Mark Dudley

Daniel Satinsky: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. And let’s just start at the beginning. I mean, how did you get interested in the Soviet Union at that time?

Mark Dudley: It was—well, my mother lived in Japan during the occupation after the war. My grandfather was an economist. I later found out he worked for the CIA, but that was many years later, after he died. But my mom told me stories about how she was curious about the Russian embassy in Tokyo, and they wandered in, and they got kicked out. And she always had an interest in Russian history, so she had been accumulating books on Russian history for decades and reading them. And so naturally, when I went to college and high school I took Russian classes, and I was fortunate to have a series of very inspirational Russian teachers. My high school teacher was Olga Penrose. She was descended from the Russians that left Russia via the Russian Far East during the civil war, and then—

Daniel Satinsky: Where did you go to school?

Mark Dudley: Bellevue High School in a suburb of Seattle. And then I went to college at Oberlin College, where I had another series of very inspirational professors—Olga Nikolayevna Markof-Belaeff. Vladimir Frumkin was a musicologist who was a personal friend of Bulat Okudzhava’s, and when we went over there to study in the CIEE program in Leningrad he gave us Okudzhava’s contact information, so when we went on a trip to Moscow, we all visited him, and it was a pleasure to meet him. He was complaining about the cover art of one of the books he’d had published in the West because Bulat had absolutely no say as to what the cover art is and made it look like a bodice ripper, when he considered it to be a deeper book than that. But anyway—

Daniel Satinsky: What years were this where you’re talking about?

Mark Dudley: Let’s see, I was at Oberlin from 1980…about 1980 to ’85 and I was in Leningrad about 1983. I was fortunate to be in amongst the group that got to stay in Obschezhitie Nomer Shest’[^1], which was right across from the Winter Palace, so you look out your windows—and the men got the side facing the river, and the women got the side facing the alleys where the cats copulated, and so we were looking out at the Winter Palace, and you see the people walking across the ice in winter. So, that was 1983.

Daniel Satinsky: Was it winter months?

Mark Dudley: Well, we arrived in January and left in May, so we got to—not quite the White Nights, but we got close to it. I participated in one of the demonstrations—it was the May Day demonstrations—so I know we stayed at least through then. I saw them staging the demonstrations on either side of our building. You know, it’s like ten different tributaries going into the big one across Palace Square, and so I just joined a factory group and, you know, they’d all been said if you participate in this, we’ll give you a bottle of vodka, so they were all well primed and got to walk across the…representing a Soviet factory. And then we traveled around the country and, you know, we went to Moscow and elsewhere, and…

Daniel Satinsky: Right. And this was all learning the language, right?

Mark Dudley: Yeah. Yeah, you know, Russian language, but it was also studying some literature and some Soviet studies. I mean, we had lectures every week, you know, in Leningrad, you know, like one was about the new Soviet man, and they were telling us about how in the Soviet Union they’d created a new kind of person that was better than other people. But I remember one that we liked was, you know, the guy who was teaching us all the gestures, you know, like that. Handy ones like that. So, they ranged from the serious to the laughable, but it did cover a range of different material.

Daniel Satinsky: And this was before perestroika began, right, really?

Mark Dudley: Oh, yeah, yeah. This was well before perestroika. Gorbachev came in in March of 1985. That’s another story.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, yeah. Okay, so when you were studying Russian, what were you thinking? Was this going to be a career? Was it something of just an interest, a hobby, or what were you thinking?

Mark Dudley: I never imagined it as a career, you know. I imagined I was going to be a doctor or something. But as I continued through studying, through my studies, it’s just the one consistent interest I had. So, you know, you get to the end of your going through college and you say oh wow, I have enough credits in Russian to graduate, I don’t have enough credits in anything else.

So, it was just a consistent interest that I pursued and then was fortunate enough to find a number of careers that were related to Russian, but not just related to Russian, but like maritime Russian, you know. In high school I worked on tour boats in Seattle, and then working for Marine Resources Company I had the opportunity to kind of fuse my two interests, maritime and ships and Russian affairs, and so Marine Resources was sort of my first Russia-related job, and that was a very…at a critical time a very interesting project. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. I think you’ve interviewed folks like Tony [Allison].

Daniel Satinsky:      Yeah, I talked with Tony, and I’ve talked to Stowe Talbot.

Mark Dudley: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, Stowe was there at the beginning. He went out himself. He wasn’t just involved in the organization, he went out as a rep, too, so…

Daniel Satinsky: Right. And so, you started working for them after you graduated from Oberlin?

Mark Dudley: No, before. I started the season before I finished. I was very… This was sort of in the atmosphere in the Pacific Northwest. You’re aware that there was this company working out there. And so I had even told some friends at Oberlin about it, so one of my friends actually went out there even before me, so I had a bit of a scoop. And then I did a quarter at the UW, and it was in a third- or fourth-year Russian class, and I told everybody else in the class about it, so everybody in the class applied. And we were going to do this play in Russian, Cinderella. I was going to play the court jester. But then we all got invited out to go to sea, and we all skipped out and didn’t finish the class and, you know, within a week or two we were all out working at sea.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay, so all of you were dispersed on different Russian trawlers interpreting between the Americans and the Russians?

Mark Dudley: Right, right. So, I don’t want to recap what you’ve already talked about with Tony and Stowe but just in short version, yeah, there was fleets with Russian catcher processors that they weren’t allowed to catch, they would just accept fish from American fishing boats, and they would take the fish and process it. And it was, you know, a great barter system that benefited both sides tremendously.

Daniel Satinsky: How long were you at sea in one of those boats?

Mark Dudley: Well, at any given season it might be four months. And I did that for three years, then did some travel and then worked for Marine Resources in Dutch Harbor for another three seasons. So, I was sort of overseeing operations from port and overseeing the port calls. The Russian ships would come in and at the end of a season so the crew could go on shore and spend some hard currency in the local stores. And then do support work for the catcher boats. You know, their antennas got blown off in a storm, so I’d run around and buy antennas and take them down to the boats or send them out, expediting, basically.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so by that time you’re living in Alaska, is that right?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Satinsky: And so, after Marine Resources what did you do?

Mark Dudley: Well, before I even finished Marine Resources, I got a job… So, I’d be working for Marine Resources in the winter and spring. Then in the summer I was a tour guide for REI Adventures. REI is another pioneering company at the time. Frith Maier set up this program to lead adventure travel throughout the Soviet Union, so I had the honor of leading Americans in exotic places in the Soviet Union, and I did some interesting trip planning, too, and I was just all on my own. At one point I was given a bicycle and a driver and told to plan out a Silk Road bicycle trip. But I planned and led tours in the Crimea, all across Central Asia, Kamchatka, Primorsky Krai. Almost got killed on a rafting trip in Primorsky Krai. I never made it to the Caucasus. Some of my colleagues did the Elbrus trips and so that’s one thing I never got a chance to do. But that was—

Daniel Satinsky: So, what years were these?

Mark Dudley: This was probably ’80…let’s see. About ’87, ’88, ’89, in there. So, it was still before the fall of the Soviet Union, but… And that was also the period, I told you at one point I had dreams of becoming like an NPR correspondent.When you’re sitting out in Dutch Harbor, and I think it was KSKA. That’s the one NPR radio station they had, and it was, you know, you’re driving your truck down these desolate roads in the blowing snow, and that’s what you’re listening to. So, I did form a relationship with KSKA in Anchorage, and they actually gave me a tape recorder, so one summer I spent traveling while I was doing my REI trips recording interviews. But I didn’t know anything about interviewing. I asked stupid questions. My Russian probably sucked. But I do have a couple dozen tapes, and I’m thinking that maybe somewhere in there there might be some interesting materials for some researcher, so I did want to consult with you what to do with those.

Daniel Satinsky: We can talk about that a little later, at the end. Let’s do this.

Mark Dudley: Okay.

Daniel Satinsky: And so you were traveling around the country. Because you spoke Russian you could actually talk to people. Did you…you know, what was the atmosphere like, political atmosphere? Did you get the sense that there were big changes coming, or was it a big change, a complete surprise?

Mark Dudley: Well, I mean, yes and no. I mean, like so I knew Russia during this time when things were already kind of falling apart, so for me that was the norm. But I actually traveled around Russia, the Soviet Union, with sort of a remarkable level of freedom. You know, I’d be…you know, they would…we were kind of maybe cheating the system a little. We were kind of cheap, so we’d get me Russian tickets, you know, because there were different prices for Russians and Americans, so I’d travel as a—but I don’t recall anybody ever checking my passport or anything. It was a, you know, it was a very kind of relaxed time, actually, where I was flying all over the Soviet Union, you know, and, you know, I got to talk to a lot of people and, you know, things were sort of chaotic.

But I didn’t really have the whole perspective of well, it didn’t used to be this chaotic, you know. Ten or 20 years before maybe it was more stable, you know. There was this…Russians were still very nostalgic for this period, but, you know, I recall, you know, lines for food. You know, you would see a long line, you’d go to the lady in the back of the line and say what are you standing in line for? And she doesn’t say anything. She turns to her kid and says go up to the front of the line and see what it’s for. You know, they see a line, they get in the line.

But it was an interesting period. You really had to have good Russian partners, you know, like in, you know, when we were leading the trekking trips we had, you know, the program partner who would help, you know, bridge all those gaps so that the clients don’t experience the inconveniences. Even so we had times when they experienced great inconvenience that we just had to deal with.

Daniel Satinsky: Who was your partner?

Mark Dudley: Probably nobody you’ve heard of, Pilgrim Tours. A couple of hardworking, responsible guys.

Daniel Satinsky: Americans?

Mark Dudley: No-no-no. They were Russian.

Daniel Satinsky: Russian? So, they were what legally? What were they, a cooperative or…?

Mark Dudley: It was just a small Russian… I don’t know the business structure. Sorry, I can’t tell you that.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, but it was a private business is what I’m asking.

Mark Dudley: You know, but it wasn’t Intourist. Yeah, it wasn’t Intourist. It was a small-scale company.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. It was a small-scale company which was private and probably operating on the margins of…right?

Mark Dudley: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. They…

Daniel Satinsky: Were they connected to the local administration or regional administrations anywhere?

Mark Dudley: Well, it would be hard for them to be connected with the Administrations of all of the odd places we went to. They just, I mean, in Russia [much is] relationship-building. I mean, I don’t know what they might have done on the side. You know, they probably did certain things to motivate people. I can’t tell you. I do recall traveling where I would be working with a Russian guy and we’d be deciding okay, we have this problem where they don’t want to give us tickets, is this…should we pull out the, you know, the American ticket where we have the American guy go up and kind of shame them into giving the tickets or do we resolve things, you know, “po russky,”[^2] and, you know. So, we, as a team we worked very well together.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And this was a relationship which was set up by REI, this is not one you set up, right?

Mark Dudley: Correct. And to be honest, you know, I feel like kind of a fraud because you have all of these people who set up great organizations, but most of my—I’m more like Forest Gump. I just kind of end up where all these other people are doing it.

Daniel Satinsky: Right,. Well, was REI headquartered in Alaska?

Mark Dudley: REI Adventures. And it was headquartered in Seattle. REI Adventures.

Daniel Satinsky: So, you were balancing those things, and traveling around the Soviet Union, and then the Soviet Union disintegrates, and then what does that mean to you?

Mark Dudley:  Well, before the Soviet Union disintegrated entirely I started working for Alaska Airlines. And that was in, I think, 1991. And, you know, they were looking…when they were setting up their flights to the Russian Far East they were trying to, you know, should they…who should they send to represent them over there, somebody who knows the aviation business or somebody who knows about Russia. And so they figured it’s easier to teach me aviation than to teach their staff Russian, so they hired two Russian speaking Americans. The other gentleman also had worked on the fleet, and so he was in Khabarovsk, and I was in Magadan for the first two years. I was there for the famous deicing of aircraft with vodka episode. You’ve probably heard about that.

Daniel Satinsky: No, tell me about that.

Mark Dudley: Oh. [Laughs.] Well, we started using MD-80s, and we used 727s for the first couple years, and when we started the Vladivostok operations, we started using MD-80s. And they have a kind of tank, a fuel tank in the wings that tends to ice up more readily in moderate conditions, and in some altitudes the fuel is really cold, and it condenses and it forms ice, and you can’t take off like that. So, the aircraft was icing up at a time of year where aircraft don’t ice up in Russia, so the Russians had already put away all their deicing fluid. And because it was the inaugural flight, we had all of the company bigwigs. We had the company president, we had the head of flight ops, we had the chief pilot, you know, all these bigwigs on board.

And at one point, as a joke, somebody said, well, is the bar still open? We can get some vodka. And then they started thinking about it. You know, they understand the chemical properties. And so we had Mike, our mechanic, run up to the kiosks that were out in front of the Magadan airport. He bought every bottle of vodka they had. I think it was like 31 bottles he managed to get. And he put them in a garden sprayer and then he sprayed the wings and deiced, and the plane took off. So, we solved the problem for the day. Alaska was very proud of that, so they wrote about it in their internal company magazine, and they were severely reprimanded by the FAA since vodka is not an FAA approved deicing fluid. So, two years in Magadan.

Daniel Satinsky: Why in Magadan? Where was the flight from and to that you were in Magadan?

Mark Dudley: Oh, okay. Well, the range of the aircraft we used was not sufficient to go where we really wanted to go, which was Khabarovsk and ultimately Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, so we had to have an intermediate fuel stop. So, Magadan, of all places, you know, the gateway to the Kolyma gulags, but it was a great airport. And so, Alaska ended up, you know, actually organizing tour groups to Magadan. They set up tour routing for tourists where they’d, you know, explore, you know, the local sights in Magadan and then continue on down to Khabarovsk.

Alaska had actually flown to the Soviet Union in the ‘70s, and what they would do is they would fly a group of people across the North Pole to Leningrad, they’d take the train across the country, then they’d pick them up from Khabarovsk on the other end. And that lasted a couple years, just seasonally. So, this was…they already had some experience. Some of the people involved in setting up the flights in the ‘90s had been involved in setting up the flights in the ‘70s.

Daniel Satinsky: I see. And who did they see as the market for these flights?

Mark Dudley: That’s a good question. I got the impression that they were setting up these flights—I mean, the president at the time was a Christian. I don’t know if you recall flying on Alaska Airlines at all, but there would sometimes be inspirational messages on like the napkins. And I think he saw Russia as a place that could use some enlightenment. But there was also this growing sense of opportunity, curiosity. I believe they kind of set up the flights with the model like they were setting up flights to Las Vegas and Puerto Vallarta. They imagined it being kind of a tourist destination. But you don’t just expect people to come fly, they set up tour packages.

So, initially a lot of the travelers were tourists. But that was really not enough to fill the flights. I suspect that they were also…there was also this inkling that there was government money, there would be NGOs. So, Alaska started flying before the fall of the Soviet Union. So, yeah, I was in Magadan during the putsch. That was an interesting story in itself. And so the first year it was the Soviet Union. The next six years were in Russia. It was Russia already.

So, ultimately, I moved to Vladivostok, and I saw that there was a lot of potential for marketing to Russians. And I might be jumping the gun here, but sort of one of my successes was marketing Alaska Airlines services to Russians. Initially we had no Russians flying on the flights. They didn’t have any money. They weren’t interested. But Vladivostok had this really burgeoning entrepreneurial class, and I really wanted to get the word out. So, I had to plead with the head office to give me a marketing budget, so they said I could spend $20 to put an ad in the local paper.

So, I put this ad in and getting it in was a challenge enough because we didn’t even have a phone, and I had to kind of, you know, bribe the local telephone company lady with chocolate and stuff to get a phone with a downtown city line that went out to the airport. But anyway, when I had the pieces in place I put this ad in the paper and like immediately the phone’s ringing off the hook with Russians wanting to buy tickets. I mean, my first customer was an entrepreneur who brought a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills wanting to buy, you know, first class tickets.

I mean, it got to be a problem because we had…we were accumulating large quantities of cash in our safe. At one point we had to…we strapped it to our bodies and flew out through Korea, you know, because we didn’t have a way to wire it back. Later on we developed a relationship with banks and we could wire it. You know, that was one of the changes that happened over time. After a few years there were banks you could trust, and you’d just bring in cash, and they’d wire it for you. But initially we didn’t really have that, and we didn’t expect it, we didn’t plan for it.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, the flights would go from—

Mark Dudley: Oh, I didn’t even answer your question. Yeah, there were flights [from] Anchorage. Initially, the first year, Anchorage to Magadan to Khabarovsk. And then with time Petropavlovsk was add, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk was added, and Vladivostok was added. Then when Vladivostok went online, I moved down there to be the station manager. That was the year that they opened the consulate so there were some [synergies] there.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so all of that was through Magadan. It was still two hops.

Mark Dudley: Well, it would either be through Magadan or through Kamchatka. So, both of those were fueling stops. And both of them are notoriously foggy, you know, not the ideal. But there’s just not a lot of alternate airports in the Russian Far East, you know.

Daniel Satinsky: Right. Well, how often were there flights?

Mark Dudley: I mean, during the peak we’d have at least three flights a week, you know, sometimes making two or three stops. There were winters where we would just fly once a week, you know, but during the summer we’d, you know. And we had a lot of, you know—I mean, we were transporting all different people to Sakhalin, of course. There was a lot of oil traffic. The fishing industry was big. I recall flights where we filled 90% of the seats with vessel crews that were going on crew changes from the Russian Far East to Anchorage to board vessels in Dutch Harbor.

Daniel Satinsky: And how many people could fit on one of these planes?

Mark Dudley: I’m embarrassed that I don’t recall the exact configuration, but something like 130, probably.Maybe more.

Daniel Satinsky: And so, it was… And did you have, you know, pretty good occupancy for these flights?

Mark Dudley: I mean, it varied a lot. You know, we rarely filled more than 60% of the seats. But they were fairly high margin flights, so we were doing okay. We had a couple of incidents that were—operationally it was very expensive, so you really needed to have a lot of margin, you know, because we were very often diverting to Anadyr to get fuel. So, we’d fly to Magadan, the weather was bad, you’d fly to Anadyr, you land there. Then you have to land at, you know, at Magadan if it’s open. If not, then you fly all the way to Khabarovsk. It was very expensive operationally. And then there was a couple of incidents, you know, where there was major engine damage. At one point in, I think, was it Petropavlovsk, the air traffic controllers directed the aircraft into the wrong taxiway, it sucked up some wet “mastika”[^3] into the engine, destroyed the engine.

Daniel Satinsky: What’s mastika?

Mark Dudley: Mastika. It’s like…it’s that tarry stuff that you have in between the concrete plates of the runway.

And so, we ended up working with Lynden Air Cargo to fly in an entirely new engine and crew. That’s an interesting story in and of itself. But that kind of thing made the operation kind of expensive. I kind of really wish they had the kind of aircraft then that they have now, where they could easily have just flown Anchorage to Vladivostok nonstop without a lot of the hassles that happened in between. But, you know, we did what we had to do.

Daniel Satinsky: So, and Alaska Air had representatives in all of these locations?

Mark Dudley: Right, right. Initially we had Americans, but then we had Russian staff, and then when I left Magadan, we had really good staff that stayed there, and ultimately we had Russian staffing all the cities.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, you had people that the airline people trusted, and who were sophisticated and understood what they needed to do in those [instances].

Mark Dudley: Yeah, yeah. I mean, they, you know, we…Alaska did something that was very smart when it first started up. It invited a bunch of employees from the enterprises where we’d be flying, from Khabarovsk and Magadan to the U.S. to train, and then they went back to Russia. And nothing worked out the way we had imagined. We’d imagined they’d be the kind of customer service agents you expect, and you see at the airport. One or two of them ended up actually helping us check in flights, but the others were people from the administration who’d been granted the trip as kind of a favor, and then they kind of remember you fondly, so when you need something you can kind of say oh, can you help me get this thing approved, you know, or what’s going on with the fuel, why isn’t…can you get us some more fuel next time, whatever. So, it was very savvy to do that.

And we just built relationships within the different airports. You know, everything is…not everything, but a lot of stuff is relationship-based in Russia, so that’s what you need to do. And Alaska was also very good about, you know, my boss, Kit Cooper, would frequently come over, and we’d do the rounds. You know, we’d meet the heads of the organizations, we’d go out to dinner, we’d tell jokes, we’d get drunk, you know, all that sort of thing. And all that contributed to making the operation work smoothly over the years.

Daniel Satinsky: So, Alaska was really committed to this?

Mark Dudley: Oh, yeah. I mean, it went—I mean, there was a few moments in there where there were various economic issues or political issues where we thought we’d have to stop, but it flew nonstop for like seven years.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And those seven years were—again, which years were those?

Mark Dudley: About 1991 to 1997, I think.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, the 1998 crisis didn’t hit you.

Mark Dudley: Well, forgive me if I have the year wrong. It might have been 1998 that we stopped, and it was largely because of the crisis. I worked from ’91—’91, ’92, ’93, ’94, ’95…I worked from ’91 to ’96, I think, and then in ’97 or ’98 is when they had to cancel operations. And I think there was a drastic drop in people buying tickets after that. I also think there was a big drop in government funding for various—U.S. government funding for various organizations that were involved in trying to, you know, encourage, you know, a market economy in Russia at that time. At one point I tracked down a…I put two charts together. It was all of the passenger flow, both on Alaska Airlines and the other carriers that were flying like the Magadan airline and the Khabarovsk airline, Dalavia, and then put it alongside a chart of how much U.S. government money was allocated for development of, you know, Russia, and they mirror each other almost exactly.

You know, there was a time when the government was putting a lot of money in this, encouraging people to, you know, fly, you know, put structures in place to encourage development, you know, of a market economy. And, you know, when the money dried up, you know, the passengers dried up, and I think interest in adopting Western market systems dried up a little, too, so the interest lasted about as long as the money did.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. So, those folks were part of your passenger core, if you will, of clients who moved back and forth from the States to the Russian Far East.

Mark Dudley: Yeah. I mean, we had, you know, people from NGOs traveling, we had accountants, we had, you know, big legitimate companies, small people trying to develop new businesses. But, you know, we also had cultural groups. Yeah, I think you might be familiar with “Vladirockstok.” Some enterprising young Americans living in Vladivostok set up rock concerts where they invited leading Pacific Northwest grunge bands and leading Russian rock bands like DDT to Vladivostok to participate in this endeavor. There were native people flying back and forth. There were missionaries. We had lots of missionaries flying back and forth to Magadan building churches and stuff like that. You know, quite a diverse group of people.

Daniel Satinsky: And at the time—well, okay, I have two lines of questions—but at the time did you feel like this was…that these changes that took place were kind of permanent, that there was going to be a sort of linear development of the Russian Far East along the lines of a market economy, that Russians would assimilate all these norms, and ways of doing things, and that it would just continue along the same lies?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, yeah. I was kind of naïve, you know. I knew a lot of entrepreneurial types in the Russian Far East, and they were doing things they hadn’t been able to do before. I saw how these enterprises like, you know, the Magadan airport turned into a company, and they were gradually learning what they can and can’t do, and that maybe it’s better if the airline  is separate from the airport. I mean, I just saw them kind of developing and learning as they went, and I thought it would all kick in and stay and keep going at some point.

So, ultimately, I don’t think the small companies worked out. It was more of the, you know, the fartsovschiki, and black marketeers who ended up buying up vouchers and buying big enterprises who, you know, didn’t have many checks and balances, you know, who ended up kind of winning in the big equation, and those checks and balances and the, you know, whatever, the anti-corruption and all the institutions we had in place to ensure transparency and fairness, you know, those didn’t really kick in.

Daniel Satinsky: And did you encounter any kind of, I don’t know, corruption, favoritism, like in your relationships with your clients on the Russian side did you—

Mark Dudley: I was, you know, pretty fortunate, you know. I worked for company, you know, American companies that, you know, refused to do any sort of bribery or any of that sort of thing. You know, you couldn’t bribe Alaska Airlines to bribe somebody. They… And we worked with—at Alaska Airlines we worked within the structure of a bilateral agreement, so that kind of cushioned us from, you know, people trying to extort extra money from us for fuel. There were massive fuel shortages at Magadan, but they knew they always had to supply us. Otherwise, we could say well, we’re not going to supply your plane when it comes to the States. So, it never came to that. They just knew we had to get fuel. I mean, there was always, you know, they’re always scaring me—oh, the barge is late and it’s, you know, we’re having this problem, but we ultimately always had the fuel we needed.

You know, I sensed that there was that corruption out there. You know, you have a friend that’s running a business and they have their krysha[^4] that has to take care of them, you know, and to operate a business in Vladivostok in the ‘90s, if you’re basically a legitimate, honest person performing a legitimate, honest service, you still need to have somebody there to take care of the other [mob]. You know, it’s a protection racket. You know, when some other Mafia guy shows up you say well, we’re already dealing with this guy, and they go deal with each other. And, you know, it’s a tax and so, you know, you sense it all the time. People show up to meetings with guns and, you know, it was kind of the wild West.

But in terms of our dealings it was, you know, pretty straightforward. We’re dealing with the airport and the Ministry of Aviation, and, you know, we did hire lots of local vendors like airports—I mean, like hotels and tour vendors, and we had good relationships with them, so I don’t…we didn’t have to get too involved in that. But you could sense it was all there and all going on.

Daniel Satinsky: And did you—I mean, so you were there during…so the, not only when Yeltsin sent the tanks in against the legislature in 1993. Did that…what did that look like from the Russian Far East? Was it too far away to even think about or what—

Mark Dudley: Well, an example might be the putsch which was in 1991—

Daniel Satinsky: Earlier then, against Gorbachev, yeah.

Mark Dudley: Right. And when…that might be illustrative, because, like, at that time my parents had come to visit me, so I’m giving my parents a tour of the air traffic control tower. Before I even give them the tour, though, and the flight is on the way in, Russians were saying something’s happening in Moscow, but we don’t know what. On TV they didn’t have the regular program. They were showing “The Simpsons.” You know, they’re supposed to show “Swan Lake” or something, but in Magadan they were showing “The Simpsons,” Season 1 or 2, I forget. And then, you know, so something’s going in Moscow, nobody knows what. So, that was already the disconnect, that no one really knows what’s going on, but there’s something going on.

And then I’m giving my parents a tour of the air traffic control tower, and the head air traffic controller, really nice guy, saying oh, we got to wait because this air traffic control is writing this message down from the pilots. Well, what Yeltsin had done, which was very savvy, is he’d taken his proclamation explaining that this was all an attempted coup d’état and he distributed it to all the pilots departing Moscow, and they were reading it to the air traffic controllers over all the cities they were overflying. So, like this was an aircraft that was on the way to Kamchatka, I think, or Anadyr, I don’t recall, and he was writing this down. And then this gets taken and delivered to the local news outlets.

So, there…you could sense that we were disconnected from Moscow. The events in 1993 didn’t impact our flights at all. We just kept flying and, you know, in the Russian Far East it didn’t really impact us. You just, you know, hear people talking about it, but it didn’t change our operations at all.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay. And did Alaska Airlines pay attention to all these political developments? I mean did…?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, but change was just a part of working with Russia if, you know, so I don’t think we had a team of people—I mean, you know, the ultimate concern is safety of the flights and safety of our tourists, so if there was ever any risk of danger to the aircraft, you know, or to our passengers they would have stopped. But, you know, as long as there was interest and things were operating normally, we just kept flying.

You know, it’s something you talk about, but there was always something going on. You might have a few dates in your mind of big things, but, you know, there was always a shortage here or a strike there. I mean, I remember, you know, once we had a flight coming in and there were protests on the runway. The airport people hadn’t been paid in a while. Other people were getting paid. If you worked in a brick factory they’d pay you in bricks. But at the airline, you know, there’s nothing to give them. So, they were all walking on the runway to disrupt the flow of traffic. But, you know, they managed to get them off in time for our flight, you know. So, there’s always something going on.

Daniel Satinsky: So, it wasn’t like there are these extraordinary events and then periods of calm and normal business. It was kind of coping and changing constantly.

Mark Dudley: Yeah. Yeah, I’d say that, pretty much. I mean, you know, when there was a big, you know, financial crisis—I think there was one or two other micro crises before the 1998 one, you know, we were wondering oh, are we going to be able to keep flying, but… So, yeah, some were bigger than others. I didn’t…I don’t recall the dates exactly.

Daniel Satinsky: So, I went to Vladivostok in 1990, and when I was getting a master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and one of the things that we saw was the people in the Far East were kind of hostile to the people from Moscow, and there was, or we were told that there were sentiments that the Far East really didn’t belong with the rest of the country, that it should be its own either autonomous or separate country. Did you encounter that kind of sentiment?

Mark Dudley: No, actually. I mean, there was always resentment towards Moscow and, you know, I think I may have heard people, you know, kind of hypothetically talking about that. And, you know, you have educated friends, they might be talking about the situation towards the end of the Russian civil war when at times it seemed like maybe the Russian Far East might break off. But I don’t recall any serious talks about or discussions about, you know, the Russian Far East breaking off. I mean, I think often I wish it would. You know, it had, you know, just the ties to Moscow just complicate everything. They appeared to complicate everything. Sometimes they’re also a stabilizing force.

During the chaotic period when the Soviet Union was kind of falling apart and these companies were starting to stand up on their own two feet, nobody knew who was responsible for what. You know, who’s responsible for giving us fuel? Is it Moscow, is it the airport, is it the local airline? You know, and so if it had all become independent, the chaos would have probably continued for years. But, you know, it was always convenient to have basically a bilateral agreement that’s enforced by Moscow so you can have some stability in there. There were certain benefits to having, you know, a central structure. But we did like to whine about the inconveniences they imposed.

Daniel Satinsky: Were you in any way in competition with the Chinese, or the Koreans, or the Japanese in terms of the business world there in the Far East?

Mark Dudley: I mean, nobody—in terms of the flights, no. I mean, Japan offered flights, you know, and they offered a route to the Russian Far East before we did, but it was a longer route, so everybody preferred our route once it was in place, at least Americans flying from the West Coast. The Chinese weren’t active in aviation at all at the time. I mean, we were competing with a couple of Russian airlines, Dalavia and Mavial, and they kept changing their names, so I don’t recall what they ultimately settled on, but the Khabarovsk airline and the Magadan airline. And we tended to cater to different, you know, passenger types.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, when Alaska decided to stop flying, was it for economic reasons, political reasons? Do you know why?

Mark Dudley: Well, I wasn’t with the company when they finally made that decision, so I could only guess. But I think it was partially because of the economic crisis, and loads were dropping. I think some of the irrational exuberance about the whole Soviet Union was wearing off not just at Alaska Airlines, but with all sorts of companies that thought oh, it’s going to open up, it’s going to be great, it’s going to be exciting. So, yeah, a lot of companies continued to work with Russia because it just made sense, but there was a huge enthusiasm bulge in the early to mid ‘90s that kind of wore off by the late ‘90s.

Daniel Satinsky: You also hinted or said that some of Alaska’s interest was in missionary work, and as they—I remember being on many flights in those early years coming from Russia to the U.S. where there were groups of missionaries on board talking about how many souls they had saved on that trip, and that there was a lot of missionary activity. Was that—how significant was that in terms of—it’s not something that I see talked about very much and, you know, I’m just curious what you…if you had any insights about that.

Mark Dudley: Yeah, I don’t know if I can quantify it very well. I just, you know, I got to know a lot of our passengers pretty well. There was a group that flew into Magadan, and they were building a church. I went and visited the church. You know, they were very well along when I visited. At one point one of them died and I had to get the remains back home. The same in Vladivostok. There were missionaries that came in. So, I mean, they were a regular entity. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity.

You know, once again it goes back to the whole, you know, oral history thing. I wished I’d, you know, been interviewing people during this period. I wish I’d had a tape recorder. I wish I’d been taking notes because there were so many interesting people that passed through. I mean, you know, missionaries, entrepreneurs, scientists, you know, like tiger scientists. But I can’t really quantify the scale of the missionary work. It was just a regular…it was a regular presence, you know. I’d see these folks regularly. I’d see them on the street of Magadan when I’m wandering around. There was a period when Russia was receptive to that. I don’t think they are anymore.

Daniel Satinsky:  Right, right. So, there was a fairly significant American presence in those years in the Russian Far East then. Would you agree with that?

Mark Dudley: Yeah. I mean, we were carrying hundreds of people back and forth every week. The expat community in Vladivostok was pretty big, and Magadan was pretty small. There was just a couple of us. In Khabarovsk it was bigger. In Vladivostok it was large, and in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk it was quite large.

Daniel Satinsky: Well, what does large and quite large mean?

Mark Dudley: I don’t have numbers, but in—

Daniel Satinsky: I’m not going to hold you to it, but—

Mark Dudley: Yeah, right, right, right. In Vladivostok there was the consulate, so there was the consular staff. Companies that wanted to set up business, they felt they wanted to be near the consulate. It was a big business center. So, you know, there were many hundreds of Americans in Vladivostok. I’d say there’s probably thousands in Sakhalin, you know, supporting the oil businesses there. In Magadan it was, you know, a handful. You know, when that gentleman died, I was told by the U.S. consulate that I’m the ranking U.S. diplomat in Magadan as the airline employee. I guess it’s kind of like designated survivor. If all these people get knocked out or you don’t have them at some point it’s the airline employee manager, and so yeah, I was the official government representative for about a day.

Daniel Satinsky: And why did you stop working for Alaska Airlines?

Mark Dudley: Well, I was kind of getting sick of living in the Russian Far East. I was living in an apartment building where you couldn’t drink the water because it was too rusty, so you have to bring in all your water. But it was just kind of getting a little old, and I wanted to move on to new things. So I did a consulting job for a while for Caterpillar helping, you know, doing some research for them in the Russian Far East update when they were, when Caterpillar was preparing a document that they would share with the potential candidates to open offices over there.

And then I got a job with Sunmar Shipping which allowed me to continue to work with Russia, but from the comfort of an office in Seattle. So, we were chartering Russian refrigerated transport vessels, and dry transport vessels, and tankers, and we would support the fishing fleet. So, I did that for quite some time.

Daniel Satinsky: So, that was primarily fishing. That was primarily fishing?

Mark Dudley: Right. It was pretty much exclusively supporting the high seas fishing fleet. And it was pretty revolutionary in its day, too. When Fuels-At-Sea started providing fuel for fishing vessels in the high seas it really was a game-changer for the Russian fishing industry because these vessels didn’t have to come in so often or wait for the next transport vessel to come out and fuel them. So, it was, you know, that was exciting to be a part of that, too.

Daniel Satinsky: So, you would send out, it was like a floating gas station or something?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, basically. You know, we get a tanker, we go into port, we fill it up with the different kinds of fuel the vessels needed, the diesel and mazut, and then you just go out and, you know, you have a list of vessels you work with. And we could work in really rough water because you didn’t have to come alongside. We’d send a heaving  line over with the hose and so, you know, the ships could be bouncing like this, kind of—you know, you’ve seen planes fueling in the sky. It was kind of like that, you know, somewhere, you know. It was pretty intense the conditions under which we could supply, but it helped make the company successful.

Daniel Satinsky: Was that a new company set up for that purpose?

Mark Dudley: Well, Sunmar had been involved in supporting the American fishing fleet in Alaska for a long time, so when the fishing fleet migrated over to the Russian Far East and there were more joint ventures and American vessels were fishing in the Russian Far East, and there were partnerships, naturally Sunmar—well, it was, you know, very astute to see the opportunity and kind of gravitate over there and provide this service over there and look for new opportunities.

Daniel Satinsky: How long were you with them?

Mark Dudley:   Probably ten years or so. Yeah, so through the aughts I worked for them. I worked as operations manager doing, you know, we would load fish in the Sea of Okhotsk. Some of it we’d send to Busan, some we’d send to Europe. We did high seas fueling in the Russian Far East. But we also chartered Russian and Ukrainian vessels to supply fleets off the U.S. West Coast, in the South Pacific, in the Indian Ocean. We worked all over, wherever there was opportunity.

Daniel Satinsky: What was the trajectory of the fishing industry in those years from like ’98 through the aughts?

Mark Dudley: I’m probably not the best person to ask because I kind of, you know, lost touch with that. I know there are other people out there more involved in the fishing industry than I, and—

Daniel Satinsky: Well, you were a part, I mean, your—

Mark Dudley: Right, right, right. We were supporting them. So, I mean, we kept pretty busy through the aughts and then we got a lot more competition and others started doing that business, and so then we kind of got nudged out. But we started fueling elsewhere, like tuna fleets in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, and hake fleets off the West Coast, so, you know. They continue to fish, of course, in the Russian Far East. I’m just not the foremost expert in sort of the U.S.-Russia relationship there. I think the Russians became more and more self-sufficient, so they didn’t need American expertise or American equipment. You know, they were learning how to do it themselves, and, you know, there wasn’t sort of the natural synergy with the U.S. fishing industry that there was initially.

Daniel Satinsky: So…and was that the last job you had connected to Russia?

Mark Dudley: No, no. I also…I went on to work for InterPacific Aviation and Marketing, which is a Japanese company, and we chartered Russian aircraft to operate flights from Alaska to the Russian Far East. Did that for quite a few years. I actually have been doing something related to Russia all the way from like 1984 up until Russia invaded Ukraine. So, we would…we worked closely, for example, with Yakutia Airlines, and we operated flights from Anchorage to Kamchatka and on to Yakutsk. But the primary interest was Kamchatka. The primary impetus was fly fishermen. Kamchatka—

Daniel Satinsky: So, these were charter flights, or—

Mark Dudley: Well, we operated them as regular flights. You could go onto any booking system in the world and book these flights. But, you know, it was… So, yes, our company was chartering Yakutia Airlines to operate the flights, but they operated like any flight you can find in a booking system. In New York somebody can find our flights and book them. That was part of the challenge of, you know, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and rules. We’re working with lawyers in D.C., and permissions, and that sort of thing. And then one of my challenges—the fishermen sort of took care of themselves that knew about our flights. I was trying to develop other traffic, you know, to develop tariffs and so forth that would encourage more Russians to fly back and forth. And then we also operated other flights, like we chartered Uzbekistan Airways aircraft to operate Northern Lights tours from Tokyo to Alaska, so we did that for a couple of seasons. Always looking for opportunities.

Daniel Satinsky: So, just out of—I’m just curious about the planes themselves because there were lots of jokes, apocryphal stories about the poor condition of Soviet airplanes and, you know, by comparison to foreign planes, but, you know, you’re working with Yakutia Airlines or Uzbek Airlines. I’m assuming they’re flying Soviet manufactured airplanes.

Mark Dudley: No. No, they were flying Boeing aircraft.

Daniel Satinsky: They were flying Boeing aircraft, okay.

Mark Dudley: Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of Boeing aircraft in Russia around that time.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay, this is in the 2000s?

Mark Dudley: Right, yeah. And the teens. You know, yeah, so…

Daniel Satinsky: So, their advantage was they had local landing rights and they knew the territories, and presumably they were relatively affordable to work with them?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a lot—it would have been a lot cheaper to charter Yakutia Airlines to operate the flight than to, say, charter Alaska Airlines to fly the other way. And there were other candidates that we looked into from time to time because it was important for us to keep operating the service. And, you know, now and then we were nervous because, you know, I don’t know, the Russian Ministry of Aviation hadn’t granted Yakutia a certain license, or they’d had some issue on some other route where they were withholding a permission, so we had to look at something else. I mean, it was an ongoing issue. But ultimately, we operated that service for ten years or so while I was there.

Daniel Satinsky: Do you think that all this interconnection sort of changed the Russians in their outlook on the world and sort of breaking the isolation from the Soviet period? Did that…did you have a meaningful impact?

Mark Dudley: Yeah, no, I think it did. I don’t think it—I mean, I think maybe we were hoping it would have a bigger impact, you know, in terms of developing Western business practices. I don’t think it had that big of a long-term impact. I think, you know, maybe the big companies learned a few things about running, you know, balancing budgets and that sort of thing. But in terms of, you know, the institutions that kind of keep things fair, that encourage small business, I don’t think any of those things kind of sunk in. We hoped they would.

But we were carrying, you know, hundreds of people back and forth. We were carrying, you know—well, I listed all sorts of categories. You can’t have that going on for a decade and have there not be some exchange of information and ideas. I don’t think there was any one big idea or sea change. I think it was, you know, they—you know, when I worked on the Soviet ships, like I was the first American any of these people had ever met, you know. So, I, for much of my time in the Russian Far East I was always running into people who’d never met an American before, so I felt kind of this obligation to kind of be a morally upstanding, ethical kind of guy so they would have a positive impression.

But, you know, there was lots of—you know, there were people getting married, forming families. There were, you know, business—I guess there weren’t a lot of success stories. There were some that were successful for a while. But, you know, I think Russia opened up a lot to the West. I think that, like I said, there was also a lot of, you know, irrational exuberance. Everyone thought, you know, the Russians thought America had more to offer, Americans thought Russia would have more to offer, so we kind of, you know, maybe reverted to the mean but, you know. So, here was our knowledge level, and we thought it was going to be up here, and we were excited for a while. Then it settled here.

So, I…it’s hard to quantify because for, you know, thousands of people moving back and forth there was, you know, they learned different things. There’s a gentleman named Jonathan Slaght. He studied. He lived in the Russian Far East and became an owl expert and a tiger expert, and he’s put out a couple of books about it, and he’s going on the, you know, he has lots of friends and contacts in the Russian Far East. There were…it was a…you know, I feel there was something enduring there, though it’s really hard for me to put my finger on it and any one thing.

Daniel Satinsky: Sure. So…and how do you think the experience of being in Russia changed you?

Mark Dudley: Oh, I can…I’m one of the foremost experts in the United States for maritime cursing. Not many Americans can do it as well as I do. There’s probably a handful of the people who worked on the ships.

Daniel Satinsky: That’s right, that’s a major learning skill.

Mark Dudley:   Right, right. No, but no—well, when you work with Russia you learn, you know, not to take things for granted. You know, I recall sometimes there would be negotiations, and you’re discussing a contract or something, and everybody thinks everything’s going great, and when things are going great in a negotiation with Russians you know you should be suspicious because it doesn’t mean anybody wants to cheat anybody else, it means everybody misunderstands the contract, you know. There might be a cost that each side assumes the other is going to bear. So, when things are going well you just say well, just for the sake of discussion let’s go over this point, or how do you perceive us dividing up the profits? And so, you know, by dealing with Russia you sort of, you know, you just learn to be more thorough, to look at things from multiple sides.

In Russia everything is relationship-based, which is quaint on a small level of an airport or an enterprise. I think it’s one of the problems why you have these oligarchs doing their thing on a large scale, but on a small scale it’s nice. But there’s something to be learned from that. It’s, you know, building relationships even here in the West is important. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I ended up marrying a Russian, so there’s that long-term benefit there as well, so I still have ties to the Soviet Union and Russia.