About
About
Kim Spencer is a television broadcaster and producer of more than 60 documentaries and news specials. He helped pioneer satellite “spacebridges” between the US and Soviet Union in the 1980’s, culminating in the Emmy Award-winning "Capital to Capital" series of seven live broadcasts on ABC News and Gosteleradio linking the US Congress with the USSR Supreme Soviet. Spencer was a co-founder in 1982 of Internews Network, which has supported the development of independent media in nearly 100 countries. He was coordinating producer at the launch of ABC News “Prime Time Live” in 1989, producing multiple episodes around the world, including an unprecedented one-hour live broadcast from inside the Kremlin.
In 1999, Spencer was the co-founder of Link TV, the independent satellite network devoted to global affairs. As President and Senior Programming Executive, he developed the Peabody Award-winning daily newscast "Mosaic: World News from the Middle East” (over 2,100 episodes from 2001 to 2012) and was Executive Producer of Link TV's weekly series "Earth Focus," the longest-running environmental program on US television. Spencer retired from Link TV in 2022 and now manages the Transformational Media Fund at the Mediators Foundation.
In 1999, Spencer was the co-founder of Link TV, the independent satellite network devoted to global affairs. As President and Senior Programming Executive, he developed the Peabody Award-winning daily newscast "Mosaic: World News from the Middle East” (over 2,100 episodes from 2001 to 2012) and was Executive Producer of Link TV's weekly series "Earth Focus," the longest-running environmental program on US television. Spencer retired from Link TV in 2022 and now manages the Transformational Media Fund at the Mediators Foundation.
Daniel Satinsky: How did you get pulled into the Space Bridge project? Was it your interest in technology and TV, or was an interest in peace, or was it an interest in Russia, or what brought you into it?
Kim Spencer: I got into it through the production of live TV programs using television. And that was not something that independents were involved in very much because mostly television technology up until the early ‘70s was totally studio-based. But then these new little Portapaks, Sony Portapaks came out and all of a sudden there was this independent television world that I happened to fall into.
So, during the ’70s I was involved in making television documentaries, and I owned a TV camera, and I progressively got to be more broadcast quality so that in 1979 I was using these to make documentaries on social issues and on environmental issues. And I was based in Washington, D.C., and I was actually doing some documentaries for the Environmental Protection Agency around environmental issues, and Three Mile Island happened, right, very close to where we lived. And I was involved with a number of other producers who also were using independent technology, and we were in touch.
And we decided that we wanted to do something to bring to light what was going on around Three Mile Island. Our camera had been rented by German television to go up and shoot there. I never went up to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But when they came back, they were bringing back shocking stories on how everything was being suppressed. And of course nobody wanted to panic the whole population of Washington, living an hour and a half away.
And so all that was happening, and some of my friends, political friends, were organizing a demonstration on the Mall in Washington for May 6, 1979, within the month after the meltdown, and still things were going on. And they were organizing a big demonstration on the Mall, and they were inviting Ralph Nader, and Jane Fonda, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and they organized this event on the steps of the Capitol.
And a bunch of us who were in Washington began talking to other people, and then there were documentary makers coming from around the country to the demonstration, and so they started meeting in my little office of a little nonprofit where I was running my little documentary production company. And everybody was going to do a documentary. We were going to all work together and somehow create something to get the word out.
And in that time, I happened to go to a meeting at public television where they were announcing that they had this new satellite system that they had just purchased the rights to connect the public television system by satellite. And this was before the commercial channels had satellites. Basically, satellite technology was very new, and all the commercial stations just had live connectivity between CBS in New York, and CBS in Chicago, and CBS in L.A., and they were all wired together. And public television stations really didn’t have that capability, they were more spread out, so it made sense that Congress had given them some transponders on the Westar satellite. And so they had a little meeting to tell the public about it, and in this meeting, which I happened to show up to, they said well, you know, now we’ve got a lot of excess capacity right now because everybody’s not, you know, the system is just starting to work out, so any nonprofit 501(c)(3) can actually apply and have the time for free.
And I went up afterwards, and I had my little card for Urban Scientific and Educational Research, which was the name of the company that a couple friends had, and we owned the camera. And I said, you know, if we wanted to use this, what would we do? And they said, oh, here, just tell us what you want, and we can give you the free satellite time. And so, I went back to my friends who were organizing a big documentary coverage and say hey, we could go live.
And everybody said wow, we could? Oh, yeah. Okay, let’s do it, yeah, yeah. And so okay, great. Let’s go back and, you know. So, we went back and said okay. We reserve three hours of live time on Sunday afternoon May 6, 1979, and we’re going to offer a free coverage of this demonstration out to the public.
Anyway, to make the long story short, it was amazing, it worked. Public stations decided to carry it. It was the first independent live satellite broadcast. It wasn’t controlled by a network or anything. Nobody else covered it. The networks didn’t cover it. And the demonstration turned out to be really big. So, all of a sudden public television does a live broadcast, and there was Jane Fonda on the stage and, you know, all these speeches. And we put together, by just magic, and a little bit of, you know, raised money at the last minute, a live truck that actually broadcast a competent live satellite thing.
So, out of that a new nonprofit got created — which all of a sudden, I was now the head of. I’d never produced a live television thing, but all of a sudden, I was like an experienced executive producer of live television, right? And so, we started getting public television money to do other live things. And we went to Cincinnati and did a live coverage of a right to life abortion demonstration, and we did a couple of things. And then we came up with a proposal to do something on Thanksgiving called America at Thanksgiving. And I don’t know if Evelyn [Messinger] told you about this program.
Daniel Satinsky: She didn’t, but I read a little bit about it in Wikipedia.
Kim Spencer: So, America at Thanksgiving 1980, so that was Thanksgiving now of 1980—was a live broadcast to all the public television stations that had Art Buchwald—I don’t know if you remember him. He was the—
Daniel Satinsky: Sure, I do.
Kim Spencer: Yeah, you know. So, he’s sitting in the control room, literally in front of a bunch of monitors, smoking a cigar in the control room, and we’re in there and we’re shooting it, and he’s basically talking to some live feeds around the country. And there’s a turkey farm in Wahoo, Nebraska where there’s some, you know, people who raise turkeys, and they’re sitting at their dinner. They’re at Thanksgiving dinner, right? And in Florida there was a semblance of a sharecropper family around a big table celebrating, in Boston there was a group, and there were [four other locations].
And Evelyn I had met about a month or two before that, and I talked her into becoming a producer of the San Francisco event, which was a live event that she covered. And at some point in all this, where Art Buchwald was just basically interviewing people, but it was live, and everybody could see each other because it was all being broadcast, and so there were TVs at each table, everybody’s talking, but mostly it was supposed to be Art Buchwald interviewing people.
And at one point the conversation turned kind of political, and a motorcycle gang that was gathering in a garage that WGBH Boston had cameras at, you know, where they had up on the riser, the hydraulic riser had plywood, and they just had a big turkey and they were whacking it up with their knives, and the biker leader, you know, raised his bottle of rotgut wine and said, you know, and made this very ambivalent toast to America and the Vietnam…there’s still the Vietnam era, you know, it was still…there was all this stuff. And then cut directly to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, where we had a U.S. Air Force pilot and his family sitting around a table in the mess hall, and he raises his glass of milk and he says something like, well, to America, what she is and what she always will be.
And all of a sudden, these two start talking, and Art Buchwald just sits back, and you have a real conversation around a political issue by people who, in that era, would have never found themselves together at Thanksgiving dinner, but due to a two-way satellite link, they…something happened, and it was a moving moment.
So, several weeks later I went out to San Francisco, and Evelyn at that time was working as an editor for CNN, and we went in there one night after everybody had left, and we were using their editing system to edit up the highlights of this thing. And I was involved with David Hoffman at that time in the issue of nuclear weapons. And I was actually working on a documentary about the history of U.S.-Soviet relations, because what about the Russians? All of this stuff brought to mind the question about the Russians.
And this is the apocryphal moment of Space Bridges being created on the American side, which was Evelyn is editing, and we’re looking at this footage, and Evelyn says wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get Russians and Americans to talk face-to-face by satellite. And I’m always thinking like how do you make that into a TV show. And I’m like yeah, we could call it the second kitchen debate, you know, hearkening back to Nixon and Khrushchev, you know, in that first kitchen debate that they had, you know, in that—[I don’t know if you remember that].
Daniel Satinsky: You’re frozen. No, I don’t remember that, honestly.
Kim Spencer: Right. So, actually, Nixon went to Moscow. Khrushchev took him onto a demonstration of a kitchen that they had at some expo, and Nixon and Khrushchev actually had the only real, real in front of the cameras debate, and it’s known as the kitchen debate. So, anyway, this is a long story, but it is the moment that I remember when Evelyn said what if we use this technology and turn it into an idea that we could propose to public television as the second kitchen debate, what if we connected Russians and Americans face-to-face from their meal dinner in Moscow and breakfast. That idea wouldn’t go away. People rejected it. But then Jim Hickman heard it in the hot tubs at Esalen.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And this was sort of circulating in your—you were in the Esalen circles as well?
Kim Spencer: Right, because…yes. We had a mutual funder who was the guy, Henry Dakin, who eventually, you know, he—I’m sure you heard of him—provided space for many of us and was funding many of these things. Was, had become …about nuclear war, or “Thinking Twice about Nuclear War” that Evelyn and I were producing. So, we met Jim, and at some point, apocryphal story, we were in the hot tub at Esalen, and we were all talking about this idea, and then a year later Jim calls me on the phone and says I’m at the airport, I’m leaving for Moscow, can you go down to the US Festival, we’re about to do it.
Daniel Satinsky: So, the connection with the US Festival was done by Hickman sort of independently of you, and then he just pulled you into it—
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I had nothing to do with that. But we had talked about this idea, and we were…I had already gone—then I went to Russia with a group of folks from Marin County because I now was making this documentary on the history of U.S.-Soviet relations from 1933 to 1983 that was the documentary that Harrison [Salisbury]—anyway, a guy from that era, a journalist, writer hosted. And I needed to go to Moscow to go to the archives to see if I could get some footage of the ambassadors from that period, so I latched onto a group and I went to Russia. So, I’d been to Russia and started developing a relationship with Gosteleradio*, which controlled the archives.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was this?
Kim Spencer: That was in ’82.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. And how difficult was it for you to develop the relationship with Gosteleradio?
Kim Spencer: At first it didn’t, you know, they…we aired the documentary the same week they finally sent the approval that we could have the rights. It was a very slow process. It was an introduction to bureaucracy. But I met a couple people there who just were assigned as my minders. And so, after the first US Festival, which really was a total failed thing, but the story about it on both sides developed a whole story, and Jim [Hickman] and what’s his name, you know, they, you know, and they made a second one happen. And the second one was real. If you’ve seen that Space Bridge with astronauts and cosmonauts and George [Brown], the congressman from California, and Evgeny [Velikhov]—not [Georgy] Arbatov—I’m losing names, but that was a real Space Bridge. That was the first real conversation.
Daniel Satinsky: That was the first one, the second.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. In the second one there was a real conversation. It wasn’t just musicians and confusion. So, in the second one you really saw the potential. And by now Jim [Hickman] was working with Joseph Goldin 1 2 3 4 in Russia to make these things happen around the edges and through the cracks. So, once that happened it was clear that there was something, there was interest on both sides, but on the U.S. side it was a totally independent broadcast or formal journalistic thing. A funder—
Daniel Satinsky: Let me ask you a question. While you were doing this, was this an interest as technology and a career move, or was it also partly politics? And if it was politics, what did you think you wanted to accomplish by this dialogue?
Kim Spencer: We thought that dialogue was essential, that it was important for Americans to see Russians as real people, and that in some way any sort of—it was sort of the beginning of the Track II sort of diplomacy, where citizens were trying to move around and do things that governments weren’t able to do on Track I.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But—go ahead, I’m sorry. I’m interrupting you.
Kim Spencer: No, no. That was a really interesting concept, but I was also interested in using television in a new way, and live broadcasts that were real, that they just weren’t reporting from someplace live, but that there was some actual thing going on was really something new. So, professionally it was interesting, but then it was also the issue that now we’re returning to — Russia — and looking at that issue.
And there were very few people who were willing to even go there or entertain, and the networks were all sort of just trying to get there and get the scoop and get out, you know, before their minders found anything. All this is the background to the third [actually the fourth] Space Bridge really, I think is probably the one that is the important one in terms of its impact, which was in the fall of ’83 when Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich did a big conference on nuclear winter. Has anybody talked to you about that one?
Kim Spencer: I got into it through the production of live TV programs using television. And that was not something that independents were involved in very much because mostly television technology up until the early ‘70s was totally studio-based. But then these new little Portapaks, Sony Portapaks came out and all of a sudden there was this independent television world that I happened to fall into.
So, during the ’70s I was involved in making television documentaries, and I owned a TV camera, and I progressively got to be more broadcast quality so that in 1979 I was using these to make documentaries on social issues and on environmental issues. And I was based in Washington, D.C., and I was actually doing some documentaries for the Environmental Protection Agency around environmental issues, and Three Mile Island happened, right, very close to where we lived. And I was involved with a number of other producers who also were using independent technology, and we were in touch.
And we decided that we wanted to do something to bring to light what was going on around Three Mile Island. Our camera had been rented by German television to go up and shoot there. I never went up to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But when they came back, they were bringing back shocking stories on how everything was being suppressed. And of course nobody wanted to panic the whole population of Washington, living an hour and a half away.
And so all that was happening, and some of my friends, political friends, were organizing a demonstration on the Mall in Washington for May 6, 1979, within the month after the meltdown, and still things were going on. And they were organizing a big demonstration on the Mall, and they were inviting Ralph Nader, and Jane Fonda, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and they organized this event on the steps of the Capitol.
And a bunch of us who were in Washington began talking to other people, and then there were documentary makers coming from around the country to the demonstration, and so they started meeting in my little office of a little nonprofit where I was running my little documentary production company. And everybody was going to do a documentary. We were going to all work together and somehow create something to get the word out.
And in that time, I happened to go to a meeting at public television where they were announcing that they had this new satellite system that they had just purchased the rights to connect the public television system by satellite. And this was before the commercial channels had satellites. Basically, satellite technology was very new, and all the commercial stations just had live connectivity between CBS in New York, and CBS in Chicago, and CBS in L.A., and they were all wired together. And public television stations really didn’t have that capability, they were more spread out, so it made sense that Congress had given them some transponders on the Westar satellite. And so they had a little meeting to tell the public about it, and in this meeting, which I happened to show up to, they said well, you know, now we’ve got a lot of excess capacity right now because everybody’s not, you know, the system is just starting to work out, so any nonprofit 501(c)(3) can actually apply and have the time for free.
And I went up afterwards, and I had my little card for Urban Scientific and Educational Research, which was the name of the company that a couple friends had, and we owned the camera. And I said, you know, if we wanted to use this, what would we do? And they said, oh, here, just tell us what you want, and we can give you the free satellite time. And so, I went back to my friends who were organizing a big documentary coverage and say hey, we could go live.
And everybody said wow, we could? Oh, yeah. Okay, let’s do it, yeah, yeah. And so okay, great. Let’s go back and, you know. So, we went back and said okay. We reserve three hours of live time on Sunday afternoon May 6, 1979, and we’re going to offer a free coverage of this demonstration out to the public.
Anyway, to make the long story short, it was amazing, it worked. Public stations decided to carry it. It was the first independent live satellite broadcast. It wasn’t controlled by a network or anything. Nobody else covered it. The networks didn’t cover it. And the demonstration turned out to be really big. So, all of a sudden public television does a live broadcast, and there was Jane Fonda on the stage and, you know, all these speeches. And we put together, by just magic, and a little bit of, you know, raised money at the last minute, a live truck that actually broadcast a competent live satellite thing.
So, out of that a new nonprofit got created — which all of a sudden, I was now the head of. I’d never produced a live television thing, but all of a sudden, I was like an experienced executive producer of live television, right? And so, we started getting public television money to do other live things. And we went to Cincinnati and did a live coverage of a right to life abortion demonstration, and we did a couple of things. And then we came up with a proposal to do something on Thanksgiving called America at Thanksgiving. And I don’t know if Evelyn [Messinger] told you about this program.
Daniel Satinsky: She didn’t, but I read a little bit about it in Wikipedia.
Kim Spencer: So, America at Thanksgiving 1980, so that was Thanksgiving now of 1980—was a live broadcast to all the public television stations that had Art Buchwald—I don’t know if you remember him. He was the—
Daniel Satinsky: Sure, I do.
Kim Spencer: Yeah, you know. So, he’s sitting in the control room, literally in front of a bunch of monitors, smoking a cigar in the control room, and we’re in there and we’re shooting it, and he’s basically talking to some live feeds around the country. And there’s a turkey farm in Wahoo, Nebraska where there’s some, you know, people who raise turkeys, and they’re sitting at their dinner. They’re at Thanksgiving dinner, right? And in Florida there was a semblance of a sharecropper family around a big table celebrating, in Boston there was a group, and there were [four other locations].
And Evelyn I had met about a month or two before that, and I talked her into becoming a producer of the San Francisco event, which was a live event that she covered. And at some point in all this, where Art Buchwald was just basically interviewing people, but it was live, and everybody could see each other because it was all being broadcast, and so there were TVs at each table, everybody’s talking, but mostly it was supposed to be Art Buchwald interviewing people.
And at one point the conversation turned kind of political, and a motorcycle gang that was gathering in a garage that WGBH Boston had cameras at, you know, where they had up on the riser, the hydraulic riser had plywood, and they just had a big turkey and they were whacking it up with their knives, and the biker leader, you know, raised his bottle of rotgut wine and said, you know, and made this very ambivalent toast to America and the Vietnam…there’s still the Vietnam era, you know, it was still…there was all this stuff. And then cut directly to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, where we had a U.S. Air Force pilot and his family sitting around a table in the mess hall, and he raises his glass of milk and he says something like, well, to America, what she is and what she always will be.
And all of a sudden, these two start talking, and Art Buchwald just sits back, and you have a real conversation around a political issue by people who, in that era, would have never found themselves together at Thanksgiving dinner, but due to a two-way satellite link, they…something happened, and it was a moving moment.
So, several weeks later I went out to San Francisco, and Evelyn at that time was working as an editor for CNN, and we went in there one night after everybody had left, and we were using their editing system to edit up the highlights of this thing. And I was involved with David Hoffman at that time in the issue of nuclear weapons. And I was actually working on a documentary about the history of U.S.-Soviet relations, because what about the Russians? All of this stuff brought to mind the question about the Russians.
And this is the apocryphal moment of Space Bridges being created on the American side, which was Evelyn is editing, and we’re looking at this footage, and Evelyn says wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get Russians and Americans to talk face-to-face by satellite. And I’m always thinking like how do you make that into a TV show. And I’m like yeah, we could call it the second kitchen debate, you know, hearkening back to Nixon and Khrushchev, you know, in that first kitchen debate that they had, you know, in that—[I don’t know if you remember that].
Daniel Satinsky: You’re frozen. No, I don’t remember that, honestly.
Kim Spencer: Right. So, actually, Nixon went to Moscow. Khrushchev took him onto a demonstration of a kitchen that they had at some expo, and Nixon and Khrushchev actually had the only real, real in front of the cameras debate, and it’s known as the kitchen debate. So, anyway, this is a long story, but it is the moment that I remember when Evelyn said what if we use this technology and turn it into an idea that we could propose to public television as the second kitchen debate, what if we connected Russians and Americans face-to-face from their meal dinner in Moscow and breakfast. That idea wouldn’t go away. People rejected it. But then Jim Hickman heard it in the hot tubs at Esalen.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And this was sort of circulating in your—you were in the Esalen circles as well?
Kim Spencer: Right, because…yes. We had a mutual funder who was the guy, Henry Dakin, who eventually, you know, he—I’m sure you heard of him—provided space for many of us and was funding many of these things. Was, had become …about nuclear war, or “Thinking Twice about Nuclear War” that Evelyn and I were producing. So, we met Jim, and at some point, apocryphal story, we were in the hot tub at Esalen, and we were all talking about this idea, and then a year later Jim calls me on the phone and says I’m at the airport, I’m leaving for Moscow, can you go down to the US Festival, we’re about to do it.
Daniel Satinsky: So, the connection with the US Festival was done by Hickman sort of independently of you, and then he just pulled you into it—
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I had nothing to do with that. But we had talked about this idea, and we were…I had already gone—then I went to Russia with a group of folks from Marin County because I now was making this documentary on the history of U.S.-Soviet relations from 1933 to 1983 that was the documentary that Harrison [Salisbury]—anyway, a guy from that era, a journalist, writer hosted. And I needed to go to Moscow to go to the archives to see if I could get some footage of the ambassadors from that period, so I latched onto a group and I went to Russia. So, I’d been to Russia and started developing a relationship with Gosteleradio*, which controlled the archives.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was this?
Kim Spencer: That was in ’82.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. And how difficult was it for you to develop the relationship with Gosteleradio?
Kim Spencer: At first it didn’t, you know, they…we aired the documentary the same week they finally sent the approval that we could have the rights. It was a very slow process. It was an introduction to bureaucracy. But I met a couple people there who just were assigned as my minders. And so, after the first US Festival, which really was a total failed thing, but the story about it on both sides developed a whole story, and Jim [Hickman] and what’s his name, you know, they, you know, and they made a second one happen. And the second one was real. If you’ve seen that Space Bridge with astronauts and cosmonauts and George [Brown], the congressman from California, and Evgeny [Velikhov]—not [Georgy] Arbatov—I’m losing names, but that was a real Space Bridge. That was the first real conversation.
Daniel Satinsky: That was the first one, the second.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. In the second one there was a real conversation. It wasn’t just musicians and confusion. So, in the second one you really saw the potential. And by now Jim [Hickman] was working with Joseph Goldin 1 2 3 4 in Russia to make these things happen around the edges and through the cracks. So, once that happened it was clear that there was something, there was interest on both sides, but on the U.S. side it was a totally independent broadcast or formal journalistic thing. A funder—
Daniel Satinsky: Let me ask you a question. While you were doing this, was this an interest as technology and a career move, or was it also partly politics? And if it was politics, what did you think you wanted to accomplish by this dialogue?
Kim Spencer: We thought that dialogue was essential, that it was important for Americans to see Russians as real people, and that in some way any sort of—it was sort of the beginning of the Track II sort of diplomacy, where citizens were trying to move around and do things that governments weren’t able to do on Track I.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But—go ahead, I’m sorry. I’m interrupting you.
Kim Spencer: No, no. That was a really interesting concept, but I was also interested in using television in a new way, and live broadcasts that were real, that they just weren’t reporting from someplace live, but that there was some actual thing going on was really something new. So, professionally it was interesting, but then it was also the issue that now we’re returning to — Russia — and looking at that issue.
And there were very few people who were willing to even go there or entertain, and the networks were all sort of just trying to get there and get the scoop and get out, you know, before their minders found anything. All this is the background to the third [actually the fourth] Space Bridge really, I think is probably the one that is the important one in terms of its impact, which was in the fall of ’83 when Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich did a big conference on nuclear winter. Has anybody talked to you about that one?
Daniel Satinsky: I remember that one from the podcast. There were excerpts from it, from the—
Kim Spencer: Right. And there, by the way, is a YouTube channel called Space Bridges created to put all these, as many of them as I have been able to find on. And that…there was a funder who was [unintelligible] on organizing and funding that event about nuclear winter, and in Washington, and he had funded—
Daniel Satinsky: Sorry, there was a glitch. What was the name of that person?
Kim Spencer: Paul Allen.
Daniel Satinsky: Paul Allen.
Kim Spencer: No, not Paul Allen, Bob, Robert Allen.
Daniel Satinsky: Robert Allen. Not Microsoft.
Kim Spencer: Yeah, fact check, right. Robert Allen. And he was—I’m forgetting the name of the foundation right now—but he was one of the funders of Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich’s event. And they were running into a problem. As the date approached in the fall 1983, they were running into a problem that they weren’t [sure] if the Russian scientists were going to get visas to come to the U.S. And they were invited, and they had agreed to come, and it was really important. It was a global thing on the risk of nuclear war, and if maybe nuclear winter.
And so basically Bob Allen called and asked whether Evelyn and I would be able to produce a Space Bridge somehow, so he funded it, and Evelyn was the producer in Washington, and I was the producer in Moscow. So, that’s the first time I produced a Space Bridge from Moscow, in the Gosteleradio [studios control room]. And it had to be done quickly. We had no more than a month to prepare it.
And there’s a lot of detail about why that was so important, but the important thing is that in the afternoon when the Soviet scientists were just sitting there in the studio watching and listening to the presentation by Ehrlich and all the scientists, and then in the U.S. they went to lunch. The scientists gathered around, the leading Soviet scientists, and they were in the studio, and it was in the evening in Moscow. And Bob Fuller, who was a physicist, and a friend of ours, and part of the nuclear weapons group, David Hoffman’s close friend, had gone along as an advisor, because people knew him. His physics book was actually published and translated and used in the schools.
So, he was like…so Bob’s sitting there in the circle with these top Soviet scientists, and they’re trying to decide what they should do because it’s now going to be their time to talk, and are they going to say anything, or are they just going to say […] you just go down, when you hear the sirens you go down into the subways, you’ll be safe and come out afterwards. That was the official nuclear preparedness in Russia at the time. And the scientists debated whether or not they should say what they really believed, which was nuclear winter was a possibility, there was not a way to survive a nuclear attack, both sides were going to go down, and what should they say. And they made a decision that they wouldn’t call their bosses, they were just going to say what they thought. And they did.
And then the next day it was Soviet, you know, Western and East, you know, Soviet and Western scientists agree. That would not have happened if it hadn’t been a Space Bridge because you can bet they would be with their minders who wouldn’t have been able to say that. And the Space Bridge just blew every rule away because it was live, and they were out of control, and everybody took the risk. And then the government reacted, which was positively, because they had to, and this was the very top scientists, so they had to. So, producing it was very difficult, and it was risky, and I got a real bond with the guys who were assigned to produce it, and they were sports producers.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Kim Spencer: Live TV, right. And they covered soccer games live. And all of a sudden, they got hooked on this idea of Space Bridges. So, I’ve given you a very long, in-depth thing because you’ve heard the other parts of the story, and it all sort of rolls out Space Bridges. But that put me in a position as being a person who could work with Gosteleradio with Russian people who were very creative and willing to push the envelope, so I started bringing more people over and proposing new things, and got a little teletype device from Western Union that was like a precursor to a—it was a keyboard with two ear pods that you put in and it was like…and it was your Western Union telex.I could type like, you know, a sentence and hit send.
And on the other side it was coming out in Moscow—I saw the machine—in this giant machine going ch-ch-ch-ch-ch with all the little holes in a paper tape, you know. And then they’re taking the punched tape and they’re going and reading, somebody reads the punch, right?
Internews San Francisco proposes a Space Bridge with the topic etc…. Evelyn and David and I had just made up the name Internews. That company, Internews, became the preferred [presenter] for Space Bridges because we were somehow able to deliver technically and politically, you know, and they wanted to keep doing these things.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And the dialogue…what did you hope to come from this dialogue, from the citizen dialogue?
Kim Spencer: Well, we wanted [to save] the planet. We wanted to prevent [nuclear war]. We wanted to reduce the conflict. I don’t…I was not thinking ahead to what would happen after Glasnost. That was, you know, I was more interested in solving a problem that we were facing, you know, the planet and civilization, and using this new technology for dialogue.
And it was a great opportunity to get to work [in Russia] and do all these things, and it kind of gave me a profession of being, making, you know, I think I produced 13 of them, so, you know. And I got to go over there a lot during the Soviet period. I wasn’t a Russian expert. I didn’t speak Russian, and I [unintelligible], you know, Jim Hickman and others, and work with them, and I just did my role, which was to know how to make live television work, and also [build up] a trust in working with the enemy, basically.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And do you feel they came to trust you as well, the Russians?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. We had to trust each other because they’re TV professionals. Of course there’s stories about how it was difficult and all that. But I think jumping forward to your question, we didn’t envision or see the business opportunities that [Peter Gerwe] and Jim [Hickman] did. And they [were all seeing it] in different ways. David Hoffman saw [Internews] as an NGO that could get USAID money, and he just kind of leveraged what we were doing in Space Bridges to a vision to do things and the importance of independent media. And I was involved in that through the ‘90s, and believed in it, and worked on it, but I didn’t have any entrepreneurial sense about it. Those three guys were the entrepreneurs, and many others.
Daniel Satinsky: Right,. So, obviously one thing led to another, in a sense, right? You had a progression. And when the Soviet Union falls apart and David sort of—I know he told me how the AID grant came about, but I’m not remembering the details right now. But you came into a fairly large pot of money that was to be used to train journalists and TV producers, right?
Kim Spencer: That’s right. And it was Ukraine. It started in Ukraine. David [Hoffman] called me up and said Hey, Kim, can you think of how we might spend $10 million, because I think I can [raise] $10 million. I’m going how the hell are we going to spend $10 million just on trainings and things like that? But I thought well, maybe we could put in a satellite dish. If we put in a satellite dish, that would allow them to be independent of the Soviet satellite system, which Ukraine had been, and they could distribute their programs by satellite. So, David goes Yeah, that’s—how much do you think it’ll cost? I’m going, well, let me call somebody. So, about $3 million, that’s what it would take.
The satellite dish was gigantic. And it had to be sourced [from the US] so it was a huge process getting it in there. But it did help create a totally independent media in Ukraine because the dish gave them the ability to connect a bunch of channels [via a European satellite] and distribute [their programming]. It was one of those big uplinks, and it was put on top of an old factory, and everything around it, and all the money that had to go to build that, you know, created an infrastructure in Ukraine that lasted…I think it’s still in use.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Who was the Ukrainian partner for that?
Kim Spencer: Well, Internews Ukraine created a whole new group through local partners, so the creation of Internews Ukraine, and around that chunk of money, [came] a resource that made it work in that country. And then it was followed by other money for the Moscow operation, and hiring Manana Aslamazyan. And then Evelyn and David and another funder from the Rockefeller [Foundation] went off [to a conference]—and Evelyn might have told you the story about their first meeting where they found these TV station owners from around the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Kim Spencer: And it was [...] there were these new TV channels, and if they could export them, it was a way to promote democracy, which became the whole, the backbone and justification of USAID grants year after year after year that supported independent media. Internews could actually promote democratization in that way.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. And when you were thinking of—what do you mean by independent? Does that mean privately owned or does it mean something more than privately owned?
Kim Spencer: Say the word again. It just broke up.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I think we’re having a little disruption of the internet connection, but whatever. When you say independent media, does that just mean non-government, or is it private, or what does it mean?
Kim Spencer: Yeah, non-government.
Daniel Satinsky: Non-government. So, it could be a local car dealer who owned a station.
Kim Spencer: For example, Krasnoyarsk out in Siberia. I’ve been there. There was an aluminum plant which was the main big thing there, and after 1990, ’91 they were the local powerhouse, so they started a TV channel. And the guy that they picked was a kind of [an innovator]…he didn’t just immediately start programming with pirated Hollywood [movie VHS] tapes, which was sort of a business model at the beginning with independent stations. And so the leaders of those channels were able to get funding through Internews to help them to get not only journalism training, because they all had to produce programs in order to get the funding, they needed to do some local journalism, right, but they also would get training in business management of TV channels.
We started exporting from the U.S., [the skills needed to] set up a commercial TV channel. Because these were commercial channels. None of them were—they weren’t like PBS or, you know, they were commercial channels. But that was back at a time when news was part of a commercial channel’s important service, right? So, my background at ABC News [helped]. That was the role I played, not the business [side], but more around journalism and the building of a network of these channels. [Internews] had a television series called “Local Time,” where each [local station] contributed a little [video], and then [the show] was broadcast on satellite to all of Russia.
So, [now there was] an alternative to [Gosteleradio state TV and radio channels]. Now you had a bunch of [new] channels coming up. And so that was, for a while, a great example of the success that you can have by supporting, training, and providing key resources to regional [TV stations]… [Internews] did the same thing in Almaty in Kazakhstan and all over [the FSU].
Daniel Satinsky: Did you have your own dish in all those places?
Kim Spencer: No. We didn’t need to provide satellite dishes by that point. There were other ways to distribute, or new systems came up.
Daniel Satinsky: But they were all private systems at that point?
Kim Spencer: They were all private companies, entrepreneurial companies. Some got started just by a guy going with a VHS—remember the old VHS players that you could choose Channel 3 or 4 on your TV? Well, they figured out you could take a VHS machine up to the top of a building which is wired for cable, plug that into the cable for the whole building, and ever resident’s Channel 3 or 4 gets the output of the VHS machine. They would just get pirated tapes and play films. That’s how it started. And that was what Evelyn [Messinger] wrote about when she went to Eastern Europe and saw that happen, [several years] before it happened in the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Interesting. I talked to Peter Gerwe, and Peter told me that he explicitly stayed away from any kind of politics in building his network. And that was his key to being able to do it. And you were the opposite. You built around politics, right?
Kim Spencer: That’s right. And there’s no Internews left in Russia because the [government] forced that to shut that down eventually. Right. It was a different path because we [not businessmen]…I mean, David was more entrepreneurial, but within a nonprofit setting. We were mission-driven. That was what we did. We sometimes did things in collaboration with Gerwe and other groups. So, my experience was never like guys having to run a business like Hickman did, and like you were involved in. I mean, it was all amazing [unintelligible] …setting up a teleport and things like that. Those were really critical and required business to do it.
But what I did get to experience was the [Russians I worked with] were able to parlay their experiences and their success as the key Space Bridge producers, and being very creative, entrepreneurial, really, within the Soviet system, when they both became the head of networks and got substantially—
Daniel Satinsky: Which ones, do you remember?
Kim Spencer: Weren’t the really big ones, and so they each went in different paths after a while, and it would just take a little bit of background research.
Daniel Satinsky: Sure.
Kim Spencer: But they are interesting characters for your book. I would talk to them because they came out of growing up in the Soviet system. And so, they were really committed to the ideas of the Soviet Union, and they really supported communism right up till it just became obvious that it wasn’t working. They weren’t like, you know. But they also understood the importance of communication and dialogue. So, then what happened to them, when they were offered this money and power and all that, I watched from afar, you know, is they sort of just got drawn into schlock TV. Not necessarily everything was, but most television is, so, you know. And it would be interesting to see how they watched what went on within media, from their point of view.
And then it would also be interesting, if you talk to any of the Russians, to talk to Manana Aslamazyan, who ran Internews Russia and would know which of [them] is the guy in Krasnoyarsk—
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, so David gave me her email, and I wrote to her, and I’ve gotten no answer, so—
Kim Spencer: Well, I’ve been in touch with her, and I’d be happy to—
Daniel Satinsky: That would be great.
Kim Spencer: She might be hesitant just until she finds out more about what you’re doing, but I think she would be…
Daniel Satinsky: That would be great.
Kim Spencer: Between the entrepreneurial, business oriented, ultimately having to be responsive to your stockholder and/or to your investor, whatever investment compared to those who are drawn in by the more nonprofit-y sort of thing. She was constantly having to deal with that.
Daniel Satinsky: What remains of the nonprofit network? Does anything remain of that as regional and smaller stations?
Kim Spencer: Right. And there, by the way, is a YouTube channel called Space Bridges created to put all these, as many of them as I have been able to find on. And that…there was a funder who was [unintelligible] on organizing and funding that event about nuclear winter, and in Washington, and he had funded—
Daniel Satinsky: Sorry, there was a glitch. What was the name of that person?
Kim Spencer: Paul Allen.
Daniel Satinsky: Paul Allen.
Kim Spencer: No, not Paul Allen, Bob, Robert Allen.
Daniel Satinsky: Robert Allen. Not Microsoft.
Kim Spencer: Yeah, fact check, right. Robert Allen. And he was—I’m forgetting the name of the foundation right now—but he was one of the funders of Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich’s event. And they were running into a problem. As the date approached in the fall 1983, they were running into a problem that they weren’t [sure] if the Russian scientists were going to get visas to come to the U.S. And they were invited, and they had agreed to come, and it was really important. It was a global thing on the risk of nuclear war, and if maybe nuclear winter.
And so basically Bob Allen called and asked whether Evelyn and I would be able to produce a Space Bridge somehow, so he funded it, and Evelyn was the producer in Washington, and I was the producer in Moscow. So, that’s the first time I produced a Space Bridge from Moscow, in the Gosteleradio [studios control room]. And it had to be done quickly. We had no more than a month to prepare it.
And there’s a lot of detail about why that was so important, but the important thing is that in the afternoon when the Soviet scientists were just sitting there in the studio watching and listening to the presentation by Ehrlich and all the scientists, and then in the U.S. they went to lunch. The scientists gathered around, the leading Soviet scientists, and they were in the studio, and it was in the evening in Moscow. And Bob Fuller, who was a physicist, and a friend of ours, and part of the nuclear weapons group, David Hoffman’s close friend, had gone along as an advisor, because people knew him. His physics book was actually published and translated and used in the schools.
So, he was like…so Bob’s sitting there in the circle with these top Soviet scientists, and they’re trying to decide what they should do because it’s now going to be their time to talk, and are they going to say anything, or are they just going to say […] you just go down, when you hear the sirens you go down into the subways, you’ll be safe and come out afterwards. That was the official nuclear preparedness in Russia at the time. And the scientists debated whether or not they should say what they really believed, which was nuclear winter was a possibility, there was not a way to survive a nuclear attack, both sides were going to go down, and what should they say. And they made a decision that they wouldn’t call their bosses, they were just going to say what they thought. And they did.
And then the next day it was Soviet, you know, Western and East, you know, Soviet and Western scientists agree. That would not have happened if it hadn’t been a Space Bridge because you can bet they would be with their minders who wouldn’t have been able to say that. And the Space Bridge just blew every rule away because it was live, and they were out of control, and everybody took the risk. And then the government reacted, which was positively, because they had to, and this was the very top scientists, so they had to. So, producing it was very difficult, and it was risky, and I got a real bond with the guys who were assigned to produce it, and they were sports producers.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Kim Spencer: Live TV, right. And they covered soccer games live. And all of a sudden, they got hooked on this idea of Space Bridges. So, I’ve given you a very long, in-depth thing because you’ve heard the other parts of the story, and it all sort of rolls out Space Bridges. But that put me in a position as being a person who could work with Gosteleradio with Russian people who were very creative and willing to push the envelope, so I started bringing more people over and proposing new things, and got a little teletype device from Western Union that was like a precursor to a—it was a keyboard with two ear pods that you put in and it was like…and it was your Western Union telex.I could type like, you know, a sentence and hit send.
And on the other side it was coming out in Moscow—I saw the machine—in this giant machine going ch-ch-ch-ch-ch with all the little holes in a paper tape, you know. And then they’re taking the punched tape and they’re going and reading, somebody reads the punch, right?
Internews San Francisco proposes a Space Bridge with the topic etc…. Evelyn and David and I had just made up the name Internews. That company, Internews, became the preferred [presenter] for Space Bridges because we were somehow able to deliver technically and politically, you know, and they wanted to keep doing these things.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And the dialogue…what did you hope to come from this dialogue, from the citizen dialogue?
Kim Spencer: Well, we wanted [to save] the planet. We wanted to prevent [nuclear war]. We wanted to reduce the conflict. I don’t…I was not thinking ahead to what would happen after Glasnost. That was, you know, I was more interested in solving a problem that we were facing, you know, the planet and civilization, and using this new technology for dialogue.
And it was a great opportunity to get to work [in Russia] and do all these things, and it kind of gave me a profession of being, making, you know, I think I produced 13 of them, so, you know. And I got to go over there a lot during the Soviet period. I wasn’t a Russian expert. I didn’t speak Russian, and I [unintelligible], you know, Jim Hickman and others, and work with them, and I just did my role, which was to know how to make live television work, and also [build up] a trust in working with the enemy, basically.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And do you feel they came to trust you as well, the Russians?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. We had to trust each other because they’re TV professionals. Of course there’s stories about how it was difficult and all that. But I think jumping forward to your question, we didn’t envision or see the business opportunities that [Peter Gerwe] and Jim [Hickman] did. And they [were all seeing it] in different ways. David Hoffman saw [Internews] as an NGO that could get USAID money, and he just kind of leveraged what we were doing in Space Bridges to a vision to do things and the importance of independent media. And I was involved in that through the ‘90s, and believed in it, and worked on it, but I didn’t have any entrepreneurial sense about it. Those three guys were the entrepreneurs, and many others.
Daniel Satinsky: Right,. So, obviously one thing led to another, in a sense, right? You had a progression. And when the Soviet Union falls apart and David sort of—I know he told me how the AID grant came about, but I’m not remembering the details right now. But you came into a fairly large pot of money that was to be used to train journalists and TV producers, right?
Kim Spencer: That’s right. And it was Ukraine. It started in Ukraine. David [Hoffman] called me up and said Hey, Kim, can you think of how we might spend $10 million, because I think I can [raise] $10 million. I’m going how the hell are we going to spend $10 million just on trainings and things like that? But I thought well, maybe we could put in a satellite dish. If we put in a satellite dish, that would allow them to be independent of the Soviet satellite system, which Ukraine had been, and they could distribute their programs by satellite. So, David goes Yeah, that’s—how much do you think it’ll cost? I’m going, well, let me call somebody. So, about $3 million, that’s what it would take.
The satellite dish was gigantic. And it had to be sourced [from the US] so it was a huge process getting it in there. But it did help create a totally independent media in Ukraine because the dish gave them the ability to connect a bunch of channels [via a European satellite] and distribute [their programming]. It was one of those big uplinks, and it was put on top of an old factory, and everything around it, and all the money that had to go to build that, you know, created an infrastructure in Ukraine that lasted…I think it’s still in use.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Who was the Ukrainian partner for that?
Kim Spencer: Well, Internews Ukraine created a whole new group through local partners, so the creation of Internews Ukraine, and around that chunk of money, [came] a resource that made it work in that country. And then it was followed by other money for the Moscow operation, and hiring Manana Aslamazyan. And then Evelyn and David and another funder from the Rockefeller [Foundation] went off [to a conference]—and Evelyn might have told you the story about their first meeting where they found these TV station owners from around the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Kim Spencer: And it was [...] there were these new TV channels, and if they could export them, it was a way to promote democracy, which became the whole, the backbone and justification of USAID grants year after year after year that supported independent media. Internews could actually promote democratization in that way.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. And when you were thinking of—what do you mean by independent? Does that mean privately owned or does it mean something more than privately owned?
Kim Spencer: Say the word again. It just broke up.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I think we’re having a little disruption of the internet connection, but whatever. When you say independent media, does that just mean non-government, or is it private, or what does it mean?
Kim Spencer: Yeah, non-government.
Daniel Satinsky: Non-government. So, it could be a local car dealer who owned a station.
Kim Spencer: For example, Krasnoyarsk out in Siberia. I’ve been there. There was an aluminum plant which was the main big thing there, and after 1990, ’91 they were the local powerhouse, so they started a TV channel. And the guy that they picked was a kind of [an innovator]…he didn’t just immediately start programming with pirated Hollywood [movie VHS] tapes, which was sort of a business model at the beginning with independent stations. And so the leaders of those channels were able to get funding through Internews to help them to get not only journalism training, because they all had to produce programs in order to get the funding, they needed to do some local journalism, right, but they also would get training in business management of TV channels.
We started exporting from the U.S., [the skills needed to] set up a commercial TV channel. Because these were commercial channels. None of them were—they weren’t like PBS or, you know, they were commercial channels. But that was back at a time when news was part of a commercial channel’s important service, right? So, my background at ABC News [helped]. That was the role I played, not the business [side], but more around journalism and the building of a network of these channels. [Internews] had a television series called “Local Time,” where each [local station] contributed a little [video], and then [the show] was broadcast on satellite to all of Russia.
So, [now there was] an alternative to [Gosteleradio state TV and radio channels]. Now you had a bunch of [new] channels coming up. And so that was, for a while, a great example of the success that you can have by supporting, training, and providing key resources to regional [TV stations]… [Internews] did the same thing in Almaty in Kazakhstan and all over [the FSU].
Daniel Satinsky: Did you have your own dish in all those places?
Kim Spencer: No. We didn’t need to provide satellite dishes by that point. There were other ways to distribute, or new systems came up.
Daniel Satinsky: But they were all private systems at that point?
Kim Spencer: They were all private companies, entrepreneurial companies. Some got started just by a guy going with a VHS—remember the old VHS players that you could choose Channel 3 or 4 on your TV? Well, they figured out you could take a VHS machine up to the top of a building which is wired for cable, plug that into the cable for the whole building, and ever resident’s Channel 3 or 4 gets the output of the VHS machine. They would just get pirated tapes and play films. That’s how it started. And that was what Evelyn [Messinger] wrote about when she went to Eastern Europe and saw that happen, [several years] before it happened in the Soviet Union.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Interesting. I talked to Peter Gerwe, and Peter told me that he explicitly stayed away from any kind of politics in building his network. And that was his key to being able to do it. And you were the opposite. You built around politics, right?
Kim Spencer: That’s right. And there’s no Internews left in Russia because the [government] forced that to shut that down eventually. Right. It was a different path because we [not businessmen]…I mean, David was more entrepreneurial, but within a nonprofit setting. We were mission-driven. That was what we did. We sometimes did things in collaboration with Gerwe and other groups. So, my experience was never like guys having to run a business like Hickman did, and like you were involved in. I mean, it was all amazing [unintelligible] …setting up a teleport and things like that. Those were really critical and required business to do it.
But what I did get to experience was the [Russians I worked with] were able to parlay their experiences and their success as the key Space Bridge producers, and being very creative, entrepreneurial, really, within the Soviet system, when they both became the head of networks and got substantially—
Daniel Satinsky: Which ones, do you remember?
Kim Spencer: Weren’t the really big ones, and so they each went in different paths after a while, and it would just take a little bit of background research.
Daniel Satinsky: Sure.
Kim Spencer: But they are interesting characters for your book. I would talk to them because they came out of growing up in the Soviet system. And so, they were really committed to the ideas of the Soviet Union, and they really supported communism right up till it just became obvious that it wasn’t working. They weren’t like, you know. But they also understood the importance of communication and dialogue. So, then what happened to them, when they were offered this money and power and all that, I watched from afar, you know, is they sort of just got drawn into schlock TV. Not necessarily everything was, but most television is, so, you know. And it would be interesting to see how they watched what went on within media, from their point of view.
And then it would also be interesting, if you talk to any of the Russians, to talk to Manana Aslamazyan, who ran Internews Russia and would know which of [them] is the guy in Krasnoyarsk—
Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, so David gave me her email, and I wrote to her, and I’ve gotten no answer, so—
Kim Spencer: Well, I’ve been in touch with her, and I’d be happy to—
Daniel Satinsky: That would be great.
Kim Spencer: She might be hesitant just until she finds out more about what you’re doing, but I think she would be…
Daniel Satinsky: That would be great.
Kim Spencer: Between the entrepreneurial, business oriented, ultimately having to be responsive to your stockholder and/or to your investor, whatever investment compared to those who are drawn in by the more nonprofit-y sort of thing. She was constantly having to deal with that.
Daniel Satinsky: What remains of the nonprofit network? Does anything remain of that as regional and smaller stations?
Kim Spencer: Manana could tell you exactly what there does. I don’t know that there’s anything that’s really continuing in Russia. I know that there are strong Internews remnants or aspirations in some of the other former Soviet states like Armenia and Kazakhstan, I think, still. And as far as I know, Internews Ukraine is still operating and doing something. [unintelligible] might be playing a major role. One crazy thing is I follow Space Bridges, and I’m also looking for Space Bridge videos, and about four years ago I discovered that a television station in western Ukraine, where the war was going on, was producing Space Bridges. They called them Telemost*, which is the…
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Kim Spencer: And they actually created a series that were using two-way technology because during the war it was like oh, okay—and I don’t know if they were just using Skype or whatever, but they were calling them Telemost. They were drawing on this history, because people do remember Space Bridges. You can go down the whole, you know, Posner, and Donohue and—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, I know, you know, here in—I’m in Boston, and a friend of mine used to run the public access station here, BNN, and probably five or six years ago we set up a Space Bridge with Yaroslavl, and it was technically difficult still. There was a lag in the timing which made the conversation choppy. It was very…it was still difficult. But I think everybody involved in it was excited about this. It was called the Bridge Over the Waters or something. But—
Kim Spencer: Is there a video of it?
Daniel Satinsky: I’ll check with my friend Kurt.
Kim Spencer: I’m just curious. There’s interest about this period and about the Space Bridges. You’re coming at it at a different angle. But I…and apologize if I got off too much in the—
Daniel Satinsky: No-no-no, nothing to apologize about.
Kim Spencer: The Space Bridges, a lot of people are interested about that period of Space Bridges, and so I’m constantly being asked to kind of dredge up old stories of how they happened.
Daniel Satinsky: This one is much more recent than…
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I’d be curious. I’m just curious. I’m tracking them, trying to understand. There is something about an intention to have people talk face-to-face across a divide when there’s a political or social difference. We have our phones and this technology now. It seems like that’s irrelevant. But actually, there’s a lot of still some, you know, it’s not so easy to actually accomplish some of the goals that we tried to set out to do in some of those early Space Bridges using Zoom, unless you really think about it, and you’ve got agreement, and there’s a whole process. Those had to happen then because they were so difficult to set up. They required trust besides. Now you just like open up a Zoom call and you start talking.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. My same friends in Yaroslavl have an English language club every Friday, and it’s a Zoom call, and they send invites out, and there’s people in Vermont, and Minnesota, and Florida and Yaroslavl talking, which is pretty amazing. I mean, I remember the telex era, so it is amazing. And something that strikes me is that for all of the forbidding notion of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, it was actually much more porous, that Iron Curtain was much more porous during the ‘80s than anyone now, than you would think. And in some ways the intention and willingness for dialogue was much stronger then than it is now. I would say the informal boundaries to people talking to each other are stronger now than then. Would you agree with that?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I’m writing this down. “Formal boundaries to dialogue are stronger now than then.” I agree with that. I’m always trying to figure out ways in my own work, although I’m retiring officially, but how to use these technologies and kind of hang onto this idea that there’s something about the technology and something about face-to-face. Even though it’s [unintelligible], as long as we can kind of keep the connection, then the trust builds. Why that’s happening I don’t know.
I mean, [unintelligible] …from Esalen that Jim Hickman was part of. Now it’s an organization called Track II that Dulce Murphy and Michael Murphy run. And they just did a conference, part of it involving—all of it involving a Zoom, about the nuclear war. And it had Governor Jerry Brown, who has become a major advocate for new focus on this issue, and had leading experts, and a bunch of questions, had them going back and forth and leading that. And so [unintelligible].
But I do think that back then there was, you know, it was just so amazing to realize how alike we were in ways, and how they, you know, the face of the enemy thing that had been instilled, that the Russians couldn’t be trusted and they were dangerous, when you went over and you met [them], and you worked with them, it was like wow, let’s do some stuff together, and let’s take a risk and push the envelope.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. One of the things, and the reasons why I’m interested in the relationship between this period and business is that Russians typically like to do things with people they know. They’re not very good at doing things with strangers. And until they get to know you, they’re very reserved. And then once they know you and they trust you, then the whole, everything changes. And so it seemed to me that once the Soviet Union fell apart, those Russians who were looking for outside connections went to trusted people. They went to people they knew. And who did they know? People from the citizen diplomacy movement, right?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I think that’s a…if that’s a basic line that you can develop, I think yes. And you mentioned… I think the only ones that we don’t know of and haven’t mentioned about is that there were other things that might be good examples of businesses that developed that I just don’t know about that you can learn more about from Manana or from their point of view what was going on, what was interesting. It wasn’t all U.S. It was [unintelligible]. They had a lot of relations with other English language producers, because they were in that section, entities that created other, probably created other businesses.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, there’s, you know, there’s a woman from Duke who wrote a book about television in Russia and the struggle for power. Do you know this book? Do you know what I’m referring to?
Kim Spencer: I don’t know the book.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, I’m getting it. It’ll just take me one second. It’s called “Changing Channels.”
Kim Spencer: Oh, uh-huh.
Daniel Satinsky: And the woman’s name is Ellen Mickiewicz.
Kim Spencer: Got it, okay.
Daniel Satinsky: And the subtitle of this is “Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia.”
Kim Spencer: What was the main title?
Daniel Satinsky: “Changing Channels.”
Kim Spencer: Oh, nice.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s a very clever title.
Kim Spencer: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: And I didn’t get this from her book, which I, you know, I keep getting, as I do these interviews people say well, you know about this, and you know about that book, and you know about that person, and I’m sort of at the gathering stage, and I’ve got to deepen it because I haven’t read the book. But I do know that part of the internal struggle in Russia was carried out through TV stations and that Berezovsky and Gusinsky in particular used them as levers for their political ambitions. And I’m just curious how all of that sort of gets sorted out.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. Well, I mean, television, as we know, was always a powerful thing. If you were going to change the government, you had to have the television station. And there’s examples of that during the whole Glasnost period, and like with Estonia and Latvia, where there was stuff happening outside the [unintelligible]. I remember it because I was working for ABC News at the time in the ‘90s, and I was going to Moscow a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that was happening.
And then the business sector and those guys you mentioned, I mean, it just…I don’t have personal experience of it. My gut tells me that there’s a great story there, once you get into it from the Russian point of view, and inside their heads, rather than seeing it, you know. I mean, the politics around the channels… There’s a guy now who’s a journalist who you might be able to get some insight from. He’s the one that was the co-producer of that podcast, Charles Maynes.
Daniel Satinsky: Charles Mayne?
Kim Spencer: M-A-Y-N-E-S. I’ll send you a link and an introduction if you’d like.
Daniel Satinsky: Great.
Kim Spencer: He’s an NPR stringer in Moscow, and he’s really good, and he’s kind of onto the current situation, and he’s been following these issues from there.
Daniel Satinsky: Great. Yeah. My impression, my personal impression from, say, within the last five years about the difference between Americans and Russians and TV is that Americans believe the TV. They believe in the information they get from the TV. Where Russians do not believe in the TV. They watch it to get somebody else’s view, but they don’t necessarily believe it. So, it’s still, you know, if you watch Fox TV, you believe what you’re told. If you watch CNN and MSNBC, you believe what they’ve told you there. But Russians watch it, and they go, eh, okay, but you know.
Kim Spencer: But they were looking for the clues. They would watch these Space Bridges for the clues about the West. And they didn’t believe anything that the people on their side were saying, but they were very influenced, I think, by the Space Bridges because it was the only time real Americans were showing up on the screen. I mean, they could get Hollywood films, right. But real people, and what did they think, what were they wearing, what were they allowed to say, how did they carry themselves, I think to Russians, that’s why it was so fascinating for them. They thought it was a joke, the people that were speaking on their side, you know, the whole thing during the Donohue show where he asked what about romance or—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right.
Kim Spencer: And it got translated as sex and it became a joke. And they wrote a book about the Space Bridge era, a Russian book. It’s called “We Don’t Have Sex in the Soviet Union.” They used that headline because everybody knows it.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
Kim Spencer: And they actually created a series that were using two-way technology because during the war it was like oh, okay—and I don’t know if they were just using Skype or whatever, but they were calling them Telemost. They were drawing on this history, because people do remember Space Bridges. You can go down the whole, you know, Posner, and Donohue and—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, I know, you know, here in—I’m in Boston, and a friend of mine used to run the public access station here, BNN, and probably five or six years ago we set up a Space Bridge with Yaroslavl, and it was technically difficult still. There was a lag in the timing which made the conversation choppy. It was very…it was still difficult. But I think everybody involved in it was excited about this. It was called the Bridge Over the Waters or something. But—
Kim Spencer: Is there a video of it?
Daniel Satinsky: I’ll check with my friend Kurt.
Kim Spencer: I’m just curious. There’s interest about this period and about the Space Bridges. You’re coming at it at a different angle. But I…and apologize if I got off too much in the—
Daniel Satinsky: No-no-no, nothing to apologize about.
Kim Spencer: The Space Bridges, a lot of people are interested about that period of Space Bridges, and so I’m constantly being asked to kind of dredge up old stories of how they happened.
Daniel Satinsky: This one is much more recent than…
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I’d be curious. I’m just curious. I’m tracking them, trying to understand. There is something about an intention to have people talk face-to-face across a divide when there’s a political or social difference. We have our phones and this technology now. It seems like that’s irrelevant. But actually, there’s a lot of still some, you know, it’s not so easy to actually accomplish some of the goals that we tried to set out to do in some of those early Space Bridges using Zoom, unless you really think about it, and you’ve got agreement, and there’s a whole process. Those had to happen then because they were so difficult to set up. They required trust besides. Now you just like open up a Zoom call and you start talking.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. My same friends in Yaroslavl have an English language club every Friday, and it’s a Zoom call, and they send invites out, and there’s people in Vermont, and Minnesota, and Florida and Yaroslavl talking, which is pretty amazing. I mean, I remember the telex era, so it is amazing. And something that strikes me is that for all of the forbidding notion of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, it was actually much more porous, that Iron Curtain was much more porous during the ‘80s than anyone now, than you would think. And in some ways the intention and willingness for dialogue was much stronger then than it is now. I would say the informal boundaries to people talking to each other are stronger now than then. Would you agree with that?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I’m writing this down. “Formal boundaries to dialogue are stronger now than then.” I agree with that. I’m always trying to figure out ways in my own work, although I’m retiring officially, but how to use these technologies and kind of hang onto this idea that there’s something about the technology and something about face-to-face. Even though it’s [unintelligible], as long as we can kind of keep the connection, then the trust builds. Why that’s happening I don’t know.
I mean, [unintelligible] …from Esalen that Jim Hickman was part of. Now it’s an organization called Track II that Dulce Murphy and Michael Murphy run. And they just did a conference, part of it involving—all of it involving a Zoom, about the nuclear war. And it had Governor Jerry Brown, who has become a major advocate for new focus on this issue, and had leading experts, and a bunch of questions, had them going back and forth and leading that. And so [unintelligible].
But I do think that back then there was, you know, it was just so amazing to realize how alike we were in ways, and how they, you know, the face of the enemy thing that had been instilled, that the Russians couldn’t be trusted and they were dangerous, when you went over and you met [them], and you worked with them, it was like wow, let’s do some stuff together, and let’s take a risk and push the envelope.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. One of the things, and the reasons why I’m interested in the relationship between this period and business is that Russians typically like to do things with people they know. They’re not very good at doing things with strangers. And until they get to know you, they’re very reserved. And then once they know you and they trust you, then the whole, everything changes. And so it seemed to me that once the Soviet Union fell apart, those Russians who were looking for outside connections went to trusted people. They went to people they knew. And who did they know? People from the citizen diplomacy movement, right?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. I think that’s a…if that’s a basic line that you can develop, I think yes. And you mentioned… I think the only ones that we don’t know of and haven’t mentioned about is that there were other things that might be good examples of businesses that developed that I just don’t know about that you can learn more about from Manana or from their point of view what was going on, what was interesting. It wasn’t all U.S. It was [unintelligible]. They had a lot of relations with other English language producers, because they were in that section, entities that created other, probably created other businesses.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, there’s, you know, there’s a woman from Duke who wrote a book about television in Russia and the struggle for power. Do you know this book? Do you know what I’m referring to?
Kim Spencer: I don’t know the book.
Daniel Satinsky: All right, I’m getting it. It’ll just take me one second. It’s called “Changing Channels.”
Kim Spencer: Oh, uh-huh.
Daniel Satinsky: And the woman’s name is Ellen Mickiewicz.
Kim Spencer: Got it, okay.
Daniel Satinsky: And the subtitle of this is “Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia.”
Kim Spencer: What was the main title?
Daniel Satinsky: “Changing Channels.”
Kim Spencer: Oh, nice.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s a very clever title.
Kim Spencer: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: And I didn’t get this from her book, which I, you know, I keep getting, as I do these interviews people say well, you know about this, and you know about that book, and you know about that person, and I’m sort of at the gathering stage, and I’ve got to deepen it because I haven’t read the book. But I do know that part of the internal struggle in Russia was carried out through TV stations and that Berezovsky and Gusinsky in particular used them as levers for their political ambitions. And I’m just curious how all of that sort of gets sorted out.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. Well, I mean, television, as we know, was always a powerful thing. If you were going to change the government, you had to have the television station. And there’s examples of that during the whole Glasnost period, and like with Estonia and Latvia, where there was stuff happening outside the [unintelligible]. I remember it because I was working for ABC News at the time in the ‘90s, and I was going to Moscow a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that was happening.
And then the business sector and those guys you mentioned, I mean, it just…I don’t have personal experience of it. My gut tells me that there’s a great story there, once you get into it from the Russian point of view, and inside their heads, rather than seeing it, you know. I mean, the politics around the channels… There’s a guy now who’s a journalist who you might be able to get some insight from. He’s the one that was the co-producer of that podcast, Charles Maynes.
Daniel Satinsky: Charles Mayne?
Kim Spencer: M-A-Y-N-E-S. I’ll send you a link and an introduction if you’d like.
Daniel Satinsky: Great.
Kim Spencer: He’s an NPR stringer in Moscow, and he’s really good, and he’s kind of onto the current situation, and he’s been following these issues from there.
Daniel Satinsky: Great. Yeah. My impression, my personal impression from, say, within the last five years about the difference between Americans and Russians and TV is that Americans believe the TV. They believe in the information they get from the TV. Where Russians do not believe in the TV. They watch it to get somebody else’s view, but they don’t necessarily believe it. So, it’s still, you know, if you watch Fox TV, you believe what you’re told. If you watch CNN and MSNBC, you believe what they’ve told you there. But Russians watch it, and they go, eh, okay, but you know.
Kim Spencer: But they were looking for the clues. They would watch these Space Bridges for the clues about the West. And they didn’t believe anything that the people on their side were saying, but they were very influenced, I think, by the Space Bridges because it was the only time real Americans were showing up on the screen. I mean, they could get Hollywood films, right. But real people, and what did they think, what were they wearing, what were they allowed to say, how did they carry themselves, I think to Russians, that’s why it was so fascinating for them. They thought it was a joke, the people that were speaking on their side, you know, the whole thing during the Donohue show where he asked what about romance or—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, right.
Kim Spencer: And it got translated as sex and it became a joke. And they wrote a book about the Space Bridge era, a Russian book. It’s called “We Don’t Have Sex in the Soviet Union.” They used that headline because everybody knows it.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. In the later period, once Internews was established, did you bring Russians to the U.S. to learn here as well?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. David knows a lot more about that because he was running the operation where they were bringing Northern Californians. And once Space Bridge was started, they were bringing these producers [inaudible].
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And so, what do you think is the long-term impact of what you did?
Kim Spencer: I think, because I’ve been asked this a lot, or kind of wonder, you know, you get to this stage of life you wonder well, what did I do all that stuff for? And clearly, we didn’t solve nuclear, you know, we didn’t… But I think that of all the Space Bridges that really had an impact, it was the first real Space Bridge which was serious, and that was the one about nuclear winter in1983, because it actually allowed Russian scientists to say what they believed — and for the world to get kind of the first [introduction] to the science of global warming, and climate change all tied in.. And so that [Carl Sagan and Paul Erlich conference in Washington] had scientists that were talking, and the Russian scientists [who could not get visas were able to join from the Moscow studios of Gosteleradio]. That, to me, I think is, if I think of any one thing that these Space Bridges did, I point to that.
And then the “Capital to Capital” series that was on ABC News was definitely a part of the Glasnost. I think Glasnost would have happened without it, but it was a part of the opening up. And there was that moment in one of the Space Bridges when Peter Jennings, who was always trying to get them, you know, always had his questions ready, and he said, well, what about these Jewish families like the da-da-da-da-da, you know, who would really want to emigrate? And without a break the Russian head of, you know, the highest rank Russian panelist at the time said oh yes, they’re being allowed to leave. They’ll be leaving this week. And Jennings does this total double take, like “what, wait, did you just say?” You know, it was news, this was news being broken [on a Space Bridge].
And sometimes it was in that [series] there were some real honest exchanges — you know, it had the Congress, representatives of the Congress watching. But then, for the U.S. to abandon Russia and all of our promises to, you know, and then for the private sector to move in and work with corrupt Russian side to just take the resources and, you know. I hated going to Russia about ’93—
Daniel Satinsky: Wait a minute. You dropped out. Can you say that again? You hated going—
Kim Spencer: I sort of hated going to Russia after about ’93. Moscow had changed. Not [all of the FSU]. Russia outside Moscow was great, and all the other places I got to go, all the other regions [of the FSU], because I would have to kind of do a formal thing [representing Internews] and got to visit the Balkans and all those other countries. But Moscow just turned into an unrecognizable sort of Mafia place, with guys with machine guns standing in front of bars, and topless dancers, and just, you know, all of that stuff that was there in the [‘90s]. Did you ever get to go there in the ‘80s?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I went there in ’84 and ’85, so yeah.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. It was tough luck, and it was not a good system, but the people were really…you know, you could…I left my wallet once, you know, like in a train station, and I came back, and there was somebody standing there waiting for me to hand it to me. It was like oh, we’re so glad you came back. And that was just a normal person, you know, it was like…anyway.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, when was the last time you were there, by the way?
Kim Spencer: Well, about four years ago I went with Michael Murphy and Dulce Murphy. Evelyn and Michael and Dulce and I went there, and we went to Moscow, and we just had a lot of meetings. And in 2019 and 2017…anyway, for two years in a row we did a project in St. Petersburg. That was two Septembers ago and three Septembers ago, or four. Anyway, we did this project there where we produced an event with Russian and American college kids meeting each other and having three days of conversations, and it was called “Who Do You Trust.”
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, it was a continuation of this…?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. And it was a real continuation of the same kind of work. And this conference, I’ll send you the report on the conference that Track II just did dealing with the same issues, the same problems. People are mentioning the risk of [nuclear war] trying to use the Track II citizen to citizen process, what are the opportunities now, now that it’s not only nuclear, it’s cyber war, you know.
Daniel Satinsky: A litany of issues, yeah. And I only asked you that because Moscow is so different than it was in ’93 that I would—
Kim Spencer: Oh, it was amazing. It was just lovely. You know, staying in an Airbnb, a great apartment. It was like really cheap. And you could walk outside and there was a store. You could go into a store, and you could…didn’t have to go to a dollar store, you could actually go to a store, and you could even get normal stuff. I loved—Moscow was just lovely. It was a beautiful spring period, and the people were friendly, and there were just all sorts of new art and culture, and yeah. I love it now. I love it now. I did not like it in the ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, I understand it. I understand. I’m just glad that you had a chance to see it afterwards, so yeah.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. Have you been back a lot recently?
Daniel Satinsky: I was going up—I haven’t been there for probably two years now, two and a half years. I have to sort of live through the pandemic here and then figure out about going back, but you know. But I was really struck by how, what an amazing city Moscow has become, so much changed. And so, Paul Greenberg, was he part of your group or not?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. So, he was the younger generation who came in with no real media background, but with expertise in Russian. So, we had to start hiring people who were really sharp. And he ended up running a whole lot of the operations outside of Moscow. And then we produced some Space Bridges together that were in the Balkans, where we had Serbs talking to Bosnias, and Azerbaijans talking to Armenias. That was amazing, because that’s just all blown up again. You know, these things just keep coming back. So, we had all these different media projects, and Paul was really on the ground, and is a good person, too. And I’m sure you just need to pursue getting to him, and Evelyn.
So, I’m just remembering like what were the great shows. You know, as soon as everything went independent who were taking on this independent challenge. And those guys were big deals during this who took on the system.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I mean, my sense of things over the—if I kind of generalize for all these spheres is that the early years, in the early ‘90s Russians reached out for expertise and experience among Americans, and then they outgrew the necessity of that, didn’t need that anymore. And so, I think some of what’s perceived to be anti-Americanism is really irrelevance rather than antagonism. We just became irrelevant to the bigger picture, you know?
Kim Spencer: Exactly. And they were really doing it on their own. And there was that, I mean, now that Trump has sort of ruined the American reputation totally, we all have to admit that as Americans we all thought we were better than—
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely.
Kim Spencer: As nice as we were and as, you know, we’d try to understand, and, you know, we’re all…we thought we had the answer. And Hoffman and I would go into meetings, and with sort of the USAID money just right behind us, and, you know, we didn’t…we *** things up. You know, or we contributed to it, or we certainly didn’t have the smarts to figure out what was really going on, or the ability to. And then, you know, the system just made, you know, that’s what happens. You know, I’ve never worked in the for-profit sector, really, except when I worked for ABC News, so it’s sad to me. A company that had a lot of social values baked in for the people, even though they didn’t trust their government, and it sucked, and it wasn’t serving them, that they had great social value. And that’s what struck me about [inaudible] when I worked with them, and some of the other people, that they really believed, and were not cynical. And I think after the ‘90s that got wiped out in many of them.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. David knows a lot more about that because he was running the operation where they were bringing Northern Californians. And once Space Bridge was started, they were bringing these producers [inaudible].
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And so, what do you think is the long-term impact of what you did?
Kim Spencer: I think, because I’ve been asked this a lot, or kind of wonder, you know, you get to this stage of life you wonder well, what did I do all that stuff for? And clearly, we didn’t solve nuclear, you know, we didn’t… But I think that of all the Space Bridges that really had an impact, it was the first real Space Bridge which was serious, and that was the one about nuclear winter in1983, because it actually allowed Russian scientists to say what they believed — and for the world to get kind of the first [introduction] to the science of global warming, and climate change all tied in.. And so that [Carl Sagan and Paul Erlich conference in Washington] had scientists that were talking, and the Russian scientists [who could not get visas were able to join from the Moscow studios of Gosteleradio]. That, to me, I think is, if I think of any one thing that these Space Bridges did, I point to that.
And then the “Capital to Capital” series that was on ABC News was definitely a part of the Glasnost. I think Glasnost would have happened without it, but it was a part of the opening up. And there was that moment in one of the Space Bridges when Peter Jennings, who was always trying to get them, you know, always had his questions ready, and he said, well, what about these Jewish families like the da-da-da-da-da, you know, who would really want to emigrate? And without a break the Russian head of, you know, the highest rank Russian panelist at the time said oh yes, they’re being allowed to leave. They’ll be leaving this week. And Jennings does this total double take, like “what, wait, did you just say?” You know, it was news, this was news being broken [on a Space Bridge].
And sometimes it was in that [series] there were some real honest exchanges — you know, it had the Congress, representatives of the Congress watching. But then, for the U.S. to abandon Russia and all of our promises to, you know, and then for the private sector to move in and work with corrupt Russian side to just take the resources and, you know. I hated going to Russia about ’93—
Daniel Satinsky: Wait a minute. You dropped out. Can you say that again? You hated going—
Kim Spencer: I sort of hated going to Russia after about ’93. Moscow had changed. Not [all of the FSU]. Russia outside Moscow was great, and all the other places I got to go, all the other regions [of the FSU], because I would have to kind of do a formal thing [representing Internews] and got to visit the Balkans and all those other countries. But Moscow just turned into an unrecognizable sort of Mafia place, with guys with machine guns standing in front of bars, and topless dancers, and just, you know, all of that stuff that was there in the [‘90s]. Did you ever get to go there in the ‘80s?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I went there in ’84 and ’85, so yeah.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. It was tough luck, and it was not a good system, but the people were really…you know, you could…I left my wallet once, you know, like in a train station, and I came back, and there was somebody standing there waiting for me to hand it to me. It was like oh, we’re so glad you came back. And that was just a normal person, you know, it was like…anyway.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, when was the last time you were there, by the way?
Kim Spencer: Well, about four years ago I went with Michael Murphy and Dulce Murphy. Evelyn and Michael and Dulce and I went there, and we went to Moscow, and we just had a lot of meetings. And in 2019 and 2017…anyway, for two years in a row we did a project in St. Petersburg. That was two Septembers ago and three Septembers ago, or four. Anyway, we did this project there where we produced an event with Russian and American college kids meeting each other and having three days of conversations, and it was called “Who Do You Trust.”
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, it was a continuation of this…?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. And it was a real continuation of the same kind of work. And this conference, I’ll send you the report on the conference that Track II just did dealing with the same issues, the same problems. People are mentioning the risk of [nuclear war] trying to use the Track II citizen to citizen process, what are the opportunities now, now that it’s not only nuclear, it’s cyber war, you know.
Daniel Satinsky: A litany of issues, yeah. And I only asked you that because Moscow is so different than it was in ’93 that I would—
Kim Spencer: Oh, it was amazing. It was just lovely. You know, staying in an Airbnb, a great apartment. It was like really cheap. And you could walk outside and there was a store. You could go into a store, and you could…didn’t have to go to a dollar store, you could actually go to a store, and you could even get normal stuff. I loved—Moscow was just lovely. It was a beautiful spring period, and the people were friendly, and there were just all sorts of new art and culture, and yeah. I love it now. I love it now. I did not like it in the ‘90s.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, I understand it. I understand. I’m just glad that you had a chance to see it afterwards, so yeah.
Kim Spencer: Yeah. Have you been back a lot recently?
Daniel Satinsky: I was going up—I haven’t been there for probably two years now, two and a half years. I have to sort of live through the pandemic here and then figure out about going back, but you know. But I was really struck by how, what an amazing city Moscow has become, so much changed. And so, Paul Greenberg, was he part of your group or not?
Kim Spencer: Yeah. So, he was the younger generation who came in with no real media background, but with expertise in Russian. So, we had to start hiring people who were really sharp. And he ended up running a whole lot of the operations outside of Moscow. And then we produced some Space Bridges together that were in the Balkans, where we had Serbs talking to Bosnias, and Azerbaijans talking to Armenias. That was amazing, because that’s just all blown up again. You know, these things just keep coming back. So, we had all these different media projects, and Paul was really on the ground, and is a good person, too. And I’m sure you just need to pursue getting to him, and Evelyn.
So, I’m just remembering like what were the great shows. You know, as soon as everything went independent who were taking on this independent challenge. And those guys were big deals during this who took on the system.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I mean, my sense of things over the—if I kind of generalize for all these spheres is that the early years, in the early ‘90s Russians reached out for expertise and experience among Americans, and then they outgrew the necessity of that, didn’t need that anymore. And so, I think some of what’s perceived to be anti-Americanism is really irrelevance rather than antagonism. We just became irrelevant to the bigger picture, you know?
Kim Spencer: Exactly. And they were really doing it on their own. And there was that, I mean, now that Trump has sort of ruined the American reputation totally, we all have to admit that as Americans we all thought we were better than—
Daniel Satinsky: Absolutely.
Kim Spencer: As nice as we were and as, you know, we’d try to understand, and, you know, we’re all…we thought we had the answer. And Hoffman and I would go into meetings, and with sort of the USAID money just right behind us, and, you know, we didn’t…we *** things up. You know, or we contributed to it, or we certainly didn’t have the smarts to figure out what was really going on, or the ability to. And then, you know, the system just made, you know, that’s what happens. You know, I’ve never worked in the for-profit sector, really, except when I worked for ABC News, so it’s sad to me. A company that had a lot of social values baked in for the people, even though they didn’t trust their government, and it sucked, and it wasn’t serving them, that they had great social value. And that’s what struck me about [inaudible] when I worked with them, and some of the other people, that they really believed, and were not cynical. And I think after the ‘90s that got wiped out in many of them.
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