About
About
David Hoffman is an American author, political commentator, television project director and media activist.
Hoffman is Founder and President Emeritus of Internews, a global non-profit organization that fosters independent media and access to information worldwide. Internews was founded by Hoffman in 1982 with partners Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger. Hoffman led Internews for its first 30 years.
Building on the groundbreaking US-Soviet spacebridges developed by Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger, Hoffman organized a series of seven satellite television exchanges between leaders of the US Congress and their counterparts on the Supreme Soviet. Produced in association with ABC News and Gosteleradio, the Capital-to-Capital live broadcasts lasted from 1987 to 1990 with each program reaching audiences of 200 million people. Hoffman and the members of Congress who helped organize the series were recognized with an Emmy Award. The programs were moderated by Peter Jennings and Leonid Zolotarevsky.
He is also the Chairman Emeritus of the Global Forum for Media Development, a cross-sector initiative of more than 200 leading media assistance organizations from 70 countries that he spearheaded.
Hoffman is Founder and President Emeritus of Internews, a global non-profit organization that fosters independent media and access to information worldwide. Internews was founded by Hoffman in 1982 with partners Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger. Hoffman led Internews for its first 30 years.
Building on the groundbreaking US-Soviet spacebridges developed by Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger, Hoffman organized a series of seven satellite television exchanges between leaders of the US Congress and their counterparts on the Supreme Soviet. Produced in association with ABC News and Gosteleradio, the Capital-to-Capital live broadcasts lasted from 1987 to 1990 with each program reaching audiences of 200 million people. Hoffman and the members of Congress who helped organize the series were recognized with an Emmy Award. The programs were moderated by Peter Jennings and Leonid Zolotarevsky.
He is also the Chairman Emeritus of the Global Forum for Media Development, a cross-sector initiative of more than 200 leading media assistance organizations from 70 countries that he spearheaded.
David Hoffman: Where do we start?
Daniel Satinsky: When did you first become involved with or interested in Russia, and why?
David Hoffman: Well, let’s see. I mean, I had been a director in the peace movement for a while. There was something called Survive the Summer, which was a coalition of all the peace and environmental groups in 19—winter of ’79 it started, 1980, and then the peace movement just took off, as you know.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, yeah.
David Hoffman: So, in 1980 I was working…I was trying to put that together. Very frustrated by the political games being played to control that movement by kind of the old established peace groups like the American Friends Service Committee, who were more Stalinist than Stalin.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.]
David Hoffman: I mean, look, the story is interesting. I was growing pot at the time up in northern California, had gone to Europe in the spring of ’79, which is when the European nuclear disarmament movement exploded. Huge demonstrations in Berlin, in Frankfurt, and London, and nothing was happening in the United States. There was an anti-nuclear energy movement, which I was never a part of, and there was kind of a taboo—you weren’t allowed to talk about nuclear war stuff. There was kind of an unspoken taboo in the energy movement that we’re just on energy. You may know this stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh, right.
David Hoffman: But by then, you know, with what was happening, after the Soviets installed SS-24 nuclear-armed missiles into the border with West Germany, NATO countered with pershing and Cruise missiles up to the east German border.And the headlines in the papers in Europe when I was there in the spring of ’79 was we’re on the verge of World War III because of these missiles being moved in, and all the rhetoric, and Ronald Reagan and all that.
I came back and wrote a little two-page paper calling for something like Vietnam Summer or Mississippi Freedom Summer. I was calling for a summer campaign against the war. And so, I was…I mean, I was barefoot, living without electricity, growing pot, and all of a sudden, I became national director of the peace movement. It’s kind of ridiculous. And so, I called a meeting [in DC] of all these organizations that participated in this new coalition of 140 national organizations. .But right before I went there, I walked by a television set and I saw George Wald, the Nobel prize-winning chemist at MIT who was speaking at a televised rally of the 3-miole Island rally against nuclear energy.
Daniel Satinsky: George Wald was there, and Chomsky.
David Hoffman: Chomsky.
Daniel Satinsky: Chomsky. Noam Chomsky.
David Hoffman: Yeah. Well, anyway, I saw Wald, who had stayed at my house when he was in Boulder… I knew this guy pretty well, and he was at an antiwar rally \speaking on PBS, which was crazy. I mean, we never, at that time there were no anti-establishment things that were happening on American television. And here was live coverage of a demonstration, 200,000 people, after Three Mile Island, and Ralph Nader had organized it in Washington. I was blown away by it. And then came Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and all these other people. And I went how did this get done? So, I looked up the guy who did it. It was Kim Spencer. More important than me, I would say. He’s the inventor of space bridges.
Anyway, I looked him up because I wanted to find out how he pulled that off. It’s an amazing story, actually, and I won’t bore you with it now. But I quickly decided we could get more done on the war issue with Russia working in a small group with television than I could get done in the peace movement as it was.
And actually, that’s a phenomenon that I think is fascinating. I think I’ve written about this once before, but it’s worth looking into. It was small groups of people who just took it on their own to organize. It was very decentralized. Like the Nuclear Freeze campaign. The little old lady in western Massachusetts who went around and started the nuclear freeze. Remember the nuclear freeze?
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: There were a lot of things like that, small groups of people who just took it on their own to go national, or go over to Russia and make friends, and Hickman’s a good example of that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, that was Joel Schatz’s story.
David Hoffman: Joel Schatz. I mean, there are a million great stories like that. So, I basically quit as national director early in 1980 and started working—
Daniel Satinsky: What was the organization you quit?
David Hoffman: Well, Survival Summer. It was the coalition—
Daniel Satinsky: Survival Summer. I haven’t heard of that one.
David Hoffman: Yeah, it’s not a big thing. I think largely it was a failure. But it was the first coalition. We had 400 cities organized. We had offices in 400 cities. And it never got to be like Mississippi Freedom Summer or even Vietnam Summer, but out of that came the freeze and all these other initiatives, so it was important. And then I stopped, went back to growing pot for a while, and my pot crop got ripped off, and I was unemployed, I needed a job. So, I called Kim up and I said… And Kim was already then doing these space bridges. So, he asked me to come in and help him raise money for the space bridges. So, I went over to Russia for Kim. They were doing Nuclear Winter or one of those space bridges. By the way, all those space bridges are now on YouTube.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
David Hoffman: Kim has uploaded them all to YouTube. There’s a space bridge channel, I think. They’re fascinating to watch now.
Daniel Satinsky: They must be.
David Hoffman: They are fascinating. I mean, look at Capital to Capital, which is the one I organized, and you’ll be blown away by that. It’s amazing how much the world has changed in such a short time. Went over there and it hit me that the Russians felt inferior. There was a certain superiority/inferiority complex I thought that Russia had as a great power, and they wanted to be recognized as an equal to the United States. And I thought well, we’ve got to get the parliaments to talk to each other, that would be a breakthrough. I knew that would mean a lot to them. And anyway, we organized that, and it just took off like crazy, and had a big impact, a series called Capital to Capital that we did with Peter Jennings and ABC.
Daniel Satinsky: And the contacts you had in Russia were through Kim, or how did you work?
David Hoffman: Kim, but Kim through [Jim] Hickman. Basically, all this stuff started with this paranormal, parapsychology stuff, whatever that was called, with guys that bent forks and, you know, did all… Because the Russians were doing a lot of research. But you know this story better than I do, I’m sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: So, that’s where it started. And then there was a guy named Joseph Goldin who got—did you know Joseph?
Daniel Satinsky: I didn’t know him. I have seen… I mean, I think Jim has talked about him. He was prominent in that podcast. Joel talked about him. So, he seemed to be kind of ubiquitous within this movement.
David Hoffman: He was just really…I mean, we’ll probably never know who he really was. He was put in mental institutions several times. I don’t know if that was political oppression or if he was—I think he was just crazy and needed it. [Evgeny Velikhov] was sort of Joe’s patron. He was head of the Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Satinsky: Velikhov?
David Hoffman: Velikhov. Yes, thank you. Velikhov once told me that Joe was crazy and that it wasn’t political oppression, that he just needed to go in, you know. He had wild ideas. And he understood this new technology of satellite television, that that could be used, that could leap across geographic boundaries and ideological boundaries, which was the same thing Kim had figured out, Kim Spencer. So, Hickman put them together and the rest is history. They started producing these things.
And then Vladimir Pozner got involved. And interestingly, the producers in Gosteleradio*—and this I write about, in that chapter in my book you’ll get this story, so I won’t go into detail—but there were two or three people who worked with Pozner on stuff, and they took the techniques and things from development in the production of this, and then produced Vzglyad*, the news program that captured 90% of the audience and became the national news program, and made state television irrelevant. And I would argue that the most important factor in the transformation of the Soviet Union was television.
But the roots of that television transformation came from the space bridges. You can trace back that huge transformation, when Gorbachev has glasnost and opens up that space, and these guys who had worked on the space bridges then start producing Vzglyad and other programs. Of course, then it gets corrupted, and one of the three guys gets assassinated, and I think [Alexander] Lyubimov, one of the other guys, is probably a top KGB general now. It’s hard to know where it all went. It probably had more to do with opening up the Soviet Union than anything else.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. And your part in that was to sort of be the fixer, go-between, producer, whatever, of these programs on the space bridge?
David Hoffman: And when you say “you,” I mean, Internews certainly. My own personal involvement was mostly around Capital to Capital. But then the creation of Internews in Russia, where we started…I think there were eventually 10,000 TV stations that were involved in our efforts.
Daniel Satinsky: 10,000?
David Hoffman: It was—well, no, I guess it was 2,000 in Russia and it was 10,000 overall in the former Soviet union. More outside of Russia itself. But there were 2,000 independent stations that we helped get started. A woman that, if you can interview her, is the key to all of this is a woman named Manana Aslamazyan. Manana is the mother of independent television in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: And she’s a Russian citizen?
David Hoffman: She’s actually Armenian. She lives in Moscow. She’s a Russian citizen. Born in Armenia. A force of nature. I was invited to one of the early meetings of the Glasnost* Foundation. This is Gorbachev’s crown jewel. This is the thing he cared the most about. He creates this foundation and puts Yegor Yakovlev in charge. Yegor was his partner. He’s the one who really educated Gorbachev and became his chief of ideology, and Yegor Yakovlev was head of this foundation. I was invited to one of their meetings. All old white guys, and like one woman is sort of like the executive secretary. She ran the whole thing. She blew me away. I mean, she just ran this thing with these top-level guys. And I traded them, I went to the director, [Alexei Simonov], and I said I’ll give you a Macintosh computer if you let me hire Manana. And he did. I traded him a computer for Manana, and then she organized 2,000 TV stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god. So, what year was that? What year was that?
David Hoffman: Ai-yai-yai.
Daniel Satinsky: Even roughly. Pre end of Soviet Union?
David Hoffman: 1983, I would say, about the time you were there. ’83, something like that, ’84. So, it was before—when does Gorbachev come into power?
Daniel Satinsky: Gorbachev doesn’t come in until, I think, ’86.
David Hoffman: Oh, it’s that late?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And the Soviet Union continues until—
David Hoffman: Right after that.
Daniel Satinsky: —1990, December 25th, so…
David Hoffman: So, it would have been the late—
Daniel Satinsky: Late ‘80s. So, you founded Internews—
David Hoffman: In ’82.
Daniel Satinsky: In ’82, but Internews Russia was when?
David Hoffman: That must have been about ’85 or so.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And it was an official organization?
David Hoffman: Yeah, yeah. They eventually closed it down under Putin. You know, he sent in his masked guys, and we had 400 employees there at the time. It was a big operation. And all the first networks came out of that, you know, REN TV and all these things. They all were involved. Manana was at the center of all independent television. But she made a decision, or it might have been Evelyn [Messinger], I forget, but somebody there made a smart decision to stay out of Moscow itself. I mean, power was…Moscow was losing control, but it started in the periphery. And we knew the Mafia in Russia would just…and they did, they killed most of the people who tried to poke their head up too high. It just got too crazy there. But outside of Moscow—well, what happened, actually—and Evelyn might have mentioned a woman named Liz Hasse to you. Does that name strike a bell?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
David Hoffman: She…we worked with her. She wasn’t, I don’t think, officially part of Internews, but we worked with her. She was a lawyer, kind of like yourself, you know, a lawyer who went over there. And we had heard a rumor that there was an independent station somewhere in Russia, and Wade Green, do you know that name? Wade was one of the big funders, worked for the Rockefeller family. He gave us a grant to go search to see if we could find what independent stations there might be. So, we sent out six people all over Russia and we discovered 200 independent stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Again, what year was this?
David Hoffman: Oh, god, I knew you’d ask me that.
Daniel Satinsky: I mean, it must be after the Soviet Union dissolved. Has to be.
David Hoffman: No, no. You still had the Soviet Union. Because we were real involved in, you know, we had a big role to play when Yeltsin got up on the tank, and we were still there. That was…
Daniel Satinsky: You had the—there were independent TV stations under the Soviet…in Soviet times?
David Hoffman: Yeah. They were losing power out on the periphery. People were going to East Berlin, and for eight dollars you could get a little thing that you’d plug into the back of your VCR and could turn it into a transmitter. So, they’d go to East Berlin, they’d buy these videotapes, mostly pornography and stuff, come back, and in these apartment complexes, for eight dollars, you could become a broadcaster to 200,000 people in your apartment complex. Because they were all hardwired into one, you know. That’s how a lot of these places started.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
David Hoffman: But yeah, things started going independent before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay,. And so you had—and what did it mean that you had—
David Hoffman: Well, I wanted to stop there a second. It would be worth—and I won’t be able to do dates and stuff, but I would suspect there’s an interesting story—in fact, I know there’s an interesting story here that the breakup of the Soviet Union had a lot to do with independent television.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: So, that you start in places like Latvia having independent TV. And so, the political breakup of the Soviet Union happens after independent television starts broadcasting in these places. Ukraine is a great example of that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I can understand that on the periphery. So, you had this more of the national, what ended up being national independence movements, so they…I can see that. There was less control and more foment, and…
David Hoffman: Look at Ukrainian television, you know, in their own language. That happens before there’s political emancipation. You get first, you know, in your own language national television happening before national independence.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when you say you found 200 stations, it was throughout the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t necessarily Russia, it was—
David Hoffman: It was the Soviet Union. It was Kazakhstan and etc. A lot of them in Kazakhstan. But Manana and Liz Hasse invited them to a conference in Moscow. And none of these guys—they all thought they were unique. They all thought they were the only one. And suddenly they’re together in a conference room with 200 people all doing the same thing, and a movement started. It just boom, day after that.
Daniel Satinsky: Huh. And how did that… So, that movement was coalesced around Internews, and what exactly did that mean? Were they sharing programming? Were they sharing experience?
David Hoffman: Eventually, yes. Eventually they created networks, and they shared programming. I mean, at the end of it it was so big and sophisticated. We were laying the last mile in places for stations.Toward the end they had a content management system.
One of the things that changed was under the Soviet Union you had no local tv…if you were in Smolensk or something you don’t know what’s happening in any other town because the only news is national, and it comes from Moscow. And so there might be a story that’s happening there, but it’s on the national news. Local news changed that for the city you’re in. But once we began to connect those dots, and we had a common content management system, so every day an editor would come into there, and he’d have a printout of here are the local news stories from all the cities in Russia. And they could cover each other’s stories and share the video. And suddenly you have this interlocking network of television stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Hoffman: But the woman who knows that, this is all Manana. If you can get to Manana. I’ll send you…I’ll send Manana’s—
Daniel Satinsky: How would I find Manana?
David Hoffman: I’m going to send you her email.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, great. And so, the KGB just didn’t realize the importance of this?
David Hoffman: Well, I can’t speak for that. I don’t really know. I would think they would have been all over this. But, you know, it’s kind of hard to control something like this. What you have are you have a steel mill in Tomsk, and the steel mill wants its own TV station because you can get away with it there. How do you stop that? They’re the big player there.
Plus, you have Gorbachev, and glasnost, and perestroika. I mean, this is a new era, and he’s opening up to this.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And so, this is a movement that sort of bubbles up from the bottom, and you provided some forum to help bring it together a bit.
David Hoffman: And then training, I mean, you know. And then you get money pouring in to support the training of journalists and the development of these stations. It’s a huge story, almost entirely untold.
I mean, I went on the 10th anniversary of Manana’s organization of Internews Russia, they rented the opera house and completely filled it. It was a stunning, stunning event. People came in their native costumes and stuff. This was a gigantic—this was so powerful and so new, and so vibrant, and it all revolved around Manana. I mean, she was the mother of all this stuff. And it was fascinating to watch them come together.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, then they played a certain, some role in the final disintegration of the Soviet Union by being a source of news and information then.
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: When did you first become involved with or interested in Russia, and why?
David Hoffman: Well, let’s see. I mean, I had been a director in the peace movement for a while. There was something called Survive the Summer, which was a coalition of all the peace and environmental groups in 19—winter of ’79 it started, 1980, and then the peace movement just took off, as you know.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, yeah.
David Hoffman: So, in 1980 I was working…I was trying to put that together. Very frustrated by the political games being played to control that movement by kind of the old established peace groups like the American Friends Service Committee, who were more Stalinist than Stalin.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.]
David Hoffman: I mean, look, the story is interesting. I was growing pot at the time up in northern California, had gone to Europe in the spring of ’79, which is when the European nuclear disarmament movement exploded. Huge demonstrations in Berlin, in Frankfurt, and London, and nothing was happening in the United States. There was an anti-nuclear energy movement, which I was never a part of, and there was kind of a taboo—you weren’t allowed to talk about nuclear war stuff. There was kind of an unspoken taboo in the energy movement that we’re just on energy. You may know this stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh, right.
David Hoffman: But by then, you know, with what was happening, after the Soviets installed SS-24 nuclear-armed missiles into the border with West Germany, NATO countered with pershing and Cruise missiles up to the east German border.And the headlines in the papers in Europe when I was there in the spring of ’79 was we’re on the verge of World War III because of these missiles being moved in, and all the rhetoric, and Ronald Reagan and all that.
I came back and wrote a little two-page paper calling for something like Vietnam Summer or Mississippi Freedom Summer. I was calling for a summer campaign against the war. And so, I was…I mean, I was barefoot, living without electricity, growing pot, and all of a sudden, I became national director of the peace movement. It’s kind of ridiculous. And so, I called a meeting [in DC] of all these organizations that participated in this new coalition of 140 national organizations. .But right before I went there, I walked by a television set and I saw George Wald, the Nobel prize-winning chemist at MIT who was speaking at a televised rally of the 3-miole Island rally against nuclear energy.
Daniel Satinsky: George Wald was there, and Chomsky.
David Hoffman: Chomsky.
Daniel Satinsky: Chomsky. Noam Chomsky.
David Hoffman: Yeah. Well, anyway, I saw Wald, who had stayed at my house when he was in Boulder… I knew this guy pretty well, and he was at an antiwar rally \speaking on PBS, which was crazy. I mean, we never, at that time there were no anti-establishment things that were happening on American television. And here was live coverage of a demonstration, 200,000 people, after Three Mile Island, and Ralph Nader had organized it in Washington. I was blown away by it. And then came Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and all these other people. And I went how did this get done? So, I looked up the guy who did it. It was Kim Spencer. More important than me, I would say. He’s the inventor of space bridges.
Anyway, I looked him up because I wanted to find out how he pulled that off. It’s an amazing story, actually, and I won’t bore you with it now. But I quickly decided we could get more done on the war issue with Russia working in a small group with television than I could get done in the peace movement as it was.
And actually, that’s a phenomenon that I think is fascinating. I think I’ve written about this once before, but it’s worth looking into. It was small groups of people who just took it on their own to organize. It was very decentralized. Like the Nuclear Freeze campaign. The little old lady in western Massachusetts who went around and started the nuclear freeze. Remember the nuclear freeze?
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: There were a lot of things like that, small groups of people who just took it on their own to go national, or go over to Russia and make friends, and Hickman’s a good example of that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, that was Joel Schatz’s story.
David Hoffman: Joel Schatz. I mean, there are a million great stories like that. So, I basically quit as national director early in 1980 and started working—
Daniel Satinsky: What was the organization you quit?
David Hoffman: Well, Survival Summer. It was the coalition—
Daniel Satinsky: Survival Summer. I haven’t heard of that one.
David Hoffman: Yeah, it’s not a big thing. I think largely it was a failure. But it was the first coalition. We had 400 cities organized. We had offices in 400 cities. And it never got to be like Mississippi Freedom Summer or even Vietnam Summer, but out of that came the freeze and all these other initiatives, so it was important. And then I stopped, went back to growing pot for a while, and my pot crop got ripped off, and I was unemployed, I needed a job. So, I called Kim up and I said… And Kim was already then doing these space bridges. So, he asked me to come in and help him raise money for the space bridges. So, I went over to Russia for Kim. They were doing Nuclear Winter or one of those space bridges. By the way, all those space bridges are now on YouTube.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
David Hoffman: Kim has uploaded them all to YouTube. There’s a space bridge channel, I think. They’re fascinating to watch now.
Daniel Satinsky: They must be.
David Hoffman: They are fascinating. I mean, look at Capital to Capital, which is the one I organized, and you’ll be blown away by that. It’s amazing how much the world has changed in such a short time. Went over there and it hit me that the Russians felt inferior. There was a certain superiority/inferiority complex I thought that Russia had as a great power, and they wanted to be recognized as an equal to the United States. And I thought well, we’ve got to get the parliaments to talk to each other, that would be a breakthrough. I knew that would mean a lot to them. And anyway, we organized that, and it just took off like crazy, and had a big impact, a series called Capital to Capital that we did with Peter Jennings and ABC.
Daniel Satinsky: And the contacts you had in Russia were through Kim, or how did you work?
David Hoffman: Kim, but Kim through [Jim] Hickman. Basically, all this stuff started with this paranormal, parapsychology stuff, whatever that was called, with guys that bent forks and, you know, did all… Because the Russians were doing a lot of research. But you know this story better than I do, I’m sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: So, that’s where it started. And then there was a guy named Joseph Goldin who got—did you know Joseph?
Daniel Satinsky: I didn’t know him. I have seen… I mean, I think Jim has talked about him. He was prominent in that podcast. Joel talked about him. So, he seemed to be kind of ubiquitous within this movement.
David Hoffman: He was just really…I mean, we’ll probably never know who he really was. He was put in mental institutions several times. I don’t know if that was political oppression or if he was—I think he was just crazy and needed it. [Evgeny Velikhov] was sort of Joe’s patron. He was head of the Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Satinsky: Velikhov?
David Hoffman: Velikhov. Yes, thank you. Velikhov once told me that Joe was crazy and that it wasn’t political oppression, that he just needed to go in, you know. He had wild ideas. And he understood this new technology of satellite television, that that could be used, that could leap across geographic boundaries and ideological boundaries, which was the same thing Kim had figured out, Kim Spencer. So, Hickman put them together and the rest is history. They started producing these things.
And then Vladimir Pozner got involved. And interestingly, the producers in Gosteleradio*—and this I write about, in that chapter in my book you’ll get this story, so I won’t go into detail—but there were two or three people who worked with Pozner on stuff, and they took the techniques and things from development in the production of this, and then produced Vzglyad*, the news program that captured 90% of the audience and became the national news program, and made state television irrelevant. And I would argue that the most important factor in the transformation of the Soviet Union was television.
But the roots of that television transformation came from the space bridges. You can trace back that huge transformation, when Gorbachev has glasnost and opens up that space, and these guys who had worked on the space bridges then start producing Vzglyad and other programs. Of course, then it gets corrupted, and one of the three guys gets assassinated, and I think [Alexander] Lyubimov, one of the other guys, is probably a top KGB general now. It’s hard to know where it all went. It probably had more to do with opening up the Soviet Union than anything else.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. And your part in that was to sort of be the fixer, go-between, producer, whatever, of these programs on the space bridge?
David Hoffman: And when you say “you,” I mean, Internews certainly. My own personal involvement was mostly around Capital to Capital. But then the creation of Internews in Russia, where we started…I think there were eventually 10,000 TV stations that were involved in our efforts.
Daniel Satinsky: 10,000?
David Hoffman: It was—well, no, I guess it was 2,000 in Russia and it was 10,000 overall in the former Soviet union. More outside of Russia itself. But there were 2,000 independent stations that we helped get started. A woman that, if you can interview her, is the key to all of this is a woman named Manana Aslamazyan. Manana is the mother of independent television in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: And she’s a Russian citizen?
David Hoffman: She’s actually Armenian. She lives in Moscow. She’s a Russian citizen. Born in Armenia. A force of nature. I was invited to one of the early meetings of the Glasnost* Foundation. This is Gorbachev’s crown jewel. This is the thing he cared the most about. He creates this foundation and puts Yegor Yakovlev in charge. Yegor was his partner. He’s the one who really educated Gorbachev and became his chief of ideology, and Yegor Yakovlev was head of this foundation. I was invited to one of their meetings. All old white guys, and like one woman is sort of like the executive secretary. She ran the whole thing. She blew me away. I mean, she just ran this thing with these top-level guys. And I traded them, I went to the director, [Alexei Simonov], and I said I’ll give you a Macintosh computer if you let me hire Manana. And he did. I traded him a computer for Manana, and then she organized 2,000 TV stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god. So, what year was that? What year was that?
David Hoffman: Ai-yai-yai.
Daniel Satinsky: Even roughly. Pre end of Soviet Union?
David Hoffman: 1983, I would say, about the time you were there. ’83, something like that, ’84. So, it was before—when does Gorbachev come into power?
Daniel Satinsky: Gorbachev doesn’t come in until, I think, ’86.
David Hoffman: Oh, it’s that late?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And the Soviet Union continues until—
David Hoffman: Right after that.
Daniel Satinsky: —1990, December 25th, so…
David Hoffman: So, it would have been the late—
Daniel Satinsky: Late ‘80s. So, you founded Internews—
David Hoffman: In ’82.
Daniel Satinsky: In ’82, but Internews Russia was when?
David Hoffman: That must have been about ’85 or so.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And it was an official organization?
David Hoffman: Yeah, yeah. They eventually closed it down under Putin. You know, he sent in his masked guys, and we had 400 employees there at the time. It was a big operation. And all the first networks came out of that, you know, REN TV and all these things. They all were involved. Manana was at the center of all independent television. But she made a decision, or it might have been Evelyn [Messinger], I forget, but somebody there made a smart decision to stay out of Moscow itself. I mean, power was…Moscow was losing control, but it started in the periphery. And we knew the Mafia in Russia would just…and they did, they killed most of the people who tried to poke their head up too high. It just got too crazy there. But outside of Moscow—well, what happened, actually—and Evelyn might have mentioned a woman named Liz Hasse to you. Does that name strike a bell?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
David Hoffman: She…we worked with her. She wasn’t, I don’t think, officially part of Internews, but we worked with her. She was a lawyer, kind of like yourself, you know, a lawyer who went over there. And we had heard a rumor that there was an independent station somewhere in Russia, and Wade Green, do you know that name? Wade was one of the big funders, worked for the Rockefeller family. He gave us a grant to go search to see if we could find what independent stations there might be. So, we sent out six people all over Russia and we discovered 200 independent stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Again, what year was this?
David Hoffman: Oh, god, I knew you’d ask me that.
Daniel Satinsky: I mean, it must be after the Soviet Union dissolved. Has to be.
David Hoffman: No, no. You still had the Soviet Union. Because we were real involved in, you know, we had a big role to play when Yeltsin got up on the tank, and we were still there. That was…
Daniel Satinsky: You had the—there were independent TV stations under the Soviet…in Soviet times?
David Hoffman: Yeah. They were losing power out on the periphery. People were going to East Berlin, and for eight dollars you could get a little thing that you’d plug into the back of your VCR and could turn it into a transmitter. So, they’d go to East Berlin, they’d buy these videotapes, mostly pornography and stuff, come back, and in these apartment complexes, for eight dollars, you could become a broadcaster to 200,000 people in your apartment complex. Because they were all hardwired into one, you know. That’s how a lot of these places started.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
David Hoffman: But yeah, things started going independent before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay,. And so you had—and what did it mean that you had—
David Hoffman: Well, I wanted to stop there a second. It would be worth—and I won’t be able to do dates and stuff, but I would suspect there’s an interesting story—in fact, I know there’s an interesting story here that the breakup of the Soviet Union had a lot to do with independent television.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: So, that you start in places like Latvia having independent TV. And so, the political breakup of the Soviet Union happens after independent television starts broadcasting in these places. Ukraine is a great example of that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I can understand that on the periphery. So, you had this more of the national, what ended up being national independence movements, so they…I can see that. There was less control and more foment, and…
David Hoffman: Look at Ukrainian television, you know, in their own language. That happens before there’s political emancipation. You get first, you know, in your own language national television happening before national independence.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when you say you found 200 stations, it was throughout the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t necessarily Russia, it was—
David Hoffman: It was the Soviet Union. It was Kazakhstan and etc. A lot of them in Kazakhstan. But Manana and Liz Hasse invited them to a conference in Moscow. And none of these guys—they all thought they were unique. They all thought they were the only one. And suddenly they’re together in a conference room with 200 people all doing the same thing, and a movement started. It just boom, day after that.
Daniel Satinsky: Huh. And how did that… So, that movement was coalesced around Internews, and what exactly did that mean? Were they sharing programming? Were they sharing experience?
David Hoffman: Eventually, yes. Eventually they created networks, and they shared programming. I mean, at the end of it it was so big and sophisticated. We were laying the last mile in places for stations.Toward the end they had a content management system.
One of the things that changed was under the Soviet Union you had no local tv…if you were in Smolensk or something you don’t know what’s happening in any other town because the only news is national, and it comes from Moscow. And so there might be a story that’s happening there, but it’s on the national news. Local news changed that for the city you’re in. But once we began to connect those dots, and we had a common content management system, so every day an editor would come into there, and he’d have a printout of here are the local news stories from all the cities in Russia. And they could cover each other’s stories and share the video. And suddenly you have this interlocking network of television stations.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Hoffman: But the woman who knows that, this is all Manana. If you can get to Manana. I’ll send you…I’ll send Manana’s—
Daniel Satinsky: How would I find Manana?
David Hoffman: I’m going to send you her email.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, great. And so, the KGB just didn’t realize the importance of this?
David Hoffman: Well, I can’t speak for that. I don’t really know. I would think they would have been all over this. But, you know, it’s kind of hard to control something like this. What you have are you have a steel mill in Tomsk, and the steel mill wants its own TV station because you can get away with it there. How do you stop that? They’re the big player there.
Plus, you have Gorbachev, and glasnost, and perestroika. I mean, this is a new era, and he’s opening up to this.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And so, this is a movement that sort of bubbles up from the bottom, and you provided some forum to help bring it together a bit.
David Hoffman: And then training, I mean, you know. And then you get money pouring in to support the training of journalists and the development of these stations. It’s a huge story, almost entirely untold.
I mean, I went on the 10th anniversary of Manana’s organization of Internews Russia, they rented the opera house and completely filled it. It was a stunning, stunning event. People came in their native costumes and stuff. This was a gigantic—this was so powerful and so new, and so vibrant, and it all revolved around Manana. I mean, she was the mother of all this stuff. And it was fascinating to watch them come together.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, then they played a certain, some role in the final disintegration of the Soviet Union by being a source of news and information then.
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. And after the Soviet Union breaks up, you still, you’re there with Internews Russia and developing these networks within Russia and outside of Russia I assume, right?
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And so then the number begins to grow, and those stations begin to get more sophisticated, is that…?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like robotic stations and stuff. I mean, some of them had the… I went to a meeting in Russia where this kind of, this—I don’t know if it was really a network, but this grouping that we had of…because there were a few networks starting, and REN TV was the second one. Turner started one, TV 6, and then REN TV I think was the second network, and then of course NTV. NTV came to us to help them get started. This guy you see on television. Oh, what is his name now? I see him quoted all the time. He’s the main pro Putin guy on Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, [Dmitry] Kiselyov?
David Hoffman: Kiselyov. He asked me for a job. He came begging for a job. I mean, we were…it was a big…we were a pretty big deal.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And you were running training classes?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. All over the place. Thousands. We trained…honestly, I…exact numbers I don’t know, but at least 10,000 journalists we trained there.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Hoffman: We had a…it was a big deal. I mean, [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky gave us a million bucks. And then they crushed us. Putin crushed us, came in and disbanded it.
Well, we got—I’ll tell you what happened, actually, was Manana went to see Putin, went in to meet with him, and he said to her how come you’re taking money from the foreigners? Why don’t you take it from Russians? She said we do. She said I just got a million dollars from Khodorkovsky. Well, it was two days before Khodorkovsky gets arrested. You can find the date.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. That’s 2005, I think, yeah.
David Hoffman: Oh, so it’s that late? Okay.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Hoffman: And then, you know, right around—and that must have…and I’m sure that Putin had already had his sights on Khodorkovsky, and for Manana to say that was a big mistake, and we got shut down.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Wow.
David Hoffman: And Khodorkovsky gets arrested, Gusinsky gets chased out of Russia. It’s an all-out attack. I don’t recall where Ellen Mickiewicz’s book stops. I know she talks about the golden age of television in Russia, which is when everything was flourishing. I’m not sure if she takes it to its demise.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. So, you were helping these local stations develop as a professional local news grouping, right?
David Hoffman: Yes. Doing the business side of it as much as the editorial side.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, they needed training on how to turn the media into a business.
David Hoffman: Profession, yeah.
I started to tell you I was—one of the funny stories is I went—they were so proud because they had gone to Cannes. It has the…there’s a big media market, the biggest there is, I guess. And they had beaten NTV, this group around Manana had beaten NTV and everybody else to get the rights to “Baywatch.” And they didn’t quite know what “Baywatch” was, only it was the most popular program in the world at that time.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: And finally, they decided no, it wasn’t appropriate for them to do “Baywatch.”
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And their idea was that would be syndicated out to all this network?
David Hoffman: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel Satinsky: So, were you in Russia at that time? Were you traveling back and forth?
David Hoffman: Traveled a lot back and forth there, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you were overseeing that office and she was running it, is that…?
David Hoffman: Manana ran it completely. I didn’t oversee Manana very much. But we were getting the grant money, so we were the funneling…we were getting grant money. And I was moving on to… My personal interest was I got a huge grant, the biggest grant USAID ever did for democracy, got a $7.9 million grant for Ukraine right after independence, which was probably a quarter of their gross national product. I mean, it was a ridiculous amount of money to have then. But we built an entire media in Ukraine—the first news agency, the first film, and on and on and on. I mean, we produced the national news in Ukraine.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Hoffman: Through state television. I mean, we, you know, it was crazy times.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And how long did that last, your involvement with Ukraine?
David Hoffman: It’s still going on. We’re still a very big NGO there.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
David Hoffman: Had a big influence there. UNIAN, the news agency, is still the premier news agency there, so things spun off, stations spun off. We had a satellite network that we lost out to CMI. Oh, I kind of put this in my novel, but I don’t remember the exact names of… Eventually big oligarchs bought everything we started. The simple answer.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Did you have local oligarchs in Russia controlling like local news stations?
David Hoffman: I think a lot of the local stations were owned by oligarchs, like the kind of steel mill in Tomsk that I mentioned. That was often the case.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Interesting. You know, I interviewed someone involved with CTC, that network that Peter Gerwe... Did you interact with them at all?
David Hoffman: Knew about it. We were kind of parallel to each other, not directly involved in it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. But I would—
David Hoffman: He pulled off something. He, in a certain sense, as I recall, I think he beat us to some stuff that we were aiming for, and he pulled off this network.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I mean, what he talked about was how he stayed out of politics, that it was only entertainment. He didn’t do any news on his network.
David Hoffman: Oh, is that right? Is that what it was? Yeah. We were just the opposite. We were doing… We had a program called “Local Time” where we took a couple minutes from each city and we would show 20 different local news programs. And that was the first time, as I was mentioning, that Russians would find out what was happening in other places.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, your focus was more on news and public affairs programming.
David Hoffman: Yeah. Well, yeah, but we wanted them to be economically viable, so we definitely…they did “Baywatch,” you know what I mean? They were going for entertainment.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And I remember there was “Dallas” and there were any number of U.S. sort of serial kind of shows that were shown in Russia. Were you involved with any of those?
David Hoffman: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t personally. Had a funny involvement with “Dallas,” actually, but that was personal, but it had nothing much to do with Internews. I met the wife of the guy who owned it, who was, for a while, a billionaire, and ended up being penniless, sleeping on her couch—his ex-wife. And he had four marriages, and by the end of his fourth marriage he didn’t have any money, the guy who produced “Dallas.”
Daniel Satinsky: Unbelievable.
David Hoffman: Yeah, some of these stories are amazing.
Daniel Satinsky: Unbelievable. So, it wasn’t gambling or bad investments, it was bad life choices.
David Hoffman: Paying off his wives.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Well, but the early ‘90s, that’s the impression of America and American life was on those TV shows with those serials, and “Dallas” and “Baywatch” and similar shows. And who was responsible for that? I mean, that was other networks, other…?
David Hoffman: You’d have, you really, if you’re going to do this right, you’d have to look at what happened inside of Gosteleradio state television. Wow, who to talk to? I mean, some of these guys got murdered. But there was a big fight over VID*, was that their name? You know, the guys who did Vzglyad, the guy who got killed, [Vladislav Listyev]? And then later there was that guy who was murdered in Washington [Mikhail Lesin — editor's note]. He was the guy, he started this ad agency, and he ended up controlling all the ad dollars going to Gosteleradio.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Hoffman: And big fights with the Mafia and stuff. He ended up getting murdered. But there’s a whole story about the kind of entrepreneurship happening within Gosteleradio, and who controlled it. And then eventually… Well, I don’t know the dates of this, but basically NTV became too powerful, and they were carrying a lot of these series, too, you know, they bought a lot of these series. And then [Vladimir] Gusinsky got chased out of Russia. I think he’s in—he’d be interesting to interview. Or the guy who tried to get us to do NTV. The pivotal—and I talk about this in my book—the pivotal moment is the election when they were afraid the communists were going to win the election against Yeltsin.
Daniel Satinsky: In 1996.
David Hoffman: ’96, okay.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that was in ’96.
David Hoffman: And they made a pact with the devil. They all agreed to back Yeltsin, and I can’t think of his name now, [Igor Malashenko]—anyway, the guy who started NTV was Yeltsin’s chief and he’s in New York now.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, it’s more detail than I can go into in this book, but to talk to somebody to get into what—
David Hoffman: You can get all this that I’ve told you up until the collapse of it all is in Ellen Mickiewicz’s book. If you find that you’re going to get all the references, you need for a lot of the sector. And if you can talk to Manana. I mean, if Manana will talk to you. I mean, she’s very careful. She can’t do anything in Russia. She does some work for Internews in Central Asia. If she’ll talk to you, and if you can interview her, it would be one of the most fascinating interviews you’ve ever had, I guarantee you.
Daniel Satinsky: So, while you were doing this, did you expect that Russia would continue to be an open environment for this kind of free exchange of news and ideas? While you were doing it did you think that?
David Hoffman: Yeah, I’m an optimist. I mean, you always knew that at any moment everything could change. Things were very tenuous there. But I never foresaw the reimposition of a dictatorship, basically. I didn’t expect that. But then, you know, we saw so…there were so many dramatic moments, like when [Alexander] Rutskoi led that rebellion against Yeltsin—
Daniel Satinsky: In ’93.
David Hoffman: Yeah. That was…that could have been a horrible turning point. So, there were these…you always…we knew it was tenuous. I kind of felt that once the cat was out of the bag it would be hard to put him back in. And I was wrong.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. And so, when people… So, what I’m trying to get at, without being whatever partisanship goes along with it, that we as Americans had a bit influence on the development of the media internally in Russia at that time.
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And if we want to look at how then Russia tries to influence the U.S. through social media—
David Hoffman: Ha-ha, ha.
Daniel Satinsky: —to a much greater or lesser extent, there’s not a—I mean, it’s not necessarily a moral equivalent. I’m not trying to make it a moral equivalent.
David Hoffman: It’s not, but it’s fascinating to pose that.
I always had wanted, before things got really bad in Russia, I always thought it would have been smart to get Russians to come monitor our elections the way we monitor people’s elections all over the world. I thought we should get Russians to come here to monitor our elections.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I actually know some who did.
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah, really?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes. One of the…a Duma deputy that I worked with at one time was an election monitor in the U.S. in 2012, I think.
David Hoffman: Wow, fascinating.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
David Hoffman: There’s a book.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, yeah, he’s a book. The problem is there’s too many books here.
David Hoffman: There’re too many books. It was American policy to influence Russian television and Russian democracy.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And was that explicit from the funders who were giving you money? You knew that that’s what you were doing?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. We were—if you would ask anybody from USAID what’s their biggest success they would have always said the television, the development of independent television. The same thing in Afghanistan. They all say, you know, the media development in Afghanistan which we did was their big success.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. So, it’s an enduring success in Ukraine, correct?
David Hoffman: Not completely. I mean, there’s, you know, the oligarchs still control television in Ukraine, which is a sad thing, but we have an ongoing presence. We don’t have the… I mean, we were practically a television monopoly in Ukraine in the beginning. At the end of the state broadcast on the news it would say something like “brought to you with the assistance of the United States Agency for International Development.” And I said take that off; you can’t publish that! They said we’ve got to, that’s the only thing that protects us from the Mafia. And we just…yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Different frames of reference there. So, it was your sense, I mean, AID had a clear sense of direction of what it wanted to try and accomplish, and—
David Hoffman: Oh, sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. Because other people have talked about other aspects of USAID being, like them giving a bunch of money and they didn’t really know where to go with it, what the goals were.
David Hoffman: Well, I’m sure that’s probably very true. There was a lot of money pouring in there. You know, if you want to get the AID angle on this you could interview the person who took over for my job, who’s president of Internews now, Jeanne Bourgault, because she worked for AID in Moscow at that time. I didn’t know her then.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, wow.
David Hoffman: But she was the Moscow person directing the democracy funds.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, great. Because part of this story is the transformation of the citizen diplomacy movement into actual real influence, practical influence in the reform period. In some cases, into business, so yeah.
David Hoffman: It’s a huge untold story. It’s gigantic. And television is a big part of it, but there’s so much more. When we started, like in ’84 or so I guess I went over there for the first… Was that my first time? Probably my first time. And we could send letters to anybody because we knew the six people who would go to Russia and back. Hickman was one of them. We knew the other five people who went at the time. And by the time we were finished there were a couple hundred thousand people going both directions. I mean, that citizen diplomacy, which, by the way, I actually came up with the phrase citizen diplomacy, so I feel some ownership of citizen diplomacy.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
David Hoffman: That movement, as you know as well as I do, was just hugely influential.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Hoffman: It’ll be interesting. I’d love to read your book.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, you know, I hope that it lives up to the quality of the information that I’m getting from people. Obviously as an author I want to live up to that and find the focus of threads to pull together because there are many.
David Hoffman: It’s hard. That’s hard to do. The story is too big and too diverse, so it’s going to take—yeah, you’re going to have to be pretty clever to figure out five themes that run through all this, tie it together.
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And so then the number begins to grow, and those stations begin to get more sophisticated, is that…?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like robotic stations and stuff. I mean, some of them had the… I went to a meeting in Russia where this kind of, this—I don’t know if it was really a network, but this grouping that we had of…because there were a few networks starting, and REN TV was the second one. Turner started one, TV 6, and then REN TV I think was the second network, and then of course NTV. NTV came to us to help them get started. This guy you see on television. Oh, what is his name now? I see him quoted all the time. He’s the main pro Putin guy on Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, [Dmitry] Kiselyov?
David Hoffman: Kiselyov. He asked me for a job. He came begging for a job. I mean, we were…it was a big…we were a pretty big deal.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And you were running training classes?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. All over the place. Thousands. We trained…honestly, I…exact numbers I don’t know, but at least 10,000 journalists we trained there.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Hoffman: We had a…it was a big deal. I mean, [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky gave us a million bucks. And then they crushed us. Putin crushed us, came in and disbanded it.
Well, we got—I’ll tell you what happened, actually, was Manana went to see Putin, went in to meet with him, and he said to her how come you’re taking money from the foreigners? Why don’t you take it from Russians? She said we do. She said I just got a million dollars from Khodorkovsky. Well, it was two days before Khodorkovsky gets arrested. You can find the date.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. That’s 2005, I think, yeah.
David Hoffman: Oh, so it’s that late? Okay.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Hoffman: And then, you know, right around—and that must have…and I’m sure that Putin had already had his sights on Khodorkovsky, and for Manana to say that was a big mistake, and we got shut down.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Wow.
David Hoffman: And Khodorkovsky gets arrested, Gusinsky gets chased out of Russia. It’s an all-out attack. I don’t recall where Ellen Mickiewicz’s book stops. I know she talks about the golden age of television in Russia, which is when everything was flourishing. I’m not sure if she takes it to its demise.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. So, you were helping these local stations develop as a professional local news grouping, right?
David Hoffman: Yes. Doing the business side of it as much as the editorial side.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, they needed training on how to turn the media into a business.
David Hoffman: Profession, yeah.
I started to tell you I was—one of the funny stories is I went—they were so proud because they had gone to Cannes. It has the…there’s a big media market, the biggest there is, I guess. And they had beaten NTV, this group around Manana had beaten NTV and everybody else to get the rights to “Baywatch.” And they didn’t quite know what “Baywatch” was, only it was the most popular program in the world at that time.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Hoffman: And finally, they decided no, it wasn’t appropriate for them to do “Baywatch.”
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And their idea was that would be syndicated out to all this network?
David Hoffman: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel Satinsky: So, were you in Russia at that time? Were you traveling back and forth?
David Hoffman: Traveled a lot back and forth there, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you were overseeing that office and she was running it, is that…?
David Hoffman: Manana ran it completely. I didn’t oversee Manana very much. But we were getting the grant money, so we were the funneling…we were getting grant money. And I was moving on to… My personal interest was I got a huge grant, the biggest grant USAID ever did for democracy, got a $7.9 million grant for Ukraine right after independence, which was probably a quarter of their gross national product. I mean, it was a ridiculous amount of money to have then. But we built an entire media in Ukraine—the first news agency, the first film, and on and on and on. I mean, we produced the national news in Ukraine.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Hoffman: Through state television. I mean, we, you know, it was crazy times.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And how long did that last, your involvement with Ukraine?
David Hoffman: It’s still going on. We’re still a very big NGO there.
Daniel Satinsky: I see.
David Hoffman: Had a big influence there. UNIAN, the news agency, is still the premier news agency there, so things spun off, stations spun off. We had a satellite network that we lost out to CMI. Oh, I kind of put this in my novel, but I don’t remember the exact names of… Eventually big oligarchs bought everything we started. The simple answer.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Did you have local oligarchs in Russia controlling like local news stations?
David Hoffman: I think a lot of the local stations were owned by oligarchs, like the kind of steel mill in Tomsk that I mentioned. That was often the case.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Interesting. You know, I interviewed someone involved with CTC, that network that Peter Gerwe... Did you interact with them at all?
David Hoffman: Knew about it. We were kind of parallel to each other, not directly involved in it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. But I would—
David Hoffman: He pulled off something. He, in a certain sense, as I recall, I think he beat us to some stuff that we were aiming for, and he pulled off this network.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I mean, what he talked about was how he stayed out of politics, that it was only entertainment. He didn’t do any news on his network.
David Hoffman: Oh, is that right? Is that what it was? Yeah. We were just the opposite. We were doing… We had a program called “Local Time” where we took a couple minutes from each city and we would show 20 different local news programs. And that was the first time, as I was mentioning, that Russians would find out what was happening in other places.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, your focus was more on news and public affairs programming.
David Hoffman: Yeah. Well, yeah, but we wanted them to be economically viable, so we definitely…they did “Baywatch,” you know what I mean? They were going for entertainment.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And I remember there was “Dallas” and there were any number of U.S. sort of serial kind of shows that were shown in Russia. Were you involved with any of those?
David Hoffman: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t personally. Had a funny involvement with “Dallas,” actually, but that was personal, but it had nothing much to do with Internews. I met the wife of the guy who owned it, who was, for a while, a billionaire, and ended up being penniless, sleeping on her couch—his ex-wife. And he had four marriages, and by the end of his fourth marriage he didn’t have any money, the guy who produced “Dallas.”
Daniel Satinsky: Unbelievable.
David Hoffman: Yeah, some of these stories are amazing.
Daniel Satinsky: Unbelievable. So, it wasn’t gambling or bad investments, it was bad life choices.
David Hoffman: Paying off his wives.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Well, but the early ‘90s, that’s the impression of America and American life was on those TV shows with those serials, and “Dallas” and “Baywatch” and similar shows. And who was responsible for that? I mean, that was other networks, other…?
David Hoffman: You’d have, you really, if you’re going to do this right, you’d have to look at what happened inside of Gosteleradio state television. Wow, who to talk to? I mean, some of these guys got murdered. But there was a big fight over VID*, was that their name? You know, the guys who did Vzglyad, the guy who got killed, [Vladislav Listyev]? And then later there was that guy who was murdered in Washington [Mikhail Lesin — editor's note]. He was the guy, he started this ad agency, and he ended up controlling all the ad dollars going to Gosteleradio.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Hoffman: And big fights with the Mafia and stuff. He ended up getting murdered. But there’s a whole story about the kind of entrepreneurship happening within Gosteleradio, and who controlled it. And then eventually… Well, I don’t know the dates of this, but basically NTV became too powerful, and they were carrying a lot of these series, too, you know, they bought a lot of these series. And then [Vladimir] Gusinsky got chased out of Russia. I think he’s in—he’d be interesting to interview. Or the guy who tried to get us to do NTV. The pivotal—and I talk about this in my book—the pivotal moment is the election when they were afraid the communists were going to win the election against Yeltsin.
Daniel Satinsky: In 1996.
David Hoffman: ’96, okay.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that was in ’96.
David Hoffman: And they made a pact with the devil. They all agreed to back Yeltsin, and I can’t think of his name now, [Igor Malashenko]—anyway, the guy who started NTV was Yeltsin’s chief and he’s in New York now.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, it’s more detail than I can go into in this book, but to talk to somebody to get into what—
David Hoffman: You can get all this that I’ve told you up until the collapse of it all is in Ellen Mickiewicz’s book. If you find that you’re going to get all the references, you need for a lot of the sector. And if you can talk to Manana. I mean, if Manana will talk to you. I mean, she’s very careful. She can’t do anything in Russia. She does some work for Internews in Central Asia. If she’ll talk to you, and if you can interview her, it would be one of the most fascinating interviews you’ve ever had, I guarantee you.
Daniel Satinsky: So, while you were doing this, did you expect that Russia would continue to be an open environment for this kind of free exchange of news and ideas? While you were doing it did you think that?
David Hoffman: Yeah, I’m an optimist. I mean, you always knew that at any moment everything could change. Things were very tenuous there. But I never foresaw the reimposition of a dictatorship, basically. I didn’t expect that. But then, you know, we saw so…there were so many dramatic moments, like when [Alexander] Rutskoi led that rebellion against Yeltsin—
Daniel Satinsky: In ’93.
David Hoffman: Yeah. That was…that could have been a horrible turning point. So, there were these…you always…we knew it was tenuous. I kind of felt that once the cat was out of the bag it would be hard to put him back in. And I was wrong.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. And so, when people… So, what I’m trying to get at, without being whatever partisanship goes along with it, that we as Americans had a bit influence on the development of the media internally in Russia at that time.
David Hoffman: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And if we want to look at how then Russia tries to influence the U.S. through social media—
David Hoffman: Ha-ha, ha.
Daniel Satinsky: —to a much greater or lesser extent, there’s not a—I mean, it’s not necessarily a moral equivalent. I’m not trying to make it a moral equivalent.
David Hoffman: It’s not, but it’s fascinating to pose that.
I always had wanted, before things got really bad in Russia, I always thought it would have been smart to get Russians to come monitor our elections the way we monitor people’s elections all over the world. I thought we should get Russians to come here to monitor our elections.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, I actually know some who did.
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah, really?
Daniel Satinsky: Yes. One of the…a Duma deputy that I worked with at one time was an election monitor in the U.S. in 2012, I think.
David Hoffman: Wow, fascinating.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
David Hoffman: There’s a book.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, yeah, he’s a book. The problem is there’s too many books here.
David Hoffman: There’re too many books. It was American policy to influence Russian television and Russian democracy.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And was that explicit from the funders who were giving you money? You knew that that’s what you were doing?
David Hoffman: Oh, yeah. We were—if you would ask anybody from USAID what’s their biggest success they would have always said the television, the development of independent television. The same thing in Afghanistan. They all say, you know, the media development in Afghanistan which we did was their big success.
Daniel Satinsky: Uh-huh. So, it’s an enduring success in Ukraine, correct?
David Hoffman: Not completely. I mean, there’s, you know, the oligarchs still control television in Ukraine, which is a sad thing, but we have an ongoing presence. We don’t have the… I mean, we were practically a television monopoly in Ukraine in the beginning. At the end of the state broadcast on the news it would say something like “brought to you with the assistance of the United States Agency for International Development.” And I said take that off; you can’t publish that! They said we’ve got to, that’s the only thing that protects us from the Mafia. And we just…yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Different frames of reference there. So, it was your sense, I mean, AID had a clear sense of direction of what it wanted to try and accomplish, and—
David Hoffman: Oh, sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. Because other people have talked about other aspects of USAID being, like them giving a bunch of money and they didn’t really know where to go with it, what the goals were.
David Hoffman: Well, I’m sure that’s probably very true. There was a lot of money pouring in there. You know, if you want to get the AID angle on this you could interview the person who took over for my job, who’s president of Internews now, Jeanne Bourgault, because she worked for AID in Moscow at that time. I didn’t know her then.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, wow.
David Hoffman: But she was the Moscow person directing the democracy funds.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, great. Because part of this story is the transformation of the citizen diplomacy movement into actual real influence, practical influence in the reform period. In some cases, into business, so yeah.
David Hoffman: It’s a huge untold story. It’s gigantic. And television is a big part of it, but there’s so much more. When we started, like in ’84 or so I guess I went over there for the first… Was that my first time? Probably my first time. And we could send letters to anybody because we knew the six people who would go to Russia and back. Hickman was one of them. We knew the other five people who went at the time. And by the time we were finished there were a couple hundred thousand people going both directions. I mean, that citizen diplomacy, which, by the way, I actually came up with the phrase citizen diplomacy, so I feel some ownership of citizen diplomacy.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
David Hoffman: That movement, as you know as well as I do, was just hugely influential.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Hoffman: It’ll be interesting. I’d love to read your book.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, you know, I hope that it lives up to the quality of the information that I’m getting from people. Obviously as an author I want to live up to that and find the focus of threads to pull together because there are many.
David Hoffman: It’s hard. That’s hard to do. The story is too big and too diverse, so it’s going to take—yeah, you’re going to have to be pretty clever to figure out five themes that run through all this, tie it together.
Free speech
"Moscow Truth", one of the first daily newspapers in Moscow (since 1918)
Outlook
Acronym of Vzglyad i Drugiye, "Outlook and Others"; production company
State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting
A shopping center in Moscow, "State department store"
Profiteers
The roof, Mafia
