I am asking for your help to keep alive the history of American-Russian interaction in the 1980's and 1990's through an oral history archive. As someone who was personally active in Russia in those years, I know how exciting, confounding, complex, frustrating, and rewarding a time it was. Over the past seven years, I have been working to preserve the history of those days through interviews with people who also experienced those times; the most intense and extensive interaction of Americans and Russians in history. This period is often misrepresented, exaggerated, or forgotten, despite being essential to contemporary Russia, particularly now with change in the air again. My goal is to preserve an accurate record through an online oral history archive of interviews done for my book. With your help, I can expand the existing archive as a source of primary information about the transformation of the USSR into modern Russia.

In 2017, I began this project by collecting in-depth interviews with citizen diplomats, aid program administrators, entrepreneurs, and investors who were active in Russia then, mostly Americans, but some Europeans and Russians. This was a personal project as an independent researcher to preserve the memory of that extraordinary period of time. By 2022, prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I recorded interviews with more than 100 people, ranging in length from an hour to six hours and secured a book contract with the publisher Routledge. The book based on excerpts from those interviews as published in 2024 book as, Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes. After finishing the book, I realized that there is so much more information in those interviews that could not be included in the book. They constitute a broad historical record that should not be deleted or discarded.

The Satinsky Archive:

In partnership with The Russia Program at George Washington University, the first stage of The Satinsky Archive is available at: https://therussiaprogram.org/satinsky_archive. The Russia Program is developing innovative ways of understanding Russia in current conditions and the Archive is a part of that effort. Posting the interviews in the Archive is a complicated and laborious task of transcription, interviewee review and approval, and website management. The most difficult task has been transcribing the interviews. Use of AI transcription has turned out to be unreliable, requiring time-consuming human editing to make readable transcripts. Despite these difficulties, we now have 13 interviews in the Archive, each with video, written transcript, and a picture of the person interviewed and two more interviews in process.

Expansion of the number of interviews in the Archive will require paying a professional transcription service using human transcribers to create the base transcripts. I have a professional transcription service with whom I have worked previously ready to begin work and staff support ready to assist in expanding the Archive by an additional 40 interviews, if I can raise the funds through this campaign.

The amount required for this expansion of the Archive is:

Professional transcription: $15,000; and

Staff and technical support: $10,000.

Total Fundraising Goal: $25,000.

Benefit:

There is no financial return to me from this project. The public benefit of this project is a unique resource directly presenting the reality of this period through primary source interviews to help inform policy makers, citizen diplomats, researchers and scholars. It is intended to counter-balance simplistic stereotypical characterizations of this period through presenting a wider range of experiences than single person memoirs.Your financial contribution will show your support for the goals of the project and the benefits it will provide.