Email #1: 12/29/2017
The Charity Sue [his wife] and I created brought from the US and installed 4 satellite dishes. 1 went to Yeltsin, 1 to Gorbachev, 1 to Channel 4 (the first non-government TV station, and 1 to the head of the Orthodox Church in Moscow.
Several years later, we created a profit-making JV and received a contract to build a cable TV system in a sector of Moscow adjacent to Gorky Park (on the river). Our first venture was the Octoberskaya Hotel (President Hotel) and surrounding territory. We brought in several dishes, TV head-end equipment, and hundreds of TV sets. We charged $10/day for TV service to the hotel rooms, and we collected payment via credit card which we processed nightly back in San Francisco through Wells Fargo Bank.
In the lobby, we built a 16-channel display of western channels from the satellite dishes we mounted on the roof. We also fed all the adjacent Communist Party Politburo apartments -- whose members for the first time ever were able to watch western TV feeds. (And, it turns out unknown to us, to the KGB residences near by).
When the failed coup against Gorbachev was plotted by renegades who secretly met in the lower Politburo meeting room of the hotel, the rest of the Politburo and Central Committee and their wives, totalling thousands of people. were watching the events through our cable TV System, which we had cut over live just 1 week before, turning on CNN International with the first contract that I signed personally with Ted Turner for Russian feeds.
CNN sent a film crew to interview me at my offices in California to ask me what I thought of the coup. I told CNN that the coup plotters weren't really serious. The Soviets had written the book on how to shut down communications to a country: they had written the book for their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. I told CNN we were still able to log into our Moscow billing server in the hotel to collect our payments. Business as usual.... The 10-minute CNN interview aired world-wide for the next 7 days every hour or so.
When I was able to get back to Moscow the next week -- by then the coup had collapsed -- I was waiting in the VIP Lounge at the international airport for my luggage and passport to be cleared. I was inundated with people I didn't know who came up to me and wanted to shake my hand and to tell me that "they had seen me on TV - from across the planet!" I immediately smiled, knowing who they were. When I asked what was happening in Moscow, they replied: "It is nothing. Just a little disturbance. Finished now. But we saw you on TV!" The world had changed overnight - and the iron curtain had been really and truly buried.
When I got back to the Hotel, everything had returned to normal, although for another week there seemed to be lots of crowds at all hours in the lobby watching the 16 screens of international channels. The most popular was NOT CNN. It was the US State department's global TV channel which the Voice of America was feeding to 100+ Countries at the time.
Email #2: 12/29/2017
More of our Russian story:
In 1982, I wrote the first national Home Satellite TV Book, so I had become well known in the US satellite TV industry and was a popular speaker.
In January, 1990, the 22nd Century Foundation, founded by Sue and me, brought over the satellite TV dishes to deliver through our Moscow partner, the Foundation for Social Innovation (FSI). Several US C-Band dish manufacturers (the 15 foot ones) donated the equipment. Pan Am Air donated the transportation. We gave them away as part of our "Keeping the Genie out of the Bottle" technology transfer program to help speed up the just-opening USSR, which was destined to collapse within 2 years.
I had first been to Moscow in 1989 through a high-level Soviet delegation which had come to the USA for an outreach tour a few months earlier. The Executive Director of the SF Chamber of Commerce had invited me to sponsor a table at their trade delegation event in the city. The delegation invited Sue and me to Moscow for trade talks. We stayed at the International Chamber of Commerce's World Trade Center. The hotel had been built as a knock-off copy of the San Francisco Hyatt Regency by US industrialist Armand Hammer. Sue and I remember with amusement the time we invited a Moscow-based friend to the closed Western hotel and they were so embarrassed about our "broken" toilets - they had never seen standing water resting in the bottom of the toilet bowl!
By the fall of 1989, SF charity Exec. Director Henry Dakin (Chairman of Dakin Toys) introduced me to Gennady Alferenko, Founder and Chairman of FSI-Moscow, the country's FIRST charity. In the process, we wound up with a Russian daughter and two identical twin grandsons.
Henry was known as the SF "fixer" who could immediately get USSR business visas from their SF Consulate nearby. It turned out that out he had built an active tracking satellite antenna on his building roof and recorded USSR polar-orbit TV domestic television satellite news feeds, which he would drop off on VHS cassettes weekly at their embassy, as well as at the local SF FBI office.
I began to commute regularly on Pan Am to Moscow. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Alferenko and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Social_Inventions
The failed coup against Gorbachev occurred on August 18, 1991. We had cut-over our Moscow CATV system just several days before and were delivering the live 24/7 BBC, CNN, USIA, etc. feeds coming from Moscow-based reporters at the International Press Center which were being broadcast real-time throughout the world.
The only place in the USSR where anyone could watch these international channels was on our Moscow CATV System! Our news feeds shocked the Central Committee members, who until then had been kept completely in the dark as to what the rest of the world was seeing.
Before we had brought western satellite TV feeds to Moscow, there were only 2 international satellite earth stations: one at Ostankino Tower, the Moscow TV Center of Central Soviet TV, and a secret military base on the outskirts of Moscow used to track the impact of potential Soviet missile launches against western nations. Just a few months before we arrived back in January, 1990, even to possess a western satellite TV reception system was a serious criminal offense punished by a long time in jail.
The USSR was dissolved the day after the western Christmas, on Dec 26, 1991, Boxing Day. By January 1, 1992, the Russian Federation under Yeltsin was in control, and the statues of Lenin and Stalin were being actively torn down throughout the former USSR and its satellite countries. One week later, on the Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1992, Yeltsin was attending Mass, and the churches were packed nationwide. The Western Christian denominations were busy in Red Square handing out New Testaments in Russian.
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