. The Tolstovskii Fond [Tolstoy Foundation] would list in a local Russian newspaper, Russian language newspaper, Novoye Russkoe Slovo, so I still have that from the newspaper.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Anya Kucharev: A family of three, they named us, and total strangers. Total strangers said we will take them in until they find work and can settle themselves. Which my father did for his friends from Klagenfurt because they didn’t like living in tropical climates. It’s so interesting. They said we just don’t like it here. And they came with their children to our three-room apartment in Brooklyn, became the place of the whole refugee thing. I experienced it at another level. So, all this integration, how do you integrate into this country? There’re so many contradictions.
So, I escaped my—and this also Birgit didn’t know because she’s not familiar with the neighborhoods. There are prosperous neighborhoods in Brooklyn that I escaped to near the Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza Library, so I was always pulled toward culture. But what helped me was to…my parents weren’t very educated, but they wanted us to be educated, their children. And I was able, through Russian literature, I went to school on Saturdays.
Daniel Satinsky: A Russian school?
Anya Kucharev: A Russian school, a church school. The church stuff was—had to take it with a grain of salt because the priest would preach love thy neighbor, and be kind, and all this, and on Sundays as the kids were running around, he would come out and shake his fist, so I called him on it. And he said, you better watch out, I’ll tell your father. I said, I don’t care.
So, that energy that I got from understanding my parents’ culture, without them being able to convey it, and the horrible stories they didn’t tell us, I understood later, when I studied psychology, that it was too traumatic, especially for my father, because he was wounded physically. He was strong, he was very bright. He learned carpentry. He learned a lot of things on his own. But he wasn’t able… He drank on weekends.
My mother was very good about that. She realized that he got depressed during the week, and so he needed the weekend to relax with a few of his buddies, and some vodka, and she would cook. So, the atmosphere in the slums, even though it was horribly bleak, there was a warmth and a camaraderie, and a real cultural appreciation of one another, even though there were Ukrainians, some of those families were Ukrainians, and Belarusian. There were even Iranians who spoke Russian, so it was really…it was very vital. But I couldn’t bring that to class because I was a commie.
Not everybody. Some of the teachers, I knew when they were calling the roll the first time, they’d look at my name and they’d go bleu-le-la, I knew that this wasn’t going to be easy. In kindergarten I had two languages, Austrian German and Russian, and nobody knew what I was saying. I got terribly frightened. I got under the table, and I wouldn’t come out. They called my mother. Because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was horrifying. So, I became a linguist for a living, just to trace it back. Anyway. So, life is…
Daniel Satinsky: So, you got out in California, and how did you become involved with Esalen?
Anya Kucharev: I taught at the Army Language School, which was at that point DLI [Defense Language Institute], because all the armed forces were involved. And that was interesting. I had college students. I wouldn’t have been able—it was the Vietnam War—I wouldn’t have been able to teach there without the kind of guys—they were mostly guys, the women came in later—they were smart in college and they realized they don’t want to get their heads blown off in Vietnam, so they took the qualifying exams for language school.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
Anya Kucharev: So, the first three years there I had really good students, and I was able, even though there was a PA system, to talk about the topics you weren’t supposed to talk about, religion and politics. And then I would invite them to my home. We would cook. They were also very—it was an immersive, very good program at that point. Then a new commandant came in, and the volunteer army came in, and I got people that couldn’t speak English, let alone any other language, and women, and there was pregnancy. They would come to me with their—girls would come and say, you know—they were living in the barracks together. And I said I’ve got to get out of here.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Anya Kucharev: But in the meantime, I was getting saturated with…I don’t want to call it New Age. Part of it was New Age, but part of it was also the whole freedom of exploration in California of the psyche, of the body. And I went to Esalen. A friend invited me to go to the baths at night, because it was open, free to the public between midnight and 6:00, I think. Yeah, around that time. So, half the night. And I learned a lot of things from meeting the kind of people who would come there from town or from the south of Esalen, people that lived in the woods. At that time growing marijuana was very difficult and very dangerous. But I didn’t smoke a lot, but I understood that there was a real opening happening.
I even met someone from Pitkin Avenue, [Brooklyn] where we had lived. He went to—he said I am—well, you emigrated, I emigrated to Los Angeles. And so, I said what are you doing in the Big Sur woods? He said, you know, I love the ocean, I hate cars, this is the place to be. So, this is a boy from Pitkin Avenue. So, it was…yeah. It was mind expanding and emotionally very…also expanding. Esalen, not only the beauty of the place, but the natural environment is so overwhelming you—oh, I mean, aside from getting in the tubs people would leave their city personalities. But it just made you contemplate, naturally contemplate what is all this about psychologically, so there’s a Zen kind of thing that happened. So—
Daniel Satinsky: And then you ended up working for them?
Anya Kucharev: Okay, here’s what happened. I was talking to my friend Joe, the one from Pitkin Avenue, and he said, you know, you should talk to—oh, my car broke down. I was meeting his girlfriend, who was manager of the kitchen, and so she said oh, well, people go to town, you know, just get a ride and get the part that you need. So, I did, and the guy who was driving to town was Brian Lyke, who was…I don’t know what he was at that time. So, we got to talking, and I said I taught at DLI locally. He said what are you doing here? I said I’m visiting Joe. Oh, great. And of course, you know Russian if you were teaching there. And I said yes. He said, you know, Michael Murphy, who founded this place, and some of his colleagues are doing something with the Soviet Union, you should find out. I said well, why? He said they need you. So, he intuited that some linkage was possible.
And at that time, I had quit. I was doing a radio program, public radio there, local. And I remember that day, yeah, I came home from the program. I was all high from the music, playing LPs. It was so different then. And there’s a note next to the phone, “call Michael Murphy.” And I was kind of like ooh, what’s going on here? And I had been reading—I was working part-time at a bookstore—I was reading one of his books. I think it was Jacob Atabet, about the painter whose paintings change with his moods. They actually changed in real life. And there’s a KGB agent that visits him in his dreams. So, this was interesting to me. I picked it off the shelf at the store. And I thought this is all very interesting, but the women characters are terrible, you know. And some of the writing is really—you know, because all these psychic terms, and it was all new stuff. He had just been to the Soviet Union a few years before, so it was all percolating for him—
Daniel Satinsky: And that trip was the Tbilisi trip where they went, yes, the conference?
Anya Kucharev: This was before.
Daniel Satinsky: Even before that, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: Seventy…’74—yes, it’s before that trip. I’m talking about like in the ‘70s when he first started meeting them. They were getting ready to go. Jim [Hickman] and Mary were getting ready. And he said what do you know about Tibetan Buddhism in the Soviet Union? I go hello, you called. I said absolutely nothing. He said oh, well, for some reason—I said but I do know Soviets who are still teaching at DLI, Soviet immigrants, and one couple, she teaches, and he is a scholar of not just Tibetan, but other forms of Buddhism in the Soviet Union. I said yeah, I could—he said can you set up a meeting? I said sure. And who else do you think we should meet because we’re going.
I said, you know, you kept me up all night with this book that you just wrote. And he said that’s very interesting that you just read my book. And so, I began to see these kind of synchronicities, because I’d experienced them before. I had studied polarity therapy, which was a form of massage, at a local—we called it University for Man, and it was free. People would give free classes at Monterey Peninsula College. It was very advanced in some ways. Some of the people that wound up in Pacific Grove and Monterey, I don’t know, there was a feeling there. And when I read some of V.S. Naipaul’s memoirs he said Pacific Grove was the most spiritual place he’d ever lived in.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Anya Kucharev: And this includes India, you know, the Caribbean. There was something—and that, like the noosphere, the gestalt of what we were trying to do was already forming. It was the kind of aura that was attracting people who wanted to make peace. For God’s sakes, we had these nuclear weapons, we were wasting money, we’re not educating our children anymore. Oh, I was so appalled at the level of ignorance of my students at the language school. It was extraordinary.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m sure it would be worse today.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I mean, they couldn’t find the simplest places on the map. And I thought what are they putting in your brains? Or are you watching so much TV that you can’t remember anything that you’re learning? So, all of this. I had read also, and I came to Monterey, synchronicity, “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain,” Ostrander and Schroeder. That book came out talking about all the experiments in the Soviet Union and in Czechoslovakia. So, why was I reading it? I was already on that kind of psychic journey of what is our environment, what do we bring to it, what does it give us, those interpersonal, intercultural…
So, I knew what Michael had already, because he had read that book. And that’s why he went in the ‘70s. That was the first trip with Nikolaev and the remote viewing… So, Michael and Jim came to Monterey with their significant others, who went shopping half the time because Carmel is wonder—you know, it’s a quaint… But we got into some heavy conversations with the emigres that I invited. There would be either a huge lunch, a walk along the ocean and Carmel Beach. And that’s where we created the Soviet studies program.
Daniel Satinsky: Out of those conversations?
Anya Kucharev: After that week, yes. After that week because one of the guys was a real bear, but he was very knowledgeable about a lot of things. He had been an actor, he was a writer, and he challenged them, so they were very interesting people. One was a literary scholar who wrote the first dissertation about Brodsky. He knew Brodsky. So, there was an interesting mix. So, Dulce [Murphy], Michael, and Jim and Mary got a feeling for some of the types of people they might encounter in the Soviet Union. That was the purpose of that.
Daniel Satinsky: So, they met members of the Soviet intelligentsia who were consistent—
Anya Kucharev: That taught at DLI. And they had their refusenik*, you know, some of them were staunch and others said oh, you know, we got such great educations, we’re making our living well. There was one guy, Tennenbaum, he created a system of language learning that was so esoteric, it was like classic sign language kind of… They were…it was great because I too, at a distance, I knew these people, but I knew only one couple really well, so for me it was very interesting when I thought, god, our emigration was so different. We were forced out. And that also made me think of the Russian diaspora, which is huge.
Daniel Satinsky: So, that resulted in the—
Anya Kucharev: After which we had lunch, and Michael said, oh, we have got to have a Soviet studies center, this is so interesting. We’re going to invite scholars because something is trying to emerge. That early period of what is trying to emerge, and how do we do this. And Michael said to me do you want to be head of this? I said no, I don’t want to be head of anything. I’m not a good manager. But I will help you with translation, I’ll help you with cultural understanding. Because I don’t do well with telling people what to do, I don’t take orders well, so that’s not my area.
I’m very good in between, and that’s what I’ve done, is intermediate, because for me, growing up, I had these—you know, the Cold War was playing out for me on the world scale. I was thinking oh my god, so how do we get these two sides to get together. And I didn’t realize that. That was what was going on. But then it became more conscious, and all the different people that I took over to the USSR, like Joel and David Woollcombe with Peace Child, because I was interested in music, and children, Cynthia Lazaroff.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when was the first time you went to the Soviet Union, your first visit?
Anya Kucharev: Before Esalen. I went to the Soviet Union in 1968. In graduate school, when I was part of intensive language training at Indiana University.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. I went to the summer school of that language training.
Anya Kucharev: You’re kidding? Well, I taught in it.
Daniel Satinsky: Years later, but yeah, when I was in—
Anya Kucharev: So, you know what that was like.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I do.
Anya Kucharev: Immersive. And if we caught somebody speaking English, we didn’t punish them, but…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it was social pressure, yes.
Anya Kucharev: The pressure. But it also taught, from what I observed was that certain people have parts of personalities that only come out when they learn another language.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I think—this is a digression—but I think I have a different personality in Russia and when I’m speaking Russian, so—
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I totally corroborate that. I could see that with… Like one girl came to me and she said, you know, I’m studying this language, and I love all this literature, but I just can’t put the words together. I don’t know who I am when I’m saying these words. I said okay, don’t speak a lot. Give yourself time. You’re pressuring yourself, relax. Part of what the language learning—and Joseph Goldin1 2 3 —by the way, I took a lot of time the last few days looking for material about this.
Daniel Satinsky: Please, yeah. I’d like to hear about that.
Anya Kucharev: I will send it to you. You read Russian, so... It’s not great, but it will—you know what happens, I’ll give you a fact here why I just…I’ve been on Mary Keen about this the last few years now she’s more free, we need a website commemorating Joseph. He’s not even in Wikipedia.
It is…I mean, my heart breaks when I think that he gave his life up, really, to making peace, he really did. When he went to Chechnya, and he never took care of himself, so his health—of course he had a heart attack. I thought he would have had it earlier the way—see, I lost touch with him in the ‘90s because I branched off and went to Eastern Europe to do “Frommer’s Guide to Eastern Europe” because I had been in Czechoslovakia when I was in Europe. I was curious to see all those countries. So, in the ‘90s I don’t know a lot about him. But Joel [Schatz] has that material.
Anya Kucharev: Well, Joel [Schatz] wasn’t part of the original few early Space Bridges. He was good at the teleconferences from Henry Dakin’s gallery, but he was not involved at all—
Daniel Satinsky: In the Space Bridges. So, I have talked to Evelyn Messinger, and Kim Spencer, and Jim Hickman, Peter Gerwe —
Anya Kucharev: Oh, good, you got Peter.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I found Peter. He was in Spain. Anyway, so I’ve constructed a version of that with the—and Evelyn has corrected it, Kim has corrected it. There’s a section in there about Joel, and he’s corrected his section. But still, I feel like there’s some pieces missing.
Anya Kucharev: Okay. You just triggered a memory. I think Harriett Crosby, her outfit ISAR, Institute for Soviet American Relations—
Daniel Satinsky: I’ve heard about her. And I understand that she won’t talk to people about this.
Anya Kucharev: No, no, she won’t. But that’s because she… For her…oh, anyway. I do have something that she published that has a chronology. I will look for it, yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, that would be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That will help you, because she funded a lot of things. And why else? When she left Washington, D.C., she left politics. She’s now involved in the natural world. She has, I think, an animal sanctuary. I lost touch with her. We were never… You know, part of this also has to do with class.
I found I didn’t have trouble in the academic world, but funding meetings, and you had to…you either had to be a brand, or a famous academic, or…there was a lot of in, kind of groupthink, and you had to break through that. And Harriett came from Pillsbury money, big money. But if you said something she didn’t like you just didn’t exist. There was a lot of citizen diplomacy necessary in the group.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: And some of those prejudices still carry on. And I know this for a fact. She was one of the women heiresses that fell in love with Jim. Whatever falling in love meant. He was charismatic. But she played a large role. And she knew Ambassador Hartman. And she got Jim into Washington that way.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, I see.
Anya Kucharev: So, a lot of personal relationships here are important.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Anya Kucharev: And some people say oh, Anya, don’t gossip. But if you look at history and how it’s made, it’s made by individuals who connect, whether they fight or they fall in love, or I want your real estate, you know, it’s still going on. So… Wendy Grace, Gwendolyn Grace.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Never heard of her.
Anya Kucharev: From the Grace Company.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, the Grace Company.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. And her sister heiress, both funded different things. Wendy had been married to the grandson of Rodzianko, who was killed in the Duma, so she was interested in Russian history because of her relationship, which ended, but nonetheless there was this whole Russian thing that she got involved in. And she gave Jim a lot of money. They helped bring into being a lot of things that might not have come into being because it was just not the business, it was strong, emotional, synchronous, enthusiastic—it’s very interesting how these things happen.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: I will definitely send you Harriett’s…
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. That will be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she was a Washington activist. She knew Hartman, and that helped because her secretary was extraordinary, she was so helpful. Have you seen the ISAR bulletin that they put out? They were very important. In some ways, because they did—
Daniel Satinsky: Let me interrupt you about this because here’s the problem I have, is this is such a rich period, and there’s so much to be told about it, and it’s one chapter of a six-chapter book.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I did look at the table of contents.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, I have to try to find what’s—two things—what’s most important and who will talk to me, because the value of my book is in the testimony or remembrance of people, because I think Birgit is writing a history, and it’s focused only on this period, and that’s a different thing. And you can do that on secondary sources. And so people like—I can mention someone like her or someone like Sharon Tennison is too important to leave out. Sharon Tennison won’t talk to me. Through a friend she sent me a message, “read my book,” which, I bought a copy of her book. So, I will reference her, but the meat is people’s remembrance.
So, when you have a chance to look at this chapter, you’ll see that it’s what Evelyn remembers, what Kim remembers, what Jim remembers. These are what I have to contribute by pulling these things together. So, for people who are important, I need to know that, and particularly I don’t want anyone from that period to say well, what an idiot, he doesn’t ever mention so-and-so.
But that’s not going to be what I have to base the book on. And I have the same thing—so I’ve written a draft of this period until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now I have a second chapter. And listen, it’s been difficult to find the inner logic, if you will, of the period, not just funny stories, but what’s the inner logic, what was it coming from, what did it lead to. And then, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union I’m trying to do the same thing at that period. And there’s some overlap. Some of the people, like Jim, become not a citizen diplomat, but an entrepreneur.
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And Joel, who starts with citizen diplomacy and becomes an entrepreneur, or maybe he always was, I don’t know. But those are the…that’s what I’m trying to piece together. And then, as Jim said to me, we have a whole other side of this story, which was what was going on in the minds of the Russians. And we have very little understanding of that, because this isn’t a one-sided story, this was a collaborative effort.
Anya Kucharev: That’s why Joseph is so important.
Daniel Satinsky: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when did you first meet Joseph, or how did you meet him?
Anya Kucharev: There was an illegal apartment that Joseph partially lived in and had meetings in. He called it headquarters. On Yuzhinsky Pereulok*. It was near the Arbat.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it sounds familiar.
Anya Kucharev: Someone may have mentioned it. Anyway, I was brought there… Who brought me there? Now I can’t remember. But I will. I think it was with the AHP [Association of Humanistic Psychology] group. No, it had to be earlier. I can’t tell you that yet, but I will write it down and then write it, so it’ll be in text you’ll have it.
Daniel Satinsky: Great. And what was your first impression of him when you met him?
Anya Kucharev: I looked at him and I thought brilliant, and I thought in another lifetime you could be Napoleon. His ability to strategize and see the big picture was very impressive. He was eloquent in Russian, and his English was interesting. It was occasionally incorrect, but in a most wonderful way, like someone with a French accent will say things and it charms people.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, so charming.
Anya Kucharev: So, charm, but he also was inclusive. When I think of Joseph, when I looked at him there was Napoleon and then there was a globe. In those days I meditated a lot, and so my first impression of people was pictorial. I would get an image. In fact, when I introduced Joel to Joseph we were at lunch or dinner in one of the hotels and I looked at them talking and it was like Napoleon talking to Moses. [Laughs.]
I just thought, oh, this is a match here energetically. Joel can be very—[laughs]—he’s congenial and all that, but… Whereas Joseph is like a ball of fire, you know, he’s all over the place. And there was the globe. So, Joseph was trying to pull people together for an event. And these are the details—because I have not as many trips as Jim, but unlike Jim, he didn’t have to speak for two sides, so when we interpreted, it’s very hard to tell people that you can’t talk for two hours straight going back and forth on a serious topic. You can make dinner conversation and casual things, but to really focus and get it right—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s exhausting.
Anya Kucharev: —you have to trade off with someone else. That’s what they do at the UN. But I didn’t study professionally, but I understood immediately this really pulls on your brain. And my sugar would go down within half an hour, especially with the AHP. We’d go to these, you know, the hospital where they put dissidents and called them crazy. So, here I am going whoa, like I’m losing my mind here. So, I learned to bring packets of sugar with me for my brain. I had to, I—there I was.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And the people on each side also don’t understand the stress you’re under, honestly, right?
Anya Kucharev: They don’t. They don’t. Because they can translate two or three sentences and say oh, well, I speak the other language. I said, oh yeah?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Not even close.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. Well, in my childhood, when I was telling you it was bleak, so I had a good imagination, and the Russian school I went to, one of my teachers was very skilled at keeping people’s attention. She could have been a great actress. She made poems come alive. I was very lucky. I had dreams that I was being visited by Pushkin. And I was able to translate some of his poems later on. I didn’t know I was going to do that. So, she carried that spirit. And that’s like some gurus or some teachers embody the spirit so much that they convey that information. That’s why Zoom is great, but it’s not the, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no, it’s not the same.
Anya Kucharev: —you don’t have the aroma. It’s not the same thing. Come on. I hope the pandemic is showing that to humanity. So, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, back to Joseph. One of the questions I have is that everyone talks about what great connections Joseph had, and yet the descriptions of him that I’ve seen is of a somewhat unkempt person, wasn’t quite clear how he made a living, holding meetings in an abandoned apartment, and then introducing people to cosmonauts and people with the, you know, at the Academy of Sciences. I’m trying to get my head around how that happened.
Anya Kucharev: I will give you those details how. He had Velikhov, who was high up in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, but how does Velikhov have a connection to a guy who’s marginal to Soviet society?
Anya Kucharev: Well, there was a commission to study man, a complex study of man, so he knew enough people. He was a scientific secretary. I think his training was in microbiology or chemistry. He had a scientific background. [Commission for the Complex Study of Man at the Scientific Council on Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences, headed by Academician Aksel’ Berg.]
He also studied—and this is how he learned English—there was a Bulgarian, Lozanov, who had a language learning method called Suggestology. And Joseph studied this way. I think Lozanov came and gave lectures, but I can check on that. And that’s the kind of thing I can’t find in the letters and all the stuff that Joel has, but I do have a friend who emigrated to Germany, and she—I tried to get Birgit to interview her, but I don’t know why, the chemistry didn’t work, and Tanya was sick. But I will—now I have a list of questions from you that I can get clarified. But I know that because he knew Jushkevichius, who was at Gosteleradio* as an engineer, but he became more than that, they were all interested in human potential. So, he was the Scientific Secretary of the Complex Study of Man.
Daniel Satinsky: And this was done by the Russian Academy of Sciences?
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That was a group that was looking at the fact that they were in stagnation when they had so many brilliant people, like what’s going on here? We know it’s Brezhnev and all of that, but how do we bust out of that without winding up in jail? So, Velikhov was very far thinking. Who else? He also knew—oh, this is where the space thing comes in. He knew another academician, Boris Rauschenbach, who wrote a very interesting study, which, if someone would pay me, I would translate it. So, he had people who were—excuse me.
Rauschenbach. Kitaev-Smyk, who died, he was very intercultural. He understood so much. I’ll get his name to you. These are all people who were kind of the avant-garde in terms of exploring human potential. [Russian] Skrytnye Chelovecheskiye Vozmozhnosti is human potential.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Anya Kucharev: I mean, literally it means the study of latent or hidden reserves. That’s how they translated human potential. So, Joseph studied English with Lozanov, or someone who trained in his method. And part of that method, when you are too engaged in your executive function, you’re not absorbing things the way a child does, so Lozanov—and I know he got this from somewhere, but I haven’t traced it yet. He said put on music. The best music to play—I can hear his voice—adagio, second movement of Baroque concerti. So, everybody lies down on pillows, Esalen style, and absorbs reams of vocabulary words. They’re not related, even. But they remember them because it’s been absorbed in that way of, like I said, the way a child hears it, and then a year later he’s making full sentences.
So, this method, they were studying that. These were all these guys doing experiments.
Daniel Satinsky: But Joseph was part of these experiments, or he just knew these people?
Anya Kucharev: He knew about them because they were included in this complex approach, this comprehensive study. And he…oh… He was alone. He had had a wife who died of a kidney problem, and he was so depressed. He needed something to do. And this studying English, he studied it because she was from America.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. She was half Russian, half American. I think her name was Joy. I never could pin that down. He never wanted to talk about that. But I can ask Tanya because she met her. So, Joseph knew people through film, because he wrote screenplays. And he knew Pozner, and Pozner’s father was in the movie world.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, he was a microbiologist, and he wrote screenplays. Amazing, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: He also had been in the merchant marine, so he had traveled, so he had an idea of the globe, not just from geography books. And he had interests. He was—so the Soviet American thing for him also was personal because he wasn’t allowed to emigrate so that she could have a kidney operation. They told them you can’t even leave, because we are working on a kidney transplant. But she died before. And yeah, it was a tragedy.
But you see, he also had this vision. He understood theater really well. That’s why there were the demonstrations in Red Square. He knew how to stage events. That’s where the big screen, the Diamond Vision. Because some Europeans had come, he had met them. And then he applied for the Rolex award. So, he was…his feelers were out. And then Jushkevichius was affiliated with UNESCO, and that’s pretty out there. If you can, get a Zoom with him about Joseph because—
Daniel Satinsky: How would I find him?
Anya Kucharev: I can give you, his email. It might have changed, but at least it’s a start. And we can find him. I can call someone up and say where is Henrykh? I interviewed him for…what was I writing? Oh, yes. I was showing the kinds of people that could contribute to these archives. So, for me it would be a recapitulation, and I would get questions answered that way. And I met with Jushkevichius. He said oh, I’m just here from Paris for a week but I’m happy to meet you—you know Joseph, you know all this history, you’ve interpreted for them, of course.
And I didn’t know who he was except by name, but when I met him, I was very impressed with him as an entity, as a—the energy he carried. Also, he was Lithuanian or—but he was multicultural. The whole thing of understanding the way different cultures interact. Like he would say well, you know, I could have pushed this thing through, but I knew I shouldn’t push because then they’ll be looking and saying oh, he wants that, we’re not going to give that. And that’s how we did the first Space Bridge, because he okayed it at Gosteleradio. Everybody else was on vacation.
So, Joseph had a very good phrase. He said you have to pierce through the armor of the bureaucracy. Pierce through it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s an excellent phrase.
Anya Kucharev: He said but you can’t do it when they’re watching, you have to—phew!—you know.
And the other phrase he used that everybody loved—this one he used more—he said you can have an effect on a person. You can flatten them. You can flatten them. In other words, energetically. You don’t have to argue. Just flatten them. And I immediately understood that he was looking at the kind of invisible, you know, this New Age thing about energy. Yes, there’s a way that people… Some people don’t use a gun. They don’t have to. They just, you know, they can intimidate you to the point where you are flattened, you can’t respond. It’s the CEO who makes 50 times more than the rest of his workers who comes in, oh, I’m entitled, to hell with you. I mean, Zuckerberg is like a robot. The first few times I watched him I thought oh my god.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Anya Kucharev: So, Joseph really had backing. And here’s where Harriett comes in also. The second time he was put in a psychiatric hospital—not because he was crazy, although there are, you know—it’s because he was raising the level too high for breakthrough—
Daniel Satinsky: Pushing beyond the boundaries?
Anya Kucharev: Pushing beyond. Because he would get desperate. And part of it is, like I said, he didn’t take care of his health. He would get into these manic states, and he just couldn’t come down, because he wasn’t eating. He wasn’t eating.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you don’t think he might have had the manic depressive…?
Anya Kucharev: I think he had some, but it’s exacerbated when you live in conditions that don’t nurture you. He had a very close friend, Vitold, who died. Vitold was overweight, not obese, but really solid. He actually took care of Joseph. He fed him. He would make him come over and eat real food, not just little cups of yogurt, those little blue jars of yogurt that Joseph had at headquarters in the corner. I said Joseph, what is that? He says oh, it’s my food. I said, you have 50 bottles of yogurt here! He said, yeah, I like yogurt. [Laughs.] So, Vitold was important also because he had been abroad. He got himself a funny job at MGU* downtown. Near the National Hotel.
He also liked this idea of human potential because he began to see where Joseph was coming from and why it was necessary, the interdisciplinary thing Joseph was trying to do. And he was an engineer, so he could help with things that broke down, you know, soldering lamps, so he was a technical assistant, but he also grounded Joseph. He gave him a kind of home because Vitold was a good cook, he had a—I won’t say lovely—but comfortable home. And once Vitold died, that was sad.
It is…I mean, my heart breaks when I think that he gave his life up, really, to making peace, he really did. When he went to Chechnya, and he never took care of himself, so his health—of course he had a heart attack. I thought he would have had it earlier the way—see, I lost touch with him in the ‘90s because I branched off and went to Eastern Europe to do “Frommer’s Guide to Eastern Europe” because I had been in Czechoslovakia when I was in Europe. I was curious to see all those countries. So, in the ‘90s I don’t know a lot about him. But Joel [Schatz] has that material.
Anya Kucharev: Well, Joel [Schatz] wasn’t part of the original few early Space Bridges. He was good at the teleconferences from Henry Dakin’s gallery, but he was not involved at all—
Daniel Satinsky: In the Space Bridges. So, I have talked to Evelyn Messinger, and Kim Spencer, and Jim Hickman, Peter Gerwe —
Anya Kucharev: Oh, good, you got Peter.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I found Peter. He was in Spain. Anyway, so I’ve constructed a version of that with the—and Evelyn has corrected it, Kim has corrected it. There’s a section in there about Joel, and he’s corrected his section. But still, I feel like there’s some pieces missing.
Anya Kucharev: Okay. You just triggered a memory. I think Harriett Crosby, her outfit ISAR, Institute for Soviet American Relations—
Daniel Satinsky: I’ve heard about her. And I understand that she won’t talk to people about this.
Anya Kucharev: No, no, she won’t. But that’s because she… For her…oh, anyway. I do have something that she published that has a chronology. I will look for it, yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, that would be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That will help you, because she funded a lot of things. And why else? When she left Washington, D.C., she left politics. She’s now involved in the natural world. She has, I think, an animal sanctuary. I lost touch with her. We were never… You know, part of this also has to do with class.
I found I didn’t have trouble in the academic world, but funding meetings, and you had to…you either had to be a brand, or a famous academic, or…there was a lot of in, kind of groupthink, and you had to break through that. And Harriett came from Pillsbury money, big money. But if you said something she didn’t like you just didn’t exist. There was a lot of citizen diplomacy necessary in the group.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: And some of those prejudices still carry on. And I know this for a fact. She was one of the women heiresses that fell in love with Jim. Whatever falling in love meant. He was charismatic. But she played a large role. And she knew Ambassador Hartman. And she got Jim into Washington that way.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, I see.
Anya Kucharev: So, a lot of personal relationships here are important.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Anya Kucharev: And some people say oh, Anya, don’t gossip. But if you look at history and how it’s made, it’s made by individuals who connect, whether they fight or they fall in love, or I want your real estate, you know, it’s still going on. So… Wendy Grace, Gwendolyn Grace.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Never heard of her.
Anya Kucharev: From the Grace Company.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, the Grace Company.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. And her sister heiress, both funded different things. Wendy had been married to the grandson of Rodzianko, who was killed in the Duma, so she was interested in Russian history because of her relationship, which ended, but nonetheless there was this whole Russian thing that she got involved in. And she gave Jim a lot of money. They helped bring into being a lot of things that might not have come into being because it was just not the business, it was strong, emotional, synchronous, enthusiastic—it’s very interesting how these things happen.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: I will definitely send you Harriett’s…
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. That will be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she was a Washington activist. She knew Hartman, and that helped because her secretary was extraordinary, she was so helpful. Have you seen the ISAR bulletin that they put out? They were very important. In some ways, because they did—
Daniel Satinsky: Let me interrupt you about this because here’s the problem I have, is this is such a rich period, and there’s so much to be told about it, and it’s one chapter of a six-chapter book.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I did look at the table of contents.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, I have to try to find what’s—two things—what’s most important and who will talk to me, because the value of my book is in the testimony or remembrance of people, because I think Birgit is writing a history, and it’s focused only on this period, and that’s a different thing. And you can do that on secondary sources. And so people like—I can mention someone like her or someone like Sharon Tennison is too important to leave out. Sharon Tennison won’t talk to me. Through a friend she sent me a message, “read my book,” which, I bought a copy of her book. So, I will reference her, but the meat is people’s remembrance.
So, when you have a chance to look at this chapter, you’ll see that it’s what Evelyn remembers, what Kim remembers, what Jim remembers. These are what I have to contribute by pulling these things together. So, for people who are important, I need to know that, and particularly I don’t want anyone from that period to say well, what an idiot, he doesn’t ever mention so-and-so.
But that’s not going to be what I have to base the book on. And I have the same thing—so I’ve written a draft of this period until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now I have a second chapter. And listen, it’s been difficult to find the inner logic, if you will, of the period, not just funny stories, but what’s the inner logic, what was it coming from, what did it lead to. And then, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union I’m trying to do the same thing at that period. And there’s some overlap. Some of the people, like Jim, become not a citizen diplomat, but an entrepreneur.
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And Joel, who starts with citizen diplomacy and becomes an entrepreneur, or maybe he always was, I don’t know. But those are the…that’s what I’m trying to piece together. And then, as Jim said to me, we have a whole other side of this story, which was what was going on in the minds of the Russians. And we have very little understanding of that, because this isn’t a one-sided story, this was a collaborative effort.
Anya Kucharev: That’s why Joseph is so important.
Daniel Satinsky: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when did you first meet Joseph, or how did you meet him?
Anya Kucharev: There was an illegal apartment that Joseph partially lived in and had meetings in. He called it headquarters. On Yuzhinsky Pereulok*. It was near the Arbat.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it sounds familiar.
Anya Kucharev: Someone may have mentioned it. Anyway, I was brought there… Who brought me there? Now I can’t remember. But I will. I think it was with the AHP [Association of Humanistic Psychology] group. No, it had to be earlier. I can’t tell you that yet, but I will write it down and then write it, so it’ll be in text you’ll have it.
Daniel Satinsky: Great. And what was your first impression of him when you met him?
Anya Kucharev: I looked at him and I thought brilliant, and I thought in another lifetime you could be Napoleon. His ability to strategize and see the big picture was very impressive. He was eloquent in Russian, and his English was interesting. It was occasionally incorrect, but in a most wonderful way, like someone with a French accent will say things and it charms people.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, so charming.
Anya Kucharev: So, charm, but he also was inclusive. When I think of Joseph, when I looked at him there was Napoleon and then there was a globe. In those days I meditated a lot, and so my first impression of people was pictorial. I would get an image. In fact, when I introduced Joel to Joseph we were at lunch or dinner in one of the hotels and I looked at them talking and it was like Napoleon talking to Moses. [Laughs.]
I just thought, oh, this is a match here energetically. Joel can be very—[laughs]—he’s congenial and all that, but… Whereas Joseph is like a ball of fire, you know, he’s all over the place. And there was the globe. So, Joseph was trying to pull people together for an event. And these are the details—because I have not as many trips as Jim, but unlike Jim, he didn’t have to speak for two sides, so when we interpreted, it’s very hard to tell people that you can’t talk for two hours straight going back and forth on a serious topic. You can make dinner conversation and casual things, but to really focus and get it right—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s exhausting.
Anya Kucharev: —you have to trade off with someone else. That’s what they do at the UN. But I didn’t study professionally, but I understood immediately this really pulls on your brain. And my sugar would go down within half an hour, especially with the AHP. We’d go to these, you know, the hospital where they put dissidents and called them crazy. So, here I am going whoa, like I’m losing my mind here. So, I learned to bring packets of sugar with me for my brain. I had to, I—there I was.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And the people on each side also don’t understand the stress you’re under, honestly, right?
Anya Kucharev: They don’t. They don’t. Because they can translate two or three sentences and say oh, well, I speak the other language. I said, oh yeah?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Not even close.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. Well, in my childhood, when I was telling you it was bleak, so I had a good imagination, and the Russian school I went to, one of my teachers was very skilled at keeping people’s attention. She could have been a great actress. She made poems come alive. I was very lucky. I had dreams that I was being visited by Pushkin. And I was able to translate some of his poems later on. I didn’t know I was going to do that. So, she carried that spirit. And that’s like some gurus or some teachers embody the spirit so much that they convey that information. That’s why Zoom is great, but it’s not the, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no, it’s not the same.
Anya Kucharev: —you don’t have the aroma. It’s not the same thing. Come on. I hope the pandemic is showing that to humanity. So, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, back to Joseph. One of the questions I have is that everyone talks about what great connections Joseph had, and yet the descriptions of him that I’ve seen is of a somewhat unkempt person, wasn’t quite clear how he made a living, holding meetings in an abandoned apartment, and then introducing people to cosmonauts and people with the, you know, at the Academy of Sciences. I’m trying to get my head around how that happened.
Anya Kucharev: I will give you those details how. He had Velikhov, who was high up in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, but how does Velikhov have a connection to a guy who’s marginal to Soviet society?
Anya Kucharev: Well, there was a commission to study man, a complex study of man, so he knew enough people. He was a scientific secretary. I think his training was in microbiology or chemistry. He had a scientific background. [Commission for the Complex Study of Man at the Scientific Council on Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences, headed by Academician Aksel’ Berg.]
He also studied—and this is how he learned English—there was a Bulgarian, Lozanov, who had a language learning method called Suggestology. And Joseph studied this way. I think Lozanov came and gave lectures, but I can check on that. And that’s the kind of thing I can’t find in the letters and all the stuff that Joel has, but I do have a friend who emigrated to Germany, and she—I tried to get Birgit to interview her, but I don’t know why, the chemistry didn’t work, and Tanya was sick. But I will—now I have a list of questions from you that I can get clarified. But I know that because he knew Jushkevichius, who was at Gosteleradio* as an engineer, but he became more than that, they were all interested in human potential. So, he was the Scientific Secretary of the Complex Study of Man.
Daniel Satinsky: And this was done by the Russian Academy of Sciences?
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That was a group that was looking at the fact that they were in stagnation when they had so many brilliant people, like what’s going on here? We know it’s Brezhnev and all of that, but how do we bust out of that without winding up in jail? So, Velikhov was very far thinking. Who else? He also knew—oh, this is where the space thing comes in. He knew another academician, Boris Rauschenbach, who wrote a very interesting study, which, if someone would pay me, I would translate it. So, he had people who were—excuse me.
Rauschenbach. Kitaev-Smyk, who died, he was very intercultural. He understood so much. I’ll get his name to you. These are all people who were kind of the avant-garde in terms of exploring human potential. [Russian] Skrytnye Chelovecheskiye Vozmozhnosti is human potential.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Anya Kucharev: I mean, literally it means the study of latent or hidden reserves. That’s how they translated human potential. So, Joseph studied English with Lozanov, or someone who trained in his method. And part of that method, when you are too engaged in your executive function, you’re not absorbing things the way a child does, so Lozanov—and I know he got this from somewhere, but I haven’t traced it yet. He said put on music. The best music to play—I can hear his voice—adagio, second movement of Baroque concerti. So, everybody lies down on pillows, Esalen style, and absorbs reams of vocabulary words. They’re not related, even. But they remember them because it’s been absorbed in that way of, like I said, the way a child hears it, and then a year later he’s making full sentences.
So, this method, they were studying that. These were all these guys doing experiments.
Daniel Satinsky: But Joseph was part of these experiments, or he just knew these people?
Anya Kucharev: He knew about them because they were included in this complex approach, this comprehensive study. And he…oh… He was alone. He had had a wife who died of a kidney problem, and he was so depressed. He needed something to do. And this studying English, he studied it because she was from America.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. She was half Russian, half American. I think her name was Joy. I never could pin that down. He never wanted to talk about that. But I can ask Tanya because she met her. So, Joseph knew people through film, because he wrote screenplays. And he knew Pozner, and Pozner’s father was in the movie world.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, he was a microbiologist, and he wrote screenplays. Amazing, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: He also had been in the merchant marine, so he had traveled, so he had an idea of the globe, not just from geography books. And he had interests. He was—so the Soviet American thing for him also was personal because he wasn’t allowed to emigrate so that she could have a kidney operation. They told them you can’t even leave, because we are working on a kidney transplant. But she died before. And yeah, it was a tragedy.
But you see, he also had this vision. He understood theater really well. That’s why there were the demonstrations in Red Square. He knew how to stage events. That’s where the big screen, the Diamond Vision. Because some Europeans had come, he had met them. And then he applied for the Rolex award. So, he was…his feelers were out. And then Jushkevichius was affiliated with UNESCO, and that’s pretty out there. If you can, get a Zoom with him about Joseph because—
Daniel Satinsky: How would I find him?
Anya Kucharev: I can give you, his email. It might have changed, but at least it’s a start. And we can find him. I can call someone up and say where is Henrykh? I interviewed him for…what was I writing? Oh, yes. I was showing the kinds of people that could contribute to these archives. So, for me it would be a recapitulation, and I would get questions answered that way. And I met with Jushkevichius. He said oh, I’m just here from Paris for a week but I’m happy to meet you—you know Joseph, you know all this history, you’ve interpreted for them, of course.
And I didn’t know who he was except by name, but when I met him, I was very impressed with him as an entity, as a—the energy he carried. Also, he was Lithuanian or—but he was multicultural. The whole thing of understanding the way different cultures interact. Like he would say well, you know, I could have pushed this thing through, but I knew I shouldn’t push because then they’ll be looking and saying oh, he wants that, we’re not going to give that. And that’s how we did the first Space Bridge, because he okayed it at Gosteleradio. Everybody else was on vacation.
So, Joseph had a very good phrase. He said you have to pierce through the armor of the bureaucracy. Pierce through it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s an excellent phrase.
Anya Kucharev: He said but you can’t do it when they’re watching, you have to—phew!—you know.
And the other phrase he used that everybody loved—this one he used more—he said you can have an effect on a person. You can flatten them. You can flatten them. In other words, energetically. You don’t have to argue. Just flatten them. And I immediately understood that he was looking at the kind of invisible, you know, this New Age thing about energy. Yes, there’s a way that people… Some people don’t use a gun. They don’t have to. They just, you know, they can intimidate you to the point where you are flattened, you can’t respond. It’s the CEO who makes 50 times more than the rest of his workers who comes in, oh, I’m entitled, to hell with you. I mean, Zuckerberg is like a robot. The first few times I watched him I thought oh my god.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Anya Kucharev: So, Joseph really had backing. And here’s where Harriett comes in also. The second time he was put in a psychiatric hospital—not because he was crazy, although there are, you know—it’s because he was raising the level too high for breakthrough—
Daniel Satinsky: Pushing beyond the boundaries?
Anya Kucharev: Pushing beyond. Because he would get desperate. And part of it is, like I said, he didn’t take care of his health. He would get into these manic states, and he just couldn’t come down, because he wasn’t eating. He wasn’t eating.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you don’t think he might have had the manic depressive…?
Anya Kucharev: I think he had some, but it’s exacerbated when you live in conditions that don’t nurture you. He had a very close friend, Vitold, who died. Vitold was overweight, not obese, but really solid. He actually took care of Joseph. He fed him. He would make him come over and eat real food, not just little cups of yogurt, those little blue jars of yogurt that Joseph had at headquarters in the corner. I said Joseph, what is that? He says oh, it’s my food. I said, you have 50 bottles of yogurt here! He said, yeah, I like yogurt. [Laughs.] So, Vitold was important also because he had been abroad. He got himself a funny job at MGU* downtown. Near the National Hotel.
He also liked this idea of human potential because he began to see where Joseph was coming from and why it was necessary, the interdisciplinary thing Joseph was trying to do. And he was an engineer, so he could help with things that broke down, you know, soldering lamps, so he was a technical assistant, but he also grounded Joseph. He gave him a kind of home because Vitold was a good cook, he had a—I won’t say lovely—but comfortable home. And once Vitold died, that was sad.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you started to say that Harriett had a role.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Harriett helped rescue Joseph from the psychiatric ward.
Daniel Satinsky: And she was able to do that?
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I can’t remember the details, but I can…
Daniel Satinsky: You don’t need to. I don’t want to stretch you to find every detail, but I just—
Anya Kucharev: No-no. This is interesting to me because I would like to remember something like that. He had pull, because, you know, the Soviets knew who had money. So, you know, if Harriett called Velikhov it was because he knew she had more pull here. That’s…
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
Anya Kucharev: Not because he wanted money, but because he knew that the NGOs depended on funding, and it was important. And Tanya would know, yeah. That’s very interesting. That was—the AHP was involved, ah. Harriett Crosby was part of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, and a lot of good material and intercultural communications, especially in psychology, came out of that. And then Steve Coll became part of the Levada… No, there’s some important…yeah. ISAR was a real entity
Daniel Satinsky: They became part of the Levada polling organization?
Anya Kucharev: Sorry?
Daniel Satinsky: They became part of Levada’s polling?
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. I think he helped set it up, yes. He had been part of the AHP, and very active. Those first trips were very groundbreaking because we interviewed a lot of people who practiced psychotherapy, which was on the rise in the classical psychiatrists, child psychologists, and people like Tom Greening made very close friends with some of them, and they continued for 20, 30 years. Fran Macy died a couple of years ago—no, not a couple already, jeez. He had been a Russian scholar and went into the Peace Corps, so Macy was very important. He pulled in the ecology people, Yablokov. So, like I said, personal relationships were very important, because a certain level of respect professionally has to happen, and then if there’s a personal—
Daniel Satinsky: Personal relationship.
Anya Kucharev: —like chemistry and you have a connection there, then that’s productive. And that work has continued.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, you introduced Joel to Joseph because Joel was interested in communications, and I know Joseph had this vision of the screens and, you know.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, exactly. There was that. And also, we went to the Peace Committee. I said, “Joel, you’re not going to like this, but we have to make a courtesy, we have to pay a courtesy call to the official Peace Committee so that you get an understanding of the bureaucracy, and what they say, and what they think peace is, and how to achieve it.” And that was a way to understand what Joseph was dealing with, what kind of bureaucracy he had to surmount and implement his ideas. He had very good backing, but you also…
Oh, some of my people that I took over, they just didn’t understand that you can’t march in and do whatever you want anywhere. They just… But this is a great idea, and it should be… I said, listen, they want to know who you are, why you’re doing this, what you can bring, and what you want to take away, so you can’t just barge in. And they would say oh, this isn’t working. I said they’re on a different time scale. They’re not going to answer your phone calls. They’re just not. That’s not how they work. They have to meet with so-and-so, get it approved, da-da-da, the wheel has to start turning.
So, Joseph had this backlog of relationships that he had already founded. He knew people in Tbilisi because they had come to Moscow, because like Victor Krivorotov, the healer, who met with the guy Whitmore from England who was interested in psychology and sports. They met because Krivorotov’s father was a famous healer. Everybody knew his name. And Joseph knew Krivorotov, so all of those people that were in the avant-garde, it has to be sub rosa at first, but as the ‘80s opened up it was easier. We also introduced Sharon Tennison. I gave her the Esalen contact list. Did she ever say thank you? No. But that’s a different story. But she did a great deal, but she never came to Esalen, which is, I mean, it’s extraordinary. You’re working in the same… However, as fate would have it, they met in Moscow in the ‘90s in Red Square after all those years. And it’s just like, whoa, like… No, it must have been 2000s—yes, 2000s.
Daniel Satinsky: 2000? Wow.
Anya Kucharev: In the 2000s, yes. I have a photo because Evelyn and Kim were there videoing with the Murphys, and they all happened to meet at Red Square. [Laughs.] And I looked at this photo and I went okay, they couldn’t meet in California, where they’re 60 miles away from each other.
Daniel Satinsky: But I thought that she had an office in the Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: She did, but Esalen didn’t.
Daniel Satinsky: Esalen didn’t. Ah.
Anya Kucharev: No. Washington Street—
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, that’s what Kim was telling me, that you were—he said they were with the Washington Institute on Washington Street, but not in Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s—
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, got it. I’ve got to correct that in my notes.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I’ll send you—I can photograph and send you. Washington Street was a three story—well, with the basement it was a four story, just a residential building. And Henry Dakin got called in because the neighbors said what are all these people coming in here at all hours of the night? What’s going on here? So, Jim lived upstairs and had an office. Then there were offices that Henry used. He had conference transcription, he had translation. He had so many interests. And then downstairs was his personal—that was for the people working with computers. He’d sit you down and put you in front of a computer and say good luck and walk out. [Laughs.] And then on the first floor was a kitchen, a big living room, and his back office. And then downstairs were the parapsychological experiments they did.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, Jim mentioned that they constructed some machinery and some—
Anya Kucharev: Yes. It was—yes. So, Henry, that building got too small and Henry moved to an auto body shop, a beautiful building on the outside, and he just gutted it and made a penthouse for meetings. That was Sacramento Street. Very important—
Daniel Satinsky: That was Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: —hub. 3220 was a front line intellectual and activist center. Very—Joel had his office there for a while. Very important.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, I had heard it described elsewhere as a kind of an incubator for social activism.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s one—yes. The UN Association didn’t have an office there; they had a cubbyhole. They would use it to meet. So, lots of people came through.
Daniel Satinsky: So, in a newspaper article about Joel’s work I read that he initially—or maybe he told me this—he was initially funded by the Washington Institute, by Henry.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. It’s unfortunate that Henry chose that title because it’s Washington Street, but it’s not Washington, Washington, so people got confused. They said oh, it’s a bunch of spies there. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous, just because of the name.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But so—and this was before Joel met Soros, who I guess became his main funder.
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: But Henry was. And there was some other person’s name who was also supposedly an entrepreneur or something who helped funding.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Mitchell Waite was a computer entrepreneur early, and he published—he had an office at Henry’s, at 3220, and he published…I actually never looked at that book. But Henry was learning desktop publishing. That’s why “Information Moscow” came out. I should actually send you—I do have an old copy. I can send it to you.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? That would be fantastic.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. Do I even have one to show? Well, you’ll see it.
Daniel Satinsky: Or just take a picture of the cover of it and send it to me if you don’t want to get rid of it.
Anya Kucharev: No-no-no. I’ll send it to you because the reason why it even got published was Henry’s interest in desktop publishing. We were the most comprehensive book that came out. It was 500 pages, “Trade and Travel Directory.”
I collected the articles. It was a way for me to open up, so the Westerners weren’t afraid to go. This was ’85 when I came upon this small guide that Victor Louis, who was a famous—he wasn’t a spy, he was an agent. He drove around the Soviet Union with his English wife Jennifer, and they created a map of all the roads you could go on, but none of the diplomats could go out because it was off territory, and we mentioned things like that. Anyway, I took this thing, and I thought, you know, you could really do something here to open up. Especially entrepreneurs were afraid to go. In fact, the commercial office had nothing to give entrepreneurs in the ‘80s, and they sold my book illegally there.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] Really?
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Interesting.
Anya Kucharev: And the secretary, she said oh, you have no idea how happy I am that you did this book because I can’t answer all those questions. They come in here and I don’t know what to tell them. There’re no phone books. There were no phone books.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, in the early ‘90s I published, with a Russian friend, a directory of Yaroslavl Oblast, which was also unknown territory.
Daniel Satinsky: Of course, yeah. There you go. Well, so Victor Louis had this thing, and I bought the rights from the Dimes Group. He did business in the Soviet Union. I never could figure out what it was, but it didn’t matter. We were able—oh, I wanted to tell you, I think you should talk to—and she loves to talk, unless she’s not well—the daughter of George Kennan, Grace Kennan. Why?
Daniel Satinsky: Why?
Anya Kucharev: She actually created a program for women in Petersburg to study entrepreneurship, and they helped them create small businesses.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? When?
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: What years was that? In the ‘80s or ‘90s?
Anya Kucharev: I think in the ‘90s. In the ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: ‘90s, really? Wow.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she became a good friend, but I lost track of her. There’s just so many things. She was very important in the early years because of who she was and her continuing interest in the Soviet Union. Grace is…she’s a lovely human being, and she really…she used her connections because everybody knew who her father was. It was called Sovus, S-O-V-U-S. I don’t have anything I can show you, but I will give you her email address and phone number.
Daniel Satinsky: That would be fantastic.
Anya Kucharev: And she just wrote a memoir two or three years ago. I can’t remember the title. She was raised as a young child in Russia because her father was ambassador for a while.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Wow.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she’s—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s Grace Kennan, so I could just Google that.
Anya Kucharev: Grace W., Warnecke for her last husband, Kennan, yeah. She helped me host an artist’s exhibit at St. John the Divine. Her apartment wasn’t very far away, and so I was able to… Yeah, she’s a really incredible human being.
I mean, Grace was a photographer, and we got her into this “One Day in the Life of the Soviet Union” book. She was editor of photographs for that. That was the right person to do it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes. Exactly the right person.
Anya Kucharev: So, those synchronicities, when they fell together, were perfect sometimes. And sometimes there’s a parallel track, but it’s in different areas. But the interest is still there.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Harriett helped rescue Joseph from the psychiatric ward.
Daniel Satinsky: And she was able to do that?
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I can’t remember the details, but I can…
Daniel Satinsky: You don’t need to. I don’t want to stretch you to find every detail, but I just—
Anya Kucharev: No-no. This is interesting to me because I would like to remember something like that. He had pull, because, you know, the Soviets knew who had money. So, you know, if Harriett called Velikhov it was because he knew she had more pull here. That’s…
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
Anya Kucharev: Not because he wanted money, but because he knew that the NGOs depended on funding, and it was important. And Tanya would know, yeah. That’s very interesting. That was—the AHP was involved, ah. Harriett Crosby was part of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, and a lot of good material and intercultural communications, especially in psychology, came out of that. And then Steve Coll became part of the Levada… No, there’s some important…yeah. ISAR was a real entity
Daniel Satinsky: They became part of the Levada polling organization?
Anya Kucharev: Sorry?
Daniel Satinsky: They became part of Levada’s polling?
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. I think he helped set it up, yes. He had been part of the AHP, and very active. Those first trips were very groundbreaking because we interviewed a lot of people who practiced psychotherapy, which was on the rise in the classical psychiatrists, child psychologists, and people like Tom Greening made very close friends with some of them, and they continued for 20, 30 years. Fran Macy died a couple of years ago—no, not a couple already, jeez. He had been a Russian scholar and went into the Peace Corps, so Macy was very important. He pulled in the ecology people, Yablokov. So, like I said, personal relationships were very important, because a certain level of respect professionally has to happen, and then if there’s a personal—
Daniel Satinsky: Personal relationship.
Anya Kucharev: —like chemistry and you have a connection there, then that’s productive. And that work has continued.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, you introduced Joel to Joseph because Joel was interested in communications, and I know Joseph had this vision of the screens and, you know.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, exactly. There was that. And also, we went to the Peace Committee. I said, “Joel, you’re not going to like this, but we have to make a courtesy, we have to pay a courtesy call to the official Peace Committee so that you get an understanding of the bureaucracy, and what they say, and what they think peace is, and how to achieve it.” And that was a way to understand what Joseph was dealing with, what kind of bureaucracy he had to surmount and implement his ideas. He had very good backing, but you also…
Oh, some of my people that I took over, they just didn’t understand that you can’t march in and do whatever you want anywhere. They just… But this is a great idea, and it should be… I said, listen, they want to know who you are, why you’re doing this, what you can bring, and what you want to take away, so you can’t just barge in. And they would say oh, this isn’t working. I said they’re on a different time scale. They’re not going to answer your phone calls. They’re just not. That’s not how they work. They have to meet with so-and-so, get it approved, da-da-da, the wheel has to start turning.
So, Joseph had this backlog of relationships that he had already founded. He knew people in Tbilisi because they had come to Moscow, because like Victor Krivorotov, the healer, who met with the guy Whitmore from England who was interested in psychology and sports. They met because Krivorotov’s father was a famous healer. Everybody knew his name. And Joseph knew Krivorotov, so all of those people that were in the avant-garde, it has to be sub rosa at first, but as the ‘80s opened up it was easier. We also introduced Sharon Tennison. I gave her the Esalen contact list. Did she ever say thank you? No. But that’s a different story. But she did a great deal, but she never came to Esalen, which is, I mean, it’s extraordinary. You’re working in the same… However, as fate would have it, they met in Moscow in the ‘90s in Red Square after all those years. And it’s just like, whoa, like… No, it must have been 2000s—yes, 2000s.
Daniel Satinsky: 2000? Wow.
Anya Kucharev: In the 2000s, yes. I have a photo because Evelyn and Kim were there videoing with the Murphys, and they all happened to meet at Red Square. [Laughs.] And I looked at this photo and I went okay, they couldn’t meet in California, where they’re 60 miles away from each other.
Daniel Satinsky: But I thought that she had an office in the Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: She did, but Esalen didn’t.
Daniel Satinsky: Esalen didn’t. Ah.
Anya Kucharev: No. Washington Street—
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, that’s what Kim was telling me, that you were—he said they were with the Washington Institute on Washington Street, but not in Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s—
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, got it. I’ve got to correct that in my notes.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I’ll send you—I can photograph and send you. Washington Street was a three story—well, with the basement it was a four story, just a residential building. And Henry Dakin got called in because the neighbors said what are all these people coming in here at all hours of the night? What’s going on here? So, Jim lived upstairs and had an office. Then there were offices that Henry used. He had conference transcription, he had translation. He had so many interests. And then downstairs was his personal—that was for the people working with computers. He’d sit you down and put you in front of a computer and say good luck and walk out. [Laughs.] And then on the first floor was a kitchen, a big living room, and his back office. And then downstairs were the parapsychological experiments they did.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, Jim mentioned that they constructed some machinery and some—
Anya Kucharev: Yes. It was—yes. So, Henry, that building got too small and Henry moved to an auto body shop, a beautiful building on the outside, and he just gutted it and made a penthouse for meetings. That was Sacramento Street. Very important—
Daniel Satinsky: That was Sacramento Street.
Anya Kucharev: —hub. 3220 was a front line intellectual and activist center. Very—Joel had his office there for a while. Very important.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, I had heard it described elsewhere as a kind of an incubator for social activism.
Anya Kucharev: Yes, that’s one—yes. The UN Association didn’t have an office there; they had a cubbyhole. They would use it to meet. So, lots of people came through.
Daniel Satinsky: So, in a newspaper article about Joel’s work I read that he initially—or maybe he told me this—he was initially funded by the Washington Institute, by Henry.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. It’s unfortunate that Henry chose that title because it’s Washington Street, but it’s not Washington, Washington, so people got confused. They said oh, it’s a bunch of spies there. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous, just because of the name.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But so—and this was before Joel met Soros, who I guess became his main funder.
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: But Henry was. And there was some other person’s name who was also supposedly an entrepreneur or something who helped funding.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. Mitchell Waite was a computer entrepreneur early, and he published—he had an office at Henry’s, at 3220, and he published…I actually never looked at that book. But Henry was learning desktop publishing. That’s why “Information Moscow” came out. I should actually send you—I do have an old copy. I can send it to you.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? That would be fantastic.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. Do I even have one to show? Well, you’ll see it.
Daniel Satinsky: Or just take a picture of the cover of it and send it to me if you don’t want to get rid of it.
Anya Kucharev: No-no-no. I’ll send it to you because the reason why it even got published was Henry’s interest in desktop publishing. We were the most comprehensive book that came out. It was 500 pages, “Trade and Travel Directory.”
I collected the articles. It was a way for me to open up, so the Westerners weren’t afraid to go. This was ’85 when I came upon this small guide that Victor Louis, who was a famous—he wasn’t a spy, he was an agent. He drove around the Soviet Union with his English wife Jennifer, and they created a map of all the roads you could go on, but none of the diplomats could go out because it was off territory, and we mentioned things like that. Anyway, I took this thing, and I thought, you know, you could really do something here to open up. Especially entrepreneurs were afraid to go. In fact, the commercial office had nothing to give entrepreneurs in the ‘80s, and they sold my book illegally there.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] Really?
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Interesting.
Anya Kucharev: And the secretary, she said oh, you have no idea how happy I am that you did this book because I can’t answer all those questions. They come in here and I don’t know what to tell them. There’re no phone books. There were no phone books.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, in the early ‘90s I published, with a Russian friend, a directory of Yaroslavl Oblast, which was also unknown territory.
Daniel Satinsky: Of course, yeah. There you go. Well, so Victor Louis had this thing, and I bought the rights from the Dimes Group. He did business in the Soviet Union. I never could figure out what it was, but it didn’t matter. We were able—oh, I wanted to tell you, I think you should talk to—and she loves to talk, unless she’s not well—the daughter of George Kennan, Grace Kennan. Why?
Daniel Satinsky: Why?
Anya Kucharev: She actually created a program for women in Petersburg to study entrepreneurship, and they helped them create small businesses.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? When?
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: What years was that? In the ‘80s or ‘90s?
Anya Kucharev: I think in the ‘90s. In the ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: ‘90s, really? Wow.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she became a good friend, but I lost track of her. There’s just so many things. She was very important in the early years because of who she was and her continuing interest in the Soviet Union. Grace is…she’s a lovely human being, and she really…she used her connections because everybody knew who her father was. It was called Sovus, S-O-V-U-S. I don’t have anything I can show you, but I will give you her email address and phone number.
Daniel Satinsky: That would be fantastic.
Anya Kucharev: And she just wrote a memoir two or three years ago. I can’t remember the title. She was raised as a young child in Russia because her father was ambassador for a while.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Wow.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she’s—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s Grace Kennan, so I could just Google that.
Anya Kucharev: Grace W., Warnecke for her last husband, Kennan, yeah. She helped me host an artist’s exhibit at St. John the Divine. Her apartment wasn’t very far away, and so I was able to… Yeah, she’s a really incredible human being.
I mean, Grace was a photographer, and we got her into this “One Day in the Life of the Soviet Union” book. She was editor of photographs for that. That was the right person to do it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes. Exactly the right person.
Anya Kucharev: So, those synchronicities, when they fell together, were perfect sometimes. And sometimes there’s a parallel track, but it’s in different areas. But the interest is still there.
A system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union
Fist
From "refusal", typically Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate by the authorities of the Soviet Union
Alley in Russian, Bolshoi Palashevskiy Pereulok after 1993
Moscow State University
State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting
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