Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. But did you see an increasing cultural influence, I guess, for, at least in the beginning, the sort of romance, as I sometimes thought of it, with Americans. You kind of saw that taking place, I assume, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, I think I saw that the whole time. You know, I mean, people knew Voice of America, and they loved to talk about the music they’d heard about from the very first time I met them.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they were eager to show that they had knowledge of American culture, those people that I interacted with. And then, you know, there was always a certain amount of cynicism along with it with respect to the interest in American action films and stuff by the filmmakers who had developed taste and repertoire.
Daniel Satinsky: How did they feel about the collapse—I will use the word collapse—of Mosfilm? What did that do to them?
Lizbeth Hasse: People had to get money. You know, I mean, people, what I found was that the difference in the cultural financing, which was that like Europe, the Soviet Union and then Russia, but with maybe less money, but still they funded their filmmakers, they funded their dancers, they funded their theater scriptwriters and everything else. That started to collapse at least…I don’t think it really collapsed that much in the theater area, but it did collapse in the film, and also for writers. They had to find somebody who was going to pay them, or they had to find money to invest in their film productions. And so, there were efforts to put together international film productions and to pre-sell rights in other countries, which they hadn’t had to do before. Or people could come to Russia and count on having everything provided and to make a film and then distribute it throughout the world. But that was no longer the case.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Do you know of any successful films that were co-produced during that period?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’m sure I do. Sergei Bodrov. I’d have to go back and kind of see what— [Subsequent note added: Marina Goldovskaya, Andrei Konchalovsky, Georgy Gavrilov.] I was involved in a couple of them.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And did you continue to be involved with the independent broadcasters in the different countries and regions?
Lizbeth Hasse: Oh, with the broadcasters? Not so much. With filmmakers, but not with people who were actually working the facilities of broadcasting, no.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Because I know Internews had a lot to do with training of journalists —
Lizbeth Hasse: I did some of that with them. I did some training in East Germany just after the wall came down, during the time of the first independent election, or alternative election, I guess, in East Germany. And yeah, and I went to Moldova and worked on their first, their own national broadcasting agency, where they were looking for somebody to come along and give them some consultation in how to develop criteria for TV licenses, and I did that there. So those were, you know, independent country projects.
Daniel Satinsky: Over time did Russian attorneys develop the expertise to do this kind of international licensing and IP related work?
Lizbeth Hasse: Not so much. You know, I was a member of the Coudert Brothers law firm. Do you know them?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they had an office in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. I was there for a short time. Then they collapsed. [Laughs.] Talking about collapse. They collapsed during the financial crisis. I joined them in like —
Daniel Satinsky: In ’98?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, no, I joined them, I’m talking about later on, in like 2003.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay, they collapsed in 2008.
Lizbeth Hasse: They collapsed — well, they collapsed maybe in ’06, something like that. A slow collapse. I was there for about two and a half years or so, and then it was clear that they were collapsing. But they would bring in Russian lawyers who were promising young folks to join the firm, and they would get trained in IP within those firms. And I think that’s where I would meet young lawyers who had intellectual property, you know, real developed knowledge and were able to use it, were lawyers who joined international firms. I don’t think it grew naturally within Russian law firms.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t know so much. You know, most of the lawyers I dealt with were in international firms, and the lawyers I dealt with who weren’t had their own small practices, so I’m not sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But the issue of IP in the technology sector has been huge. And the difficulty of ascertaining who actually owns something was like the major stumbling block in the early days, for sure, and I think it’s still been an issue that they’ve been struggling with about IP.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think that’s right. And it certainly was a big problem in the film industry. And the interesting thing about the film industry is you have more of a sense of an author than you do in, say, a patent issue where you’ve got people at an institute developing stuff that basically belongs to the institute, which is how it works here, too. You’ve got a lot of creative people, but they’re at a large pharmaceutical, and they don’t own it. Maybe if they’re working at a university that’s heavily funded, then they get credited and some interest in a project that they’ve developed, but otherwise it’s an institutional ownership issue, and I think that’s really what goes on in Russia now, and probably always did in a way, since the institution was the government, and now it’s still the same.
Daniel Satinsky: I mean, flipping back to the film industry, I had a personal friend who was married to a guy who was an illustrator for children’s films, and he was fairly well-known. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union all of his work was owned by Mosfilm, and I think he managed to get a copy, but never any rights to these animated children’s films that he had made, and he effectively stopped working at that point. And I don’t know how general that experience was.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it’s probably pretty general. There were people who came to the United States and tried to make their own deals for their films, and then somebody dealing with them, some smaller distributor, would find out this person didn’t even have rights, and these deals just never got anywhere. And if Mosfilm or a distributor in Russia didn’t take an interest, that was the end of it. And coupled with that there wasn’t the support of the filmmaker anymore monetarily or with the institution, so it was a very hard time.
People who could not find a German partner, or work in Europe, or put together an international deal.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And the people who were able to do that probably had some prior international experience or contacts. In other words, those were fairly domestic —
Lizbeth Hasse: They were people whose films had a reputation. Which is not all that different from your average producer or director in Hollywood, whether you’re brand new and, you know, how you become a hot commodity, it does happen occasionally. But they just didn’t have the networks for that. It was hard. I knew one — well, he was Serbian, I guess — but he was somebody who had sold his film throughout the Soviet bloc, and in Western countries, and suddenly found himself just flailing, just no way knowing how to put together a team, how to make a film. I mean, he had many films that he had made, and he just didn’t know how to do that anymore. It was quite distressing for people. I think the arts really suffered because they had had good support, in the European style, and then that was gone.
Daniel Satinsky: Has it transformed in the sense that now there are sort of private or independent filmmakers and artists that license abroad, or that would use the services of someone like you?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, there are…I think there’s a lot. I don’t know for sure. I don’t know what the statistics are, and I’m only guessing. I think there’s a lot that the Russian film industry has probably diminished, you know, contracted. They’re still putting out a lot of films, and now they spend a lot of time trying to get money, and those who have relationships do, and people from here seek their money. There’s not that much interest in doing that now. China is the big place to go for your money as far as Americans go, and they’re also seeking that large audience and stuff, and that sort of dictates some of the kinds of films that are made. But yeah, I mean, there’s a much less lively interaction between Russians and Americans in filmmaking right now, and I would say for the last four or five years.
Daniel Satinsky: But connected to politics?
Lizbeth Hasse: Connected to — yes. Connected to the rise of China as the place where—you know, because people making big films, or hoping that they’re making big films want the big audience because that helps to bring the money back in, or that’s where you get the money partners, and so everyone’s interested in —
Daniel Satinsky: In China.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, as a partner.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, so going back to 1996, the Yeltsin election in 1996, which looked to be in peril until he was resuscitated by his domestic and foreign backers, were you —what were you thinking about that election? Were you concerned about what was going to happen to your friends or to the circumstances of the country, or did you have an opinion, or was it background noise and not really that important?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, it wasn’t background noise, and I think I was talking to my friends in St. Petersburg quite a bit about it. They were pretty interested in it at the time. There’s not a lot of political discussion now, and not much… Well, after that people got pretty disconcerted and disaffected, I guess is the word.
Daniel Satinsky: After the Yeltsin election?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, sometime after the Yeltsin election.
Daniel Satinsky: Disconcerted, but do you know why? Do you have a theory for that?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, there was a period of general economic improvement, and then… I mean, I’d have to go back and look and see when these things happened. But then there were disappointments, and there were new periods of thought that the economy might collapse again, and so people were starting to think that, you know, there was all that thought about the good old days with the Soviet Union, which probably was not right, but things did start to get economically stressed.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, and 1998, was that like a watershed in any way, or the default and devaluation of the ruble?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I think that probably was a big deal from the American side. Yeah. I mean, I… I’m trying to think really what was happening with… I mean, I think there was a lot of concern that the country didn’t have a good…there wasn’t a good floor. I know that we were still, you know, within the medical projects, that was a time when we lost some good doctors, too, who left the country. Because along, you know, the anti-Semitism really rose at that time, too. It became more obvious and brutal, and we had a couple of Jewish doctors who left.
Daniel Satinsky: And do you know what kind of anti-Semitism they experienced? Was it their careers being blocked? Was it personal threats? Was it insults? Do you have a recollection?
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it was more about a general… I don’t know of anybody’s career being blocked, but I don’t know if they would have told me that, either. But there certainly was a general feeling and demonstrations of anti-Semitism publicly, and violence in the street, and people concerned about their children.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you know the previous book that I worked on that we wrote was called “Hammer and Silicon,” about the Soviet emigration to the U.S., and people in the high-tech sector in particular. We looked at some of these different periods of emigration. So, I don’t know if you’re interested in that, but…
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I would be, actually, I mean, and friends going through it, too, so yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: “Hammer and Silicon” is the name of the book.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’ll look for it. Thank you.
Daniel Satinsky: As you were doing this work did you have hopes for what you thought the country would evolve into, what Russia would evolve into? And did those hopes…well, how do you think about those hopes now?
Lizbeth Hasse: You know what, I enjoyed my relationships in Russia and found them quite rich and very satisfying throughout the period of time, and I developed some very good friends early on, and those sustained me. So, you notice less the macro changes when you’re relating at that level. You get concerned about individuals’ jobs, and friends who get thrown out of positions that they had had.
Or my friend who developed the Tarkovsky museum and now lives in a tiny apartment at the outskirts of Moscow because he no longer can run the archives. Putin put in a bureaucrat in his place.
Also, in my work it’s more specific now. There are people who call me when they need something, and they know who to call, and we work on whether they can get permission to use this clip for some documentary that they’re doing in the Ural Mountains or something, I don’t know. I mean, it’s just…they’re much more specific relationships. Also people are not starting up new businesses between Americans and Russians anymore, so on a larger level that impacts me and how I think about the country or respond to it.
I think I always, you know, really, I’m a fairly literary person, and early on I got more and more interested in Russian literature, and trying to learn the language, and getting to know the literary culture. And my husband has put on several theatrical performances in the last few years in St. Petersburg, so we have had ways to relate to the parts that we like of Russia on a continuing basis, both in the medical project which has been extremely effective and developed deep relationships and the artistic side.