Post-Soviet States: People, Power, and Assets Oral History Archive

Interviewee: Christopher G. Senie Interviewer: Rebecca Adeline Johnston Date: December 12, 2019 Location: Berlin, MA

Abstract

Christopher G. Senie is an American attorney specializing in land use and land litigation. He has represented private, commercial, and residential clients on a broad range of planning, zoning, and other land use matters. Based in Brewster, MA, he is an alum of Hampshire College and the University of Bridgeport School of Law. In the early 1980s, he became active in citizen diplomacy efforts between Western countries and the . He worked for several years spearheading and negotiating the Rosinka real estate development outside of under the auspices of the 1987 Soviet law on joint ventures. In this interview, Mr. Senie discusses his experience in the Soviet Union and Russia working on citizen diplomacy, land use negotiations, and becoming subject to a hostile takeover.

This transcript is lightly edited for clarity. Unedited remarks are available in the embedded audio recording and can be located with the aid of timestamps bracketed in the transcript text. Interviewer questions and remarks are presented in bold.

Interview Transcript

Why don’t we start with your background and how you became interested in working in Russia—the Soviet Union at the time.

Well, I’m an attorney, and my father was an attorney and always wanted me to go to law school. I always told him that I wouldn’t. I was going to become a high school teacher. I studied education at Hampshire College, and I graduated in 1976. I was doing something like teaching— I was the director of youth programs for my town, Westport, Connecticut, after finishing college. I just loved working with kids, and I just knew, I knew, there was no way I was going to become a lawyer, and I was going to become a high school teacher.

But I got a little bit bored, and one day, I drove by a sign that said University of Bridgeport School of Law. Bridgeport is not far from Westport. So I went inside, and I said, this sign wasn’t up here last week. I was actually in a Master’s program at University of Bridgeport in municipal planning, or something. I was searching for something in addition to the teaching I thought I would be doing, and I thought some further education would be good. So I saw this law school and I applied to it. I told my father, look, I’m just applying. I’m sure I’m not going to get in. Don’t get your hopes up. And then, I got in and I said, all right, I’m just trying it for a couple weeks. Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t want to be a lawyer. And I loved it, from about the first week on. Your first year of law school they teach you about legal writing and researching, and back then, there was no computerized researching. You had to go to the library and look cases up in a book.

I enjoyed law school, and my last semester, I took a course called Soviet Law. It was taught by Al Schmidt [Albert J. Schmidt]. It was an elective course, and I enjoyed that course very much. It opened my eyes to a world I hadn’t been aware of, which is that, even though he was teaching about the Soviet Union, it is made up of many legal institutions, and even was at the time that it was the Soviet Union. There was a large body of administrative law and local agencies in communities, like a planning board and like a conservation commission. I had no idea that these things existed, even though it was under a communist system.

So, he announced toward the end of the class that he would lead a trip to the Soviet Union that summer. I was the first person to sign up. By now, I had sort of caught this fascination that I think happens to a lot of people, and I wanted to fly to the Soviet Union and see, what are these people like? What is the system like? Why is it that I grew up believing that the Soviets were our enemy? It was a two-week trip, and I got inside Soviet courtrooms and met judges and listened to cases unfold in front of judges, met people, was invited into people’s apartments and homes, and we were hosted by many wonderful groups.

I sensed that there was something a little artificial about some of our meetings, like it had been contrived to be grand, but I really loved the Soviet people. On the plane on the way back, a woman who had been on the trip with me said, “I’m very sad because I realize I cannot go to the Soviet Union again for the first time.” And I think that expresses a sentiment that a lot of people who traveled to the Soviet Union in the ‘70s and ‘80s came back with, feeling like they had discovered something very special and unique, and all of a sudden, having, as part of them, a desire to be more involved with the Soviet Union.

So that led to writing some proposals about how American and Soviet citizens might work together to break down some of these preconceived notions. I wrote a proposal called “Bike Ride for Peace.” And my plan was that American and Soviet bike riders, or people, should get on their bicycles and ride about a thousand miles together and learn from one another, [0:05:00] and maybe come away from that with the experience that we’re not one another’s enemies. That crossed the desk of a professor in New Haven, Connecticut, who also had just received a proposal from a Norwegian called “Bike for Peace.” He couldn’t believe on his desk there were two proposals for the same concept. He called me up on the telephone and he said, “Hey, you’ve got to know about this guy, Tore Narland, from Norway. He’s proposing the same thing.”

We got together, and I abandoned my proposal and became the American coordinator of his proposal. Before I knew it, it was May of 1983 and I was in Moscow meeting with Yuri [Aleksandrovich] Zhukov of the Soviet Peace Committee. The Soviet Peace Committee was a

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 2 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie big propaganda machine, designed by the Soviets to make it appear that the Soviet Union wanted peace. I don’t mean to be so harsh, but in reality, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was being worked, so to speak, and there were photographs and I held up pictures of things that would be experienced along the American portion of this route.

Sure enough, in June of 1983, thirty-three bicycle riders—a third American, a third Scandinavian, and a third Soviet—took off from Moscow on Route 10 toward what was then Leningrad. It was not St. Petersburg for a while. So we rode all the way up to Leningrad, then into Scandinavia, over to Oslo, Norway, and then to New York, where we met the Secretary General of the United Nations, Pérez de Cuéllar, and bicycled all the way to Washington D.C. and ended at the Capitol. So this was called Bike for Peace—Veloprobeg k miru vocem’deciat’ tri [Bike Ride for Peace 1983]. It was repeated three years later in 1986.

The early ‘80s was a very contentious time. We were threatening to put more long-range missiles into Western , aimed at Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, they were placing more long- range missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Western Europe, and even the . It was a very contentious time. What I didn’t know at the time is that what I was feeling and working on and trying to accomplish was part of a bigger picture that came to be known as “citizen diplomacy.” Actually, through efforts like this, I think we did help influence government leaders, and I think it did help lead to a thawing of this or cold atmosphere that we lived in. As you know, then, came to power and introduced concepts that were somewhat Western-like. But a lot of the foundation for American involvement was by people known as “citizen diplomats.” There was actually a book written, called Citizen Diplomats, by Gale Warner and Michael Shuman. One of the chapters in that book is on Bike for Peace.

So Bike for Peace played a small role in an effort of American citizens, without government approval, but perhaps government allowance, joined together with Soviet counterparts to try to elevate people’s understanding that we didn’t necessarily have to look at one another the way we do.

Bike for Peace was wonderful. We were met in many cities by large crowds, groups of Young Pioneers with their red Pioneer hats showed up to give us flowers, we gave speeches. It was really marvelous. The whole time, we knew we were being manipulated by the Soviet Peace Committee, but as it turned out, I think we played a role in even helping them, the Soviets, perhaps go in directions that hadn’t been imagined at that time.

It’s strange to put so much work and effort into something where you know and you realize that you’re being manipulated, but you’re looking at a greater goal, which is to see if we can educate more Americans about the fact that we don’t have to look at Soviets the way we do.

So, in 1987, the Soviet Union adopted the joint venture law, which allowed, for the first time, foreigners to own shares of Soviet companies. That was the year after the second Bike for Peace. So now I’m back in my law office working with my father, [0:10:00] who is a real estate developer and a lawyer, and we just start to talk about why don’t we develop some condominiums along the Moscow River in Moscow. A kind of foolish and dreamy idea, but together, with one of the builder partners my father had worked with, we put together a little

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 3 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie fund, and I began to travel back and forth between Connecticut, where our law practice was, and Moscow, visiting people, springing off from the Bike for Peace contacts, meeting with people, and proposing a Western-style condominium development in the outskirts of Moscow.

Over the period of 1987 to 1991, we put that project together. I traveled to Moscow almost monthly and learned about the Soviet land use process, which was remarkable. It was hard for me to understand how one gets permission at the different levels in the Soviet Union, and every time I came back on the plane I would do a new flow chart of what I need to get through to have approval to build 428 condominium units. And it would be different from the month earlier. It was always changing. But I worked my way through it and, believe it or not, there were local boards and commissions like we have here. I’m a land use attorney, so it’s the only legal field I really know.

I know how to get a project approved here in the United States. This was strangely different, strangely manipulated, sort of like the Wizard of Oz—there was a guy behind a curtain. But the process was there, and the regime was somewhat similar, to my surprise. So here I was sitting in the Moscow Oblast’—Moscow regional offices at what was really a conservation commission meeting, talking about the environmental impacts of converting eighty-two hectares of land—a hectare is about 2.4 acres—from farmland to a village. It was remarkably similar to the experiences I was learning here in my career. So we got this approved, and then we raised funds and we began to build a Western-style housing project in the municipality of Krasnogorsk, which is located northwest of Moscow, about six kilometers past the outer ring road, really at a small village called Mar’ino, I think. We met people in that village and we met people at the Krasnogorsk city hall, and we had to convince a lot of people that we would stick with this project and it would be good for the community, it would provide jobs, but also it would provide accommodations that Westerners wanted.

Now, it can be argued, and I even argue with myself sometimes, that it’s not a good thing to go and build Western-style housing in a community that really doesn’t have that kind of housing. At the time we started this project, that was the case. But nonetheless, there was a market, and we began to meet all kinds of Western companies, American companies, European companies that really wanted to bring more staff to Moscow, but that staff was families, and those families wanted to have, as a choice, living in the kind of living unit that they were accustomed to.

So we signed many leases, including with the U.S. State Department, which wanted to lease ninety of the units. This was not intended to be a “for sale” project. It was intended to be rental, so that the kolkhoz [collective farm], that was our fifty percent partner, and we, the group from Connecticut that had put this together, would benefit from this long term. We would own this, and after we reduced our debt on it, we would be distributing profit. So it was meant to be a long-term hold, not a quick sale of finished units. But the State Department—I negotiated this lease with the State Department, many, many meetings at the American Embassy, and we signed this lease for these units. But they bargained in the right to buy the units within ninety days of taking occupancy if they wanted to buy. And because getting the State Department was so helpful in terms of growing interest at the project we called Rosinka—Rosinka, rosa is dew [0:15:00] and rosinka is a little dew drop, and we called it Rosinka. We didn’t want to be selling units at Rosinka, but we wanted to attract more, and if the State Department was one of our

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 4 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie customers, it would help us grow the project. So this was really pure real estate business, and the decision was made, yes, we will sign the lease with that provision. And sure enough, they exercised.

That brought five million dollars into a bank called the International Moscow Bank, which was a conglomerate of three Soviet banks and five European banks.1 Something happened, I think that caught the attention of some people, and it was just too much money coming in too quickly. That led to an evening where my father was in Moscow and we were taken to somewhere, and my deputy general director introduced us to our new partner. We learned that the kolkhoz share was being drastically reduced and our share was being drastically reduced.

My father—he’s someone who always believed in right and wrong, and fair, and following the requirements that we set out—shook his finger at Oleg2 and said, this isn’t going to happen. We’re not going to have a new partner that we’ve never met. We’re going to keep this as a fifty- fifty venture. It was angry; my father was angry at Oleg. Oleg had come out of the KGB. We don’t know how he became my deputy; he just was presented, and he became my deputy. We did a lot for Oleg over the years. He had had an alcohol problem; we got him into a treatment program in Norwalk, Connecticut, which had become a sister city with Krasnogorsk. I remember meeting with Oleg, and he asked me—I went to see him at this treatment facility, and he said, “Chris, I don’t know what to do. Everybody here is being honest about their past, and in order to get good treatment you’re supposed to be honest, but I really don’t want to tell people that I was in the KGB.” So I said, “Well, you tell them what you feel comfortable telling them.”

But later, after that five million dollars came into International Moscow Bank, and Riverbridge [sic; refers to Rosinka] had caught the attention of some people who, I don’t really know how to characterize them, but wanted to take advantage of situations like this, became our new partner. Although, my father rejected that. Then what happened, my wife and two children and I were living at Rosinka and then it became very ugly with—this was July of 1993, so the Soviet Union had ceased to exist in 1991. I was actually there the day those tanks rolled in along Leningradsky Prospect toward Moscow. I watched Oleg and the rest of our staff be so concerned about what was happening that day.

Our project began in 1987 with the joint venture law and transitioned across into the early ‘90s. It had the kind of euphoria of 1990 and 1991, where perestroika and glasnost were accomplishing great things, or so we thought. And then in August of 1991, there was this coup attempt by this “Committee of Twelve.” Then Boris Yeltsin stood out in front of the White House, and the Soviet Union, without a shot fired, sort of melted away and Russia became the dominant political area. So we’re talking about July of 1993, not so long after that. So I’d had some experience continuing our Rosinka project under the Russian government.

There was a lot of frantic learning about how do you register a joint venture, and what is a joint venture? It was very blocky and awkward in the beginning. I remember being asked by many Soviets, what’s your experience with joint ventures? The joint venture law really talked in terms of entities being joint ventures, but here in the West, a joint venture is a more generic term, just [0:20:00] describing many different kinds of entities to where there is joint participation. But the Soviets had this awkward approach where something would actually be registered as a joint

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 5 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie venture. The Russians were trying to learn how to do this. So it was a time of great change and great experimentation.

So as I mentioned, we were introduced to this new partner. My father reacted very badly to that, understandably; I’m not critical of my father. And then Oleg and others executed a kind of intimidation campaign. We came home in July of 1993. For a while, I was involved with the U.S.-Russian Chamber of Commerce in Boston. That’s where I met Dan Satinsky [Daniel Satinsky], who you know.3 I was involved, thinking that I didn’t know how to do anything else now; I had to stay involved in business with the Soviet Union. Eventually, that stopped. I swore: one currency, one country, one language. I swore that I would do a real estate development project one day that met those three criteria: one country, one currency, one time zone, one language. And this is it; we’re sitting here in what eventually became a Senie family real estate development. We only use dollars and it’s only one time zone. We don’t deal in a whole regime that we really don’t understand.

So this has been a great experience for us. No real estate development, anywhere, is easy. Real estate developers solve problems, and they come up all the time when you’re trying to develop a real estate project. So we’re nearing a successful completion of what we call Riverbridge.4 For me, it sort of replaces Rosinka. Although, again, I put many, many years into Rosinka. I had two kids; I now have three. But, at the time, two. We were living in one of the units at Rosinka and they turned off the electricity and the heat. But that was how nasty it became. My last meeting with Oleg, he was dressed in camouflage uniform, and he had a long knife.

So Oleg was flicking dirt out of his boots with this long knife, and he put it down on the table with a real thud and he said, “Chris, what can I do for you?” I thought, okay, I get the message. Now, I had people back home, investors, not wanting me to leave Rosinka, because everybody knew the minute the general director of Rosinka left, the takeover was perfected. So this was excruciating, to be wanting to protect my wife and two kids, wanting not to have anything bad happen to us, being the object of some obvious strong intimidation. So my wife and I talked about it and we just got on a plane and came home.

We were upset with the State Department, because they knew what was happening, and they had to make what we think was a calculated decision that if they’re going to side with anyone in this hostile takeover attempt, it should be the party that controls the site. Because they already had families living at Rosinka, and I don’t think they wanted to see those families come under attack the way we had. I don’t mean physical attack; I was never physically attacked. So I think they were in a tough position, and they just decided to deal with Oleg and the new partners.

So we really lost everything. We did bring a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington when we got back saying, hey, you should have come to our aid here. You knew who built this project and you knew that we had been the subject of a real hostile takeover, and you should have assisted us and not recognized them as the new owner, even though I had left and gone back to the United States. I don’t think the court system knew what to do with this claim. It’s not really a great legal theory. They had already paid for their units; they were just trying to pay their utilities and deal with the new developer. Somehow, this joint venture was reregistered to the new

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 6 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie owners. Once my father didn’t accept the way it was being restructured, we wound up with no [0:25:00] interest in the joint venture.

I don’t know if the kolkhoz still exists and if it still has an interest in Rosinka. I do understand that it’s fully built out and that it’s been a successful project. I have not gone back to Moscow or to Rosinka and wouldn’t want to. I don’t think this was a wasted experience for me, but it was a very difficult period. We lost a lot of investment dollars that people who had faith in my enthusiasm risked, and that’s a lot of pressure, as well.

As I reflect back, and again, for many years I haven’t, because I don’t want to, I think the ‘70s was a decade of great academic interest in the Soviet Union. And the ‘80s saw the rise of citizen diplomacy, which helped government leaders get to a different type of relationship with the Soviet Union. The joint venture law in 1987 ushered in a period of people trying to do business in the Soviet Union. I think the first people in were not particularly equipped. I think they might break down into two categories: one, the dreamy people that wanted to build a stronger friendship between Americans and Russians, and I include myself in that group; but also, there was a second group of people—and this is going to sound kind of harsh and critical—but there were sort of flimflam businesspeople who weren’t doing very well with their various ventures in their home countries deciding that since the Soviet Union had welcomed business partners for the first time, they should go there and try to make money.

So I met many people in Moscow, over these years of 1987 to 1993, who I wasn’t terribly impressed with, and I didn’t think they were bringing real capital. I think they were just trying to make it there when they didn’t make it somewhere else. I don’t know what’s happened since 1993. There were good companies there, too. Some of the tenants who leased businesses at Rosinka were quality companies that were really investing resources and were standing behind their commitments there. I know that a number of law firms and other businesses closed up shop and left as this early business period came to an end, if it did. Again, I’ve lost track of what’s happened there. But we trailblazers weren’t very ready for this, or very knowledgeable. Either we were just too naive, like myself, or we were sort of flimflammy and not real serious business.

I don’t know what exists today. I haven’t been to Russia in a long time. I don’t know what exists today, but I think I was among a group that really couldn’t pivot from citizen diplomacy to business, even though that’s what I sold the investors who lost money on Rosinka—that I could. Just because you can ride a bicycle with a Soviet for 1,200 miles doesn’t mean you can actually run a real estate development in an area where the civil legal society exists but can be controlled.

Here in the United States, people criticize our court system and our legal system and things take too long, people say it doesn’t work, but it really does work. Our legal system responds well when earnest parties come before it and are trying to resolve honest disputes. Equity plays a major role—what is fair. We look at contractual agreements, but we also look at the whole picture. The Soviet legal system, while it has many features that are similar, was different in the sense that while it was the Soviet Union, which is much of the time I was there, there was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 7 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie I was at a meeting, a planning committee meeting in Krasnogorsk in the city town hall, and I thought it was going pretty well, and that we were going to have our project approved, and there was a phone call. [0:30:00] Now, this was before cell phones. There was a phone on the table, and there was some kind of a phone call. My Russian was not good enough to know what was said. I can only imagine that that board wanted to know, from someone, is it okay to approve this project? So the mechanism is there, these are volunteers sitting on a planning board, just the way we have in our communities here, but at that time, these later years of the Soviet Union, it was controlled by something and it was hard to understand what was happening.

I did get it zoned, I did get it approved, and there was a lot of substance there. I think we would have been okay, but I think what happened is that as the Soviet mechanisms to control society left, some kind of vacuum developed and meetings like the one I went to with my father, where Oleg introduced us to our new partner, and said if we don’t agree we’re going to reregister and you’re going to have no interest, was possible. It became possible, maybe frequent. I don’t know. But it just really got taken away from us as part of a phenomenon that was happening at that time. So it’s not easy to go from Bike for Peace into developing real estate and I learned that the hard way.

You said that there was either the flimflam or the naivete, but do you think that anybody could have possibly been prepared for this scenario that you found yourself in?

I think some of the companies we leased units to at Rosinka did good business, but more of them were European than American, and I think Europeans understood better the setting they were in. I don’t think Americans had a clue. I don’t think I met an American during that time frame that really had a handle on this, on what was happening, but I think some of the Europeans did. I don’t know what the difference is, I don’t know much about European countries or business or cultures, but it seemed to me that some of the Scandinavian businesses, some of the German businesses, Italian, these countries had businesspeople working even in those early days, who, it seemed to me, were just—they understood it.

Now, I do believe—this will also sound bad—but I do believe that European business culture is more inclined to pay bribes than American. America, we have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and one of the funniest stories that ever came out of Rosinka was—we needed 428 telephone lines, and there was a fellow who controlled the local telephone lines in Krasnogorsk. My deputy, Oleg, went out there and he came back and he said, “Okay, he’ll give us 428 lines but he wants us to carve out a hectare of land for his new dacha and give it to him.” So I sent Oleg back there and I said, “Tell him that I’m a lawyer in the United States and that I’m under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and I can’t give something of value in exchange for a government action, so I can’t do that.” So he came back, after that second meeting and he said, “Okay, he wants a VCR, he wants a VCR.” So a VCR, at that time, was kind of like our best technology for watching movies. We used to slide tapes into a VCR. So Soviets knew about this technology and he wanted a VCR. I said to Oleg, “Look, that still costs too much for me not to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, so tell him even though that’s a lot less valuable than 2.4 acres of land, I can’t agree to that.” So he went out. And then he came back and he said, “Okay, he wants a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and he wants to drink it with you.” I said, “Done!” [claps] We got

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 8 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie in the car, we went to a Western store, bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and went out to this fellow’s office and we drank a whole bottle of Johnny Walker Red.

So I think that was an unusual approach on my part because I really wouldn’t pay a bribe. Even in this country, not all of our towns and cities are clean, and you get that vibe if you’re a land use attorney. [0:35:00] And I’ve taught my clients how to never go down that road, how to never have that conversation, how to wait and how to not get pulled into an “expediting” type of situation. It’s not worth it. It’s not very prevalent here. I’ve worked in Massachusetts for many years. I can identify towns that I think have that characteristic, but it’s small and it’s contained and it’s normal, and you can work around it. As long as you stay resolute, you can work around it.

I don’t think the European businesspeople operating in the Soviet Union after the ’87 law hesitated; I think they paid bribes. Now, that’s a huge generalization and I don’t know that that’s true, but we Americans were—or, I—was resolute in not doing that. And because there was some virtue to our project and I stuck with it and I just kept meeting people and just kept advocating for it, we got some approval without paying a single bribe. I drank half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red; that was it. There was no other payment of any kind.

I think the Europeans might have been more culturally ready. I think a German or Italian, or someone with a real strong business background might have handled that evening meeting, where we met our new partner, differently. I think the venture might have survived and that new partner might have had a share. We weren’t like that. My father wasn’t like that and I wasn’t like that, and—what’s happened to our fifty-fifty joint venture? We’ve invested much money here, some of ours, some of our investors, and we can’t have our share reduced. So I think very few Americans were prepared for what existed there. I think some people might have been. But again, I’ve lost touch. I don’t know how did those companies do over the decades since. I don’t know how anyone’s done.

You mentioned that during the lawsuit, you had grievances with the State Department— the basis of the lawsuit—and that that did not pan out in your favor. Is there anything that you would want to say in response to that, or as a follow-up to that lawsuit, that you’d want to leave people with?

I’m not critical of the U.S. government. I don’t know that our complaint articulated a wrong that is remediable by our legal system. It was crummy; it wasn’t standing behind American citizens who were being taken advantage of, but I don’t think they broke any U.S. law. I think they just did an expeditious thing. They wanted to protect their families, their interest. They paid a lot of money for these apartments, and in a way, they acted a little Soviet. Okay, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. A new company that owns this project, we’re going to deal with them. So, I’m not critical. It was ironic, we went down for oral argument in [Washington,] D.C. and the judge who heard the case was out jogging. I don’t know if it was later that afternoon or the same day, but he was jogging with someone and he was talking about the case. I don’t know what he said, but I wasn’t the only one who heard that. We were amazed that you can be in front of a court and then the next minute you can be out on the sidewalk and hear the judge jogging by talking about

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 9 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie the case. But the word “Rosinka” is not a common word here in the United States, so you notice it.

I don’t think the government knew what to do. I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t know if they still own those units. If they do, they’ve probably had a lot of American families living there, and that might have helped the State Department have good personnel. If you can have families there, your personnel will be happier and do better work at the Embassy. I’m not critical of anyone, except I just feel bad having gotten caught up in a time when we, as American businesspeople, didn’t know how to react to a situation, wouldn’t have—I was never going to give a hectare of land to that telephone operator. I was never going to give him a VCR, either. I was just going to try to do this the straight way, and I just think we got swallowed up.

You mentioned how the transition from Bike for Peace [0:40:00] citizen diplomacy to a business venture was very difficult. Do you think that there was anything that could have been done to make that transition easier?

The reason one thinks he or she can make that transition is that some of the elements are the same. If you can sit in someone’s living room—you probably know the saying—nothing in the stores, nothing on the shelves, everything on the table. That’s how it is when you go to a Soviet apartment, or now, Russian apartment. I’ve traveled in many countries. I’ve never met people who are better hosts than the Russians. They’re just wonderful at it. So, to make Bike for Peace happen, I needed to drink some vodka with someone from the Soviet Peace Committee and talk about my family and go to their apartment and meet their family. That’s what it takes to get Bike for Peace done. That’s what it took to get Rosinka zoned.

I had that skill, and it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking, if I can do that, if I can develop that rapport and use my enthusiasm and my determination to make something happen, well, I’ll solve any problem that comes up. But I had no clue how big these problems were. I got a little flavor of it with the telephone thing. I knew that that existed and I felt that I had been held up a number of times. That took a long time to get zoning, and I’m sure at a number of moments, I was being held up for something, but I just played dumb. I just played the way I do here—I just don’t have that conversation. For a bribe to get paid, there has to be an agreement. I’m going to give you something of value and you’re going to give me what I’m looking for. If you never have that conversation, you never pay a bribe. I would have to just be a different person. I don’t think I could have prepared myself better, or I don’t think I could have learned something or taken a course or consulted with an expert who could have gotten us through that transition. I just don’t think I was the right person.

Do you think, then, that there’s a limit to what citizen diplomacy can do, even today? Or would you say that that is still a worthwhile venture for forging relations between U.S. and Russia?

Well, it’s critical. It’s critical. I like to say, first in the ‘80s I ended the Cold War, and then after that, I went on and did other things. But we did. Samantha Smith, who wrote to ,5 is a chapter in that book, and Armand Hammer, and other great people. We had an impact and I think there’s never a reason to stop doing that. Whether business can flow is a different question,

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 10 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie and I understand the importance of commerce and the importance of doing business, and that that ties our communities together, too.

I’m not really a businessperson. In fact, we’re sitting in a successful real estate development. I still don’t consider myself a real estate developer, a real savvy real estate developer. I’m a guy whose parents left some money, and we bought this property, again, in a country we know, in a system we know, with one currency, one time zone, one language. Now, we’ve been at this ten years, and now we have a gas station and a daycare center and an apartment complex and a hotel, and a wine and beer shop, and a café. We put all this here. I guess you could say, okay, you’re a successful real estate developer.

But this our only project. We don’t have ten other projects. I just don’t know enough about real business, but I do know this—the human condition and character needs citizen diplomacy. That never went wrong; that went right. We did something, we believed in it and it had a good result. Getting into business, business and real estate development, it’s a tough thing. I understand the civil norms around me here and the legal infrastructure around me, and I can navigate that. I write leases and I sign loan documents, and I understand where I am here. I don’t think I understood how little I understood about where I was. I didn’t have [0:45:00] any orientation. I was trading on my good will and my ability to be a citizen diplomat, but that’s not enough for business, and that was a tough lesson.

I think that that would be a good last word. Thank you so much for your time.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

1 Today, AO UniCredit Bank. 2 Oleg is Oleg Aleksandrovich Zakharov, a former officer with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Zakharov controlled Rosinka until his death in 2006, after which the property became embroiled in an ownership dispute between Zakharov's family members. 3 An interview with Daniel Satinsky is included in this archive. 4 Riverbridge Village of Berlin, MA. 5 Peace activist Samantha Smith famously wrote a letter to Soviet General Secretary Andropov in 1982 at age 10.

Christopher G. Senie, interview by Rebecca Adeline Johnston, December 12, 2019, transcript, Post-Soviet States Oral 11 History Collection, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Austin, TX, available online at: https://www.strausscenter.org/interview/christopher-senie