Dear CCI friends,

Dr. Glenn Rennels, an anesthesiologist from Palo Alto, CA , traveled with us to Russia in September. Knowing we wouldn’t have scheduled cultural tours, he took this trip in his own hands and purchased tickets for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg before leaving home. Glenn sleuthed around and came up with other personal interests he wanted to pursue, which you will see below.  The most remarkable one was his intention to locate Andrei Nekrasov, Russia’s avant-garde dissident filmmaker. He did locate him and after a lengthy effort, we hosted Andrei for a fascinating evening in St. Petersburg. Glenn proved to us all that one can have both classical culture in addition to a full schedule of investigating and learning from Russians everyday.  Granted it takes not needing much sleep!

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

St. Petersburg reminds me of Boston/Cambridge in Massachusetts:

• Rivers run through town, so you’re often crossing bridges.

• Historic buildings are everywhere.

• Major universities draw young people.

Meet professor of linguistics Ilya Utekin (tan coat) who I approached as he exited a lecture hall of St. Petersburg State University. Hearing my story — that I was on a pilgrimage to honor a legendary Russian mathematician named Markov — professor Utekin volunteered to chaperone me for a while. He took me to a campus museum and over lunch he explained Chomsky linguistic theory and Piaget linguistic theory. We talked a bit about politics, and about our families. His dad teaches pathophysiology, which is right up my alley as a doctor. I was extremely grateful to him for making an unplanned day so fulfilling. I plan to host Ilya in California someday soon.

The next day, a meeting was arranged with four students from St. Petersburg State University. They fielded our questions, and they asked some of their own.

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Dear CCI Readers,

Farewell to St. Petersburg, from Mike Metz!

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

I came to Russia looking for history, that’s been my passion since retirement. I found history for sure, but mostly what I found was a country looking forward, looking away from a difficult past. Clean cities, crowded streets, new cars, busy people, peace, stability and relative prosperity.

When I watched the Russian team in the World Cup, I noticed the old Romanov crest on their uniforms and thought what an identity—centuries of czars, decades of communism, ten years of anarchy followed by nearly twenty years of Putin. Who are these people?  They are all of that.

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CCI Friends,

Meet Vadim Vasiliev in the photo below. Vadim is one of CCI’s  6,000 Russian entrepreneurs who studied how to develop small businesses in U.S. companies during the ‘90s and 2000s. He provides his large showroom when we need space for visiting Americans to meet with local entrepreneurs. Here we see him describing the climate in which he and Russia’s brightest and best were reinventing themselves as they were trying to create businesses for the first time ever. CCI’s alumni are spread over 71 of Russia’s 85 regions, from Western Russia (outside of Moscow) to the Far East. We chose not to take applicants from Moscow since that one city was getting 85% of all foreign capital and programs sent into Russia. For Russia to succeed, their vast regions also had to succeed. We’ve never regretted this decision. Now we have businessmen and women all over Russia who are eager to participate when we visit their cities. One of Mike Metz’s fabulous Foto-Journal pages follows:

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Back in his day, Stalin responded to idealistic critics by saying his was the best of socialism, “really existing socialism,” with the gulags, police state, purges etc. Hey, you want free education, housing, healthcare, etc., ya’ gotta’ put up with a little pain. It was a rough bargain.

As I listened to the Russian entrepreneur below describing his successful business I thought about the rough road these Russians have had to walk as they learned how to do real-life capitalism. He described all sorts of pitfalls and how he negotiated them one after another. Today he’s a small manufacturer with a growing clientele that succeeds in spite of sanctions and dips in the market.

Vadim was a teacher who loved the outdoors, camping, climbing, skiing, and in the 90s he was sewing his own jackets and mittens to be able to do that. He met Sharon Tennison of CCI who arranged for him to come to Colorado, and learn from people who ran outdoors companies. Then he went home and started his own company. Today he runs a Russian division of a Swedish outdoor clothing supplier. The room is filled with Russians telling of their small business successes, folks Sharon brought to the US to learn from our small business owners and Rotary Club members. [Continue Reading]

Dear CCI friends,

The largest and most extensive investigative trip to Russia is now history. Without a doubt there has not been another Russia trip dedicated to understanding where Russia is today (or yesterday), what her cities look like, how Russian people are faring, what their level of culture is, their social services, financial well being, education, their sense of the future, their respect (or lack thereof) of their leadership and a multitude of other indicators.

For this trip we intentionally forgot what US mainstream media prints about Russia and Russians and used our own lenses and ears to get at the truth.

Our 24 American travelers went to a total of nine different Russian regions and 14 Russian cities and towns, some huge ones, a few small ones and one tiny town. We traveled on planes, trains and in one case automobiles.  We got to see huge new airports, town-to-town train stations and back country roads. Those of us going to Yaroslavl traveled overnight in a Soviet-era train. It was the first I’ve seen in decades––clean but looking to be a relic from 100 years ago. Some of us got to see the huge new bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, the longest in Europe (19 kilometers or 12 miles).

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