About
John I. Huhs began working in the Soviet Union in 1970 with an office in Moscow in Soviet times and continued to serve major international clients in the Russian Federation until 2012. Mr. Huhs was a partner in the international law firm, Pisar & Huhs, with an extensive practice in Soviet and Russian matters. Then in 1989, he joined the New York law firm, Dewey & LeBoeuf and served as a partner and chaired the international practice of the firm until 2007. He founded the firm's Moscow office in 1990 and its Almaty office in 1994. He is fluent in Russian and divided his residency between New York and Moscow.
Notable clients and projects include The Boeing Company, founded the Boeing Technical Research Center in Moscow and representation for aerospace projects in Russia; VAO Electronorgtechnica, software transactions; International Monetary Fund, general legal representation; Nintendo, software transactions including "Tetris" video game; Pratt & Whitney, joint venture to produce commercial jet engines in Perm; Revlon, cosmetics transactions and projects; Seagram, wine and spirits transactions and projects; Yukos Oil Company, merger with Sibneft.
Mr. Huhs also served as a national security advisor to two presidents in the White House (1973-76) and as a legislative assistant to the governor of Washington (1965-67). He was a member of the governing Council of the ABA's International Section and chaired many committees of the American Bar Association's and NY State Bar Association's International Sections, including the ABA's Soviet Law Committee (1980-85).
Notable clients and projects include The Boeing Company, founded the Boeing Technical Research Center in Moscow and representation for aerospace projects in Russia; VAO Electronorgtechnica, software transactions; International Monetary Fund, general legal representation; Nintendo, software transactions including "Tetris" video game; Pratt & Whitney, joint venture to produce commercial jet engines in Perm; Revlon, cosmetics transactions and projects; Seagram, wine and spirits transactions and projects; Yukos Oil Company, merger with Sibneft.
Mr. Huhs also served as a national security advisor to two presidents in the White House (1973-76) and as a legislative assistant to the governor of Washington (1965-67). He was a member of the governing Council of the ABA's International Section and chaired many committees of the American Bar Association's and NY State Bar Association's International Sections, including the ABA's Soviet Law Committee (1980-85).
Daniel Satinsky: So, let’s just go to when did you first go to Russia and when did you start working there?
John Huhs: I started working in Russia, which was the first time I ever went there, in September of 1970.
Daniel Satinsky: Of 1970. And who sent you in 1970?
John Huhs: In June of 1970 I was graduated from law school and business school at Stanford, and I did real well. I was No. 4 in my class at law school, an officer on the law review, and about the same kind of stuff in the business school, so I could get a job anywhere. And I interviewed and interviewed, and I interviewed investment banks, law firms, corporations, and nothing really seemed to ring a bell. In a law firm I’d be in a library for the next three years doing research memoranda for senior associates.
In a corporation I interviewed IBM, and they already had the next 20, 30 years of my life all charted out. They said we’ll start you at Armonk, and you’ll be here around three years, and then we’ll move you out to one of our domestic subsidiaries, and if you’re lucky you’ll go to San Jose and you’ll serve there for a few years. And then, since you have an international interest, we’ll probably move you out to one of our foreign subsidiaries. If you’re lucky, maybe we’ll put you in our French subsidiary, and da da-da da-da, and we have a defined benefit pension program, and we have healthcare after you retire and before you retire, all of that stuff, and a competitive salary. They were willing to meet law firms’ salaries, which were $18,000 a year in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Exorbitant amounts, yes.
John Huhs: Exorbitant amounts. Well, it was thought to be an exorbitant amount.
Daniel Satinsky: I know, I know, yeah.
John Huhs: But no, I mean, all I had to do was just put my hook in a cog at IBM and I’d be spit out 30, 40 years later with a nice pension and healthcare and, I don’t know, some other things that would make it easier in my dotage. So, I decided that wasn’t for me. So, I got together with one of my classmates, a fellow named Carl Longley—I can give you these names later if there are any… And we got together with a guy named Jim Giffen. You may have heard about him.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that name.
John Huhs: He was the guy who had an FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] prosecution against him. And his defense was I was working for the CIA. Well, he wasn’t working for the CIA. He was a source, and the CIA people would come and visit him periodically, usually pretty low-ranking people. That’s really a crappy job in the intelligence community, having to interview businessman. It doesn’t require much of anything. So you don’t have the best and the brightest such as there is in the intelligence community, but all right. But anyway, that was his defense. He was acquitted. And I guess he’s—
Daniel Satinsky: That was much later, right?
John Huhs: It was about ten years ago.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you meet him at school, at university?
John Huhs: I was introduced to him by my finance professor, James McDonald, who passed away a few years ago. And then Jim had a couple of guys he knew in the New York area. He was a California boy, UCLA law grad, born in…where the hell was he born? Somewhere in Los Angeles or in that area. So, he’s a California boy, but he’s living in New York at the time, and he was working for a company called Satra Corporation, S-A-T-R-A is the way you spell it. Ara Oztemel was the head of Satra, the founder of it. He was an Armenian Turk whose father was in the chromium ore business.
So, Turkey and the Soviet Union made chromium ore. There’s a big deposit of it in Turkey and in the western area of the Soviet Union, and some in the Caucasian republics. So, he was making an okay living at it. He moved to New York and continued his father’s business from New York rather than Istanbul. And nothing much going on. Then in 1965 the United Nations imposed a blockage on Rhodesia. Rhodesia, up until that time, was the world’s largest source of chromium ore. And Ara Oztemel would deal in Rhodesian ore, but he found that he could get it a little bit cheaper from the Soviets, who were trying to penetrate the market and be competitive with Rhodesian chrome.
So, all of a sudden, the price of chrome quintupled. Meanwhile, Ara had contracts, multiyear contracts, with the Sovs for chrome, so he was minting money hand over fist. And then he hired this kid Giffen, who was in his early 20s at the time. A nice boy. And Giffen talked to me. He said look, Ara, you have all this money, and you’re specializing now in Soviet chromium ore, why don’t we step out a bit and expand things, and why don’t we get into general international consulting and trade? General international, but probably with developing countries—the Turkeys of the world, the African countries of the world, the South Americas, those kinds of places. And the Sovs—yeah, sure. You have a good contact there in the chromium ore trading company, which was Soyuzpromexport at the time. And so, Ara said fine, and Jim said okay, I’d like to hire a few guys to help me. He said fine, fine, Ara said fine. He said I’d like to interview them first before you actually hire them, although you vet them, and I’m the last step.
So Giffen went to McDonald, among other people, and he said hey, this is what I’m doing, and do you have any people really interested in international work. And he said well, gee, I have two guys in the law business program who have been talking to me about international work and where they can get into it without having to spend time on low level work at law firms and corporations and consulting companies. And so fine, we were introduced, Longley and I. Giffen liked us, and so he asked us to come to New York, which we did, and met Oztemel, and he said fine.
And so Giffen said I’ll meet the salary of whatever law firm or business firm you’re thinking about joining. I said well, you know, Jim, after all of what I’ve been doing, I mean interviewing, I think I’m down to…if I go to a law firm it’s going to be the Cleary Gottlieb firm, which was at that time the most international firm on Wall Street. Cleary Gottlieb was right next to Cravath and Sullivan & Cromwell as being the leading law firms in New York. So Jim said well, okay, look, I’ll do two things for you: one, I’ll start you out at whatever Cleary is. I said well, it’s 18K. He said yeah, okay, we’ll pay you 18K. And also I need a pretty good bonus if I do well, and so let’s set up some metrics that will track whether I’m doing well or not, and whether I deserve a bonus, how much of a bonus, all that kind of thing. So, we did that.
Daniel Satinsky: And up to then you didn’t have any special interest in Russia, you didn’t have any Russian language?
John Huhs: The only thing I did is my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Washington I was required to take a foreign language. And if you remember—this is 1962-63—if you remember, this was, you know, the Sovs had sent up all the Sputniks, they had put people in space, and the movie “The Russians Are Coming” had been released, so I thought gee, if these guys are going to come over here and take us over, it might be useful to speak their language, and so I took Russian at the University of Washington my freshman and sophomore years. The only other contact with Russia, remotely, was I took Leon Lipson’s course in Soviet law at Stanford Law School. And I got an A plus in it. An A plus was good in Stanford Law School in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, you were hired to be a lawyer or a trader?
John Huhs: I was hired to be a consultant, a legal, and financial and business consultant.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were completely inexperienced at this, but you had an education in business and law, right?
John Huhs: Yes. And Giffen was. I mean, we were all kids. And just by luck one of the guys who joined us was Paul O. Proehl, who at that time was a vice chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA, for external relations, i.e. fundraising. He knew most of the chief executives in California and many in the rest of the United States, and he happened to sit next to a guy on a plane, a guy named Zenon Hansen.
Zenon Hansen at that time was the chief executive of the Mack Truck Co. in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And during that period the Sovs were negotiating with Henry Ford to build a big truck plant, the Kamaz plant. And finally, Ford chickened out, i.e., just didn’t want to push the limits of the envelope in Washington. Nixon and Kissinger weren’t quite ready to go to Moscow yet. They were planning it, but they didn’t want to…they wanted to maintain a hostile attitude towards the Sovs until… That was part of their strategy.
So, Hansen said I can do this—my god, I’ve put in truck plants before around the world. But I don’t know anybody in Russia. And Proehl said we have one of the biggest U.S. traders in our company, Ara Oztemel, who does hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of chromium ore a year with them, and he’s the largest thing in the U.S.-Soviet commercial experience. So, Hansen said fine. He said the first thing is let’s go to Moscow and meet the guys.
And so, we set up meetings in Moscow, went to Moscow, met the guys, and it was a very positive meeting. And we invited the guys to then visit Hansen in the U.S. And meanwhile Hansen said gee, it’s going pretty well, why don’t we set up a project office in Moscow. And so, we rented rooms 425, 427, 429 and 431 in the Metropole Hotel on the fourth floor, right on the front, and turned them into offices—just had them take the beds and furniture, and we got office furniture scrounged around from various sources. So, we opened that office towards the end of 1970.
And I spent more time in that office in the next few years than did Longley, who was very rarely there, Giffen, Oztemel or really anybody else at Satra. I had identified, I said what do I have that these guys don’t—well, at least I have a little bit of Russian language that I can then, if people will tolerate me, I can do what Armand Hammer did, I’ll learn five words a day, and then be exposed to it—so I’ll go to Russian parties, I’ll accept invitations to socialize, I’ll do this kind of stuff. And so I spent most of 1970, 1971, 1972, a little bit of 1973 in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: And in those years were there other expats there?
John Huhs: A few. But mostly the Oztemels of the world, that is, the trading types. Some had made some money, like Oztemel, some hadn’t. And they were all sort of crazy kinds of characters. You know, there were real characters involved, because it wasn’t the thing to do in those days. And I wasn’t looking at doing the thing to do, I was looking for a way to have some fun, get some experience, do some interesting things. So fast forward, in June of 1971 the Russians came to the United States. Giffen invited Pierson—I don’t know, what was his first name, James?
Daniel Satinsky: Were they Canadian?
John Huhs: No, Pierson, he was the foreign reporter for Business Week at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. No idea.
John Huhs: I forget the first name. Anyway. So, Pierson attached himself, or embedded himself in our delegation, with the Mack delegation and with the Soviet delegation. He attended all the meetings and everything. Zenon said fine, just let me know what you’re going to print before you print it, you’re under a code of silence, and NDA. So, we signed an agreement at the end of that visit that envisioned the design and construction of of the Kamaz plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, a greenfields facility in Tatarstan on the banks of the Kama River. And Pierson put it on the front page of Business Week under the banner headline “The Billion Dollar Truck Project with the Russians.” Wow.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: In other words, it was a billion dollars. And so, all of a sudden things were beginning to fall a bit in Washington. You could feel it. And of course, in 1972 Nixon and Kissinger went to China. They went to Russia. They signed all the commercial agreements with Russia, and the era of detente bloomed. And our phones lit up, and they’d been lighting up ever since the Mack deal, but they lit up, and there was no way we could handle all the business. It was just, it was bedlam. I mean, sometimes I’d be on four phone conversations at once, just putting one on hold, the other, the other. But it worked. It really worked. And we made good money, and we did good things.
And I was serving both as a lawyer and putting the deal documents together, because nobody else knew anything about how to put agreements together with Russians, and I didn’t, but I taught myself. And so, we did real well. Giffen got together with Najeeb Halaby, and Jeeb, as you remember, was Kennedy’s head of the the FAA. He was a big guy in aviation at the time.
So Giffen and Halaby were involved in trying to get some financial backers to buy the consulting part of Satra Corporation from Oztemel, but they didn’t tell Oztemel. They wanted everything all set up. And in this world leaks, leaks, leaks, you can’t keep anything secret. Oztemel heard about it from third parties, called Giffen into his office, and they had a knock down drag out, the result of which is Oztemel fired Giffen.
And following that Giffen, who had a good relationship with Bill Verity, the chief executive of Armco Steel—Armco was bought by some other steel company, I forget which—so when Giffen was fired Verity said well, come over and join me, and you can do this general international stuff with a Soviet orientation. Because Armco was real interested in doing steel in Russia. And so Giffen went over to Armco and formed Armco International, of which he was president, fully a subsidiary of Armco Steel. And meanwhile the conditions at Satra for myself, because I was identified as a Giffen guy—
Daniel Satinsky: That’s what I was going to ask you. You’re part of the offending guy here, yeah.
John Huhs: They really went south. And so, I thought, you know, there isn’t much of a future here for me. And I spoke with Oztemel about it very openly, and he said, well, you know, John, yeah, you’ve got to prove yourself to me; right now, it’s a question mark. He was, I mean, God bless him, he was open. Not like guys who would put a shiv in your back if you turned the other way. So, I began to be open to inquiries.
And in 1973 one of my clients, Roy Ash, was running for Treasury Secretary. The President said why don’t you come in and become an assistant to the President in the White House and take over the newly named Office of Management and Budget. And Roy was a big management guy, chief executive of Litton, and he had sterling career at Litton, and it was a great thing. Litton was one of the first real conglomerates.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I vaguely remember this.
John Huhs: Litton, Teledyne, and Textron were the three big conglomerates in the early ’70s and late ‘60s. So, then Roy started casting around for people to join him, and he remembered me, he remembered Russia. When Bill Simon was appointed Treasury Secretary rather than Roy, Roy stayed around for a few months and then he left.
Daniel Satinsky: You had moved out of Moscow. You were in D.C. You were what, 26, 27, something?
John Huhs: I was 29—28 when I got that job, almost 29. And so I began…I was sort of a smart guy, hardworking guy without portfolio, so I got involved with all kinds of things. So technically my portfolio was national security and international affairs, but defense is such a huge thing that I was pretty much involved in the intelligence and State Department things, and a little bit of the international activities at Commerce, a few things with defense, like foreign arms sales—foreign arms sales to Iran.
I began being more open to alternatives on the outside. I’d been introduced to Sam Pisar, a lawyer in Paris, and in 1974 he invited my wife at the time, Vivian, and myself to visit him at his chateau in the valley of the Loire. The chateau was right down the road from Giscard d’Estaing’s chateau. Of course, he had much more money than Pisar. But he was finance minister at the time, and then of course elected president of France, and now he’s dead.
And Sam and I got along pretty well, and so we kept in touch. And periodically he’d call, and he’d say well, how are things going? Geez, I’m not sure…is it really what you wanted it to be, and do you have a future, do you think? I said, you know, I just don’t think the President is going to be reelected, and maybe I should beat the rush. So, in 1976, or maybe it’s early to mid ’76 I resigned, got together with Pisar. We formed offices in New York and Washington that I headed. We called the firm Pisar & Huhs. And the office in Paris was called Cabinet Pisar because I’m not admitted to practice in France.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was consulting or legal work?
John Huhs: Legal. Sam was a lawyer, has an SJD from Harvard, and wrote a seminal book on legal relations between East and West called “Coexistence and Commerce.” And so, Sam and I got along pretty well. He invited me to all kinds of family affairs, and there I met his stepson, who’s now Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: Yeah. Antony, he was just a beginning teenager at the time, but a precocious guy. I was very impressed with Antony. He was going to school in Paris. His father, Don Blinken, is a partner in Warburg Pincus, Warburg something, a Jewish investment banking firm, a top-drawer firm, and was also a philanthropist, made himself piles of money, served for 20 years in a philanthropy position as chairman of the State University of New York.
And so, we’d very often get together in family functions like that, and whereas my contacts with Antony were not all that substantive, you know, still I was impressed with the guy, but my real business was with Sam. Sam and I practiced law together until 1985, so for ten years we practiced law together. And we handled a lot of Soviet matters.
Daniel Satinsky: What kind of—I mean, you don’t—what kind of matters? Was it all trade?
John Huhs: Well, opening a McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow, where we ran up against Viktor Grishin, who was at that time party boss of Moscow. And after we had been years negotiating this thing, he put the kibosh on it saying no, this isn’t my view of how Moscow should look, with arches and all that. He didn’t buy the glitz. He was an old-line Soviet conservative. Others, Revlon for selling cosmetics, producing them there. Seagram, where my real client was Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who was chief executive at the time of Seagram. And he was importing Russian wines and spirits, wanted to import more. Particularly he wanted to get the Stolichnaya distribution for the United States away from Pepsi and Monsieur Henrie. And then a number of machinery companies for selling parts to the Kamaz project, which was still going on.
Ultimately Mack and the Soviets parted ways, and the Sovs did it pretty much themselves after getting whatever they wanted from Mack, and they opened a purchasing commission in Paris to buy the block machining line, the forge line, the stamping line, the paint shop. It was entirely, fully automated—I mean, fully integrated. So they did everything there, because in Soviet times you couldn’t rely on your suppliers to give you high quality stuff on time, so they did it all there. And so, I represented a lot of machinery companies selling things to the Kamaz project.
Daniel Satinsky: And they were paid in hard currency, and this was money from the sale of natural gas to Europe?
John Huhs: I don’t think they had the gas lines in at that time. [There were] lines that were just being constructed in the early ‘70s, and maybe a few gas lines, because I represented Cameron Ironworks, which was a manufacturer of ball valves for gas pipelines. And these pipelines were 60 inches, five feet tall, huge things. And the ball valves were really huge also. So, I guess what we did, yeah. So, we did some, yeah, on the gas line, too, we did some deals.
So, it was very good. We made good money. I was making more money than probably I would have in a New York law firm. And then as Sam got older—he was a concentration camp survivor. He wrote a book about it called “Le Sang de l’espoir” in French, “Of Blood and Hope” in English, about his experiences being born in Bialystok, Poland in 1928, at age 12 being deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where his mother and small sister were sent to the left, and he was sent to the right, ultimately to survive. But the reason he was a survivor is because he was able to focus. You only get one chance. One mistake in a camp, you’re dead. You had to make sure you didn’t make one mistake.
And that really gave Sam a good focus that enabled him to do things early in his career and in his life. But as he got older, he became, how would you say? The relationship between him and me frayed because we fought about too many small things, inconsequential things. Sam could never make a mistake. And I just got tired of backing up and giving up on small things. So sometimes I’d draw a line, or he’d draw a line—oh, we’d go on for months talking about $100 or something. It was really ridiculous.
So, we both agreed that yeah, okay, I’ll go do something else. And he was at that time thinking about retiring, and ultimately, he did in 1990, closed his office in Paris in ’92. When he and I broke up, we closed our offices in the States, and at that time I got together with the LeBoeuf, Lamb firm, a law firm in New York, to help form an international practice for them with the Russia practice or Soviet practice being one of the first elements of it. And in 1990 I established the first office for LeBoeuf, Lamb in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And you were one of the first in that period then, right?
John Huhs: Coudert preceded us by about a year. Coudert was accredited by UpDK first*. Then a firm that doesn’t exist anymore, with Sarah Carey leading its Soviet practice.
Daniel Satinsky: Sarah Carey, yeah. She was at Arnold & Porter.
John Huhs: No, before that. She was with some other firm. I forget the name. Anyway, that firm was accredited.
Daniel Satinsky: So, Sarah Carey did the joint venture agreement for the first joint venture that I worked for in like 1991 or 1992.
John Huhs: Yeah, that could be. She had some good clients. She had a good gift of gab and was able to—and she had an instinct for the jugular. You could see her in a reception. She came into a reception already knowing which people she wanted to talk to, and she’d look around the room, spot a person, go and say whatever she had previously thought of saying to them, give them a card, leave a follow-up, or get a card from them, go on to the next one. Oh, she was a very good business developer.
We were accredited in 1990 or 1991, although we set up our office before being accredited. And we had a relationship with OKO Bank, the Finnish Bank, at that UpDK building on, oh, what is it Dobryninskaya. Yeah, big UpDK building there. And so, OKO Bank had some extra space. They wanted to lay off, we needed some space, so we set up an office there.
I hired the husband of the head of the political section of the U.S. embassy, a guy named Jim Mandel. His wife Judy Mandel was head of the political section. He was a lawyer by trade, and he had excellent Russian, and a good Russian education, much more than I ever had, not in Russian, but at U.S. universities he’d attended. So, he became the first head of our Moscow office. And then we began hiring people. And then in 1991 the IMF engaged us to help them set up in Moscow, and we negotiated space for them in the SEV building, you know that big thing that looks like a book that is located across from the White House.
Daniel Satinsky: I know that building very well, yes. I used to know…my first translator’s former wife ran the restaurant there, and so we used to go hang out. It was a place where you had to have a Russian passport, but I could get in, so yeah.
John Huhs: Okay. So anyway, through representing the IMF and dealing with the management of the SEV building we became acquainted with them. And at that time, remember the wall came down in ’89, and then SEV disintegrated. So, they moved everybody out, and then they began picking and choosing who would come in, like the IMF and some other people. And I said gee, you don’t have a law firm in there yet, you need a law firm. And so, we began negotiating, and end of ’92, beginning of ’93 they—we needed some new space by then, so we rented a wing of the SEV building, you know the open book, so the wing was ours, and we sublet part of that because we didn’t need it all. Ultimately, we did, but we just sublet it on a short-term basis to cover some of the rental. And so, we moved into the SEV building in ’93—
John Huhs: I started working in Russia, which was the first time I ever went there, in September of 1970.
Daniel Satinsky: Of 1970. And who sent you in 1970?
John Huhs: In June of 1970 I was graduated from law school and business school at Stanford, and I did real well. I was No. 4 in my class at law school, an officer on the law review, and about the same kind of stuff in the business school, so I could get a job anywhere. And I interviewed and interviewed, and I interviewed investment banks, law firms, corporations, and nothing really seemed to ring a bell. In a law firm I’d be in a library for the next three years doing research memoranda for senior associates.
In a corporation I interviewed IBM, and they already had the next 20, 30 years of my life all charted out. They said we’ll start you at Armonk, and you’ll be here around three years, and then we’ll move you out to one of our domestic subsidiaries, and if you’re lucky you’ll go to San Jose and you’ll serve there for a few years. And then, since you have an international interest, we’ll probably move you out to one of our foreign subsidiaries. If you’re lucky, maybe we’ll put you in our French subsidiary, and da da-da da-da, and we have a defined benefit pension program, and we have healthcare after you retire and before you retire, all of that stuff, and a competitive salary. They were willing to meet law firms’ salaries, which were $18,000 a year in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Exorbitant amounts, yes.
John Huhs: Exorbitant amounts. Well, it was thought to be an exorbitant amount.
Daniel Satinsky: I know, I know, yeah.
John Huhs: But no, I mean, all I had to do was just put my hook in a cog at IBM and I’d be spit out 30, 40 years later with a nice pension and healthcare and, I don’t know, some other things that would make it easier in my dotage. So, I decided that wasn’t for me. So, I got together with one of my classmates, a fellow named Carl Longley—I can give you these names later if there are any… And we got together with a guy named Jim Giffen. You may have heard about him.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember that name.
John Huhs: He was the guy who had an FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] prosecution against him. And his defense was I was working for the CIA. Well, he wasn’t working for the CIA. He was a source, and the CIA people would come and visit him periodically, usually pretty low-ranking people. That’s really a crappy job in the intelligence community, having to interview businessman. It doesn’t require much of anything. So you don’t have the best and the brightest such as there is in the intelligence community, but all right. But anyway, that was his defense. He was acquitted. And I guess he’s—
Daniel Satinsky: That was much later, right?
John Huhs: It was about ten years ago.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you meet him at school, at university?
John Huhs: I was introduced to him by my finance professor, James McDonald, who passed away a few years ago. And then Jim had a couple of guys he knew in the New York area. He was a California boy, UCLA law grad, born in…where the hell was he born? Somewhere in Los Angeles or in that area. So, he’s a California boy, but he’s living in New York at the time, and he was working for a company called Satra Corporation, S-A-T-R-A is the way you spell it. Ara Oztemel was the head of Satra, the founder of it. He was an Armenian Turk whose father was in the chromium ore business.
So, Turkey and the Soviet Union made chromium ore. There’s a big deposit of it in Turkey and in the western area of the Soviet Union, and some in the Caucasian republics. So, he was making an okay living at it. He moved to New York and continued his father’s business from New York rather than Istanbul. And nothing much going on. Then in 1965 the United Nations imposed a blockage on Rhodesia. Rhodesia, up until that time, was the world’s largest source of chromium ore. And Ara Oztemel would deal in Rhodesian ore, but he found that he could get it a little bit cheaper from the Soviets, who were trying to penetrate the market and be competitive with Rhodesian chrome.
So, all of a sudden, the price of chrome quintupled. Meanwhile, Ara had contracts, multiyear contracts, with the Sovs for chrome, so he was minting money hand over fist. And then he hired this kid Giffen, who was in his early 20s at the time. A nice boy. And Giffen talked to me. He said look, Ara, you have all this money, and you’re specializing now in Soviet chromium ore, why don’t we step out a bit and expand things, and why don’t we get into general international consulting and trade? General international, but probably with developing countries—the Turkeys of the world, the African countries of the world, the South Americas, those kinds of places. And the Sovs—yeah, sure. You have a good contact there in the chromium ore trading company, which was Soyuzpromexport at the time. And so, Ara said fine, and Jim said okay, I’d like to hire a few guys to help me. He said fine, fine, Ara said fine. He said I’d like to interview them first before you actually hire them, although you vet them, and I’m the last step.
So Giffen went to McDonald, among other people, and he said hey, this is what I’m doing, and do you have any people really interested in international work. And he said well, gee, I have two guys in the law business program who have been talking to me about international work and where they can get into it without having to spend time on low level work at law firms and corporations and consulting companies. And so fine, we were introduced, Longley and I. Giffen liked us, and so he asked us to come to New York, which we did, and met Oztemel, and he said fine.
And so Giffen said I’ll meet the salary of whatever law firm or business firm you’re thinking about joining. I said well, you know, Jim, after all of what I’ve been doing, I mean interviewing, I think I’m down to…if I go to a law firm it’s going to be the Cleary Gottlieb firm, which was at that time the most international firm on Wall Street. Cleary Gottlieb was right next to Cravath and Sullivan & Cromwell as being the leading law firms in New York. So Jim said well, okay, look, I’ll do two things for you: one, I’ll start you out at whatever Cleary is. I said well, it’s 18K. He said yeah, okay, we’ll pay you 18K. And also I need a pretty good bonus if I do well, and so let’s set up some metrics that will track whether I’m doing well or not, and whether I deserve a bonus, how much of a bonus, all that kind of thing. So, we did that.
Daniel Satinsky: And up to then you didn’t have any special interest in Russia, you didn’t have any Russian language?
John Huhs: The only thing I did is my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Washington I was required to take a foreign language. And if you remember—this is 1962-63—if you remember, this was, you know, the Sovs had sent up all the Sputniks, they had put people in space, and the movie “The Russians Are Coming” had been released, so I thought gee, if these guys are going to come over here and take us over, it might be useful to speak their language, and so I took Russian at the University of Washington my freshman and sophomore years. The only other contact with Russia, remotely, was I took Leon Lipson’s course in Soviet law at Stanford Law School. And I got an A plus in it. An A plus was good in Stanford Law School in those days.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, you were hired to be a lawyer or a trader?
John Huhs: I was hired to be a consultant, a legal, and financial and business consultant.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were completely inexperienced at this, but you had an education in business and law, right?
John Huhs: Yes. And Giffen was. I mean, we were all kids. And just by luck one of the guys who joined us was Paul O. Proehl, who at that time was a vice chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA, for external relations, i.e. fundraising. He knew most of the chief executives in California and many in the rest of the United States, and he happened to sit next to a guy on a plane, a guy named Zenon Hansen.
Zenon Hansen at that time was the chief executive of the Mack Truck Co. in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And during that period the Sovs were negotiating with Henry Ford to build a big truck plant, the Kamaz plant. And finally, Ford chickened out, i.e., just didn’t want to push the limits of the envelope in Washington. Nixon and Kissinger weren’t quite ready to go to Moscow yet. They were planning it, but they didn’t want to…they wanted to maintain a hostile attitude towards the Sovs until… That was part of their strategy.
So, Hansen said I can do this—my god, I’ve put in truck plants before around the world. But I don’t know anybody in Russia. And Proehl said we have one of the biggest U.S. traders in our company, Ara Oztemel, who does hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of chromium ore a year with them, and he’s the largest thing in the U.S.-Soviet commercial experience. So, Hansen said fine. He said the first thing is let’s go to Moscow and meet the guys.
And so, we set up meetings in Moscow, went to Moscow, met the guys, and it was a very positive meeting. And we invited the guys to then visit Hansen in the U.S. And meanwhile Hansen said gee, it’s going pretty well, why don’t we set up a project office in Moscow. And so, we rented rooms 425, 427, 429 and 431 in the Metropole Hotel on the fourth floor, right on the front, and turned them into offices—just had them take the beds and furniture, and we got office furniture scrounged around from various sources. So, we opened that office towards the end of 1970.
And I spent more time in that office in the next few years than did Longley, who was very rarely there, Giffen, Oztemel or really anybody else at Satra. I had identified, I said what do I have that these guys don’t—well, at least I have a little bit of Russian language that I can then, if people will tolerate me, I can do what Armand Hammer did, I’ll learn five words a day, and then be exposed to it—so I’ll go to Russian parties, I’ll accept invitations to socialize, I’ll do this kind of stuff. And so I spent most of 1970, 1971, 1972, a little bit of 1973 in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: And in those years were there other expats there?
John Huhs: A few. But mostly the Oztemels of the world, that is, the trading types. Some had made some money, like Oztemel, some hadn’t. And they were all sort of crazy kinds of characters. You know, there were real characters involved, because it wasn’t the thing to do in those days. And I wasn’t looking at doing the thing to do, I was looking for a way to have some fun, get some experience, do some interesting things. So fast forward, in June of 1971 the Russians came to the United States. Giffen invited Pierson—I don’t know, what was his first name, James?
Daniel Satinsky: Were they Canadian?
John Huhs: No, Pierson, he was the foreign reporter for Business Week at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. No idea.
John Huhs: I forget the first name. Anyway. So, Pierson attached himself, or embedded himself in our delegation, with the Mack delegation and with the Soviet delegation. He attended all the meetings and everything. Zenon said fine, just let me know what you’re going to print before you print it, you’re under a code of silence, and NDA. So, we signed an agreement at the end of that visit that envisioned the design and construction of of the Kamaz plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, a greenfields facility in Tatarstan on the banks of the Kama River. And Pierson put it on the front page of Business Week under the banner headline “The Billion Dollar Truck Project with the Russians.” Wow.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: In other words, it was a billion dollars. And so, all of a sudden things were beginning to fall a bit in Washington. You could feel it. And of course, in 1972 Nixon and Kissinger went to China. They went to Russia. They signed all the commercial agreements with Russia, and the era of detente bloomed. And our phones lit up, and they’d been lighting up ever since the Mack deal, but they lit up, and there was no way we could handle all the business. It was just, it was bedlam. I mean, sometimes I’d be on four phone conversations at once, just putting one on hold, the other, the other. But it worked. It really worked. And we made good money, and we did good things.
And I was serving both as a lawyer and putting the deal documents together, because nobody else knew anything about how to put agreements together with Russians, and I didn’t, but I taught myself. And so, we did real well. Giffen got together with Najeeb Halaby, and Jeeb, as you remember, was Kennedy’s head of the the FAA. He was a big guy in aviation at the time.
So Giffen and Halaby were involved in trying to get some financial backers to buy the consulting part of Satra Corporation from Oztemel, but they didn’t tell Oztemel. They wanted everything all set up. And in this world leaks, leaks, leaks, you can’t keep anything secret. Oztemel heard about it from third parties, called Giffen into his office, and they had a knock down drag out, the result of which is Oztemel fired Giffen.
And following that Giffen, who had a good relationship with Bill Verity, the chief executive of Armco Steel—Armco was bought by some other steel company, I forget which—so when Giffen was fired Verity said well, come over and join me, and you can do this general international stuff with a Soviet orientation. Because Armco was real interested in doing steel in Russia. And so Giffen went over to Armco and formed Armco International, of which he was president, fully a subsidiary of Armco Steel. And meanwhile the conditions at Satra for myself, because I was identified as a Giffen guy—
Daniel Satinsky: That’s what I was going to ask you. You’re part of the offending guy here, yeah.
John Huhs: They really went south. And so, I thought, you know, there isn’t much of a future here for me. And I spoke with Oztemel about it very openly, and he said, well, you know, John, yeah, you’ve got to prove yourself to me; right now, it’s a question mark. He was, I mean, God bless him, he was open. Not like guys who would put a shiv in your back if you turned the other way. So, I began to be open to inquiries.
And in 1973 one of my clients, Roy Ash, was running for Treasury Secretary. The President said why don’t you come in and become an assistant to the President in the White House and take over the newly named Office of Management and Budget. And Roy was a big management guy, chief executive of Litton, and he had sterling career at Litton, and it was a great thing. Litton was one of the first real conglomerates.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I vaguely remember this.
John Huhs: Litton, Teledyne, and Textron were the three big conglomerates in the early ’70s and late ‘60s. So, then Roy started casting around for people to join him, and he remembered me, he remembered Russia. When Bill Simon was appointed Treasury Secretary rather than Roy, Roy stayed around for a few months and then he left.
Daniel Satinsky: You had moved out of Moscow. You were in D.C. You were what, 26, 27, something?
John Huhs: I was 29—28 when I got that job, almost 29. And so I began…I was sort of a smart guy, hardworking guy without portfolio, so I got involved with all kinds of things. So technically my portfolio was national security and international affairs, but defense is such a huge thing that I was pretty much involved in the intelligence and State Department things, and a little bit of the international activities at Commerce, a few things with defense, like foreign arms sales—foreign arms sales to Iran.
I began being more open to alternatives on the outside. I’d been introduced to Sam Pisar, a lawyer in Paris, and in 1974 he invited my wife at the time, Vivian, and myself to visit him at his chateau in the valley of the Loire. The chateau was right down the road from Giscard d’Estaing’s chateau. Of course, he had much more money than Pisar. But he was finance minister at the time, and then of course elected president of France, and now he’s dead.
And Sam and I got along pretty well, and so we kept in touch. And periodically he’d call, and he’d say well, how are things going? Geez, I’m not sure…is it really what you wanted it to be, and do you have a future, do you think? I said, you know, I just don’t think the President is going to be reelected, and maybe I should beat the rush. So, in 1976, or maybe it’s early to mid ’76 I resigned, got together with Pisar. We formed offices in New York and Washington that I headed. We called the firm Pisar & Huhs. And the office in Paris was called Cabinet Pisar because I’m not admitted to practice in France.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was consulting or legal work?
John Huhs: Legal. Sam was a lawyer, has an SJD from Harvard, and wrote a seminal book on legal relations between East and West called “Coexistence and Commerce.” And so, Sam and I got along pretty well. He invited me to all kinds of family affairs, and there I met his stepson, who’s now Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
John Huhs: Yeah. Antony, he was just a beginning teenager at the time, but a precocious guy. I was very impressed with Antony. He was going to school in Paris. His father, Don Blinken, is a partner in Warburg Pincus, Warburg something, a Jewish investment banking firm, a top-drawer firm, and was also a philanthropist, made himself piles of money, served for 20 years in a philanthropy position as chairman of the State University of New York.
And so, we’d very often get together in family functions like that, and whereas my contacts with Antony were not all that substantive, you know, still I was impressed with the guy, but my real business was with Sam. Sam and I practiced law together until 1985, so for ten years we practiced law together. And we handled a lot of Soviet matters.
Daniel Satinsky: What kind of—I mean, you don’t—what kind of matters? Was it all trade?
John Huhs: Well, opening a McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow, where we ran up against Viktor Grishin, who was at that time party boss of Moscow. And after we had been years negotiating this thing, he put the kibosh on it saying no, this isn’t my view of how Moscow should look, with arches and all that. He didn’t buy the glitz. He was an old-line Soviet conservative. Others, Revlon for selling cosmetics, producing them there. Seagram, where my real client was Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who was chief executive at the time of Seagram. And he was importing Russian wines and spirits, wanted to import more. Particularly he wanted to get the Stolichnaya distribution for the United States away from Pepsi and Monsieur Henrie. And then a number of machinery companies for selling parts to the Kamaz project, which was still going on.
Ultimately Mack and the Soviets parted ways, and the Sovs did it pretty much themselves after getting whatever they wanted from Mack, and they opened a purchasing commission in Paris to buy the block machining line, the forge line, the stamping line, the paint shop. It was entirely, fully automated—I mean, fully integrated. So they did everything there, because in Soviet times you couldn’t rely on your suppliers to give you high quality stuff on time, so they did it all there. And so, I represented a lot of machinery companies selling things to the Kamaz project.
Daniel Satinsky: And they were paid in hard currency, and this was money from the sale of natural gas to Europe?
John Huhs: I don’t think they had the gas lines in at that time. [There were] lines that were just being constructed in the early ‘70s, and maybe a few gas lines, because I represented Cameron Ironworks, which was a manufacturer of ball valves for gas pipelines. And these pipelines were 60 inches, five feet tall, huge things. And the ball valves were really huge also. So, I guess what we did, yeah. So, we did some, yeah, on the gas line, too, we did some deals.
So, it was very good. We made good money. I was making more money than probably I would have in a New York law firm. And then as Sam got older—he was a concentration camp survivor. He wrote a book about it called “Le Sang de l’espoir” in French, “Of Blood and Hope” in English, about his experiences being born in Bialystok, Poland in 1928, at age 12 being deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where his mother and small sister were sent to the left, and he was sent to the right, ultimately to survive. But the reason he was a survivor is because he was able to focus. You only get one chance. One mistake in a camp, you’re dead. You had to make sure you didn’t make one mistake.
And that really gave Sam a good focus that enabled him to do things early in his career and in his life. But as he got older, he became, how would you say? The relationship between him and me frayed because we fought about too many small things, inconsequential things. Sam could never make a mistake. And I just got tired of backing up and giving up on small things. So sometimes I’d draw a line, or he’d draw a line—oh, we’d go on for months talking about $100 or something. It was really ridiculous.
So, we both agreed that yeah, okay, I’ll go do something else. And he was at that time thinking about retiring, and ultimately, he did in 1990, closed his office in Paris in ’92. When he and I broke up, we closed our offices in the States, and at that time I got together with the LeBoeuf, Lamb firm, a law firm in New York, to help form an international practice for them with the Russia practice or Soviet practice being one of the first elements of it. And in 1990 I established the first office for LeBoeuf, Lamb in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And you were one of the first in that period then, right?
John Huhs: Coudert preceded us by about a year. Coudert was accredited by UpDK first*. Then a firm that doesn’t exist anymore, with Sarah Carey leading its Soviet practice.
Daniel Satinsky: Sarah Carey, yeah. She was at Arnold & Porter.
John Huhs: No, before that. She was with some other firm. I forget the name. Anyway, that firm was accredited.
Daniel Satinsky: So, Sarah Carey did the joint venture agreement for the first joint venture that I worked for in like 1991 or 1992.
John Huhs: Yeah, that could be. She had some good clients. She had a good gift of gab and was able to—and she had an instinct for the jugular. You could see her in a reception. She came into a reception already knowing which people she wanted to talk to, and she’d look around the room, spot a person, go and say whatever she had previously thought of saying to them, give them a card, leave a follow-up, or get a card from them, go on to the next one. Oh, she was a very good business developer.
We were accredited in 1990 or 1991, although we set up our office before being accredited. And we had a relationship with OKO Bank, the Finnish Bank, at that UpDK building on, oh, what is it Dobryninskaya. Yeah, big UpDK building there. And so, OKO Bank had some extra space. They wanted to lay off, we needed some space, so we set up an office there.
I hired the husband of the head of the political section of the U.S. embassy, a guy named Jim Mandel. His wife Judy Mandel was head of the political section. He was a lawyer by trade, and he had excellent Russian, and a good Russian education, much more than I ever had, not in Russian, but at U.S. universities he’d attended. So, he became the first head of our Moscow office. And then we began hiring people. And then in 1991 the IMF engaged us to help them set up in Moscow, and we negotiated space for them in the SEV building, you know that big thing that looks like a book that is located across from the White House.
Daniel Satinsky: I know that building very well, yes. I used to know…my first translator’s former wife ran the restaurant there, and so we used to go hang out. It was a place where you had to have a Russian passport, but I could get in, so yeah.
John Huhs: Okay. So anyway, through representing the IMF and dealing with the management of the SEV building we became acquainted with them. And at that time, remember the wall came down in ’89, and then SEV disintegrated. So, they moved everybody out, and then they began picking and choosing who would come in, like the IMF and some other people. And I said gee, you don’t have a law firm in there yet, you need a law firm. And so, we began negotiating, and end of ’92, beginning of ’93 they—we needed some new space by then, so we rented a wing of the SEV building, you know the open book, so the wing was ours, and we sublet part of that because we didn’t need it all. Ultimately, we did, but we just sublet it on a short-term basis to cover some of the rental. And so, we moved into the SEV building in ’93—
Daniel Satinsky: And you were living in Moscow by then?
John Huhs: I was living in both places. I always had a place in New York. In 1978 I bought a place on East 74th Street right around Park Avenue, a duplex penthouse right in the midst of the fiscal crisis, that I ultimately sold once Renee and I were married for, I don’t know, 10, 15 times what I paid for it, something like that. It was just one of those things. Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time. So, we moved into the SEV building. I pretty much always, or most times, not always in the ‘80s, but in the ‘70s I generally lived in the Hotel National, and particularly in the Lenin Suite. That was my favorite.
And I knew all the administrators there, and if I were just coming back in a week or so, leaving and coming back, I’d pay for extra nights, or sometimes even eat a few rent-free nights and they’d keep me around. And sometimes they had a higher-ranking guy than I, so sometimes I was kicked out and I’d have to move to another room. 439 was my next favorite. It was bigger than the Lenin Suite, about twice the size, but I don’t know, I just, I liked…the Lenin Suite was preserved exactly the way it was when Vladimir Ilych lived there, and so 439 wasn’t. It was really nice.
And then in the ‘90s and in the 2000s, up until 2012, I had apartments in Moscow. I lived for a while in Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya*. That’s the artsy-crafty place that the Stalin wedding cake building where Plisetskaya lived and all that kind of chi-chi stuff, and I lived there for a while. I lived, oh, gee, down near Kievskiy Vokzal* for a while. There’s a nice apartment complex down there. Rostovskaya Naberzhenaya. Ultimately, I got the place I really liked, which was just walking distance from the office, and that was at Pushkinskaya Ploschad*, just walking distance from…what Pereulok*? Nikitsky, they called it, but it was Ulitsa* Belinskogo before it was Nikitsky Pereulok. When we first moved there, it was a Belinskogo.
I just walked a few hundred meters down from Pushkinskaya, so I’d walk to the office, unless it was really crappy weather out. I already knew legal Russian pretty well from my time with Satra and Sam, but... So, I learned a lot of my interpersonal Russian from them. I remember in 1993, in the siege of the White House, I was living right near Kievskiy Vokzal, and I walked over and watched the siege, because they’d taken over our offices.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. That was right next to your office then, right, in the SEV building, yeah?
John Huhs: Well, not next to it, in it. And they really trashed our place. They took all our petty cash. They took all of our computers and whatever, and then they set it on fire, and then the firemen doused it with water. Oh, what a mess. It was unlivable, so we couldn’t live there. We moved into a domik* owned by Earl Worsham of the Worsham Group. He owned these small domiks around. He did a lot of real estate in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Let me ask you, I want to go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. What’s your recollection? Did you see that coming? Did it change things dramatically for you? How did you feel at the time while that was going on?
John Huhs: Well, at the beginning of December 1991 it was in the cards, obviously. They had that Minsk meeting. They created this SNG [Commonwealth of Independent States], and it was… So, it was only a matter of time, I felt. And before then, with the putsch in August of 1991, and then with Gorbachev being rescued by Yeltsin, being flown back to Moscow on a plane organized by Yeltsin, he then had a joint news conference where Gorbachev was really short, and Boris Nikolayevich was very tall. It was like Mutt and Jeff. And Boris Nikolayevich, he treated Mikhail Sergeyevich like sort of his pet. It looked like he was really talking down to him and sort of patting him on the head—I’ll make it all right, don’t worry. So, I saw that and I just thought nah, it’s not going to last. So that was about three months in advance, I’d say, that I came to that sort of a firm conclusion, so I began briefing our clients and preparing for whatever needed to be done.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you think that it was impending disaster for you and your clients, or did you think that it was a period of wait and see? How were you looking at it in terms of the business outlook?
John Huhs: From a business outlook I thought probably if the whole thing fell apart, we were still in the Russian Federation, which was the biggest and strongest, and most industrially advanced part of the Soviet Union, so I thought, yeah, you know, shit happens, so we’ll just live with it, we’ll roll with the punches. And all of our clients, of course, had all kinds of questions, asked me to do research on this, research on that. The law firm was busy at 150% of capacity there in Moscow trying to handle all that, and we really couldn’t, because who knew what was—Gorbachev himself didn’t know what was going to happen.
And finally, the real key to it came in early December of 1991, when a friend of mine, a Russian friend of mine, was appointed Defense Minister of the Russian Federation. And we visited his office, Mandel and I, some day in December, and his office, the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, consisted of Kokoshin, Kokoshin, and Kokoshin. One guy in one office with a Russian flag and a Soviet flag outside, and with, I don’t know, one or two militia men standing guard there.
And Kokoshin welcomed us in, and I said well, Andrei, are you getting ready for your move down to Frunze, which is the Soviet defense ministry. He said, well, I don’t know, maybe, and don’t you tell anybody you’ve been talking with me about this—nobody, nobody, nobody. There’s so much rumor going on, rumors flying here and there and everything. So I said Andrei, good luck, and thanks for seeing us.
I just ran into Andrei, I don’t know, a few years ago on a plane to Moscow and we had a nice talk. He’s doing a lot of interesting things. But he never did become defense minister of the RF after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They combined the two defense ministries, and there was only one chair and two ministers, and that fight Kokoshin lost. So I just looked at it as just another problem to solve.
Daniel Satinsky: Just another problem to solve.
John Huhs: There were all kinds of problems to solve in those days. Beginning with ’92 things were changing at warp speed in the Soviet Union, so we were constantly trying to keep up with things. And we just said another thing’s going to happen. Probably the RF will split off. Maybe this SNG* will come to something, which it never did. So, we’ll do that.
And so, in January of Nineteen Ninety—no, it was December 25, 1991, that they voted to annul the Union Treaty and the Russian Federation then bloomed. The Soviet Union disintegrated. So, we were just booked with work, more work than we knew what to do with. Our clients didn’t want to give up what they’d been doing. Some of them were doing some interesting things. Pratt & Whitney, for example, they were putting in a jet engine factory out in Perm.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John Huhs: The Russian equivalent of the JT9D. And Boeing, we were representing the Boeing company there, and they wanted to know what was going on. And yeah, it was really—
Daniel Satinsky: Boeing had a design bureau there, right, didn’t they?
John Huhs: I set it up.
Daniel Satinsky: With Luxoft. Well, what became Luxoft, but it was…
John Huhs: Well, what we did is we set up a Boeing technical research center in the McDonald’s building in ’91. And the first head of it, Mike Friend who ultimately married my office manager, Laura Bernier, so we were real close to Mike and we did a lot of stuff for him. And he was just one block up from us. Our office in Moscow, Nikitsky Pereulok, was just one block from the McDonald’s building.
Daniel Satinsky: But most of your clients were Western companies.
John Huhs: That began to change in the second half of the ‘90s, first half of the 2000s.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But at that ’91, ’92 it was foreign companies who were there doing business?
John Huhs: And some Russian companies doing business overseas and in [the United States]. For example, the Foreign Trade Organization, Electronorgtechnica. We represented Nintendo to sell them or to license to them—license Nintendo to use the Russian video game Tetris. And Nintendo really wanted it for not only its Nintendo entertainment system and its other systems, but also for something new they were bringing out, a handheld game called Game Boy. And they loaded a Tetris cartridge with every Game Boy they sold, and it was phenomenally popular. Within a year I think sales were 50 million or something like that, individual units. And so, this was a big deal for Nintendo.
And Nintendo, from our dealing with Electronorgtechnica, which had the rights to it, the Nintendo folks realized that the Russians weren’t handling their intellectual property very well, so Nintendo didn’t want the Russians to mess up Tetris. So, what they did is they convinced the Russians to engage us, me, to negotiate any licenses or anything to do with Tetris Electronorgtechnica had to use us for, and Nintendo would pay for it out of Electronorgtechnica royalties from Tetris. Our check came from Nintendo. We didn’t have to wait.
And we became pretty good friends with the Electronorgtechnica people. And ultimately, they established an office in Bellevue, Washington that I helped them establish in Nineteen Ninety…I guess it was in 1991. Yeah, it was under Soyuz. Yeah, but everything was falling apart then. You could see even the foreign trade organizations were screwing around and spending their money like it really was theirs.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when the Soviet Union comes apart, and the Russian government’s sort of now figuring out where to go, did you have any relationship with the Russian government? Did they come to you and say help us with figuring out our foreign relations legislation or our business legislation? Did they approach you?
John Huhs: No. We knew a lot of officials. For example, I was able to introduce a lot of clients to Yegor Gaidar, but he didn’t give us any work to do for him because he’d have to pay us. We weren’t going to do it for free. And the U.S. government wasn’t looking to us. They were looking to the accounting firms to do the kind of work that the U.S. government wanted done. And the Russians said I don’t know whether we need this stuff or not, but as long as it’s free, fine, let’s see if there’s anything in it. So, we did have a lot of contact with the Russian government at all levels, with Boris Nikolayevich, with, ach, privatization.
Daniel Satinsky: Chubais.
John Huhs: Chubais, yes, Chubais. A lot of contact with Chubais. And in the early 1990s, we introduced a lot of American lawyers, businessmen, whatever to Chubais. Now one other thing I’ll mention, which may or may not be relevant, is that in 1985 I was the only guy in the United States, practically, putting on Soviet programs for the American Bar Association. And I’d usually do one a year—oh, excellent publicity. It was worth the work, the publicity with this. So, I’d do probably one a year.
And in 1985 I got together with the American Bar Association and some other lawyers, and we contacted the Sovs—I contacted the Sovs, really—and we decided to form a lawyers group between the American Bar Association and the Association of Soviet Lawyers. It was an informal group. I don’t think we ever…we didn’t have a name for it, I don’t think, other than it’s the joint working group or I don’t know, several things. And that was a big part of the legal relationship between the U.S. and Soviet Union from 1985 until 1995.
After 1995, it sort of tailed off, I lost contact with it. The other guy who was helping me organize it, a San Francisco attorney, he had other things to do also, and he was getting older, and you can only do so many things as you get older, so I’ve found. And so that may or may not be relevant to what you’re talking about. We did a few things, like we sponsored a project on Russian securities law. And I and—
Daniel Satinsky: In ’85?
John Huhs: No, this was ’91. It could have been ’90. Because they were just coming out with securities, and securities laws, and stock companies and all of it. They needed a regulatory framework, they thought, and so I and a couple of guys from the Cleary Gottlieb firm—good guys—they really bore the laboring oar. I’m not a securities lawyer. I sort of brought the Russian part of it with me, they brought the U.S. part. And we did some wonderful work for the Russians on suggesting securities legislation, even drafting it, not completely, but in draft form to see what they thought about it.
And then the Russians sort of began to break off the contact, or not follow up on contacts, and lo and behold they came up with their own securities legislation, which borrowed a few things from us, but was a typically Russian invention. A lot of Russian things that Americans would have never thought about being relevant to securities regulation.
And we never did much in representing any of the accounting firms in the accounting engagements with the various Russian agencies. A lot of that was handled by the World Bank. And the U.S. part of it, a lot of that sometimes went through the World Bank because the World Bank funded it. So, U.S. money goes into the World Bank, then it goes out the door. And then there were some U.S. funded projects, and then there was this stock fund that invested in—a U.S. government stock fund. I forget the name of it now.
Daniel Satinsky: TUSRIF, was that it?
John Huhs: What?
Daniel Satinsky: TUSRIF. T-U-S-R-I-F. It was the U.S.—
John Huhs: The U.S. Russia Investment Fund. Yeah. That sounds like it, yeah. Didn’t have much to do with it. That was done by somebody else.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you have anything to do with HIID and Harvard, their whole—they worked with Chubais I know, and Gaidar on loans for shares.
John Huhs: Yeah, not early on. But in the year 2000 or 2001 I became the outside general counsel of the Harvard group that was put together as a result of Allison’s work in the Soviet Union, Graham Allison. He said well, Harvard doesn’t want to do this anymore, but we’re doing great stuff, why don’t we put together a private organization. So, they put together the IEA, the International Economic Association—yeah, IEA. And they hired [Van McCormick] to handle all the staff work for them and they gave him the title of director.
Daniel Satinsky: So you weren’t, in terms of…you were sort of part of the large corporate expansion in Russia in that period, in the ‘90s, the Soviet Union.
John Huhs: We had a few small clients, but small companies couldn’t afford our fees. They wanted to be able to afford our fees. And we were expensive. Not as expensive as some others, but… And we did good work. And we were expanding as fast as we could. We never had—
Daniel Satinsky: How big of an office did you have?
John Huhs: At its height, not in the ‘90s, but in the 2000s we had over 100 people. And what happened in 2012, previously LeBouef Lamb had merged with Dewey Ballantine to form Dewey & LeBouef, and the trouble is LeBouef Lamb was debt-free and very expense conscious, Dewey Ballantine had and wasn’t expense conscious, and the LeBouef Lamb new management, younger generation, took over and they ran the firm into bankruptcy in a period of 4 years.
The merger with Dewey Ballantine was in September 2007. I was ousted from firm management formally in December 31, 2006. But I stayed on as of counsel, so I could do as much or as little work as I wanted. It ended up being that people were still asking me to do work. I needed the firm’s help. I needed to use the office over there. I knew everybody. And the firm needed me because I’d also helped form their international department, so I knew where all the skeletons were buried. We had 23 offices worldwide in 2012—I mean, 23 overseas plus some domestic. So, we were…so they kept me on.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, looking back, when you’re saying what you thought in the ‘90s about how Russia was going to turn out as a market, as an opportunity, has it turned out to be as you would have expected in those days? Do you know what I’m saying about that?
John Huhs: It has, but. The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia of course has not been good.
Daniel Satinsky: No, of course. Right.
John Huhs: Since the Ukraine thing and all that, it just hasn’t been good. And if the bilateral relationship had continued past, say, 2005, like it was from 2000 to 2005, it would have—yeah, they would have hit the ball out of the park, I think. The sanctions have really put a damper on U.S. companies doing business there. And particularly now with the cancel culture chief executives are afraid of their shadows. They don’t want a Twitter mob burning crosses outside their homes. And going to Russia, and Russia isn’t a friend of the LGBTQ+’s, and they’re not a friend of these, and that. So, if not for that it would have. They were really setting the world on fire, and so were we, until the crisis of…it was 1997?
John Huhs: I was living in both places. I always had a place in New York. In 1978 I bought a place on East 74th Street right around Park Avenue, a duplex penthouse right in the midst of the fiscal crisis, that I ultimately sold once Renee and I were married for, I don’t know, 10, 15 times what I paid for it, something like that. It was just one of those things. Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time. So, we moved into the SEV building. I pretty much always, or most times, not always in the ‘80s, but in the ‘70s I generally lived in the Hotel National, and particularly in the Lenin Suite. That was my favorite.
And I knew all the administrators there, and if I were just coming back in a week or so, leaving and coming back, I’d pay for extra nights, or sometimes even eat a few rent-free nights and they’d keep me around. And sometimes they had a higher-ranking guy than I, so sometimes I was kicked out and I’d have to move to another room. 439 was my next favorite. It was bigger than the Lenin Suite, about twice the size, but I don’t know, I just, I liked…the Lenin Suite was preserved exactly the way it was when Vladimir Ilych lived there, and so 439 wasn’t. It was really nice.
And then in the ‘90s and in the 2000s, up until 2012, I had apartments in Moscow. I lived for a while in Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya*. That’s the artsy-crafty place that the Stalin wedding cake building where Plisetskaya lived and all that kind of chi-chi stuff, and I lived there for a while. I lived, oh, gee, down near Kievskiy Vokzal* for a while. There’s a nice apartment complex down there. Rostovskaya Naberzhenaya. Ultimately, I got the place I really liked, which was just walking distance from the office, and that was at Pushkinskaya Ploschad*, just walking distance from…what Pereulok*? Nikitsky, they called it, but it was Ulitsa* Belinskogo before it was Nikitsky Pereulok. When we first moved there, it was a Belinskogo.
I just walked a few hundred meters down from Pushkinskaya, so I’d walk to the office, unless it was really crappy weather out. I already knew legal Russian pretty well from my time with Satra and Sam, but... So, I learned a lot of my interpersonal Russian from them. I remember in 1993, in the siege of the White House, I was living right near Kievskiy Vokzal, and I walked over and watched the siege, because they’d taken over our offices.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. That was right next to your office then, right, in the SEV building, yeah?
John Huhs: Well, not next to it, in it. And they really trashed our place. They took all our petty cash. They took all of our computers and whatever, and then they set it on fire, and then the firemen doused it with water. Oh, what a mess. It was unlivable, so we couldn’t live there. We moved into a domik* owned by Earl Worsham of the Worsham Group. He owned these small domiks around. He did a lot of real estate in Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: Let me ask you, I want to go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. What’s your recollection? Did you see that coming? Did it change things dramatically for you? How did you feel at the time while that was going on?
John Huhs: Well, at the beginning of December 1991 it was in the cards, obviously. They had that Minsk meeting. They created this SNG [Commonwealth of Independent States], and it was… So, it was only a matter of time, I felt. And before then, with the putsch in August of 1991, and then with Gorbachev being rescued by Yeltsin, being flown back to Moscow on a plane organized by Yeltsin, he then had a joint news conference where Gorbachev was really short, and Boris Nikolayevich was very tall. It was like Mutt and Jeff. And Boris Nikolayevich, he treated Mikhail Sergeyevich like sort of his pet. It looked like he was really talking down to him and sort of patting him on the head—I’ll make it all right, don’t worry. So, I saw that and I just thought nah, it’s not going to last. So that was about three months in advance, I’d say, that I came to that sort of a firm conclusion, so I began briefing our clients and preparing for whatever needed to be done.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you think that it was impending disaster for you and your clients, or did you think that it was a period of wait and see? How were you looking at it in terms of the business outlook?
John Huhs: From a business outlook I thought probably if the whole thing fell apart, we were still in the Russian Federation, which was the biggest and strongest, and most industrially advanced part of the Soviet Union, so I thought, yeah, you know, shit happens, so we’ll just live with it, we’ll roll with the punches. And all of our clients, of course, had all kinds of questions, asked me to do research on this, research on that. The law firm was busy at 150% of capacity there in Moscow trying to handle all that, and we really couldn’t, because who knew what was—Gorbachev himself didn’t know what was going to happen.
And finally, the real key to it came in early December of 1991, when a friend of mine, a Russian friend of mine, was appointed Defense Minister of the Russian Federation. And we visited his office, Mandel and I, some day in December, and his office, the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, consisted of Kokoshin, Kokoshin, and Kokoshin. One guy in one office with a Russian flag and a Soviet flag outside, and with, I don’t know, one or two militia men standing guard there.
And Kokoshin welcomed us in, and I said well, Andrei, are you getting ready for your move down to Frunze, which is the Soviet defense ministry. He said, well, I don’t know, maybe, and don’t you tell anybody you’ve been talking with me about this—nobody, nobody, nobody. There’s so much rumor going on, rumors flying here and there and everything. So I said Andrei, good luck, and thanks for seeing us.
I just ran into Andrei, I don’t know, a few years ago on a plane to Moscow and we had a nice talk. He’s doing a lot of interesting things. But he never did become defense minister of the RF after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They combined the two defense ministries, and there was only one chair and two ministers, and that fight Kokoshin lost. So I just looked at it as just another problem to solve.
Daniel Satinsky: Just another problem to solve.
John Huhs: There were all kinds of problems to solve in those days. Beginning with ’92 things were changing at warp speed in the Soviet Union, so we were constantly trying to keep up with things. And we just said another thing’s going to happen. Probably the RF will split off. Maybe this SNG* will come to something, which it never did. So, we’ll do that.
And so, in January of Nineteen Ninety—no, it was December 25, 1991, that they voted to annul the Union Treaty and the Russian Federation then bloomed. The Soviet Union disintegrated. So, we were just booked with work, more work than we knew what to do with. Our clients didn’t want to give up what they’d been doing. Some of them were doing some interesting things. Pratt & Whitney, for example, they were putting in a jet engine factory out in Perm.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John Huhs: The Russian equivalent of the JT9D. And Boeing, we were representing the Boeing company there, and they wanted to know what was going on. And yeah, it was really—
Daniel Satinsky: Boeing had a design bureau there, right, didn’t they?
John Huhs: I set it up.
Daniel Satinsky: With Luxoft. Well, what became Luxoft, but it was…
John Huhs: Well, what we did is we set up a Boeing technical research center in the McDonald’s building in ’91. And the first head of it, Mike Friend who ultimately married my office manager, Laura Bernier, so we were real close to Mike and we did a lot of stuff for him. And he was just one block up from us. Our office in Moscow, Nikitsky Pereulok, was just one block from the McDonald’s building.
Daniel Satinsky: But most of your clients were Western companies.
John Huhs: That began to change in the second half of the ‘90s, first half of the 2000s.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But at that ’91, ’92 it was foreign companies who were there doing business?
John Huhs: And some Russian companies doing business overseas and in [the United States]. For example, the Foreign Trade Organization, Electronorgtechnica. We represented Nintendo to sell them or to license to them—license Nintendo to use the Russian video game Tetris. And Nintendo really wanted it for not only its Nintendo entertainment system and its other systems, but also for something new they were bringing out, a handheld game called Game Boy. And they loaded a Tetris cartridge with every Game Boy they sold, and it was phenomenally popular. Within a year I think sales were 50 million or something like that, individual units. And so, this was a big deal for Nintendo.
And Nintendo, from our dealing with Electronorgtechnica, which had the rights to it, the Nintendo folks realized that the Russians weren’t handling their intellectual property very well, so Nintendo didn’t want the Russians to mess up Tetris. So, what they did is they convinced the Russians to engage us, me, to negotiate any licenses or anything to do with Tetris Electronorgtechnica had to use us for, and Nintendo would pay for it out of Electronorgtechnica royalties from Tetris. Our check came from Nintendo. We didn’t have to wait.
And we became pretty good friends with the Electronorgtechnica people. And ultimately, they established an office in Bellevue, Washington that I helped them establish in Nineteen Ninety…I guess it was in 1991. Yeah, it was under Soyuz. Yeah, but everything was falling apart then. You could see even the foreign trade organizations were screwing around and spending their money like it really was theirs.
Daniel Satinsky: So, when the Soviet Union comes apart, and the Russian government’s sort of now figuring out where to go, did you have any relationship with the Russian government? Did they come to you and say help us with figuring out our foreign relations legislation or our business legislation? Did they approach you?
John Huhs: No. We knew a lot of officials. For example, I was able to introduce a lot of clients to Yegor Gaidar, but he didn’t give us any work to do for him because he’d have to pay us. We weren’t going to do it for free. And the U.S. government wasn’t looking to us. They were looking to the accounting firms to do the kind of work that the U.S. government wanted done. And the Russians said I don’t know whether we need this stuff or not, but as long as it’s free, fine, let’s see if there’s anything in it. So, we did have a lot of contact with the Russian government at all levels, with Boris Nikolayevich, with, ach, privatization.
Daniel Satinsky: Chubais.
John Huhs: Chubais, yes, Chubais. A lot of contact with Chubais. And in the early 1990s, we introduced a lot of American lawyers, businessmen, whatever to Chubais. Now one other thing I’ll mention, which may or may not be relevant, is that in 1985 I was the only guy in the United States, practically, putting on Soviet programs for the American Bar Association. And I’d usually do one a year—oh, excellent publicity. It was worth the work, the publicity with this. So, I’d do probably one a year.
And in 1985 I got together with the American Bar Association and some other lawyers, and we contacted the Sovs—I contacted the Sovs, really—and we decided to form a lawyers group between the American Bar Association and the Association of Soviet Lawyers. It was an informal group. I don’t think we ever…we didn’t have a name for it, I don’t think, other than it’s the joint working group or I don’t know, several things. And that was a big part of the legal relationship between the U.S. and Soviet Union from 1985 until 1995.
After 1995, it sort of tailed off, I lost contact with it. The other guy who was helping me organize it, a San Francisco attorney, he had other things to do also, and he was getting older, and you can only do so many things as you get older, so I’ve found. And so that may or may not be relevant to what you’re talking about. We did a few things, like we sponsored a project on Russian securities law. And I and—
Daniel Satinsky: In ’85?
John Huhs: No, this was ’91. It could have been ’90. Because they were just coming out with securities, and securities laws, and stock companies and all of it. They needed a regulatory framework, they thought, and so I and a couple of guys from the Cleary Gottlieb firm—good guys—they really bore the laboring oar. I’m not a securities lawyer. I sort of brought the Russian part of it with me, they brought the U.S. part. And we did some wonderful work for the Russians on suggesting securities legislation, even drafting it, not completely, but in draft form to see what they thought about it.
And then the Russians sort of began to break off the contact, or not follow up on contacts, and lo and behold they came up with their own securities legislation, which borrowed a few things from us, but was a typically Russian invention. A lot of Russian things that Americans would have never thought about being relevant to securities regulation.
And we never did much in representing any of the accounting firms in the accounting engagements with the various Russian agencies. A lot of that was handled by the World Bank. And the U.S. part of it, a lot of that sometimes went through the World Bank because the World Bank funded it. So, U.S. money goes into the World Bank, then it goes out the door. And then there were some U.S. funded projects, and then there was this stock fund that invested in—a U.S. government stock fund. I forget the name of it now.
Daniel Satinsky: TUSRIF, was that it?
John Huhs: What?
Daniel Satinsky: TUSRIF. T-U-S-R-I-F. It was the U.S.—
John Huhs: The U.S. Russia Investment Fund. Yeah. That sounds like it, yeah. Didn’t have much to do with it. That was done by somebody else.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you have anything to do with HIID and Harvard, their whole—they worked with Chubais I know, and Gaidar on loans for shares.
John Huhs: Yeah, not early on. But in the year 2000 or 2001 I became the outside general counsel of the Harvard group that was put together as a result of Allison’s work in the Soviet Union, Graham Allison. He said well, Harvard doesn’t want to do this anymore, but we’re doing great stuff, why don’t we put together a private organization. So, they put together the IEA, the International Economic Association—yeah, IEA. And they hired [Van McCormick] to handle all the staff work for them and they gave him the title of director.
Daniel Satinsky: So you weren’t, in terms of…you were sort of part of the large corporate expansion in Russia in that period, in the ‘90s, the Soviet Union.
John Huhs: We had a few small clients, but small companies couldn’t afford our fees. They wanted to be able to afford our fees. And we were expensive. Not as expensive as some others, but… And we did good work. And we were expanding as fast as we could. We never had—
Daniel Satinsky: How big of an office did you have?
John Huhs: At its height, not in the ‘90s, but in the 2000s we had over 100 people. And what happened in 2012, previously LeBouef Lamb had merged with Dewey Ballantine to form Dewey & LeBouef, and the trouble is LeBouef Lamb was debt-free and very expense conscious, Dewey Ballantine had and wasn’t expense conscious, and the LeBouef Lamb new management, younger generation, took over and they ran the firm into bankruptcy in a period of 4 years.
The merger with Dewey Ballantine was in September 2007. I was ousted from firm management formally in December 31, 2006. But I stayed on as of counsel, so I could do as much or as little work as I wanted. It ended up being that people were still asking me to do work. I needed the firm’s help. I needed to use the office over there. I knew everybody. And the firm needed me because I’d also helped form their international department, so I knew where all the skeletons were buried. We had 23 offices worldwide in 2012—I mean, 23 overseas plus some domestic. So, we were…so they kept me on.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, looking back, when you’re saying what you thought in the ‘90s about how Russia was going to turn out as a market, as an opportunity, has it turned out to be as you would have expected in those days? Do you know what I’m saying about that?
John Huhs: It has, but. The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia of course has not been good.
Daniel Satinsky: No, of course. Right.
John Huhs: Since the Ukraine thing and all that, it just hasn’t been good. And if the bilateral relationship had continued past, say, 2005, like it was from 2000 to 2005, it would have—yeah, they would have hit the ball out of the park, I think. The sanctions have really put a damper on U.S. companies doing business there. And particularly now with the cancel culture chief executives are afraid of their shadows. They don’t want a Twitter mob burning crosses outside their homes. And going to Russia, and Russia isn’t a friend of the LGBTQ+’s, and they’re not a friend of these, and that. So, if not for that it would have. They were really setting the world on fire, and so were we, until the crisis of…it was 1997?
Daniel Satinsky: Eight.
John Huhs: ’98.
Daniel Satinsky: 1998 was the big default, right, the devaluation.
John Huhs: Yeah. And that we really did well. They devalued the currency. And we were still in Nikitsky Pereulok, and in the same building was our bank. What was it then? It was a French bank. Oh, what the hell was it? It was Credit…
Daniel Satinsky: Credit Lyonnais. Lyonnais, yeah?
John Huhs: No, it wasn’t Lyonnais. It was Credit something-or-other. Anyway. I can find it. And they were in the same building. We kept our accounts with them. And when the ruble was devalued, I called the head of the branch. I had a million dollars in rubles sitting up there. You know what that asshole Chubais did? He knew that devaluation was coming, and so on Friday—remember, the devaluation was on Sunday—on Friday he paid a million dollars that his Privatization Ministry owed us for fees.
We were really big in—what we did, I didn’t add that—but in order to get some of that World Bank business we hired one of the World Bank people who happened to be a lawyer to work with us, Barbara Evans, and she landed a bunch of World Bank projects with the privatization ministry. So, the way it was paid, World Bank would transfer the money to Chubais, Chubais would transfer the money to us in rubles. And he paid everything, millions, on Friday. So, we were sitting with all these millions. And the bastard then devalues the currency on Sunday. So, first thing Monday morning I was on with the bank, and they said, you know, our internal exchange rate hasn’t been changed yet; if you want, I can change all of your rubles into dollars at Friday’s rate. Okay. I said—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, really. What’s the decision there?
John Huhs: Right. And to show you what the other Russians were thinking, my office manager, a Tatarka, Tanya Myanso, I don’t know if you’ve ever met her. Anyway, great girl. She borrowed enough money to buy a car from me—or from the firm. I prepaid some of her salary with some of those rubles that I didn’t have the French bank take. And she went out and bought a car from the Volkswagen distributorship that still had its pre-devaluation prices, which were a lot better in rubles than the post devaluation price, for the family and friends. You know how relationships are.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
John Huhs: So that’s what a lot of Russians did, buy anything—
Daniel Satinsky: Buy anything to get value, yeah.
John Huhs: Like a new car. So yeah. Other than that, it just produced a lot of new business for us because firms were wondering what do we do. Allen & Overy’s answer was to close their Moscow office a few months later in October, November, something like that.
Daniel Satinsky: Who was that that closed it?
John Huhs: Allen & Overy.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
John Huhs: After August it was October, November or something they closed the Moscow office, only to reopen a little bit later. Reopened a couple years later. And a number of other firms did the same thing, particularly Clifford Chance did it. The English firms did. I don’t know what it is about an English firm that they were the ones that were closing. And we, on the other hand, were just booked solid, wanting to add people. But I didn’t start hiring until I was really sure that we were going to maintain this. But that wasn’t until 1999 that I saw that this was going to be… But it was a bonanza for us. And for the Russians it really made an impression on them, those who kept track of the—
Daniel Satinsky: That stayed, yeah.
John Huhs: These guys don’t cut and run like the Brits. They stayed with us. And not only that, they help us, they do this, they do that and make things happen. That’s what we do, we make things happen.
Daniel Satinsky: Did any of your American clients close up?
John Huhs: A few closed. Most just reduced staff and were going to see how does this play out.
Daniel Satinsky: How does it play out, yeah.
John Huhs: The ones who didn’t close, like the Boeing company, came back and really expanded. Then 1999 came along, if you remember the long-term credit something crisis in the Far East, and there was a real meltdown in the U.S. in the value of the dollar, and there was the…what was it, the Plaza Hotel agreement. That had more of an effect on our American clients. Nothing on the Russians. It didn’t affect them. But that had more of an effect on Americans.
Daniel Satinsky: So did you ever have much to do with AmCham or… And if you did or didn’t, why?
John Huhs: I was too busy.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
John Huhs: Too busy making money. I didn’t need introductions because they just came over the transom word of mouth. We had more business than we knew what to do with. And in those days would usually come to work at 9:00, whether I was in New York or Moscow. I’d leave around 11:00 or 12:00. Actually, in Moscow sometimes I’d work until 1:00, and come back the next day and do it again, Saturdays and Sundays, too. It was so much work. And so, I didn’t pay much attention to AmCham except when I hired Jonny Hines away from the Debevoise firm in the year 2000 to move to Moscow. He’s a joiner. He likes to be on boards and stuff like that. He wanted to run for the AmCham board. I said fine. So, he was elected. So, during the 2000s we had excellent contacts with AmCham. It was all Jonny’s stuff. And he…
Daniel Satinsky: Lost you, John. [Conversation re reconnecting, logistics.]
Daniel Satinsky: So you were saying about consultants.
John Huhs: Yeah. They were so numerous, and trying to network, that we couldn’t avoid them. They were all over the place, in restaurants and all over the place. And so, we became acquainted with some of them. Some of them would ask to visit us in the office just to see what a real law office looks like in Moscow, and so they’d come over. Usually, they’d be invited over by one of my lawyers or staff, and so I’d show them around. Actually, technically I’d never been head of our Moscow office, always had somebody else. So, Mandel was first, then Brian Zimbler, and then finally one of my Estonian lawyers has been head of the Moscow office the last five years, Vasilisa Strizh. And she’s very good.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, I remember her. I remember her. I’m sure I met her. I remember her name, for sure.
John Huhs: Anyway, so I did interact with them. Sometimes, if they were doing something interesting where we might have some synergy I’d invite them to lunch, or dinner, or just to come over for a longer, more formal meeting in the office. And in my informal interactions with them, say over dinner or something like that, particularly get them a bottle of red wine, give them a few drinks and let them open up a bit. Most of them, I mean, they did have senior guys who might have known something or might not have known something, but the guys who were staffing this—and there were hordes of them in the various Russian ministries.
And in my view, they didn’t know anything, hardly. And the advice they were giving wasn’t American advice. I mean, the American system adapted to the realities of Russia. Because they didn’t know the realities of Russia. Most didn’t speak the language, most didn’t know the history, most had never had a Russian friend. They were just over there. And most were just there for six months, so they had a short—or maybe a year, so they had a short-timer’s attitude. And they just were non-serious.
Most of the Russians with whom I spoke had the same opinion. They said well, you know, let’s see what they come up with, they’re having their fun, and we’re learning a few things, but not much, and we’ll see what they come up with. But gee, they ought to try to give us advice adapted to our system and our realities. Well, you know what it was like in ’91, ’92, ’93—hyperinflation, people had lost all their savings to inflation—
Daniel Satinsky: Barter and broken economic ties.
John Huhs: Yeah. It was really a mess. And then with the privatization in full swing, all the ins and outs of these companies stealing from each other, and various oligarchs or wannabe oligarchs stealing companies from each other. Some stole from our American clients. Like Dart—what was his first name? Dart Industries. Remember they did some business over there?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, vaguely.
John Huhs: They had a joint venture out somewhere. I didn’t handle their particular affairs in our office, but their Russian partner took all of their interest away from them just by changing the share register in the computer. And it was 300 and some million dollars that Dart lost. Ken Dart was personally involved. So yeah, there was a lot of icky stuff going on. And these guys didn’t have a clue as to what was happening, because they were rather insular. Most of them associated with each other, and not very much with Russians, though the Russians would give them a banquet occasionally, but then by people, and so you just talk to the person next to you and have your vodka toast. Maybe you get drunk, maybe you don’t. But always keep each other at sort of a distance.
And yeah, so they were…not only were they too young and too inexperienced, but they didn’t know enough about Russia to adapt their advice to the realities of Russia at that time. And I’m not saying we knew a lot of the realities; we didn’t. We didn’t live it day-to-day, I mean, like an average Russian who’s lost his salary. But we had situations. I’ll give you a perfect situation. Belov, Yuri Belov. He was a trade representative I think at the Soviet embassy in Washington for years. And good guy. A lawyer by trade, but good guy, and that’s why I involved him in some legal things when he was in Washington. And then he went back to become the equivalent of general counsel of the Ministry of Justice of the Soviet Union, a big, important position. He was the one who really got us accredited.
I came to him. I said, Yuri Andreyich Belov, we need to be accredited. He said of course you do. I will vouch for you personally—here, fill out the application and get all your documents and bring them in and I’ll make sure it happens in real time. And that’s what he did, and we were accredited. So, we were able to…we needed to be accredited to move into the SEV building. They wouldn’t let us in there unless we were accredited, so that had to happen before then.
But here’s Belov, and as I mentioned, there’s the Soviet Ministry of Justice and the Russian Ministry of Justice, two stools combined into one, and Belov lost that one. And I visited with him. He was a pretty good friend. He was maybe ten years older than I, maybe 15. And we visited both in his last days at the Ministry of Justice as well as his life as a retiree. He was really bitter—really, really bitter. He said you know, I’ve done everything all my life what I was told to do. I was a model Soviet citizen. I was a model diplomat. I was a model Soviet representative in Washington.
Daniel Satinsky: And this is what it got him, yeah.
John Huhs: And now, yeah, I have my hundred rubles a month pension, which doesn’t amount to anything after inflation. So, he was real bitter. He was really having a tough time getting along. I said maybe I could find something for you, maybe a big joint venture might need an internal lawyer. Some of them are hiring internal lawyers now. I know someone who talked to me about it. And he said you know, I’m just not a commercial guy. I’m a bureaucrat. I just couldn’t adjust to being with a commercial firm in a Russian firm or a foreign firm. So, I don’t know what happened to him. I think he died fairly soon thereafter, but I just don’t know. So, a lot of that kind of tragedy was playing out. And these young fellows, young girls, they had no… You’d sort of hear about it, this or that, but nothing real personal like somebody you’ve known for—
Daniel Satinsky: Somebody you knew, and had worked with, and respected, yeah. And these were consultants that were being paid by OECD, or World Bank or USAID?
John Huhs: Their firms were being paid I think mostly by World Bank, but some by OECD, I guess, and maybe some directly by the U.S. government. I didn’t pay much attention. They always got their money, and they paid these guys, their consultants, they paid them a normal consulting salary that they would earn in the States, and I think they gave them—I don’t recall right now—but I think they gave them a little bit of an uplift, you know, hardship pay or something like that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
John Huhs: But ’95 most of them were out of there. It didn’t last—
Daniel Satinsky: By when, ’95?
John Huhs: ’95 as I recall, is it, or maybe ’96. But it all pretty much… My recollection is that it had dissipated. I never really had much to do with it in the first place. It was more my associate Barbara Evans who was in that kind of business. And as that petered out her interest in the firm petered out because she was really good at doing World Bank kind of projects with an accounting firm, or with the World Bank, or with a Soviet ministry. She spoke pretty good Russian, wrote okay Russian. But that work sort of petered out, as I recall, and she finally left the firm, gee, ’97, maybe.
We did everything we could to keep her. Gee, the chairman of the firm at the time, Sam Sugden really respected her. He thought she walked on water. And she’s a smart girl, real smart, but just no interest in the commercial practice of law, in putting together a stock company, putting together an acquisition, putting together a joint venture. Nah, she just…not much in that. Which is fine, you know, everybody to everybody.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, do you have any regrets, things you wish you had done differently?
John Huhs: Well, I’ll tell you what I thought was my biggest success. From the formation of our office, 1990, until about the year 2000, we didn’t have anybody leave us voluntarily—no turnover.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
John Huhs: Zero. Everybody thought that we had the greatest office in Moscow. And I really encouraged the use of the Russian language among the lawyers in the office, and particularly between Americans. We didn’t have very many Americans, mainly Russians, so between Americans and Russians, including myself. And I used Russian with the staff. Except where they were just so much better than I that I said okay. I mean, that’s a struggle we have. We all have a tough time here. So anyway. So that is my one biggest success. We really had a wonderful organization. And a large one.
But then it became a little too large. The 2000s it was more competition, real competition, and those competitors would just offer our guys much more money than they were getting, because I’ve always been thrifty, including with myself, so we didn’t pay the highest salaries in Moscow. We paid good salaries, and even better bonuses. We paid the best bonuses. Always I was a base salary plus bonus guy. I gave one of my associates a million-dollar bonus once. Because he did such a good job for a Russian client that that client paid the firm a two-million-dollar bonus with the understanding that we would share half of it with my associate.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa. He did a hell of a job, whatever that was.
John Huhs: Yeah, well really, he did an acquisition for them that the guy didn’t think could be done. But this is a good example of the kind of people I hire. Oleg Berger was his name—is his name, he’s still alive.
Daniel Satinsky: I remember that name.
John Huhs: Yeah. He was working with the Millbank Tweed firm in New York when I hired him in 1994, and son of a Soviet emigre, Jewish. Came from Moscow. He took me—anyway, I hired him for the Moscow office, but I also hired him for one specific purpose. He looked, talked, acted and was in every way as much like a Russian oligarch as any American could be. He loved to go to the saunas, the dachas on the weekend, drink vodka, tell dirty jokes in Russian. His Russian was absolutely fluent, of course. He was born in Moscow and then they fled. They emigrated with all those Jews coming over in the late ‘70s.
Daniel Satinsky: Late ‘70s, yeah.
John Huhs: Anyway, so those are the kind of people I hired because they really got along with the Russian clients. And you may not be aware, but he was also the guy I staffed on my Yukos-Sibneft merger. Did the Yukos-Sibneft merger. Oleg was the guy I staffed on it. And we dealt with Khodorkovsky, his general counsel, whose name I’ve forgotten, and a couple of other people who were part of the management team along with Khodorkovsky. And we were still representing him in 2003, October, when Khodorkovsky went out to, I don’t know where, one of his plants, one of his facilities in Siberia and was arrested by the KGB out there.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you adapted to Russian reality.
John Huhs: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: And it seems that that was the prerequisite for ongoing success.
John Huhs: I think so. I don’t know of a person who made it there in the long-term who didn’t really go native. And I sort of, I mean, I dated all kinds of Russian girls, and I had all kinds of Russian friends. I’d go into parties, went to this, that.
Daniel Satinsky: You became nash chelovek*.
John Huhs: Yeah, that’s… Well, yeah, so that’s what I wanted to do. You know, that’s what I wanted to do. And when I became it, in addition I was helping the firm build its international practice, which, I was traveling all over the world. That was a period of my life that, say, beginning with the year 2000 until 2012 is just a blur. I don’t know how I managed to get done as much as I got done in that time. I was a lot younger.
John Huhs: I’m going to look at your paper here and see if… I underlined some of the things. What impact do you think you had on the Russian economy?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
John Huhs: I don’t know. Nothing measurable.
Daniel Satinsky: Nothing measurable, yeah.
John Huhs: Yeah, nothing measurable. It’s a big place. But I believe that what I did had a positive impact on the Russian economy and on the people who were affected by it.
I felt like we were doing good things. Not things that would just make money for my client or the Russians, or our firm or something, but just, you know, it was all a win-win situation. Some didn’t turn out to be that way ultimately, but at least when I did it, assuming that everybody would continue to act in the spirit with which we did the merger or acquisition in the first place, I thought that hey, this is going to be good. Some didn’t. And why didn’t they turn out? People. And usually, it was American companies changing people in charge of their project at the head office and cutting the budget, moving people around, whatever. Or the Russians doing the same thing. Russians can be American as Americans can be Russians.
John Huhs: ’98.
Daniel Satinsky: 1998 was the big default, right, the devaluation.
John Huhs: Yeah. And that we really did well. They devalued the currency. And we were still in Nikitsky Pereulok, and in the same building was our bank. What was it then? It was a French bank. Oh, what the hell was it? It was Credit…
Daniel Satinsky: Credit Lyonnais. Lyonnais, yeah?
John Huhs: No, it wasn’t Lyonnais. It was Credit something-or-other. Anyway. I can find it. And they were in the same building. We kept our accounts with them. And when the ruble was devalued, I called the head of the branch. I had a million dollars in rubles sitting up there. You know what that asshole Chubais did? He knew that devaluation was coming, and so on Friday—remember, the devaluation was on Sunday—on Friday he paid a million dollars that his Privatization Ministry owed us for fees.
We were really big in—what we did, I didn’t add that—but in order to get some of that World Bank business we hired one of the World Bank people who happened to be a lawyer to work with us, Barbara Evans, and she landed a bunch of World Bank projects with the privatization ministry. So, the way it was paid, World Bank would transfer the money to Chubais, Chubais would transfer the money to us in rubles. And he paid everything, millions, on Friday. So, we were sitting with all these millions. And the bastard then devalues the currency on Sunday. So, first thing Monday morning I was on with the bank, and they said, you know, our internal exchange rate hasn’t been changed yet; if you want, I can change all of your rubles into dollars at Friday’s rate. Okay. I said—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, really. What’s the decision there?
John Huhs: Right. And to show you what the other Russians were thinking, my office manager, a Tatarka, Tanya Myanso, I don’t know if you’ve ever met her. Anyway, great girl. She borrowed enough money to buy a car from me—or from the firm. I prepaid some of her salary with some of those rubles that I didn’t have the French bank take. And she went out and bought a car from the Volkswagen distributorship that still had its pre-devaluation prices, which were a lot better in rubles than the post devaluation price, for the family and friends. You know how relationships are.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
John Huhs: So that’s what a lot of Russians did, buy anything—
Daniel Satinsky: Buy anything to get value, yeah.
John Huhs: Like a new car. So yeah. Other than that, it just produced a lot of new business for us because firms were wondering what do we do. Allen & Overy’s answer was to close their Moscow office a few months later in October, November, something like that.
Daniel Satinsky: Who was that that closed it?
John Huhs: Allen & Overy.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.
John Huhs: After August it was October, November or something they closed the Moscow office, only to reopen a little bit later. Reopened a couple years later. And a number of other firms did the same thing, particularly Clifford Chance did it. The English firms did. I don’t know what it is about an English firm that they were the ones that were closing. And we, on the other hand, were just booked solid, wanting to add people. But I didn’t start hiring until I was really sure that we were going to maintain this. But that wasn’t until 1999 that I saw that this was going to be… But it was a bonanza for us. And for the Russians it really made an impression on them, those who kept track of the—
Daniel Satinsky: That stayed, yeah.
John Huhs: These guys don’t cut and run like the Brits. They stayed with us. And not only that, they help us, they do this, they do that and make things happen. That’s what we do, we make things happen.
Daniel Satinsky: Did any of your American clients close up?
John Huhs: A few closed. Most just reduced staff and were going to see how does this play out.
Daniel Satinsky: How does it play out, yeah.
John Huhs: The ones who didn’t close, like the Boeing company, came back and really expanded. Then 1999 came along, if you remember the long-term credit something crisis in the Far East, and there was a real meltdown in the U.S. in the value of the dollar, and there was the…what was it, the Plaza Hotel agreement. That had more of an effect on our American clients. Nothing on the Russians. It didn’t affect them. But that had more of an effect on Americans.
Daniel Satinsky: So did you ever have much to do with AmCham or… And if you did or didn’t, why?
John Huhs: I was too busy.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
John Huhs: Too busy making money. I didn’t need introductions because they just came over the transom word of mouth. We had more business than we knew what to do with. And in those days would usually come to work at 9:00, whether I was in New York or Moscow. I’d leave around 11:00 or 12:00. Actually, in Moscow sometimes I’d work until 1:00, and come back the next day and do it again, Saturdays and Sundays, too. It was so much work. And so, I didn’t pay much attention to AmCham except when I hired Jonny Hines away from the Debevoise firm in the year 2000 to move to Moscow. He’s a joiner. He likes to be on boards and stuff like that. He wanted to run for the AmCham board. I said fine. So, he was elected. So, during the 2000s we had excellent contacts with AmCham. It was all Jonny’s stuff. And he…
Daniel Satinsky: Lost you, John. [Conversation re reconnecting, logistics.]
Daniel Satinsky: So you were saying about consultants.
John Huhs: Yeah. They were so numerous, and trying to network, that we couldn’t avoid them. They were all over the place, in restaurants and all over the place. And so, we became acquainted with some of them. Some of them would ask to visit us in the office just to see what a real law office looks like in Moscow, and so they’d come over. Usually, they’d be invited over by one of my lawyers or staff, and so I’d show them around. Actually, technically I’d never been head of our Moscow office, always had somebody else. So, Mandel was first, then Brian Zimbler, and then finally one of my Estonian lawyers has been head of the Moscow office the last five years, Vasilisa Strizh. And she’s very good.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, I remember her. I remember her. I’m sure I met her. I remember her name, for sure.
John Huhs: Anyway, so I did interact with them. Sometimes, if they were doing something interesting where we might have some synergy I’d invite them to lunch, or dinner, or just to come over for a longer, more formal meeting in the office. And in my informal interactions with them, say over dinner or something like that, particularly get them a bottle of red wine, give them a few drinks and let them open up a bit. Most of them, I mean, they did have senior guys who might have known something or might not have known something, but the guys who were staffing this—and there were hordes of them in the various Russian ministries.
And in my view, they didn’t know anything, hardly. And the advice they were giving wasn’t American advice. I mean, the American system adapted to the realities of Russia. Because they didn’t know the realities of Russia. Most didn’t speak the language, most didn’t know the history, most had never had a Russian friend. They were just over there. And most were just there for six months, so they had a short—or maybe a year, so they had a short-timer’s attitude. And they just were non-serious.
Most of the Russians with whom I spoke had the same opinion. They said well, you know, let’s see what they come up with, they’re having their fun, and we’re learning a few things, but not much, and we’ll see what they come up with. But gee, they ought to try to give us advice adapted to our system and our realities. Well, you know what it was like in ’91, ’92, ’93—hyperinflation, people had lost all their savings to inflation—
Daniel Satinsky: Barter and broken economic ties.
John Huhs: Yeah. It was really a mess. And then with the privatization in full swing, all the ins and outs of these companies stealing from each other, and various oligarchs or wannabe oligarchs stealing companies from each other. Some stole from our American clients. Like Dart—what was his first name? Dart Industries. Remember they did some business over there?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, vaguely.
John Huhs: They had a joint venture out somewhere. I didn’t handle their particular affairs in our office, but their Russian partner took all of their interest away from them just by changing the share register in the computer. And it was 300 and some million dollars that Dart lost. Ken Dart was personally involved. So yeah, there was a lot of icky stuff going on. And these guys didn’t have a clue as to what was happening, because they were rather insular. Most of them associated with each other, and not very much with Russians, though the Russians would give them a banquet occasionally, but then by people, and so you just talk to the person next to you and have your vodka toast. Maybe you get drunk, maybe you don’t. But always keep each other at sort of a distance.
And yeah, so they were…not only were they too young and too inexperienced, but they didn’t know enough about Russia to adapt their advice to the realities of Russia at that time. And I’m not saying we knew a lot of the realities; we didn’t. We didn’t live it day-to-day, I mean, like an average Russian who’s lost his salary. But we had situations. I’ll give you a perfect situation. Belov, Yuri Belov. He was a trade representative I think at the Soviet embassy in Washington for years. And good guy. A lawyer by trade, but good guy, and that’s why I involved him in some legal things when he was in Washington. And then he went back to become the equivalent of general counsel of the Ministry of Justice of the Soviet Union, a big, important position. He was the one who really got us accredited.
I came to him. I said, Yuri Andreyich Belov, we need to be accredited. He said of course you do. I will vouch for you personally—here, fill out the application and get all your documents and bring them in and I’ll make sure it happens in real time. And that’s what he did, and we were accredited. So, we were able to…we needed to be accredited to move into the SEV building. They wouldn’t let us in there unless we were accredited, so that had to happen before then.
But here’s Belov, and as I mentioned, there’s the Soviet Ministry of Justice and the Russian Ministry of Justice, two stools combined into one, and Belov lost that one. And I visited with him. He was a pretty good friend. He was maybe ten years older than I, maybe 15. And we visited both in his last days at the Ministry of Justice as well as his life as a retiree. He was really bitter—really, really bitter. He said you know, I’ve done everything all my life what I was told to do. I was a model Soviet citizen. I was a model diplomat. I was a model Soviet representative in Washington.
Daniel Satinsky: And this is what it got him, yeah.
John Huhs: And now, yeah, I have my hundred rubles a month pension, which doesn’t amount to anything after inflation. So, he was real bitter. He was really having a tough time getting along. I said maybe I could find something for you, maybe a big joint venture might need an internal lawyer. Some of them are hiring internal lawyers now. I know someone who talked to me about it. And he said you know, I’m just not a commercial guy. I’m a bureaucrat. I just couldn’t adjust to being with a commercial firm in a Russian firm or a foreign firm. So, I don’t know what happened to him. I think he died fairly soon thereafter, but I just don’t know. So, a lot of that kind of tragedy was playing out. And these young fellows, young girls, they had no… You’d sort of hear about it, this or that, but nothing real personal like somebody you’ve known for—
Daniel Satinsky: Somebody you knew, and had worked with, and respected, yeah. And these were consultants that were being paid by OECD, or World Bank or USAID?
John Huhs: Their firms were being paid I think mostly by World Bank, but some by OECD, I guess, and maybe some directly by the U.S. government. I didn’t pay much attention. They always got their money, and they paid these guys, their consultants, they paid them a normal consulting salary that they would earn in the States, and I think they gave them—I don’t recall right now—but I think they gave them a little bit of an uplift, you know, hardship pay or something like that.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
John Huhs: But ’95 most of them were out of there. It didn’t last—
Daniel Satinsky: By when, ’95?
John Huhs: ’95 as I recall, is it, or maybe ’96. But it all pretty much… My recollection is that it had dissipated. I never really had much to do with it in the first place. It was more my associate Barbara Evans who was in that kind of business. And as that petered out her interest in the firm petered out because she was really good at doing World Bank kind of projects with an accounting firm, or with the World Bank, or with a Soviet ministry. She spoke pretty good Russian, wrote okay Russian. But that work sort of petered out, as I recall, and she finally left the firm, gee, ’97, maybe.
We did everything we could to keep her. Gee, the chairman of the firm at the time, Sam Sugden really respected her. He thought she walked on water. And she’s a smart girl, real smart, but just no interest in the commercial practice of law, in putting together a stock company, putting together an acquisition, putting together a joint venture. Nah, she just…not much in that. Which is fine, you know, everybody to everybody.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, do you have any regrets, things you wish you had done differently?
John Huhs: Well, I’ll tell you what I thought was my biggest success. From the formation of our office, 1990, until about the year 2000, we didn’t have anybody leave us voluntarily—no turnover.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
John Huhs: Zero. Everybody thought that we had the greatest office in Moscow. And I really encouraged the use of the Russian language among the lawyers in the office, and particularly between Americans. We didn’t have very many Americans, mainly Russians, so between Americans and Russians, including myself. And I used Russian with the staff. Except where they were just so much better than I that I said okay. I mean, that’s a struggle we have. We all have a tough time here. So anyway. So that is my one biggest success. We really had a wonderful organization. And a large one.
But then it became a little too large. The 2000s it was more competition, real competition, and those competitors would just offer our guys much more money than they were getting, because I’ve always been thrifty, including with myself, so we didn’t pay the highest salaries in Moscow. We paid good salaries, and even better bonuses. We paid the best bonuses. Always I was a base salary plus bonus guy. I gave one of my associates a million-dollar bonus once. Because he did such a good job for a Russian client that that client paid the firm a two-million-dollar bonus with the understanding that we would share half of it with my associate.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa. He did a hell of a job, whatever that was.
John Huhs: Yeah, well really, he did an acquisition for them that the guy didn’t think could be done. But this is a good example of the kind of people I hire. Oleg Berger was his name—is his name, he’s still alive.
Daniel Satinsky: I remember that name.
John Huhs: Yeah. He was working with the Millbank Tweed firm in New York when I hired him in 1994, and son of a Soviet emigre, Jewish. Came from Moscow. He took me—anyway, I hired him for the Moscow office, but I also hired him for one specific purpose. He looked, talked, acted and was in every way as much like a Russian oligarch as any American could be. He loved to go to the saunas, the dachas on the weekend, drink vodka, tell dirty jokes in Russian. His Russian was absolutely fluent, of course. He was born in Moscow and then they fled. They emigrated with all those Jews coming over in the late ‘70s.
Daniel Satinsky: Late ‘70s, yeah.
John Huhs: Anyway, so those are the kind of people I hired because they really got along with the Russian clients. And you may not be aware, but he was also the guy I staffed on my Yukos-Sibneft merger. Did the Yukos-Sibneft merger. Oleg was the guy I staffed on it. And we dealt with Khodorkovsky, his general counsel, whose name I’ve forgotten, and a couple of other people who were part of the management team along with Khodorkovsky. And we were still representing him in 2003, October, when Khodorkovsky went out to, I don’t know where, one of his plants, one of his facilities in Siberia and was arrested by the KGB out there.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you adapted to Russian reality.
John Huhs: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: And it seems that that was the prerequisite for ongoing success.
John Huhs: I think so. I don’t know of a person who made it there in the long-term who didn’t really go native. And I sort of, I mean, I dated all kinds of Russian girls, and I had all kinds of Russian friends. I’d go into parties, went to this, that.
Daniel Satinsky: You became nash chelovek*.
John Huhs: Yeah, that’s… Well, yeah, so that’s what I wanted to do. You know, that’s what I wanted to do. And when I became it, in addition I was helping the firm build its international practice, which, I was traveling all over the world. That was a period of my life that, say, beginning with the year 2000 until 2012 is just a blur. I don’t know how I managed to get done as much as I got done in that time. I was a lot younger.
John Huhs: I’m going to look at your paper here and see if… I underlined some of the things. What impact do you think you had on the Russian economy?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
John Huhs: I don’t know. Nothing measurable.
Daniel Satinsky: Nothing measurable, yeah.
John Huhs: Yeah, nothing measurable. It’s a big place. But I believe that what I did had a positive impact on the Russian economy and on the people who were affected by it.
I felt like we were doing good things. Not things that would just make money for my client or the Russians, or our firm or something, but just, you know, it was all a win-win situation. Some didn’t turn out to be that way ultimately, but at least when I did it, assuming that everybody would continue to act in the spirit with which we did the merger or acquisition in the first place, I thought that hey, this is going to be good. Some didn’t. And why didn’t they turn out? People. And usually, it was American companies changing people in charge of their project at the head office and cutting the budget, moving people around, whatever. Or the Russians doing the same thing. Russians can be American as Americans can be Russians.
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