About
About
Charlie Hosford is a co-founder and former Co-Director of Project Harmony, now PH International. With a background in architecture and experience in community leadership, Charlie and two other friends, Kathy Cadwell and David Kelley founded Project Harmony in 1985 to bring together American and Soviet citizen for people-to-people diplomacy. Their vision of citizen diplomacy during the Cold War let to the birth of Project Harmony, with their first activity being student choir exchanges between Vermont high schools and Leningrad in the spring of 1985.
From this small beginning, Project Harmony grew into one of the leading non-profit organizations promoting citizen exchanges and educational programs between Americans and Russians as one of the leading USAID funded non-profits working in the former Soviet Union. Project Harmony, the Center for Citizen Initiatives led by Sharon Tennyson, and American Councils were the leading non-government, non-profit organizations operating the extensive citizen exchange programs in the post-Soviet period. Project Harmony was part of the Sister State program between Vermont and Karelia and the Sister City program between Burlington and Yaroslavl. The interview includes a wide-ranging overview of Project Harmony programs, including an extensive police exchange program, opening of Ben & Jerry’s in Karelia and Yaroslavl, and extensive travels through the Russian provinces.
Charlie has been managing, leading, and advising PH international in a variety of ways, including his current role on the Board of Directors.
From this small beginning, Project Harmony grew into one of the leading non-profit organizations promoting citizen exchanges and educational programs between Americans and Russians as one of the leading USAID funded non-profits working in the former Soviet Union. Project Harmony, the Center for Citizen Initiatives led by Sharon Tennyson, and American Councils were the leading non-government, non-profit organizations operating the extensive citizen exchange programs in the post-Soviet period. Project Harmony was part of the Sister State program between Vermont and Karelia and the Sister City program between Burlington and Yaroslavl. The interview includes a wide-ranging overview of Project Harmony programs, including an extensive police exchange program, opening of Ben & Jerry’s in Karelia and Yaroslavl, and extensive travels through the Russian provinces.
Charlie has been managing, leading, and advising PH international in a variety of ways, including his current role on the Board of Directors.
Charles Hosford: We—before I get in—we currently still have offices in—we closed our offices in Russia about four months ago, after being declared an unwanted organization and a bunch of other things, but we have offices in Armenia, Georgia, Bosnia, Moldova, let’s see, Sarajevo, Montenegro, in a lot of places that border. And we actually have a small office in Kyiv. But let me just sort of set the scene here.
I’m one of the founding directors of Project Harmony, sort of a 1984-85 organization. My background is actually; I’m an architect by training. I graduated from Amherst College in 1960, the Yale School of Architecture in ’64, was a Fulbright in Finland for a year, lecturing and working in an architectural office there. And I have had a life of design and building for most of my life.
But in 1984, when our government was mired in the Cold War, and there was this sort of stagnation of diplomatic efforts, by accident three of us got together. The three founders of Project Harmony were Kathy Cadwell, David Kelley and myself. Kathy Cadwell was a social studies teacher at a local high school, David Kelley was a lawyer in Montpelier, and I was an architect. And we had similar feelings about the sort of stifling Cold War and punctuated by the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall. And I had a daughter studying in Germany who had a boyfriend whose family lived next to the Berlin Wall. We made some trips there.
So our feeling was, at the time, our meeting, the three of us, was if our government can’t get it done, the citizen diplomacy was in a sort of fledgling state at the time. And coincidentally, our good friend Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan got together in Geneva in 1985, and they came up with some cultural agreements that—
Daniel Satinsky: Can I interrupt you a second to just ask did any of the three of you ever, had you ever been to the Soviet Union, or did you speak Russian, or any particular background in this other than the threat of war?
Charles Hosford: No. Although my year in Finland brought me to, you know, the 30-day war brought me to a lot of Finnish history, and I became quite close friends with some individuals who were exported from Finland during that time to Sweden, and the sort of curious position of Finland during the Second World War. That was my only contact with Russia. I went to Estonia during my time in Finland and sort of became acquainted with the Baltics. But no, none of us had a relative or anything. My relatives came from County Cork. Kathy Cadwell and her husband—actually Kathy, being a social studies teacher, and just sort of incidentally, she and her husband actually went and lived in Georgia during the ‘90s and taught school there.
Of course, that’s after we had started the program in 1985. I mean, things just… So, our legacy, you know, it’s not deep.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right. So, you started this with the objective of bridging differences, or cultural exchanges, or what were you trying to do?
Charles Hosford: Our original, when we first got together, myself, I’m a sort of hockey player by sport choice. And our first thought was geez, let’s take a youth hockey team to Russia, we can really make some… And we had a lot of friends, in particular at Middlebury College. But then we sat down and said that would mean boys only, at that point in history, and we said that’s not going to work. So, we said Russians like music, let’s choose music as a medium. And hence the name, frankly.
So, since Kathy Cadwell was a teacher at a local regional high school called Harwood Union, we convinced the principal at that time, a recent graduate of Harvard ed, that this would be an okay thing to do, to take the advanced course from the high school and build an exchange program with the Soviet Union. And there was not a lot of support from the school board at the time, although the principal convinced most of them that it was an okay thing to do. So hence the name, Project Harmony. We said geez, you know, we’re a singing group, we can get 25 kids. So, the messengers were teenagers, and the medium was music.
And we built this… Prior to actually building this first group we went to—since Kathy Cadwell was a graduate of Middlebury College, along with her husband, we went to see Olin Robison. You remember Olin Robison, the president of Middlebury at the time?
Daniel Satinsky: No, I don’t.
Charles Hosford: Anyways, Olin Robison was a member, he was a Russian speaker. He wrote a lot of commentary. And the guy Ray Benson. I don’t know if you know Ray Benson. He had just left the Moscow embassy as the cultural affairs officer, and he started the American Consortium of Colleges as a professor at Middlebury College. So we went to see Olin Robison, and Olin Robison looked at us, the three of us at the time, and said, you know, guys, you’re dealing with the Soviet Union, this will be a marathon, not a sprint, and so if you think you’re just going to sort of go over there and do your thing and make some waves and so forth, you better be ready for a long haul. And we just swallowed those things. Dave Kelley and I said we’ve got to make some contacts here.
We went to the UN, and they had a cultural attaché there by the name of Valentin Makarov. And this guy had one office. And we just went to New York, went there and knocked on his door. And he said come in, and said what are you here for, and we told him we’d like to take a group to the Soviet Union. And he said you know, I’ve got a 12-year-old son that, you know, he’s interested in actually coming to the States, maybe I can work something out for you. And he said, you know, there’s an organization called Sputnik. You remember Sputnik?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, the youth travel organization.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, youth travel deal. And Intourist was the adult version.
Daniel Satinsky: Was the adult. I went to the Soviet Union in 1984 on an Intourist trip, so yeah.
Charles Hosford: So, this guy Valentin Makarov, here we were putting together this group of 25 musicians and singers from Harwood Union High School—
Daniel Satinsky: In what state? In Maine or Vermont?
Charles Hosford: Vermont. We were in Waitsfield, Vermont, which was just south of Montpelier. And we convinced Valentin to come to Vermont. And they weren’t supposed to travel, at that time, more than 25 miles away from the UN. And coincidentally we informed the Boston Globe—well, someone said, you know, told. The Boston Globe published this little piece after Valentin had come and met the group and so forth, and Valentin, they published this piece, and Valentin Makarov got, I don’t know what you call it, got scolded for traveling at the time. And anyway, he became our contact with Sputnik. And we kept him informed and so forth.
But we put together this group, and we ran all of these seminars. Ron Liebowitz—remember Ron Liebowitz? Does that mean anything to you? He became the president of Middlebury College, but at the time he was a professor of Russian geography and Russian. And we got Stanley Rabinowitz, a professor at Amherst in Russian literature, also a professor at Harvard in the same. We got Stanley Rabinowitz to come up and we did all these seminars to get the children, the kids in the group up to speed on some Russian history, some Russian literature, some…we had the nuclear accords were being negotiated at the time. We got some of those folks involved and tried to build a group that had a little bit of background.
And so, we took our first trip in November of 1985 with this choral group, and Sputnik arranged a tour of Leningrad, Smolensk, Moscow and Minsk. And that trip opened the floodgates. We became attached to the…the Zhdanov Pioneer Palace in Leningrad was our primary host. And that was, at the time, a giant Pioneer Palace, with I don’t know how many thousand members. And of course we were totally amazed at the repertoire of language training, music, dance, sports, chess, you know, just everything imaginable collected under one roof eventually. And so, they became our primary contact. And the trip made such an impression on the delegation that the kids—and there were what, 25 kids and probably six adults—
Daniel Satinsky: Were all three of you, the founders of Project Harmony, part of this?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. And so, we told Sputnik, you know that—they said okay, you know, send us another group. And we said, well, we’re not going to send you another group until you send us a group.
And when you send us the group, I know you put us all up in hotels, but when you send us your group, we’re going to do home stays with your kids. And that was almost a dealbreaker because they said well, you know, that’s…you know, you’re going to propagandize these kids and so forth. But we promised that we’d put them at least in pairs or triples. There were enough adults in the return group that was based from the Zhdanov Pioneer Palace.
So, this group of 33 kids and adults were, you know, we’re not talking amateur singers here. We’re talking sort of operatic trained voices. Some of them were in their 20s. Some of them were definitely… But we brought them to Vermont to start with, and they were in home stays. And part of the group that came, the adult part, were definitely KGB sort of adults. Others were choral directors and musicians and so forth. And that visit unleashed just an incredible… Well, it unleashed the FBI, for one thing.
My wife was principal of our elementary school, and many of the kids were in the school for observations, and singing, and so forth, and the day after that occurs the FBI shows up in her office asking her questions about what kind of discussions did you have, this and that. The FBI was from Albany, New York, the closest one. But that visit—and of course the final concert there was in Burlington, and Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington at the time.
And Bernie Sanders was just sort of in love with this delegation. And I can remember Bernie, at the end of—Memorial Auditorium holds a couple thousand people, and Bernie gets up to sort of conclude this concert and said, you know, folks, you’ve met the enemy. And at the time I was standing next to the FBI guy in his trench coat in the back of the auditorium, and I said to him, I said, so what do you think? And he just smiled and sort of walked away. He said, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing here, basically.
Daniel Satinsky: What year was that?
Charles Hosford: That was 1986.
So just, you know, actually, after those two exchanges we, in our first exchange we encountered, you know, school principals, we were visiting secondary schools that taught English and German and so forth as specialties, and schools that focused on artistic pursuits. And they said could you arrange a school exchange—you’re doing one with the Pioneer Palace, but how about us? And of course, at that time, you know, we said yes to everything. We said yes, of course we could. And I don’t know if you remember Samantha Smith, that episode.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
Charles Hosford: And that happened in ’82, and with Andropov and her visit with her father to Russia. And the first monies that USIA, the United States Information Agency put out were called the Samantha Smith grants. And we tapped in, immediately tapped into the USIA and began just a massive relationship with them. And we got a Samantha Smith grant, which funded initially what were called direct school exchanges. And the explosion of interest in Russia and Russian culture, and sort of the opportunity for kind of nonprofit groups to engage in that culture, it just went crazy.
And my son, who was a participant on our first exchange in ’85, he was a…let’s see, he went to Amherst in ’86 and decided he’d major in Russian studies. And along with—and at the time, when Ray Benson had established this American Consortium of Colleges with Middlebury, Amherst, Bowdoin, Davidson, with exchanging students for a semester as part of their Russian studies programs, that led to a lot of interest in Russian programs. And Amherst…I’m sure you’ve probably heard of Jane and Bill Taubman, who wrote the big biography recently of Gorbachev. Anyways. A lot of the students actually on our first exchange became Russian studies majors.
Daniel Satinsky: And did your group as a group expand or was it still just the three of you kind of managing all this?
Charles Hosford: No, we took on…I guess you’d call them employees, although they were, as they will remind us, they were not very highly paid. And we probably had—you know, we were still working out of my basement and so forth, and we still had these tiny Apple computers, about as big as my iMac here, my iPad. And they were all young collegians who… And some of them hadn’t even graduated. They were working for summers and so forth. But when we began to… And all of the stuff with Sputnik was non-currency exchanges, and that meant that we would send groups, and Sputnik would totally take care of them, transport them, feed them, find school partners and so forth, and we would do the same when they came to the States.
And when we paired them with a school, of course the school that we paired them with was responsible for finding host families, putting together a plan. We would embed a translator in the group and so forth. But the schools actually had to sort of raise a certain amount of money in order to host these direct school exchanges. And that, you know, at one point we had nearly a hundred schools. I mean, we’re talking from Palo Alto, California, to Main, to Rhode Island, to New Jersey, New York, Chappaqua, Ridgewood, I mean, all over the place.
Daniel Satinsky: What year would you say that was when you had that level of interest?
Charles Hosford: Well, it certainly was by ’90, because my son came to work for Project Harmony when he graduated in 1990, and he was leading these…he was living in Russia and leading these schools that we were sending over there, and moving from… So, the direct school exchanges led to what were called semester study programs. And that was where, you know, in these Russian schools—for instance, in… I mean, we had school partnerships in Petrozavodsk, in Pskov, in Novgorod, in Novosibirsk, Volgograd, and all over the place. And so, we began sending staff full-time to Russia. We opened an office in Moscow, and our first office manager there is someone you should interview, Paul Podolsky. He came out of Brown. And we found him a school in Moscow to actually teach in to begin with. And this was in 1990.
Daniel Satinsky: In 1990. And this was—U.S. Information Agency funding allowed you to do this?
Charles Hosford: After we sort of…many of these early direct school exchanges were this concurrency, you know, where schools like the Brooks School in Providence sent their entire junior class. And they would also fund the hosting of the group that came back. But we began to get more and more money. And the programs then, the semester study program popped up. That became a funded program where we were recruiting. Our staff in Russia had grown to probably six or eight people. They were traveling throughout Russia interviewing potential Russian students who had English ability in these English language schools and determining whether they felt they could handle an American host family and a secondary school education curriculum.
And so…but in the meantime the USIA began funding these special, what we called special focus programs. The first one, one of the first ones we did was the White Sea ecology program. Joined up with Pioneer Palace in Vermont, and these Pioneer Palaces have these zoology, ecology groups, these giant aquariums and all this stuff. And they wanted to…we designed this program to look at the ecology of the White Sea, and then we were sampling the canals in Leningrad or in… And then when they came to the States, we were at Arcadia National Park looking at the littoral population in the Atlantic there. And in the early ‘90s we broke into the Baltics. We found this environmental studies school in Riga, and we designed this program between Vermont rivers and lakes and the rivers and lakes in Latvia. And it was amazing. We just said okay, we’re headed for Riga.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was that? Was that also in ’90?
Charles Hosford: Probably ’91.
Daniel Satinsky: Before the breakup of the Soviet Union?
Charles Hosford: Yes, it was before. And the Latvian program led to one in Lithuania. We were rowing every lake and river and taking water samples. Then we were joined up with an ecology, environmental studies program at Montpelier High School in Montpelier.
And in 1990, I believe, Kathy and her husband went to Tbilisi, because we had done a folk arts program with the Pioneer Palace in Tbilisi. And we had taken a group of American teenagers from three different high schools who prepared a whole thing of American folk songs, American folk history of the South, the Midwest, the West. You know, all this sort of American folk music history. And we took it to Georgia, and the Georgians just—if you know anything about Georgian culture, they are phenomenal dancers and singers, and The Pioneer Palace in Tbilisi sent this delegation of Georgians for us, and we took them all over New England, and Manhattan, and Spanish Harlem. And from that group Kathy Cadwell, one of the founders, and her husband Jared decided they were going to go live in Tbilisi and teach high school, teach English in a high school there. So, they did that and became embedded in Georgian culture.
Daniel Satinsky: And they were there at the period in which, then, there were all the uprisings and when they exited the Soviet Union, right?
Charles Hosford: They were killing people on the steps of the parliament there.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, with Gamsakhurdia and then Shevardnadze replacing him, all those things, those years.
Charles Hosford: Right. So, Kathy Cadwell sort of took this hiatus in her social studies career at the local high school, and we’re learning Georgian. In fact, I texted Kathy yesterday and I said Kathy, where are you? She says I’m with our Georgian friends out in California, blah-blah-blah. Anyways. So, this Georgian connection became pretty intense, and today our biggest office is in Tbilisi.
In fact, we just got a…well, it’s a $10 million grant here for our work in Georgia to last over five years. So, these special…you know, the direct school exchanges and the semester study programs, these special study programs became sort of intertwined here. And Vermont established a sister state relationship with Karelia.
Daniel Satinsky: And Burlington has a sister city with Yaroslavl.
Charles Hosford: In fact, most of the cities were city to city. Vermont itself established this state-to-state relationship with Karelia.
Daniel Satinsky: And were you involved with that?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. And Bernie Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, got very involved in the Yaroslavl piece of it. And of course, Ben & Jerry’s got very involved in the Karelia state relationship because they built their factory up in Petrozavodsk.
Daniel Satinsky: Do you know anybody that was involved with that? I would love to talk to somebody from Ben & Jerry’s.
Charles Hosford: Oh, my god, yeah. You know, so Karelia became one of our sort of…our most intense, you know, areas of involvement. We had I don’t know how many direct school exchanges there. We had a disabled children’s program which, I mean, you can’t even begin to describe what we uncovered in this program while working with the disabled community in Petrozavodsk, which had been not seeing the light of day for a hundred years or more. We brought doctor delegations. We brought a whole group of urologists and were doing laparoscopy gallbladder removals in Karelia.
We did a whole agricultural exchange, because Ben & Jerry’s was buying cream and so forth from a whole group of dairies in Karelia, so there was interest in an agricultural exchange with Vermont being a dairy producer and so forth. And then, almost by accident—and by this time we had a real office in the town of Waitsfield, where I live. We bought part of a building, we took a mortgage on it, got out of my basement. We had ten people in our office in Vermont. We had probably 20 people in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Around what years was this?
Charles Hosford: Probably mid ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union you expanded all these exchange programs, right?
Charles Hosford: Although our staff was in Kaunas when Lithuania raised their flag of independence. They were in Riga. In ’91 things were just, as you remember, they were just exploding with excitement and sort of international sort of sovereignty.
But we…let’s see, where was I here?
Daniel Satinsky: You were talking about your expansion, and I just diverted you because I’m just trying to get the time sequence. And Karelia became a sister state before the Soviet Union disbanded or after?
Charles Hosford: Before.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was a pretty intense period of activity in those years, in ’88 to ’91, right?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. Oh my god. I mean, you know, in most, like in Petrozavodsk we became attached at the hip to the Children’s Palace there. And in fact, that’s where Ben & Jerry’s located their factory.
Daniel Satinsky: In Petrozavodsk, yeah.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, in the lower portion of the Children’s Palace.
Daniel Satinsky: In the Children’s Palace itself, wow.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And had this amazing, you know, they were giving ice cream, you know, one day a week it was free ice cream to all the kids in return for rent and so forth. And we became very close to the manager, this guy David Morse, who was sent over there by Ben & Jerry’s to set up the factory. And early on we began hiring Russian staff and renting offices. And we eventually, we bought part of the building in Petrozavodsk. We bought to co-op apartments in St. Pete[rsburg] and renovated them. We bought an office in Moscow.
I mean, this is in late ‘90s, but we migrated from just renting and so forth to actually purchasing and renovating, because I was an architect and I said, you know, let’s, you know, I know how to do this. I would hire all these different tradesmen and so forth. So, in ’91, when things basically came unhinged, our euphoria was, you know, we were beyond. It was almost out of control in terms of what we were able to do and being asked to do.
And incidentally, in Nineteen Ninety…was it Two or Three, we got a call from a girl in Fitchburg, Mass, Fitchburg, Medford. A couple of police officers who had sort of heard it and wanted to do an exchange with the Soviet Union, okay? A guy by the name of Paul Makowski from Medford, Eddie Cronin from Fitchburg, and Wilbraham and…not Wilbraham, but Leominster and so forth. Anyways, we put together this because in Petrozavodsk we’d been working with a school director at a children’s school, and her husband was either the chief of police or one of the sergeants in the police department there, and he said geez, if you can do a school exchange, we can do a police exchange at least, we’re more important than my wife’s school.
So we began working with this group in central Mass, Fitchburg, Medford, and we decided that we would formulate a group that had different community policing elements to it—drug and alcohol, rape investigations, domestic violence advocates and so forth—and that anyone that wanted to enter this, come on this program had to have some…be able to present in one of these expertises, one of these things. We put together a group that was like…God, I forget how big it was, like 30 people. And the chief of police organizations were funding these various participants. We had participants from the Mass State Police, from Bellingham, Tyngsboro, you know, just all over the place there.
And we went with this delegation, and by the time we went we had convinced CBS News to embed a commentator, a correspondent with us. He was one of the sort of known guys. I sort of forget his name, actually, now. So we go to Petrozavodsk with this police delegation, and loaded with, I mean, everything from armored vests to, you know—as gifts, you know—to all kinds of…I think it was called PR-24s, these batons, these…and we actually took a drug dog with us because we had the drug dog trainer to give as a gift, you know, to the department in Petrozavodsk. And we go there, and it’s just like…you know, it’s just unbelievable because the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is slightly military... I mean, we became extremely friendly with the chief of police in Petrozavodsk. Yunash, his name was. Yunash was a close friend of Gorbachev or the leading MVD* guy down in Moscow. I forget it all. And—
Daniel Satinsky: So, this was still Soviet Union times you took these guys, yeah?
Charles Hosford: Yeah, the Soviet Union. But we organized a return trip for this chief Yunash and his group. And by that time, we had convinced—somehow the State Department got wind of this program and invited us to the State Department, and they basically said how much money do you want, and how many exchanges do you want to do, just tell us how much you need.
And the money was like, I mean, we’d never heard of FICA—not FICA, but what’s the overhead formula we use? Anyways, we made up an overhead formula based on some friends who had been working with big time loaning, and the State Department says ah, that sounds good, we’ll just go with that. And so when we got this delegation to the States, we were focused in central Mass and had just like all these programs, in Worcester, and Boston, and Lowell, and even in Cambridge, actually.
And when we went to Washington, Louis Freeh, who was the head of the FBI at that time, invited us to come and stay at the FBI academy. And be a part of what was called the National Academy, which is where all these police officers who are chosen by their departments every year go there for, I think 12 weeks or something to the academy in Quantico and so forth. So here we were with this delegation of Russian police officers from Petrozavodsk taking part in seminars at the FBI academy in Quantico. And Louis Freeh is there talking to them. And the group is doing these mock drug raids in that village they have there—I forget what it’s called. They’re in their firing range firing all the weapons. They’re in the video studios where you react to certain hostage situations and so forth, firing these virtual weapons. And at the same time this national academy is taking place, so these high-class officers from all over the country are interacting with these guys, and—
Daniel Satinsky: How many Russians were there in your group?
Charles Hosford: There were probably 30.
Daniel Satinsky: Thirty? And I assume you must have had a bunch of translators because cops in those days didn’t speak English.
Charles Hosford: We did have some. We had probably three cops who were detectives in the Petrozavodsk that had gone through English school and—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. But they must have loved this, man. I mean…
Charles Hosford: Oh, it was like, you know, they were holding seminars trying hopefully to…and running by with these guys, running by these American Mafia, Russian Mafia and asking them if they knew anything about these various American…these Russian Mafia guys operating in Brooklyn and so forth. And of course, the police department in Petrozavodsk is sort of provincial. They didn’t have much…
Anyways, this law enforcement program exploded. Exploded into, you know, we did this domestic violence coalition, building these coalitions in Odessa, in Lviv, in Petrozavodsk, in Volgograd where we would go in with police delegations from—you know, we had police coming from New Orleans, from Michigan, all over the place to these delegations. We put together these groups and this domestic violence program to go in and build these coalitions of community groups that would intervene.
And when we began uncovering the data on domestic violence in these cities, it was just staggering what we could or could not find in terms of… And then we were bringing in—we brought in a judge, a Superior Court judge from down in Mass—gosh, what was his name? Where we were teaching them about…geez, what’s it called when you issue a…restraining order.
And our Russian translators were saying we don’t have a word for restraining order, like what…how can we explain this? So, we were doing these domestic violence programs, and we would get different groups. In fact, in Odessa, we had a group of nuns. We had groups weighing in. And they said we’ve never been asked. We’ve never been asked to weigh in on this issue of domestic violence, but it’s rampant. Our police departments and so forth think we know how to treat our women, it’s under control, you guys don’t need to tell us anything about domestic violence. And when we came to look at the statistics of deaths in domestic violence situations—for instance, in Petrozavodsk if the woman didn’t die at the time of the incident, but she died a day later, she didn’t get recorded as a statistic. So, we were trying to uncover how many of the—
Daniel Satinsky: But the Russians weren’t that open to this kind of policing, is what you’re saying?
Charles Hosford: No, it was—especially when we started in Tbilisi. And Georgian men say they know how to take care of their women, and don’t be telling us. And we started these women support groups, which opened up a chapter that to this day is sort of legendary. So the law enforcement programs, we began, you know, we partnered with the criminal justice school in Michigan State University, and the criminal justice school in South Carolina at University of South Carolina. And we began bringing over these groups of criminal justice students to be training in academies like in Lviv, and Volgograd where they were training young police officers. And those partnerships just exploded. I mean, we were…
Then we got funding. We were placing computers to these police departments that they’d never seen had before. So, they had people that were capable of using it for data collection and so forth. And the partnerships with Michigan State, the head of the social sciences department out there, Scott Bell Smith, who eventually became a director at Project Harmony, and opened gobs of money and doors and stuff for us. But our focus—
Daniel Satinsky: This was a big focus of your programs then, these criminal justice programs.
Charles Hosford: It became. And it led to a connection with a State Department organization called INL, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement agency. And they have been a funder for the last 20 years, big money. And we took over a program the DOJ, the Department of Justice had tried to implement through…no, how did that work? Anyways, the DOJ couldn’t implement this program called Legal Socialization. In other words, looking at laws and trying to sort of interpret them. And when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the typical chain of command for law enforcement disintegrated as well, and no longer could you enforce juvenile justice through firing or threatening parents at work as a control of their children. But everything came down to sort of a free-for-all, and INL is responsible for the law enforcement attachés in all the embassies.
And we began placing officers that had participated in our first program, we began placing them as law enforcement attachés in embassies. And Eddie Denmark, who’s the police chief in Harvard, Mass, Eddie Denmark is just this, you know, he’s been through a couple of Harvard programs, you know, leadership and became just this exceptional trainer. Anyways, there’s…we’ve been at this for 36 years—for more than 36 years, so my ability to sort of categorize a lot of the programmatic sort of migration is beyond your interest.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no, the level of detail is beyond it. But to me what’s really interesting is this law enforcement connection that you established. I just can’t believe that most people would understand that there was a period of time where police from small towns in New England and throughout the country were interacting with their colleagues in Russia, and in the other independent states. It’s not a well-known story, let’s say.
Charles Hosford: Well, you know, one of your questions—
Daniel Satinsky: It has to go to, though—you know, let me ask you this. What long-term impact do you think that kind of program has had?
Charles Hosford: Well, you know, that’s so difficult to answer, in a way, because when we first encountered the Soviet Union, it was really years of a love affair. I mean, you know, and I began just writing down some quick thoughts about Russian culture that, you know, we didn’t know a lot about Russian history and Russian culture, and even some of our earliest participants from the schools, from the school exchange program, hadn’t even taken World War II history. They didn’t know what side the Russians were on. It was hard for some of them to believe that the Russians and the Americans were fighting on the same side in the Second World War. So just this sort of cultural, you know, I just began sort of stream-of-consciousness, when we began being placed in Soviet homes. When we first went there, there were these hard currency shops that—
I’m one of the founding directors of Project Harmony, sort of a 1984-85 organization. My background is actually; I’m an architect by training. I graduated from Amherst College in 1960, the Yale School of Architecture in ’64, was a Fulbright in Finland for a year, lecturing and working in an architectural office there. And I have had a life of design and building for most of my life.
But in 1984, when our government was mired in the Cold War, and there was this sort of stagnation of diplomatic efforts, by accident three of us got together. The three founders of Project Harmony were Kathy Cadwell, David Kelley and myself. Kathy Cadwell was a social studies teacher at a local high school, David Kelley was a lawyer in Montpelier, and I was an architect. And we had similar feelings about the sort of stifling Cold War and punctuated by the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall. And I had a daughter studying in Germany who had a boyfriend whose family lived next to the Berlin Wall. We made some trips there.
So our feeling was, at the time, our meeting, the three of us, was if our government can’t get it done, the citizen diplomacy was in a sort of fledgling state at the time. And coincidentally, our good friend Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan got together in Geneva in 1985, and they came up with some cultural agreements that—
Daniel Satinsky: Can I interrupt you a second to just ask did any of the three of you ever, had you ever been to the Soviet Union, or did you speak Russian, or any particular background in this other than the threat of war?
Charles Hosford: No. Although my year in Finland brought me to, you know, the 30-day war brought me to a lot of Finnish history, and I became quite close friends with some individuals who were exported from Finland during that time to Sweden, and the sort of curious position of Finland during the Second World War. That was my only contact with Russia. I went to Estonia during my time in Finland and sort of became acquainted with the Baltics. But no, none of us had a relative or anything. My relatives came from County Cork. Kathy Cadwell and her husband—actually Kathy, being a social studies teacher, and just sort of incidentally, she and her husband actually went and lived in Georgia during the ‘90s and taught school there.
Of course, that’s after we had started the program in 1985. I mean, things just… So, our legacy, you know, it’s not deep.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right. So, you started this with the objective of bridging differences, or cultural exchanges, or what were you trying to do?
Charles Hosford: Our original, when we first got together, myself, I’m a sort of hockey player by sport choice. And our first thought was geez, let’s take a youth hockey team to Russia, we can really make some… And we had a lot of friends, in particular at Middlebury College. But then we sat down and said that would mean boys only, at that point in history, and we said that’s not going to work. So, we said Russians like music, let’s choose music as a medium. And hence the name, frankly.
So, since Kathy Cadwell was a teacher at a local regional high school called Harwood Union, we convinced the principal at that time, a recent graduate of Harvard ed, that this would be an okay thing to do, to take the advanced course from the high school and build an exchange program with the Soviet Union. And there was not a lot of support from the school board at the time, although the principal convinced most of them that it was an okay thing to do. So hence the name, Project Harmony. We said geez, you know, we’re a singing group, we can get 25 kids. So, the messengers were teenagers, and the medium was music.
And we built this… Prior to actually building this first group we went to—since Kathy Cadwell was a graduate of Middlebury College, along with her husband, we went to see Olin Robison. You remember Olin Robison, the president of Middlebury at the time?
Daniel Satinsky: No, I don’t.
Charles Hosford: Anyways, Olin Robison was a member, he was a Russian speaker. He wrote a lot of commentary. And the guy Ray Benson. I don’t know if you know Ray Benson. He had just left the Moscow embassy as the cultural affairs officer, and he started the American Consortium of Colleges as a professor at Middlebury College. So we went to see Olin Robison, and Olin Robison looked at us, the three of us at the time, and said, you know, guys, you’re dealing with the Soviet Union, this will be a marathon, not a sprint, and so if you think you’re just going to sort of go over there and do your thing and make some waves and so forth, you better be ready for a long haul. And we just swallowed those things. Dave Kelley and I said we’ve got to make some contacts here.
We went to the UN, and they had a cultural attaché there by the name of Valentin Makarov. And this guy had one office. And we just went to New York, went there and knocked on his door. And he said come in, and said what are you here for, and we told him we’d like to take a group to the Soviet Union. And he said you know, I’ve got a 12-year-old son that, you know, he’s interested in actually coming to the States, maybe I can work something out for you. And he said, you know, there’s an organization called Sputnik. You remember Sputnik?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, the youth travel organization.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, youth travel deal. And Intourist was the adult version.
Daniel Satinsky: Was the adult. I went to the Soviet Union in 1984 on an Intourist trip, so yeah.
Charles Hosford: So, this guy Valentin Makarov, here we were putting together this group of 25 musicians and singers from Harwood Union High School—
Daniel Satinsky: In what state? In Maine or Vermont?
Charles Hosford: Vermont. We were in Waitsfield, Vermont, which was just south of Montpelier. And we convinced Valentin to come to Vermont. And they weren’t supposed to travel, at that time, more than 25 miles away from the UN. And coincidentally we informed the Boston Globe—well, someone said, you know, told. The Boston Globe published this little piece after Valentin had come and met the group and so forth, and Valentin, they published this piece, and Valentin Makarov got, I don’t know what you call it, got scolded for traveling at the time. And anyway, he became our contact with Sputnik. And we kept him informed and so forth.
But we put together this group, and we ran all of these seminars. Ron Liebowitz—remember Ron Liebowitz? Does that mean anything to you? He became the president of Middlebury College, but at the time he was a professor of Russian geography and Russian. And we got Stanley Rabinowitz, a professor at Amherst in Russian literature, also a professor at Harvard in the same. We got Stanley Rabinowitz to come up and we did all these seminars to get the children, the kids in the group up to speed on some Russian history, some Russian literature, some…we had the nuclear accords were being negotiated at the time. We got some of those folks involved and tried to build a group that had a little bit of background.
And so, we took our first trip in November of 1985 with this choral group, and Sputnik arranged a tour of Leningrad, Smolensk, Moscow and Minsk. And that trip opened the floodgates. We became attached to the…the Zhdanov Pioneer Palace in Leningrad was our primary host. And that was, at the time, a giant Pioneer Palace, with I don’t know how many thousand members. And of course we were totally amazed at the repertoire of language training, music, dance, sports, chess, you know, just everything imaginable collected under one roof eventually. And so, they became our primary contact. And the trip made such an impression on the delegation that the kids—and there were what, 25 kids and probably six adults—
Daniel Satinsky: Were all three of you, the founders of Project Harmony, part of this?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. And so, we told Sputnik, you know that—they said okay, you know, send us another group. And we said, well, we’re not going to send you another group until you send us a group.
And when you send us the group, I know you put us all up in hotels, but when you send us your group, we’re going to do home stays with your kids. And that was almost a dealbreaker because they said well, you know, that’s…you know, you’re going to propagandize these kids and so forth. But we promised that we’d put them at least in pairs or triples. There were enough adults in the return group that was based from the Zhdanov Pioneer Palace.
So, this group of 33 kids and adults were, you know, we’re not talking amateur singers here. We’re talking sort of operatic trained voices. Some of them were in their 20s. Some of them were definitely… But we brought them to Vermont to start with, and they were in home stays. And part of the group that came, the adult part, were definitely KGB sort of adults. Others were choral directors and musicians and so forth. And that visit unleashed just an incredible… Well, it unleashed the FBI, for one thing.
My wife was principal of our elementary school, and many of the kids were in the school for observations, and singing, and so forth, and the day after that occurs the FBI shows up in her office asking her questions about what kind of discussions did you have, this and that. The FBI was from Albany, New York, the closest one. But that visit—and of course the final concert there was in Burlington, and Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington at the time.
And Bernie Sanders was just sort of in love with this delegation. And I can remember Bernie, at the end of—Memorial Auditorium holds a couple thousand people, and Bernie gets up to sort of conclude this concert and said, you know, folks, you’ve met the enemy. And at the time I was standing next to the FBI guy in his trench coat in the back of the auditorium, and I said to him, I said, so what do you think? And he just smiled and sort of walked away. He said, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing here, basically.
Daniel Satinsky: What year was that?
Charles Hosford: That was 1986.
So just, you know, actually, after those two exchanges we, in our first exchange we encountered, you know, school principals, we were visiting secondary schools that taught English and German and so forth as specialties, and schools that focused on artistic pursuits. And they said could you arrange a school exchange—you’re doing one with the Pioneer Palace, but how about us? And of course, at that time, you know, we said yes to everything. We said yes, of course we could. And I don’t know if you remember Samantha Smith, that episode.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
Charles Hosford: And that happened in ’82, and with Andropov and her visit with her father to Russia. And the first monies that USIA, the United States Information Agency put out were called the Samantha Smith grants. And we tapped in, immediately tapped into the USIA and began just a massive relationship with them. And we got a Samantha Smith grant, which funded initially what were called direct school exchanges. And the explosion of interest in Russia and Russian culture, and sort of the opportunity for kind of nonprofit groups to engage in that culture, it just went crazy.
And my son, who was a participant on our first exchange in ’85, he was a…let’s see, he went to Amherst in ’86 and decided he’d major in Russian studies. And along with—and at the time, when Ray Benson had established this American Consortium of Colleges with Middlebury, Amherst, Bowdoin, Davidson, with exchanging students for a semester as part of their Russian studies programs, that led to a lot of interest in Russian programs. And Amherst…I’m sure you’ve probably heard of Jane and Bill Taubman, who wrote the big biography recently of Gorbachev. Anyways. A lot of the students actually on our first exchange became Russian studies majors.
Daniel Satinsky: And did your group as a group expand or was it still just the three of you kind of managing all this?
Charles Hosford: No, we took on…I guess you’d call them employees, although they were, as they will remind us, they were not very highly paid. And we probably had—you know, we were still working out of my basement and so forth, and we still had these tiny Apple computers, about as big as my iMac here, my iPad. And they were all young collegians who… And some of them hadn’t even graduated. They were working for summers and so forth. But when we began to… And all of the stuff with Sputnik was non-currency exchanges, and that meant that we would send groups, and Sputnik would totally take care of them, transport them, feed them, find school partners and so forth, and we would do the same when they came to the States.
And when we paired them with a school, of course the school that we paired them with was responsible for finding host families, putting together a plan. We would embed a translator in the group and so forth. But the schools actually had to sort of raise a certain amount of money in order to host these direct school exchanges. And that, you know, at one point we had nearly a hundred schools. I mean, we’re talking from Palo Alto, California, to Main, to Rhode Island, to New Jersey, New York, Chappaqua, Ridgewood, I mean, all over the place.
Daniel Satinsky: What year would you say that was when you had that level of interest?
Charles Hosford: Well, it certainly was by ’90, because my son came to work for Project Harmony when he graduated in 1990, and he was leading these…he was living in Russia and leading these schools that we were sending over there, and moving from… So, the direct school exchanges led to what were called semester study programs. And that was where, you know, in these Russian schools—for instance, in… I mean, we had school partnerships in Petrozavodsk, in Pskov, in Novgorod, in Novosibirsk, Volgograd, and all over the place. And so, we began sending staff full-time to Russia. We opened an office in Moscow, and our first office manager there is someone you should interview, Paul Podolsky. He came out of Brown. And we found him a school in Moscow to actually teach in to begin with. And this was in 1990.
Daniel Satinsky: In 1990. And this was—U.S. Information Agency funding allowed you to do this?
Charles Hosford: After we sort of…many of these early direct school exchanges were this concurrency, you know, where schools like the Brooks School in Providence sent their entire junior class. And they would also fund the hosting of the group that came back. But we began to get more and more money. And the programs then, the semester study program popped up. That became a funded program where we were recruiting. Our staff in Russia had grown to probably six or eight people. They were traveling throughout Russia interviewing potential Russian students who had English ability in these English language schools and determining whether they felt they could handle an American host family and a secondary school education curriculum.
And so…but in the meantime the USIA began funding these special, what we called special focus programs. The first one, one of the first ones we did was the White Sea ecology program. Joined up with Pioneer Palace in Vermont, and these Pioneer Palaces have these zoology, ecology groups, these giant aquariums and all this stuff. And they wanted to…we designed this program to look at the ecology of the White Sea, and then we were sampling the canals in Leningrad or in… And then when they came to the States, we were at Arcadia National Park looking at the littoral population in the Atlantic there. And in the early ‘90s we broke into the Baltics. We found this environmental studies school in Riga, and we designed this program between Vermont rivers and lakes and the rivers and lakes in Latvia. And it was amazing. We just said okay, we’re headed for Riga.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was that? Was that also in ’90?
Charles Hosford: Probably ’91.
Daniel Satinsky: Before the breakup of the Soviet Union?
Charles Hosford: Yes, it was before. And the Latvian program led to one in Lithuania. We were rowing every lake and river and taking water samples. Then we were joined up with an ecology, environmental studies program at Montpelier High School in Montpelier.
And in 1990, I believe, Kathy and her husband went to Tbilisi, because we had done a folk arts program with the Pioneer Palace in Tbilisi. And we had taken a group of American teenagers from three different high schools who prepared a whole thing of American folk songs, American folk history of the South, the Midwest, the West. You know, all this sort of American folk music history. And we took it to Georgia, and the Georgians just—if you know anything about Georgian culture, they are phenomenal dancers and singers, and The Pioneer Palace in Tbilisi sent this delegation of Georgians for us, and we took them all over New England, and Manhattan, and Spanish Harlem. And from that group Kathy Cadwell, one of the founders, and her husband Jared decided they were going to go live in Tbilisi and teach high school, teach English in a high school there. So, they did that and became embedded in Georgian culture.
Daniel Satinsky: And they were there at the period in which, then, there were all the uprisings and when they exited the Soviet Union, right?
Charles Hosford: They were killing people on the steps of the parliament there.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, with Gamsakhurdia and then Shevardnadze replacing him, all those things, those years.
Charles Hosford: Right. So, Kathy Cadwell sort of took this hiatus in her social studies career at the local high school, and we’re learning Georgian. In fact, I texted Kathy yesterday and I said Kathy, where are you? She says I’m with our Georgian friends out in California, blah-blah-blah. Anyways. So, this Georgian connection became pretty intense, and today our biggest office is in Tbilisi.
In fact, we just got a…well, it’s a $10 million grant here for our work in Georgia to last over five years. So, these special…you know, the direct school exchanges and the semester study programs, these special study programs became sort of intertwined here. And Vermont established a sister state relationship with Karelia.
Daniel Satinsky: And Burlington has a sister city with Yaroslavl.
Charles Hosford: In fact, most of the cities were city to city. Vermont itself established this state-to-state relationship with Karelia.
Daniel Satinsky: And were you involved with that?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. And Bernie Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, got very involved in the Yaroslavl piece of it. And of course, Ben & Jerry’s got very involved in the Karelia state relationship because they built their factory up in Petrozavodsk.
Daniel Satinsky: Do you know anybody that was involved with that? I would love to talk to somebody from Ben & Jerry’s.
Charles Hosford: Oh, my god, yeah. You know, so Karelia became one of our sort of…our most intense, you know, areas of involvement. We had I don’t know how many direct school exchanges there. We had a disabled children’s program which, I mean, you can’t even begin to describe what we uncovered in this program while working with the disabled community in Petrozavodsk, which had been not seeing the light of day for a hundred years or more. We brought doctor delegations. We brought a whole group of urologists and were doing laparoscopy gallbladder removals in Karelia.
We did a whole agricultural exchange, because Ben & Jerry’s was buying cream and so forth from a whole group of dairies in Karelia, so there was interest in an agricultural exchange with Vermont being a dairy producer and so forth. And then, almost by accident—and by this time we had a real office in the town of Waitsfield, where I live. We bought part of a building, we took a mortgage on it, got out of my basement. We had ten people in our office in Vermont. We had probably 20 people in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Around what years was this?
Charles Hosford: Probably mid ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union you expanded all these exchange programs, right?
Charles Hosford: Although our staff was in Kaunas when Lithuania raised their flag of independence. They were in Riga. In ’91 things were just, as you remember, they were just exploding with excitement and sort of international sort of sovereignty.
But we…let’s see, where was I here?
Daniel Satinsky: You were talking about your expansion, and I just diverted you because I’m just trying to get the time sequence. And Karelia became a sister state before the Soviet Union disbanded or after?
Charles Hosford: Before.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was a pretty intense period of activity in those years, in ’88 to ’91, right?
Charles Hosford: Oh, yeah. Oh my god. I mean, you know, in most, like in Petrozavodsk we became attached at the hip to the Children’s Palace there. And in fact, that’s where Ben & Jerry’s located their factory.
Daniel Satinsky: In Petrozavodsk, yeah.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, in the lower portion of the Children’s Palace.
Daniel Satinsky: In the Children’s Palace itself, wow.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And had this amazing, you know, they were giving ice cream, you know, one day a week it was free ice cream to all the kids in return for rent and so forth. And we became very close to the manager, this guy David Morse, who was sent over there by Ben & Jerry’s to set up the factory. And early on we began hiring Russian staff and renting offices. And we eventually, we bought part of the building in Petrozavodsk. We bought to co-op apartments in St. Pete[rsburg] and renovated them. We bought an office in Moscow.
I mean, this is in late ‘90s, but we migrated from just renting and so forth to actually purchasing and renovating, because I was an architect and I said, you know, let’s, you know, I know how to do this. I would hire all these different tradesmen and so forth. So, in ’91, when things basically came unhinged, our euphoria was, you know, we were beyond. It was almost out of control in terms of what we were able to do and being asked to do.
And incidentally, in Nineteen Ninety…was it Two or Three, we got a call from a girl in Fitchburg, Mass, Fitchburg, Medford. A couple of police officers who had sort of heard it and wanted to do an exchange with the Soviet Union, okay? A guy by the name of Paul Makowski from Medford, Eddie Cronin from Fitchburg, and Wilbraham and…not Wilbraham, but Leominster and so forth. Anyways, we put together this because in Petrozavodsk we’d been working with a school director at a children’s school, and her husband was either the chief of police or one of the sergeants in the police department there, and he said geez, if you can do a school exchange, we can do a police exchange at least, we’re more important than my wife’s school.
So we began working with this group in central Mass, Fitchburg, Medford, and we decided that we would formulate a group that had different community policing elements to it—drug and alcohol, rape investigations, domestic violence advocates and so forth—and that anyone that wanted to enter this, come on this program had to have some…be able to present in one of these expertises, one of these things. We put together a group that was like…God, I forget how big it was, like 30 people. And the chief of police organizations were funding these various participants. We had participants from the Mass State Police, from Bellingham, Tyngsboro, you know, just all over the place there.
And we went with this delegation, and by the time we went we had convinced CBS News to embed a commentator, a correspondent with us. He was one of the sort of known guys. I sort of forget his name, actually, now. So we go to Petrozavodsk with this police delegation, and loaded with, I mean, everything from armored vests to, you know—as gifts, you know—to all kinds of…I think it was called PR-24s, these batons, these…and we actually took a drug dog with us because we had the drug dog trainer to give as a gift, you know, to the department in Petrozavodsk. And we go there, and it’s just like…you know, it’s just unbelievable because the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is slightly military... I mean, we became extremely friendly with the chief of police in Petrozavodsk. Yunash, his name was. Yunash was a close friend of Gorbachev or the leading MVD* guy down in Moscow. I forget it all. And—
Daniel Satinsky: So, this was still Soviet Union times you took these guys, yeah?
Charles Hosford: Yeah, the Soviet Union. But we organized a return trip for this chief Yunash and his group. And by that time, we had convinced—somehow the State Department got wind of this program and invited us to the State Department, and they basically said how much money do you want, and how many exchanges do you want to do, just tell us how much you need.
And the money was like, I mean, we’d never heard of FICA—not FICA, but what’s the overhead formula we use? Anyways, we made up an overhead formula based on some friends who had been working with big time loaning, and the State Department says ah, that sounds good, we’ll just go with that. And so when we got this delegation to the States, we were focused in central Mass and had just like all these programs, in Worcester, and Boston, and Lowell, and even in Cambridge, actually.
And when we went to Washington, Louis Freeh, who was the head of the FBI at that time, invited us to come and stay at the FBI academy. And be a part of what was called the National Academy, which is where all these police officers who are chosen by their departments every year go there for, I think 12 weeks or something to the academy in Quantico and so forth. So here we were with this delegation of Russian police officers from Petrozavodsk taking part in seminars at the FBI academy in Quantico. And Louis Freeh is there talking to them. And the group is doing these mock drug raids in that village they have there—I forget what it’s called. They’re in their firing range firing all the weapons. They’re in the video studios where you react to certain hostage situations and so forth, firing these virtual weapons. And at the same time this national academy is taking place, so these high-class officers from all over the country are interacting with these guys, and—
Daniel Satinsky: How many Russians were there in your group?
Charles Hosford: There were probably 30.
Daniel Satinsky: Thirty? And I assume you must have had a bunch of translators because cops in those days didn’t speak English.
Charles Hosford: We did have some. We had probably three cops who were detectives in the Petrozavodsk that had gone through English school and—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. But they must have loved this, man. I mean…
Charles Hosford: Oh, it was like, you know, they were holding seminars trying hopefully to…and running by with these guys, running by these American Mafia, Russian Mafia and asking them if they knew anything about these various American…these Russian Mafia guys operating in Brooklyn and so forth. And of course, the police department in Petrozavodsk is sort of provincial. They didn’t have much…
Anyways, this law enforcement program exploded. Exploded into, you know, we did this domestic violence coalition, building these coalitions in Odessa, in Lviv, in Petrozavodsk, in Volgograd where we would go in with police delegations from—you know, we had police coming from New Orleans, from Michigan, all over the place to these delegations. We put together these groups and this domestic violence program to go in and build these coalitions of community groups that would intervene.
And when we began uncovering the data on domestic violence in these cities, it was just staggering what we could or could not find in terms of… And then we were bringing in—we brought in a judge, a Superior Court judge from down in Mass—gosh, what was his name? Where we were teaching them about…geez, what’s it called when you issue a…restraining order.
And our Russian translators were saying we don’t have a word for restraining order, like what…how can we explain this? So, we were doing these domestic violence programs, and we would get different groups. In fact, in Odessa, we had a group of nuns. We had groups weighing in. And they said we’ve never been asked. We’ve never been asked to weigh in on this issue of domestic violence, but it’s rampant. Our police departments and so forth think we know how to treat our women, it’s under control, you guys don’t need to tell us anything about domestic violence. And when we came to look at the statistics of deaths in domestic violence situations—for instance, in Petrozavodsk if the woman didn’t die at the time of the incident, but she died a day later, she didn’t get recorded as a statistic. So, we were trying to uncover how many of the—
Daniel Satinsky: But the Russians weren’t that open to this kind of policing, is what you’re saying?
Charles Hosford: No, it was—especially when we started in Tbilisi. And Georgian men say they know how to take care of their women, and don’t be telling us. And we started these women support groups, which opened up a chapter that to this day is sort of legendary. So the law enforcement programs, we began, you know, we partnered with the criminal justice school in Michigan State University, and the criminal justice school in South Carolina at University of South Carolina. And we began bringing over these groups of criminal justice students to be training in academies like in Lviv, and Volgograd where they were training young police officers. And those partnerships just exploded. I mean, we were…
Then we got funding. We were placing computers to these police departments that they’d never seen had before. So, they had people that were capable of using it for data collection and so forth. And the partnerships with Michigan State, the head of the social sciences department out there, Scott Bell Smith, who eventually became a director at Project Harmony, and opened gobs of money and doors and stuff for us. But our focus—
Daniel Satinsky: This was a big focus of your programs then, these criminal justice programs.
Charles Hosford: It became. And it led to a connection with a State Department organization called INL, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement agency. And they have been a funder for the last 20 years, big money. And we took over a program the DOJ, the Department of Justice had tried to implement through…no, how did that work? Anyways, the DOJ couldn’t implement this program called Legal Socialization. In other words, looking at laws and trying to sort of interpret them. And when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the typical chain of command for law enforcement disintegrated as well, and no longer could you enforce juvenile justice through firing or threatening parents at work as a control of their children. But everything came down to sort of a free-for-all, and INL is responsible for the law enforcement attachés in all the embassies.
And we began placing officers that had participated in our first program, we began placing them as law enforcement attachés in embassies. And Eddie Denmark, who’s the police chief in Harvard, Mass, Eddie Denmark is just this, you know, he’s been through a couple of Harvard programs, you know, leadership and became just this exceptional trainer. Anyways, there’s…we’ve been at this for 36 years—for more than 36 years, so my ability to sort of categorize a lot of the programmatic sort of migration is beyond your interest.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no, the level of detail is beyond it. But to me what’s really interesting is this law enforcement connection that you established. I just can’t believe that most people would understand that there was a period of time where police from small towns in New England and throughout the country were interacting with their colleagues in Russia, and in the other independent states. It’s not a well-known story, let’s say.
Charles Hosford: Well, you know, one of your questions—
Daniel Satinsky: It has to go to, though—you know, let me ask you this. What long-term impact do you think that kind of program has had?
Charles Hosford: Well, you know, that’s so difficult to answer, in a way, because when we first encountered the Soviet Union, it was really years of a love affair. I mean, you know, and I began just writing down some quick thoughts about Russian culture that, you know, we didn’t know a lot about Russian history and Russian culture, and even some of our earliest participants from the schools, from the school exchange program, hadn’t even taken World War II history. They didn’t know what side the Russians were on. It was hard for some of them to believe that the Russians and the Americans were fighting on the same side in the Second World War. So just this sort of cultural, you know, I just began sort of stream-of-consciousness, when we began being placed in Soviet homes. When we first went there, there were these hard currency shops that—
Daniel Satinsky: Right. I remember them.
Charles Hosford: What were they called, Beryozka?
Daniel Satinsky: Beryozka.
Charles Hosford: The black market. We told the kids do not be exchanging rubles on the black market. The black-market exchanges, all the things that could come backwards from their host family. No shaking hands—
Daniel Satinsky: The rabbit hats, right?
Charles Hosford: —no shaking hands over the threshold. No whistling inside the house. It means you’re going to lose all your money. No going outside with wet hair. The American teenagers would just, you know. And the Russian mothers were making them stick their heads in the oven to dry their hair, okay?
And the kids would go out on the street, and if the kids had a jacket or something, or a long coat that the hem was showing, the women on the street would just come up to them and tap them and say fix your coat.
And if the kids would walk around with their shoes untied the women would tap them and say tie your shoes. The difference between public spaces and private spaces, apartments and the corridors right outside apartments was just like… And the kids would go up into these apartment buildings with trash chutes and people peeing next to the elevators, and they’d walk into these apartments, they were like slippers, shoes off, rugs on the wall, everything clean.
And the standing in lines. The kids would say, well, what’s everybody standing in line for? What’s that all about? And they said well, they’re standing in line for cheese, and shoes. The etiquette on trains. We took a lot of train trips. And these coupes, you know. I’m sure you, you know. And the etiquette that sort of exists around the bathrooms, and no flushing the toilets in the stations, and the toilets that just dump out onto the railroad tracks.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m familiar with that, yeah.
Charles Hosford: And then when the kids encountered—and even I—I think it was Georgia in one of the first apartments we see this porch with a Stalin over the piano. And the kids, some of the kids were asking who’s that? And the host would say, well, that’s Stalin. And as an adult I was pretty familiar that Stalin was not a hero in my vocabulary, but here he is still hanging on the wall of these apartments. So, this sort of dichotomy of is Stalin a despot or a hero?
And then encountering the whole sort of banya* dacha* sort of thing, especially in Karelia. The kids were then taken to these banyas and these little dachas, and this was like sacred territory for most Russians. And then the police banyas, and the railroad worker banyas, and oh my god, you know. I mean, these things were like… I’m just looking… Every school had a museum on the great patriotic war. Remnants, you know. Helmets with bullet holes, and pieces of shrapnel, and foreign flags. And you got a tour of those museums whether you wanted it or not. And those tours were not short tours. And every…they were everywhere. Everywhere. And so, there was… And I remember looking up at some of these balconies on these sorts of Stalin-type apartments and seeing people bathing in ice cold water. And the babies.
You know, we went into this one hospital and these newborn babies were wrapped in swaddling and stacked on a gurney like cordwood, just stacked up in a pyramid with of course their heads and their little feet covered up, and they were being doled out to the mothers as packages. I mean, just on and on these images that were so foreign to the kids and to us. But we saw them mostly as, you know, just sort of like… Well, like in Leningrad there’s the Museum of Curiosities. You’ve been?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Charles Hosford: But, you know, so there was just… And then Russian life is just embedded with music and dance. And these major plazas of—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Volgograd and the Mamayev Kurgan statue that’s cut, I don’t know, it’s like ten stories high, you know, and—
Daniel Satinsky: I’ve seen pictures of it. I’ve not been there.
Charles Hosford: You know, the pool of tears and, you know, where the mothers of, you know, and the scenes of the battle of Volgograd, or south Stalingrad. And then there’s… And after a few years, and after different programs, you discover part of the underbelly of Russian culture. And some of that, of course, underbelly became obvious to me and to our staff as adults because of the domestic violence issue.
We had a whole series of law enforcement programs that focused on prisons. We were taking from Massachusetts Gardner medium security, Sterling, the highest of maximum-security prisoners you know, Cook County prison. And we would be visiting prisons, female prisons, male prisons across Russia and Ukraine, and seeing the tattooed knuckles of prisoners, and the work programs.
And when we got into the disabled children’s program in Karelia, we encountered women who hadn’t seen basically the light of day for 20 years, where disabled children that they were carrying around on their backs and had never been asked to come to a meeting where there might be some services of some kind offered. And we established a group of taxi drivers in Petrozavodsk who agreed to transport women and their disabled children to the arena, to the market. In order to get there prior to that they had to carry them onto a tram on their backs. And people just shunned them kind of thing.
And then there were orphanages that we began working with. I mean, oh my god. I mean, it was like another sort of part of the underbelly of… You know, adoption and fostering kids is not a part of Russian culture. And these orphanages where 18-year-olds were taking care of two-year-olds, and those 18-year-olds had been there most of their lives.
And then we got into the gulags. We established an office in Tomsk and Irkutsk, and out into Ulan-Ude, out into that area. And we took a group of performing teenagers up the Ob River one summer, and I can’t even begin to tell you the villages that we encountered on that trip. The Ob freezes over, so they’re not accessible a lot of the year. Just the old believer villages. Some of the villages were totally Polish, or I think one of them was... Actually, Stalin had exiled these groups of people to these Siberian places, and we began…we were performing. We were going to go to these villages, and the ship, this boat we were on, we’d just sort of run it into the sandbar and get off. And we had fiddle players and clogging kids, and we taught clogging that we taught clogging to and so forth. And we encountered one village where the Ob had opened up a mass grave. A mass grave where there were like a thousand bodies in this grave.
And they’d begun to…they were frozen, and they had begun to sort of float down the Ob and so forth. And so, after that trip, I mean, that trip was like…that was like going back a hundred years or 200 years into Soviet life. I mean, the Old Believer villages that we encountered were…they were frozen in time.
Daniel Satinsky: Was this in the early ‘90s as well?
Charles Hosford: Yeah, this was…gosh, again, I’m not good on the dates, but I can… But the follow-up to that was that my son actually, my son, in his senior year in college, was looking for a thesis project, and in some of our first trips to Karelia we encountered some of the remnants of the migration of American Finns and Canadian Finns to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
I don’t know if you remember that whole piece of history. But there were about 10,000, 10 to 15,000 that were recruited by Russian recruiters that came over to the work halls of America, particularly to the Finnish settlements in upper Michigan and different places and recruited people with skills—carpenters, electricians, miners, and so forth. And we encountered a couple in Petrozavodsk in probably 1989, a couple named Elmer and…Miriam and Elmer Nousiainen, a Finnish name. And their parents had been convinced to migrate back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. And Elmer was, I think, 14 at the time. Miriam’s family was also recruited, and I think she was 12 or something.
And it turns out Elmer had to give up his American passport, you know, when…so forth. And when he was 24 or something he went to the American embassy in Moscow to retrieve his American passport and was arrested there. He spent 16 years in the gulag—16 years in the gulag. And Miriam during those years was running with her mother from all over the northern Karelia and the White Sea area and Arkhangelsk. But they decided he would…
Because when we went to Petrozavodsk and they found out we were Americans, and their families had migrated from America, they contacted us and said—because they actually spoke English—and said could you, you know, we’d like to talk with you. And Miriam could bake a pretty good apple pie at the time. [Laughs.] So, my son became attached to this couple and wrote his thesis on this migration and Elmer’s stories of his 16 years in the gulag.
And beyond that, so they began recruiting kids for summer trips to explore gulag survivors and record their stories. And went out to the area in Irkutsk and Tomsk, in that area where these villages were established and so forth and began recording stories of some of these fairly elderly women, actually. They were the ones that survived and spent a lot of their lives running through the woods to do it. And had a group of teenage students from—he became, after his graduation from Stanford and Harvard ed school, became a teacher Lincoln Sudbury High School.
And he’d take students with him, videographers and recorders and so forth, and begin collecting these stories. So, another piece of the underbelly of Russian culture that we began becoming familiar with was this whole, the gulag. And of course, Solzhenitsyn was a resident just south of us here for many years. In Chester, Vermont. And also, Elka Schumann. Elka Schumann was the daughter of John Scott. John Scott wrote a book called “Beyond the Urals,” his experience in the 1930s living in Magnitogorsk, the iron, steel mills of the times. And Elka Schumann became a legend here in Vermont as the wife of Peter Schumann, who formed the Bread & Puppet Theater, which is—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, right. I remember them, yeah.
Charles Hosford: So, we began a very close relationship with Elka Schumann because she had relatives and Latvia, and we would help her go visit them and so forth. And the stories of her childhood as the daughter of John Scott, you know, who wrote that book, which is—I don’t know if you ever read that thing.
Daniel Satinsky: I have not read that book. I think I’ve heard of it, but I have not read it, no.
Charles Hosford: Anyways, so there was this growing, you know, our initial sort of euphoria and sort of look at Soviet culture and Soviet society from these classical direct school exchanges, these special focus programs in ecology and folk music, and God, we paired up with a group of folk singers from Tomsk, and it was amazing. And then we began to discover the part of Russian society that was a little bit the underbelly. And almost every encounter, whether it was the coat women at the Hermitage Museum, who would, through our translators, they would tell us about after the war there weren’t any men left. These women in these little cafeterias where we could get a glass of juice, and you’d hand the glass back to the woman, and she’d put it in the cold water, and hand it to the next person. They would start telling us these stories about, I don’t know, the kids would ask why are all the women, why are all the dentists women. And these women would just look at them and say, you know, it was like ten to one after the war. There was nobody left, no men left for these professions. And these women, I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered them in the parks with these brooms made out of twigs.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, sure.
Charles Hosford: You know, just these legions of women just cleaning with equipment made from saplings and bundles of twigs. And our kids would look, and they’d just say what are they doing? How can they sweep with those twigs? So anyways, just this…when you ask about… I mean, in the final—I don’t know if it’s the final analysis, but do you think we did any good there or do you think we made any headway in open society.
We became very involved with the Soros foundation. In recent years we had some big grants from Microsoft, from Intel. We established about 300 internet classrooms across Russia. We had a grant called the Internet Access & Training Programs. We would go into libraries and universities and renovate a room, put probably 12 computers, training journalists, basically, how to operate these computers, how to access the internet, how to build. And then when Intel came to us and said can you take groups of teachers and do the same, teach them how to build curriculums based on real information and so forth. We began working with…and Microsoft gave us money to work with the blind and deaf communities in Russia. So, we had programs from Vladivostok, to Oryol, to Tyumen, to Yakutsk.
And our life took us to, for instance in Armenia. We built internet classrooms in 150 secondary schools. We built two mobile vehicles that had three workstations, a satellite dish, and we would go to these remote villages and set up for two weeks at a time and access the internet off of a satellite. We got access to the U.S. Army, or somebody gave us access to these things. And of course, we got embedded in Armenian culture, which, if you’ve been to Watertown or other places, you’ll know that some Armenian food is quite good.
And then, you know, our presence in Moscow, for instance. I can’t tell you how many ambassadors and three-year foreign service crews we’ve outlived. And one of the people I’d like to put you onto is this Paul Smith, who, in our early days, was the general counsel in St. Petersburg and went on to be the DCM in Moscow. And Paul Smith, along with Senator Leahy, we were squiring these people around Karelia and different places, showing them programs and so forth. So, we became very embedded in the embassies, and St. Pete was a consulate. And in fact, for years, we’ve run the American Corners program out of the Moscow embassy, which is the American culture program that deals with Muskie fellowships and brings in all kinds of professors and lecturers to Russia. And because we were a constant there, and as the ambassadors and staff at the embassy changed every three years, and they’d just say go talk to Project Harmony if you want to find out what’s happening, and just keep getting—
Daniel Satinsky: How big was your office there?
Charles Hosford: Oh, God. When we…probably at its height it was maybe 25 people. And we had a retreat in Tbilisi two years ago and probably had, I don’t know, two-thirds of our staff there, and we had 50 people there from all our offices. But Moscow was…you know, I mean, we had, when Yeltsin was jumping on the tanks and this stuff our office there was run by this guy Paul Podolsky, and Paul, a former bicycle courier from Washington, D.C., decided he would do the same in Moscow. So, when things were just going crazy there, he was riding his bike like… He used to try…he says I can’t tell you how many times I should have been killed in that city. And during Yeltsin’s crazy time, and the confrontations and tanks and stuff, he was there.
And he’s another person who got involved in, when he came back to the States—well, he married a woman from Siberia, I forget, from Sverdlovsk or Novo…or somewhere, went to work for a hedge fund as the sort of Russian contact. So, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the businesses started to appear, we were very, you know, I mean, the first McDonald’s was a quick walk from our office to Moscow on the…what was the street called?
Daniel Satinsky: Tverskaya.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And, you know, and the shawarma stands and stuff. And Dave Kelley, our third director, Dave Kelley started a business when the…he started a t-shirt printing business when the duty-free shops were still in existence and so forth. And he and Scott European, that company Scott European, and what was the guy’s name? Anyways, Kelley lost probably $100,000 in this. But he thought he could hire a manager and manage this business from Vermont, from the States.
And I was with him on one occasion when he went to Moscow to check in on the business, and we walked into the office that we were renting, and the manager—and he had two or three employees—had bought a secondhand Volvo and gone to Vienna or somewhere like that. They bought all the sneakers and Austrian beer that they could fit in this car, and they brought it back and they put it in the bedroom of this office, okay? So, when we came to check on this t-shirt printing business, which unfortunately was a cash business, Dave happened to sort of open the door to this bedroom, and I happened to be there at the time, and he just said what the hell is this? And we’re getting into selling sneakers and beer, you know. Kelley had this temper, and I remember him slamming the glass coffee table in this office and smashing this thing to smithereens. And telling these guys to just get the hell out, you know. And I said Dave. He says Charlie, you can’t trust anybody. I said Dave, you can’t manage a cash business from the States if you think everyone’s going to hand over all the money when they’re going to these duty-free shops and collecting your t-shirt money.
And one of his ways of trying to—when he hired people this is what he did. He would interview someone in the kitchen of this office apartment, and he would put a package of cigarettes on the table open. And everybody at the time smoked and so forth. And then he would excuse himself to go to the bathroom. He says just a minute, I’ll be right back. And when he came back, if they’d stolen some cigarettes out of his cigarettes, he knew that they weren’t going to be a good employee. And I said Dave, so how long did—he said everybody stole them. He said I had to give up that system of truthfulness.
And somehow, in those days there was no banking system, so when I went to the Soviet Union I would carry anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand dollars in cash in my pants or inside my pocket lining or somewhere in my coat. And when Dave wanted to send money back to the States, he would tell me so Charlie, go into the bedroom and look under the mattress and see if you can find something. He wouldn’t tell me. He said whatever you find just take it back with you. And I’d go in, and I’d look under the mattress, and somehow, he’d converted cash to traveler’s checks. In those days Stockmann from Helsinki had opened some stores, and Stockmann was the place to buy Ben & Jerry’s and buy food.
Anyways, carrying money to the Soviet Union was like… And we wouldn’t ask any of our female staff to do it, but we would ask a lot of our male staff to stuff their coats with money. And of course, there were no X-ray machines or anything at that time. And often—I remember our Ukrainian staff going from Russia to Ukraine. I would say Anya, what are you doing? And she said well, I need an old newspaper here. And I said why? She says, well, just don’t ask me what I’m doing. And she would put rubles or dollars in this newspaper and slide it to some customs official, and they let us through the gates, and oh, my god, you know.
The customs, when we went with performing groups, you know, we took performing groups. We took a rock band there. And we took all the amplifiers and currency converters. We had these trunks. We made three or four of these big rolling trunks of stuff. And when we got to the airports they got put into baggage, and we had to go and claim them. And to claim them, what was it, the tamozhenniki*. They wanted something in return before they’d release them. And so, whenever I did that, I would always pack some baseball hats and some stuff in with the musical equipment, and I’d unlock these chests, and I’d just start handing it out.
Daniel Satinsky: Handing out stuff, yeah.
Charles Hosford: And usually they were women, and they’d say fine, but if they were men, they’d say no-no, we want more than that. And I’d say well, you’re not getting any of this equipment. I mean, we need this. One summer we took a performing group from a big performing high school in Tennessee, was it? And we were doing a Broadway musical, part of a Broadway musical. I can’t even remember. And we had to hire basically a big bus. We were going into the golden circle there from Nizhny Novgorod to oh, I forget the various things. But it got so, you know, we had to bribe so many people. And I began riding in the dump truck that was carrying the scenery because the dump truck drivers were selling off the scenery for this play we were putting on. Russian culture is…I mean, stealing was just a way of life. And they didn’t call it stealing, they called it sort of appropriating goods for their personal dacha use.
But in amongst all this Paul Richardson, which—you know who is—
Daniel Satinsky: I knew him at one point. I wrote some articles for his publication back in the day.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, that’s right. He represented initially Alpha Graphics. Alpha Graphics was, I think, a Canadian firm, or at least it started over there. But Paul Richardson, Dave Kelley and myself, and three Russians set up a business called Businesses for Russia. And this is just after, I think, the breakup. And you remember the commercial center in Moscow, the Mezh, I think it was called? The Mezh*?
Daniel Satinsky: The Mezh, sure. The Hammer Center.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. Well, somehow these three Russians, I don’t know who got a hold of them, we just…a company called Beryoshka, I think it was called, it was Bridge Street Associates. And these three Russian guys somehow had access to all these apartments. They knew the owners and so forth. So, we began leasing, became a company that was leasing apartments to incoming businesses. You know, there were people coming in, and these Russian guys eventually came over to Vermont and we gave them the basement of our office, and we renovated it, or they renovated it. And we kept this rental business going not too long. And then they wanted to establish a flower business.
Daniel Satinsky: Flowers as in plants?
Charles Hosford: Delivering flowers on Russian holidays. American Russians. Russian immigrants to America sending flowers to the Soviet Union, and wanting flowers to be delivered to their—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, oh, okay.
Charles Hosford: Opening a school day, you know, all these. And these three Russian guys, I mean, they were endless with ideas, and we just said well, yeah, sure. I mean, we were making money. It was split six or eight ways. But that didn’t last too long because the people leasing these apartments decided that they could lease them directly and all this stuff.
But it was just a completely wild time. And Paul Richardson, and Alpha Graphics, and David Kelley and his t-shirt business. Every time he mentions that he says Charlie, remember I lost $100,000, you don’t want to laugh at me. And he gave all the equipment to an American guy who had married a Russian woman and wanted to stay there, and I forget how it all transpired. But…
Daniel Satinsky: He literally lost $100,000?
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And he had convinced Bob Krattli, who was head of the business called Scott European. So, they were sending medical equipment to some parts of Russia, and somehow it was being paid for by coal, and Krattli somehow could sell somewhere in Europe. I forget exactly how this all worked. But if you look it up in early businesses, Scott European and Bob Krattli is right in there.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s interesting to me that a number of people who were involved in citizen diplomacy then in the early days after the breakup of the Soviet Union got involved in businesses. And my sense of that is that Russians like to do business with people they know, so who did they know? They knew the citizen diplomat people, and so, you know, that was a pattern, I guess. I’ve seen that.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, you know, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the business scene, although it was exploding around us. I mean, some of our staff got sort of hired off into—in fact one of them, Sam Vanderlip, works for…is married to a woman who works in the Dutch embassy in Moscow, and he’s been there for years, and he works for a consulting group there in Moscow. And Paul Hingejaw. I don’t know if you ever encountered him. He was the representative from the American Chamber of Commerce who spent quite a few years after working for us and working for the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow.
Kelley and Richardson wrote the business survival guide for Moscow. Paul Richardson did all these upgrades to these maps of all these Soviet cities, Russian cities, and hired some people to go out and redraw the proper roads and geographic features and so forth. But I stayed pretty much in the nonprofit sector. Some of our staff got hired off by the Eurasia Foundation. Some were working for the Soros foundation. Soros became a pretty big player in Russia.
But as we migrated to Ukraine, and to the Baltics, and especially to the Caucasus and so forth, there was no lack of work in the nonprofit sector. And we became a really trusted partner in the embassies because we somehow survived different generations of those embassies and became familiar with the various departments, the PAS, the public…I forget what all the different parts of those embassies are. And in some cases became, like with Paul Smith, and he sends me messages, and since his wife’s Ukrainian, he sends me a lot more messages these days. And right now, just today—just today—I mean, I have a friend in Petrozavodsk. He’s marching with a group of—he’s 22 years old—he’s marching with a group of friends to the Finnish border, and he says, you know, we’re out of here. We’re out of here.
We have a Ukrainian staff member who got to Poland with his wife and two young sons, and we figured out a way to send him money that he’s distributing to the Ukrainians that are sort of flooding into Poland. We wired him $2,800 today to… And people are just like where can I send you money, and how can we get it there with some assurance that it’ll land in the proper places. And my travels in, you know, we used to have an office in Baku—Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. And there is a triumvirate that we were, you know, Yerevan or Armenia and Azerbaijan don’t see eye-to-eye, and we were like trying to balance programs and mix students from three countries and having these horrendous discussions.
And the teachers from Abkhazia, the province in Georgia that is sort of partially occupied by Russia, when we were there a couple of years ago, the Russians nearly took over Georgia in 2008. And the world never hardly knew about it. So, they’re cheering for Ukraine right now big time. And there’s so many moving parts to working in that part of the world that I can’t always separate, in my own mind, between Karelia and Tbilisi. And having lived a year in Finland, and Finland and Karelia used to be one place, so their folklore, and their music, and their language, there’s a whole bit of Karelian language in Petrozavodsk, and schools that specialize in that.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, you’ve had an amazing experience, and life, and achievements, starting from the three of you getting together to try to do something. I mean, it’s quite a story.
Charles Hosford: You know, Olin Robison’s suggestion that it might be a marathon rather than a sprint if we wanted to work in that part of the world, it’s turned into an ultra-marathon, where you’re running not 26 miles, but 126 miles.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And there’s no end in sight.
Charles Hosford: And you’re running at night, and with a little headlamp on, and that headlamp doesn’t shed much light on the whole situation. And I have people, friends who don’t know a lot about that part of the world say Charlie, just yesterday I just felt, when Putin suggested nuclear weapons were on the table, my life just flashed before me.
And so, in 1985, when the Cold War was child’s play, and the sort of consolidation of our diplomatic efforts frankly were spectacular, when Reagan and Gorbachev sort of decided that the jig was up and we should probably be doing things in a different way. And of course, Gorbachev didn’t make it more than about six years. And there was Yeltsin, who thought he wasn’t doing enough. And so, I think back to the times I wind up in Red Square at Lenin’s tomb with school groups. And those Soviet army guards, if you put your hands in your pocket, or you had to check your pocketbooks, you couldn’t carry anything in those lines. And you got in there and walked by this embalmed creature, and you couldn’t speak. I don’t know if you’ve ever—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I went through there, yeah. I did it.
Charles Hosford: And then John Reed’s name is on the wall behind there. I mean, it’s… And so, I don’t know, you know, looking back on it all is…it’s really hard to give a current status of things. It’s really hard to sort of…geez, you know, that was a great run, and it was a great culture to be involved with, and… I mean, I’ve met so many people that are Russian. I mean, we were hosting a group from Minsk about three years ago. They were sleeping in my house. We had a program there. But when we took our first group there in 1985 the Soviet soldiers were tearing the cameras out of our students’ hands. and ripping the film out of the cameras and giving the cameras back to our kids and saying, no pictures.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no pictures.
Charles Hosford: Yet when we went to the Pioneer Palace in Minsk and performed, and their groups performed, and the parents were yelling and screaming, and we were having these parties after the performance, the world was like, you know, it was… And so, there’s a part of me that’s just emotionally a wreck at this particular moment.
Charles Hosford: What were they called, Beryozka?
Daniel Satinsky: Beryozka.
Charles Hosford: The black market. We told the kids do not be exchanging rubles on the black market. The black-market exchanges, all the things that could come backwards from their host family. No shaking hands—
Daniel Satinsky: The rabbit hats, right?
Charles Hosford: —no shaking hands over the threshold. No whistling inside the house. It means you’re going to lose all your money. No going outside with wet hair. The American teenagers would just, you know. And the Russian mothers were making them stick their heads in the oven to dry their hair, okay?
And the kids would go out on the street, and if the kids had a jacket or something, or a long coat that the hem was showing, the women on the street would just come up to them and tap them and say fix your coat.
And if the kids would walk around with their shoes untied the women would tap them and say tie your shoes. The difference between public spaces and private spaces, apartments and the corridors right outside apartments was just like… And the kids would go up into these apartment buildings with trash chutes and people peeing next to the elevators, and they’d walk into these apartments, they were like slippers, shoes off, rugs on the wall, everything clean.
And the standing in lines. The kids would say, well, what’s everybody standing in line for? What’s that all about? And they said well, they’re standing in line for cheese, and shoes. The etiquette on trains. We took a lot of train trips. And these coupes, you know. I’m sure you, you know. And the etiquette that sort of exists around the bathrooms, and no flushing the toilets in the stations, and the toilets that just dump out onto the railroad tracks.
Daniel Satinsky: I’m familiar with that, yeah.
Charles Hosford: And then when the kids encountered—and even I—I think it was Georgia in one of the first apartments we see this porch with a Stalin over the piano. And the kids, some of the kids were asking who’s that? And the host would say, well, that’s Stalin. And as an adult I was pretty familiar that Stalin was not a hero in my vocabulary, but here he is still hanging on the wall of these apartments. So, this sort of dichotomy of is Stalin a despot or a hero?
And then encountering the whole sort of banya* dacha* sort of thing, especially in Karelia. The kids were then taken to these banyas and these little dachas, and this was like sacred territory for most Russians. And then the police banyas, and the railroad worker banyas, and oh my god, you know. I mean, these things were like… I’m just looking… Every school had a museum on the great patriotic war. Remnants, you know. Helmets with bullet holes, and pieces of shrapnel, and foreign flags. And you got a tour of those museums whether you wanted it or not. And those tours were not short tours. And every…they were everywhere. Everywhere. And so, there was… And I remember looking up at some of these balconies on these sorts of Stalin-type apartments and seeing people bathing in ice cold water. And the babies.
You know, we went into this one hospital and these newborn babies were wrapped in swaddling and stacked on a gurney like cordwood, just stacked up in a pyramid with of course their heads and their little feet covered up, and they were being doled out to the mothers as packages. I mean, just on and on these images that were so foreign to the kids and to us. But we saw them mostly as, you know, just sort of like… Well, like in Leningrad there’s the Museum of Curiosities. You’ve been?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Charles Hosford: But, you know, so there was just… And then Russian life is just embedded with music and dance. And these major plazas of—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Volgograd and the Mamayev Kurgan statue that’s cut, I don’t know, it’s like ten stories high, you know, and—
Daniel Satinsky: I’ve seen pictures of it. I’ve not been there.
Charles Hosford: You know, the pool of tears and, you know, where the mothers of, you know, and the scenes of the battle of Volgograd, or south Stalingrad. And then there’s… And after a few years, and after different programs, you discover part of the underbelly of Russian culture. And some of that, of course, underbelly became obvious to me and to our staff as adults because of the domestic violence issue.
We had a whole series of law enforcement programs that focused on prisons. We were taking from Massachusetts Gardner medium security, Sterling, the highest of maximum-security prisoners you know, Cook County prison. And we would be visiting prisons, female prisons, male prisons across Russia and Ukraine, and seeing the tattooed knuckles of prisoners, and the work programs.
And when we got into the disabled children’s program in Karelia, we encountered women who hadn’t seen basically the light of day for 20 years, where disabled children that they were carrying around on their backs and had never been asked to come to a meeting where there might be some services of some kind offered. And we established a group of taxi drivers in Petrozavodsk who agreed to transport women and their disabled children to the arena, to the market. In order to get there prior to that they had to carry them onto a tram on their backs. And people just shunned them kind of thing.
And then there were orphanages that we began working with. I mean, oh my god. I mean, it was like another sort of part of the underbelly of… You know, adoption and fostering kids is not a part of Russian culture. And these orphanages where 18-year-olds were taking care of two-year-olds, and those 18-year-olds had been there most of their lives.
And then we got into the gulags. We established an office in Tomsk and Irkutsk, and out into Ulan-Ude, out into that area. And we took a group of performing teenagers up the Ob River one summer, and I can’t even begin to tell you the villages that we encountered on that trip. The Ob freezes over, so they’re not accessible a lot of the year. Just the old believer villages. Some of the villages were totally Polish, or I think one of them was... Actually, Stalin had exiled these groups of people to these Siberian places, and we began…we were performing. We were going to go to these villages, and the ship, this boat we were on, we’d just sort of run it into the sandbar and get off. And we had fiddle players and clogging kids, and we taught clogging that we taught clogging to and so forth. And we encountered one village where the Ob had opened up a mass grave. A mass grave where there were like a thousand bodies in this grave.
And they’d begun to…they were frozen, and they had begun to sort of float down the Ob and so forth. And so, after that trip, I mean, that trip was like…that was like going back a hundred years or 200 years into Soviet life. I mean, the Old Believer villages that we encountered were…they were frozen in time.
Daniel Satinsky: Was this in the early ‘90s as well?
Charles Hosford: Yeah, this was…gosh, again, I’m not good on the dates, but I can… But the follow-up to that was that my son actually, my son, in his senior year in college, was looking for a thesis project, and in some of our first trips to Karelia we encountered some of the remnants of the migration of American Finns and Canadian Finns to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
I don’t know if you remember that whole piece of history. But there were about 10,000, 10 to 15,000 that were recruited by Russian recruiters that came over to the work halls of America, particularly to the Finnish settlements in upper Michigan and different places and recruited people with skills—carpenters, electricians, miners, and so forth. And we encountered a couple in Petrozavodsk in probably 1989, a couple named Elmer and…Miriam and Elmer Nousiainen, a Finnish name. And their parents had been convinced to migrate back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. And Elmer was, I think, 14 at the time. Miriam’s family was also recruited, and I think she was 12 or something.
And it turns out Elmer had to give up his American passport, you know, when…so forth. And when he was 24 or something he went to the American embassy in Moscow to retrieve his American passport and was arrested there. He spent 16 years in the gulag—16 years in the gulag. And Miriam during those years was running with her mother from all over the northern Karelia and the White Sea area and Arkhangelsk. But they decided he would…
Because when we went to Petrozavodsk and they found out we were Americans, and their families had migrated from America, they contacted us and said—because they actually spoke English—and said could you, you know, we’d like to talk with you. And Miriam could bake a pretty good apple pie at the time. [Laughs.] So, my son became attached to this couple and wrote his thesis on this migration and Elmer’s stories of his 16 years in the gulag.
And beyond that, so they began recruiting kids for summer trips to explore gulag survivors and record their stories. And went out to the area in Irkutsk and Tomsk, in that area where these villages were established and so forth and began recording stories of some of these fairly elderly women, actually. They were the ones that survived and spent a lot of their lives running through the woods to do it. And had a group of teenage students from—he became, after his graduation from Stanford and Harvard ed school, became a teacher Lincoln Sudbury High School.
And he’d take students with him, videographers and recorders and so forth, and begin collecting these stories. So, another piece of the underbelly of Russian culture that we began becoming familiar with was this whole, the gulag. And of course, Solzhenitsyn was a resident just south of us here for many years. In Chester, Vermont. And also, Elka Schumann. Elka Schumann was the daughter of John Scott. John Scott wrote a book called “Beyond the Urals,” his experience in the 1930s living in Magnitogorsk, the iron, steel mills of the times. And Elka Schumann became a legend here in Vermont as the wife of Peter Schumann, who formed the Bread & Puppet Theater, which is—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, right. I remember them, yeah.
Charles Hosford: So, we began a very close relationship with Elka Schumann because she had relatives and Latvia, and we would help her go visit them and so forth. And the stories of her childhood as the daughter of John Scott, you know, who wrote that book, which is—I don’t know if you ever read that thing.
Daniel Satinsky: I have not read that book. I think I’ve heard of it, but I have not read it, no.
Charles Hosford: Anyways, so there was this growing, you know, our initial sort of euphoria and sort of look at Soviet culture and Soviet society from these classical direct school exchanges, these special focus programs in ecology and folk music, and God, we paired up with a group of folk singers from Tomsk, and it was amazing. And then we began to discover the part of Russian society that was a little bit the underbelly. And almost every encounter, whether it was the coat women at the Hermitage Museum, who would, through our translators, they would tell us about after the war there weren’t any men left. These women in these little cafeterias where we could get a glass of juice, and you’d hand the glass back to the woman, and she’d put it in the cold water, and hand it to the next person. They would start telling us these stories about, I don’t know, the kids would ask why are all the women, why are all the dentists women. And these women would just look at them and say, you know, it was like ten to one after the war. There was nobody left, no men left for these professions. And these women, I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered them in the parks with these brooms made out of twigs.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, sure.
Charles Hosford: You know, just these legions of women just cleaning with equipment made from saplings and bundles of twigs. And our kids would look, and they’d just say what are they doing? How can they sweep with those twigs? So anyways, just this…when you ask about… I mean, in the final—I don’t know if it’s the final analysis, but do you think we did any good there or do you think we made any headway in open society.
We became very involved with the Soros foundation. In recent years we had some big grants from Microsoft, from Intel. We established about 300 internet classrooms across Russia. We had a grant called the Internet Access & Training Programs. We would go into libraries and universities and renovate a room, put probably 12 computers, training journalists, basically, how to operate these computers, how to access the internet, how to build. And then when Intel came to us and said can you take groups of teachers and do the same, teach them how to build curriculums based on real information and so forth. We began working with…and Microsoft gave us money to work with the blind and deaf communities in Russia. So, we had programs from Vladivostok, to Oryol, to Tyumen, to Yakutsk.
And our life took us to, for instance in Armenia. We built internet classrooms in 150 secondary schools. We built two mobile vehicles that had three workstations, a satellite dish, and we would go to these remote villages and set up for two weeks at a time and access the internet off of a satellite. We got access to the U.S. Army, or somebody gave us access to these things. And of course, we got embedded in Armenian culture, which, if you’ve been to Watertown or other places, you’ll know that some Armenian food is quite good.
And then, you know, our presence in Moscow, for instance. I can’t tell you how many ambassadors and three-year foreign service crews we’ve outlived. And one of the people I’d like to put you onto is this Paul Smith, who, in our early days, was the general counsel in St. Petersburg and went on to be the DCM in Moscow. And Paul Smith, along with Senator Leahy, we were squiring these people around Karelia and different places, showing them programs and so forth. So, we became very embedded in the embassies, and St. Pete was a consulate. And in fact, for years, we’ve run the American Corners program out of the Moscow embassy, which is the American culture program that deals with Muskie fellowships and brings in all kinds of professors and lecturers to Russia. And because we were a constant there, and as the ambassadors and staff at the embassy changed every three years, and they’d just say go talk to Project Harmony if you want to find out what’s happening, and just keep getting—
Daniel Satinsky: How big was your office there?
Charles Hosford: Oh, God. When we…probably at its height it was maybe 25 people. And we had a retreat in Tbilisi two years ago and probably had, I don’t know, two-thirds of our staff there, and we had 50 people there from all our offices. But Moscow was…you know, I mean, we had, when Yeltsin was jumping on the tanks and this stuff our office there was run by this guy Paul Podolsky, and Paul, a former bicycle courier from Washington, D.C., decided he would do the same in Moscow. So, when things were just going crazy there, he was riding his bike like… He used to try…he says I can’t tell you how many times I should have been killed in that city. And during Yeltsin’s crazy time, and the confrontations and tanks and stuff, he was there.
And he’s another person who got involved in, when he came back to the States—well, he married a woman from Siberia, I forget, from Sverdlovsk or Novo…or somewhere, went to work for a hedge fund as the sort of Russian contact. So, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the businesses started to appear, we were very, you know, I mean, the first McDonald’s was a quick walk from our office to Moscow on the…what was the street called?
Daniel Satinsky: Tverskaya.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And, you know, and the shawarma stands and stuff. And Dave Kelley, our third director, Dave Kelley started a business when the…he started a t-shirt printing business when the duty-free shops were still in existence and so forth. And he and Scott European, that company Scott European, and what was the guy’s name? Anyways, Kelley lost probably $100,000 in this. But he thought he could hire a manager and manage this business from Vermont, from the States.
And I was with him on one occasion when he went to Moscow to check in on the business, and we walked into the office that we were renting, and the manager—and he had two or three employees—had bought a secondhand Volvo and gone to Vienna or somewhere like that. They bought all the sneakers and Austrian beer that they could fit in this car, and they brought it back and they put it in the bedroom of this office, okay? So, when we came to check on this t-shirt printing business, which unfortunately was a cash business, Dave happened to sort of open the door to this bedroom, and I happened to be there at the time, and he just said what the hell is this? And we’re getting into selling sneakers and beer, you know. Kelley had this temper, and I remember him slamming the glass coffee table in this office and smashing this thing to smithereens. And telling these guys to just get the hell out, you know. And I said Dave. He says Charlie, you can’t trust anybody. I said Dave, you can’t manage a cash business from the States if you think everyone’s going to hand over all the money when they’re going to these duty-free shops and collecting your t-shirt money.
And one of his ways of trying to—when he hired people this is what he did. He would interview someone in the kitchen of this office apartment, and he would put a package of cigarettes on the table open. And everybody at the time smoked and so forth. And then he would excuse himself to go to the bathroom. He says just a minute, I’ll be right back. And when he came back, if they’d stolen some cigarettes out of his cigarettes, he knew that they weren’t going to be a good employee. And I said Dave, so how long did—he said everybody stole them. He said I had to give up that system of truthfulness.
And somehow, in those days there was no banking system, so when I went to the Soviet Union I would carry anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand dollars in cash in my pants or inside my pocket lining or somewhere in my coat. And when Dave wanted to send money back to the States, he would tell me so Charlie, go into the bedroom and look under the mattress and see if you can find something. He wouldn’t tell me. He said whatever you find just take it back with you. And I’d go in, and I’d look under the mattress, and somehow, he’d converted cash to traveler’s checks. In those days Stockmann from Helsinki had opened some stores, and Stockmann was the place to buy Ben & Jerry’s and buy food.
Anyways, carrying money to the Soviet Union was like… And we wouldn’t ask any of our female staff to do it, but we would ask a lot of our male staff to stuff their coats with money. And of course, there were no X-ray machines or anything at that time. And often—I remember our Ukrainian staff going from Russia to Ukraine. I would say Anya, what are you doing? And she said well, I need an old newspaper here. And I said why? She says, well, just don’t ask me what I’m doing. And she would put rubles or dollars in this newspaper and slide it to some customs official, and they let us through the gates, and oh, my god, you know.
The customs, when we went with performing groups, you know, we took performing groups. We took a rock band there. And we took all the amplifiers and currency converters. We had these trunks. We made three or four of these big rolling trunks of stuff. And when we got to the airports they got put into baggage, and we had to go and claim them. And to claim them, what was it, the tamozhenniki*. They wanted something in return before they’d release them. And so, whenever I did that, I would always pack some baseball hats and some stuff in with the musical equipment, and I’d unlock these chests, and I’d just start handing it out.
Daniel Satinsky: Handing out stuff, yeah.
Charles Hosford: And usually they were women, and they’d say fine, but if they were men, they’d say no-no, we want more than that. And I’d say well, you’re not getting any of this equipment. I mean, we need this. One summer we took a performing group from a big performing high school in Tennessee, was it? And we were doing a Broadway musical, part of a Broadway musical. I can’t even remember. And we had to hire basically a big bus. We were going into the golden circle there from Nizhny Novgorod to oh, I forget the various things. But it got so, you know, we had to bribe so many people. And I began riding in the dump truck that was carrying the scenery because the dump truck drivers were selling off the scenery for this play we were putting on. Russian culture is…I mean, stealing was just a way of life. And they didn’t call it stealing, they called it sort of appropriating goods for their personal dacha use.
But in amongst all this Paul Richardson, which—you know who is—
Daniel Satinsky: I knew him at one point. I wrote some articles for his publication back in the day.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, that’s right. He represented initially Alpha Graphics. Alpha Graphics was, I think, a Canadian firm, or at least it started over there. But Paul Richardson, Dave Kelley and myself, and three Russians set up a business called Businesses for Russia. And this is just after, I think, the breakup. And you remember the commercial center in Moscow, the Mezh, I think it was called? The Mezh*?
Daniel Satinsky: The Mezh, sure. The Hammer Center.
Charles Hosford: Yeah. Well, somehow these three Russians, I don’t know who got a hold of them, we just…a company called Beryoshka, I think it was called, it was Bridge Street Associates. And these three Russian guys somehow had access to all these apartments. They knew the owners and so forth. So, we began leasing, became a company that was leasing apartments to incoming businesses. You know, there were people coming in, and these Russian guys eventually came over to Vermont and we gave them the basement of our office, and we renovated it, or they renovated it. And we kept this rental business going not too long. And then they wanted to establish a flower business.
Daniel Satinsky: Flowers as in plants?
Charles Hosford: Delivering flowers on Russian holidays. American Russians. Russian immigrants to America sending flowers to the Soviet Union, and wanting flowers to be delivered to their—
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, oh, okay.
Charles Hosford: Opening a school day, you know, all these. And these three Russian guys, I mean, they were endless with ideas, and we just said well, yeah, sure. I mean, we were making money. It was split six or eight ways. But that didn’t last too long because the people leasing these apartments decided that they could lease them directly and all this stuff.
But it was just a completely wild time. And Paul Richardson, and Alpha Graphics, and David Kelley and his t-shirt business. Every time he mentions that he says Charlie, remember I lost $100,000, you don’t want to laugh at me. And he gave all the equipment to an American guy who had married a Russian woman and wanted to stay there, and I forget how it all transpired. But…
Daniel Satinsky: He literally lost $100,000?
Charles Hosford: Yeah. And he had convinced Bob Krattli, who was head of the business called Scott European. So, they were sending medical equipment to some parts of Russia, and somehow it was being paid for by coal, and Krattli somehow could sell somewhere in Europe. I forget exactly how this all worked. But if you look it up in early businesses, Scott European and Bob Krattli is right in there.
Daniel Satinsky: It’s interesting to me that a number of people who were involved in citizen diplomacy then in the early days after the breakup of the Soviet Union got involved in businesses. And my sense of that is that Russians like to do business with people they know, so who did they know? They knew the citizen diplomat people, and so, you know, that was a pattern, I guess. I’ve seen that.
Charles Hosford: Yeah, you know, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the business scene, although it was exploding around us. I mean, some of our staff got sort of hired off into—in fact one of them, Sam Vanderlip, works for…is married to a woman who works in the Dutch embassy in Moscow, and he’s been there for years, and he works for a consulting group there in Moscow. And Paul Hingejaw. I don’t know if you ever encountered him. He was the representative from the American Chamber of Commerce who spent quite a few years after working for us and working for the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow.
Kelley and Richardson wrote the business survival guide for Moscow. Paul Richardson did all these upgrades to these maps of all these Soviet cities, Russian cities, and hired some people to go out and redraw the proper roads and geographic features and so forth. But I stayed pretty much in the nonprofit sector. Some of our staff got hired off by the Eurasia Foundation. Some were working for the Soros foundation. Soros became a pretty big player in Russia.
But as we migrated to Ukraine, and to the Baltics, and especially to the Caucasus and so forth, there was no lack of work in the nonprofit sector. And we became a really trusted partner in the embassies because we somehow survived different generations of those embassies and became familiar with the various departments, the PAS, the public…I forget what all the different parts of those embassies are. And in some cases became, like with Paul Smith, and he sends me messages, and since his wife’s Ukrainian, he sends me a lot more messages these days. And right now, just today—just today—I mean, I have a friend in Petrozavodsk. He’s marching with a group of—he’s 22 years old—he’s marching with a group of friends to the Finnish border, and he says, you know, we’re out of here. We’re out of here.
We have a Ukrainian staff member who got to Poland with his wife and two young sons, and we figured out a way to send him money that he’s distributing to the Ukrainians that are sort of flooding into Poland. We wired him $2,800 today to… And people are just like where can I send you money, and how can we get it there with some assurance that it’ll land in the proper places. And my travels in, you know, we used to have an office in Baku—Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. And there is a triumvirate that we were, you know, Yerevan or Armenia and Azerbaijan don’t see eye-to-eye, and we were like trying to balance programs and mix students from three countries and having these horrendous discussions.
And the teachers from Abkhazia, the province in Georgia that is sort of partially occupied by Russia, when we were there a couple of years ago, the Russians nearly took over Georgia in 2008. And the world never hardly knew about it. So, they’re cheering for Ukraine right now big time. And there’s so many moving parts to working in that part of the world that I can’t always separate, in my own mind, between Karelia and Tbilisi. And having lived a year in Finland, and Finland and Karelia used to be one place, so their folklore, and their music, and their language, there’s a whole bit of Karelian language in Petrozavodsk, and schools that specialize in that.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, you’ve had an amazing experience, and life, and achievements, starting from the three of you getting together to try to do something. I mean, it’s quite a story.
Charles Hosford: You know, Olin Robison’s suggestion that it might be a marathon rather than a sprint if we wanted to work in that part of the world, it’s turned into an ultra-marathon, where you’re running not 26 miles, but 126 miles.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And there’s no end in sight.
Charles Hosford: And you’re running at night, and with a little headlamp on, and that headlamp doesn’t shed much light on the whole situation. And I have people, friends who don’t know a lot about that part of the world say Charlie, just yesterday I just felt, when Putin suggested nuclear weapons were on the table, my life just flashed before me.
And so, in 1985, when the Cold War was child’s play, and the sort of consolidation of our diplomatic efforts frankly were spectacular, when Reagan and Gorbachev sort of decided that the jig was up and we should probably be doing things in a different way. And of course, Gorbachev didn’t make it more than about six years. And there was Yeltsin, who thought he wasn’t doing enough. And so, I think back to the times I wind up in Red Square at Lenin’s tomb with school groups. And those Soviet army guards, if you put your hands in your pocket, or you had to check your pocketbooks, you couldn’t carry anything in those lines. And you got in there and walked by this embalmed creature, and you couldn’t speak. I don’t know if you’ve ever—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I went through there, yeah. I did it.
Charles Hosford: And then John Reed’s name is on the wall behind there. I mean, it’s… And so, I don’t know, you know, looking back on it all is…it’s really hard to give a current status of things. It’s really hard to sort of…geez, you know, that was a great run, and it was a great culture to be involved with, and… I mean, I’ve met so many people that are Russian. I mean, we were hosting a group from Minsk about three years ago. They were sleeping in my house. We had a program there. But when we took our first group there in 1985 the Soviet soldiers were tearing the cameras out of our students’ hands. and ripping the film out of the cameras and giving the cameras back to our kids and saying, no pictures.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no pictures.
Charles Hosford: Yet when we went to the Pioneer Palace in Minsk and performed, and their groups performed, and the parents were yelling and screaming, and we were having these parties after the performance, the world was like, you know, it was… And so, there’s a part of me that’s just emotionally a wreck at this particular moment.
Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Ministry of Internal Affairs
kind of sauna, traditional Russian steam bath
summer house
Mezhdunarodnaya, International center
Customs officers
