 Come back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Global Connections. And we're going to talk about Gorbachev. Where does he fit in global history? He died a couple of weeks ago. We need to have a retrospective on what he did, where he fit, and the influence he left, the legacy he left, if you will, on Russia and on Russian relations with the U.S. and other countries. For this discussion, we have Carl Ackerman, who joins us from Honolulu. And Rob Matthews, who joins us from Chevy Chase. The two were on a trip together in 1991, where 25 students rambled around Russia with Carl and learned a lot about the Russian people, Russian history, and it just so happens they were there at the time of Glass Nose, which left an impression on everyone involved. Welcome to the show, Carl. Thank you, Jay. You continue to be the king of menschwood. And Rob, of course, it's, you know, it's one of the greatest pleasures in a long time to be able to see you in person and hear you speak. The feeling is mutual. Tell me, tell me where Gorbachev fits on this. I mean, how did he rise to power? What sort of power did he have and what was happening under his feet so that we could have Glass Nose, you know, under him, around him, changing Russia, you know, for a long time, hopefully, forever, you know, and I think we need to know what Glass Nose actually was and what the change in Russia was. Rob, can you talk about, you know, your perceptions of Mikhail Gorbachev and what you found, what you learned, what you know now about his imprimatur on Russian history? Well, to be, to be totally honest, a lot of my perspective comes from my own personal experience, just as a teenager growing up in the United States and spending a surprisingly fortuitous summer in Russia, and experiencing the culture and the people that were there and in retrospect, it's certainly the case that the society that we experienced in those weeks didn't seem remarkable at all to us at the time, but in retrospect, that I think is very much the outcome from Gorbachev's policies of Glass Nose and Perestroika. And this was what, six or seven years into his, his, his transitions. So what we, what I remember experiencing in the, in the city of Sochi was a very, a pretty open and welcoming city and a lot of freedom of movement and a lot of tourism. And I, I feel like certainly in retrospect, that is a credit to his policies in the years leading up to that point. Carl, can I turn to you now or is it soup, is it soup? No, no, it's, it's, it's good. So, you know, this was a remarkable time for Robert and I to be in the Soviet Union along with the 24 of his colleagues. And, you know, it was during the coup. So we actually saw the coup front-handed. Ironically, we're in Sochi and very safe. And because, you know, Soviet bureaucracy is what it is, they flew us right into the middle of the coup in Moscow the day it started. And I'll always remember my Soviet contact saying to me, Carl Leopoldovich, small problem, coup d'etat, as we landed in Moscow. And so, you know, my job was to make sure that these 20, 25 students were well kept, well kept. But the answer question is, you know, what people failed to read, I think they failed to realize this at the time is Mikhail Gorbachev was trying to improve the Sochi Union. Glasnost didn't mean democracy, it meant openness. And he was trying to improve the economic system and Perestroika was just that, a restructuring of the economic system. So he was a party secretary bent on reform. He was a true Marxist-Leninist. And you know, in later years when he went to the West and actually had his foundation, he became much more of a liberal Democrat, small d. And so that's what we have to remember. But still, it was very brave of him. I mean, he did not want to go into Eastern Europe and put down rebellions. And so, you know, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. So Gorbachev, you know, even among Russian scholars, there were people all across the country, especially people on the left, who were saying, yes, this is going to be a great Soviet Union. You know, it's going to, the Soviet Union is going to be able to reform itself. And there was one professor at Berkeley named Martin Malia. And Martin Malia wrote a piece in the New York Times called Z, you know, to kind of refer to the X document that appeared by George Kennan during the Cold War, which is, you know, absolute deterrence. You know, George Kennan advocated for, you know, fighting against the Soviets in every way possible. But Martin Malia wrote this piece called Z and it was in the New York Times. And what he said is he can't reform a totalitarian system. If you open it up, it's going to fall like a house of cards. And indeed, Martin Malia was right. And Martin Malia was always sort of center right. And he got this one right. And I'm not trying to advocate for the right or the left here. I'm just, you know, trying to tell you what happened. And I'm going to embarrass my student now because when we got on the bus and we were going to our hotel, and then we took a tour during the three days with the kids eating, you know, McDonald's hamburgers, because Gorbachev had let a lot of different things in. But when we got on the bus originally, you know, there were tanks surrounding us. And it was a very difficult situation. And of course, I stood up in my colleague Gail, who was my co-chaperone. We told the students not to do anything crazy. So anyway, to end this story, Robert, who had just a, you know, just a wonderful sense of humor. And while I can't say he was a favorite, I had to treat all the students carefully. I really admired his humor. And he stood up as if he were in the Wizard of Oz and he was Dorothy. And he clicked his heel three times standing up and said, I wish I were home. I wish I were home. I wish I were home, which brought down the house on the bus because you can imagine these tanks were passing us. We were on the Ring Road. You know, we didn't know whether we'd be, you know, stopped and put in prison or fired upon, you know, because we had an American flag on our bus. So anyway, that's, Rob, you saved the day in a sense because you made people much more relaxed. Rob, you want to do rebuttal on that? No, but, you know, as we were talking it, and specifically, you know, thinking about the cultural differences of the glass nose period versus the more totalitarian state, it made me realize that the morning that we were supposed to fly back to and just supposed to and did fly into Moscow, you know, the night before everything was quote unquote normal. And then I woke up that morning with my bags packed and ready to get on the plane and fly to Moscow. And the host brother that was part of the small family that I was living with, he came into my bedroom, which was really just like a three season porch. I was sleeping on a couch for the few weeks that I was living with them. He came in and he said, Gorbachev is very sick. The news has gone off the air and he has, he has retired or resigned. He said something like that. And sure enough, everything that we had had experienced, you know, on that morning, it all changed. And suddenly, you know, I did witness what it would be like in an environment where there was no television, there was no news. It all switched to classical music. And and we, I remember standing on the sidewalk waiting to get on the bus to go to the airport and no one had any idea what was going on. None of the kids, we didn't get a whole lot of information from our guides because they didn't have a whole lot of information to give us. And so we just piled onto the plane and landed in Moscow. And suddenly, as Carl mentioned, we were driving around Moscow with big tanks and armor personnel carriers all along the highways and on all the corn, street corners and the next day we went on a tour of the museum at the Kremlin. Not to be deterred. So what is it with the coup? What was, what happened in the coup? Who was doing what and what was the result of it? Well, basically what there was, you know, a right wing in the in the Politburo. And I'm trying to remember whether it was Gorosimov for or not the general that was in charge. But they planned a coup against Gorbachev. They arrested him, you know, in his in the Sochi area in the Crimea actually wasn't so she was in Crimea. We were in Sochi and and there was an attempt to move Russia in a much more right wing direction and replace him in the Politburo. And, you know, what was supposed to happen is according to the coup planners is they were going to take over everything, you know, fire on the crowds. And, you know, it was a case like the Russian Revolution of February 1917. The Russian troops just did not see this happening and they were not going to fire on the crowds and they ended up joining, you know, invaders and, you know, eventually Gorbachev came back to power and, you know, eventually like within several months he will, you know, leave power and Boris Yeltsin will take over. But it was it was a failed coup d'etat because the right wingers did not have enough enough support. And one of the ironies of life is that this entire trip for us was sort of a crazy trip because as Robert will tell you we were supposed to be in Almata and Kazakhstan. That was the original destination and suddenly we went to Sochi because, you know, the Soviet inter-system there was a glitch and so we ended up miles away. We weren't in Kazakhstan. We were in Russia. And then while we were in Sochi there was a tornado. There was an outbreak of cholera and then there was a coup. So, you know, it was it was quite a trip. And, you know, the kids were staying as Robert said in the longer kids I may add young adults were staying in host families. And so they got a really good look of what Soviet life was like even under the Gorbachev period. And, you know, some of the young women were staying with families that were very conservative about women going out and, you know, they might have belonged to, you know, the Islamic sect and, you know, we're concerned about women going out at all. And so there were lots of different cultural things that the that our students had to realize. And of course Russian students and Russian kids, you know, from a pretty young age are able to drink and they learn not to drink, you know, in great quantities. But, you know, the kids that were in the homestays, you know, had access to alcohol too. And so that was another thing because, you know, American students are taught not to drink alcohol at all. And so when exposed to this, most of the kids, you know, kept their wits about them, but there are a couple kids that I had to go in the middle of the night and, you know, detoxify them because they had been offered too much liquor by their host families. You mean vodka? You mean vodka? Yeah, it was, it was well, it was Georgian wine and it was it was vodka and it was, you know, and the joke about vodka is the word for water in Russian is vodka. And you know what vodka is, of course. And, you know, Russians drink vodka like Americans drink vodka. That's the kind of funny phrase. So Rob, let's unpack some of that. You mentioned before the show that the Russians liked Americans, that they were friendly to you and so forth. And that's really important. And there had been no, under Gorbachev, there had been a kind of enlightenment, a move to be more liberal, more accepting from the Cold War. Because remember, you know, the U.S. and Russia had been in the Cold War and now it was somehow softening with Gorbachev. Just to say, as Carl said, that it was a failed coup, not a successful one. And he came back, although not for all that long. But my, you know, my question is, you know, how did the Russian people that you interacted with feel about Gorbachev? Was he a statement of the future for them? Or did they see him as a somehow retrograde? I honestly don't remember having any direct conversations with the Russian students about Gorbachev or any specific politicians on either side of the Cold War. I remember speaking to them and having conversations with them about more general kinds of conversations about, I remember having a conversation with somebody, I think we were at a tea plantation, Carl. And I remember we just sat down and we started talking about, you know, they had no real idea what it was like to live in America, not surprisingly. But for me, as a 17-year-old kid with very little world experience, I was sort of surprised by that. I just kind of assumed that everybody knew what it was like to live in America. And so they asked questions like, would Americans be willing to help us move to a market economy? And I thought, of course, how could you question that? Of course, there are Americans that would want to help you move to it. Optimistic, this whole conversation. And, you know, in the 10 years or so that followed that, the story didn't quite play out that way. But that was a moment in time that I will distinctly remember. And this is, of course, a couple of weeks before the coup actually took place. So everything seemed very, very normal to everybody around. No one had any indication that this was about to, that everything was about to end. Was they unwilling or perhaps unable to talk to you about Russian politics? I don't really know the answer to that. I don't. We certainly had some conversations about bureaucracy and the kind of the Soviet system in very general terms, just kind of like the jokes on the street kind of thing. I don't remember ever having any specific conversations about what the political system was like for the kids. Because, you know, for the most part, they were, my host brother, who I lived with, was only 15. So they were all about the same ages as we were. They weren't really out in the world themselves yet, either. Stay in touch with him? I stayed in touch with him for a little while, but 30 years is a long time. I've lost touch with him since then. I'll go with that. You learned that here on Think Tech. 30 years is really a long time. And Carl Ackerman can help us understand that. So Rob, you know, you apparently jumped up and down and said, I want to go home. Why? Why did you do that? Probably just to make people laugh. I mean, I actually, I was really enjoying being in the thick of it. And I was not eager to go home. So I was not, I was one of the more careful students in the group when it came to, while we were, I remember driving around, some of the students were kind of waving at the soldiers. And I thought that was probably pushing the envelope a little bit. But yeah, I, it didn't seem all that dangerous to you. I didn't, I didn't think that we were in any real danger, but I also didn't want to poke the bear. So that's the story Carl told about you, but what's the story you were going to tell us about Carl? Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Well, you know, we, we drove around, you know, the first day we landed, we drove around. We tried to, I mean, not we, the, the guides and the drivers did try to get us to the parliament building, which was cordoned off by barricades. But the following day we went to the Kremlin Museum and we toured Moscow and walked around the streets and bought things on the streets, just like we were regular tourists because I mean, we went to, like Carl said, we went to McDonald's. And the story I remember is that on one of our little excursions as, you know, we kind of broke out into groups and let people wander around the streets a little bit. And me and a friend of mine were walking along the sidewalk and Carl told us to stop and he walked further down the, the, the, the path and talked to a uniformed individual in front of the door somewhere. And then Carl came back and it brought us over and he said, I just told this guard that you two are the children of diplomats. And so he is allowing us to go into this cemetery. And it was the Novodetsky cemetery. And we went and visited Khrushchev's grave. And Carl told us, given the moment in history that we're at, I felt it was important to go visit Khrushchev's grave to whatever degree we could. And so the guard was more than willing to, I suspect, take some money and believe the story that we were diplomats. And I guess we looked Russian enough that we, he let us through the door. And so that's our, that's my story of how I got in to see Khrushchev's grave on August 20th, 1991. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Carl, you said that a third of the group were Japanese. No, they were, you know, they were heavily kits mostly from all over, from all over the United States, because it was an American field service trip. And, you know, as I recall, we may have had some training in upstate New York before we left, but in other words, they were kids from all over the place. And they were, they were kids from all over. And just to add to that story, no money exchanged hand, but, but, but, but. It's a better story with money exchanging hands, Carl. We're leaving it ambiguous. No, but, but the story about me telling that they were, you know, American that the sons and daughter of sons, sons of American diplomats is true because in Russia, you know, even today, you know, if you want to get anywhere, you have to tell like sort of a white lie in order to get someplace because if you're just a regular part of the narrow road, the general people, they're not going to budge. And so, you know, I told us white lies in order to get these kids into to see Nikita Khrushchev's grave, which is, of course, was just so apropos given his attempts to reform Russia himself during the coup with Mikhail Gorbachev. And, you know, Jay, this is what Rob said has particularly a particular significance for what's happening today. Remember, he talked about his host brother coming after watching the television and still most Russians have one, you know, have a television and they get most of their news from that and they reflect that news the way people do sometimes by only watching, you know, either CNN or Fox News, they don't try to get the, you know, the alternative opinion and they, you know, especially people in our country that, you know, listen to sort of craziness, you know, on either far left or far right, you know, podcasts and stuff like that and they take that verbatim. In Russia, you know, the Russians, at least I give them some credit because that's the only thing available. That's why Vladimir Putin is being able to do what he has done. But I have to say about Rob and his 24 colleagues, they were really good. I mean, you know, it was, it's because I immediately called our embassy and they couldn't get us out before the date that we had to plan, which was three days later and by that time the coup was over and Mikhail Gorbachev was restored and back in Moscow. It was a pretty, for me as an adult, it was pretty frightening and we were taking the subways and I always remember these young guys with bull horns, you know, who were leading the movement, you know, the student movement, of course they could have been shot like, you know, at Tiananmen Square and things like this because it was a Marxist regime. But, you know, people had seen the flowering of Glastonost and Perestroika and even though under Gorbachev a lot of, people had a lot of problems with getting goods and services and of course originally he put a ban on vodka which is, you know, you don't do that in Russia. So people were complaining about him but they appreciated the kind of freedoms they had and a lot of people weren't scared anymore. You know, I mean, things had to happen. How important was he in turning the country toward Glastonost? How important was he in enlightening Russia because that happened right around that time? Was this his intention? What was his philosophical, you know, orientation here? What made it possible for this to happen under him? Rob, I'm going to let you take a crack and then I'll take a crack. Certainly my impression is that it's entirely due to him. But there were, my understanding is that there were, there were some shoots of reform that were trying to poke up through the bureaucracy and the system before he took over. But it was, it was his entire personality, his motivation, you know, everything about him was dedicated to that prospect of reforming Russia and within the system, as Karl pointed out, he didn't, he was not trying to institute a democratic system at the time. But he, it was, it was his, it was really his show. Okay. So he's really important in understanding modern Russia because of, you know, the huge inflection point that Glastonost created or reflected. And here we are 30 years later and we have Vladimir Putin there, Putin who was, as I recall, he was in East Germany, East Berlin at the time the wall was taken down, trying to protect KGB documents and the like. That, you know, the story about how he prevented the mob in East Germany from tearing down the Russian embassy there by speaking to them in German because he does speak German, the whole thing. He was instrumental but very loyal and faithful to the preservation of, you know, of the USSR. Okay. So how, what's the connection between Mikhail Gorbachev and Glastonost and Enlightenment or reform to the extent it happened in Russia and Vladimir Putin, we need to connect it somehow or not. Would you say that Vladimir Putin liked what Gorbachev had done for Russia or was he unhappy about it, Karl? You know, I would say that, you know, the response and I agree with Rob about, you know, it was Gorbachev. You know, he's entirely responsible but he was reacting, you may recall, that the United States had just launched this kind of missile system called Star Wars under Ronald Reagan and he needed to reform his country in order to even compete in the Cold War. So that was his motivation. He wanted to make the Soviet Union stronger so that's why he launched Perestroika, well first Glastonost and then, well, first Perestroika then Glastonost. But the connection is that Boris Yeltsin who took over after Mikhail Gorbachev was still a pretty reforming guy. I mean, he allowed democracy to flourish. He allowed lots of different thick journals to be published, you know, one was called Spark or Gun Yoke. And there was a lot of Democratic fever going on or fervor going on in Russia. The problem was that, you know, Boris Yeltsin was older and he was drinking a lot of vodka and they wanted someone new and vibrant. And so he turned to this young guy who came out of a fairly liberal cohort in St. Petersburg, Lettingrad initially and then St. Petersburg. And then, you know, people thought of him as sort of continuing the reforms even though he had been KGB because he could be part of the government and still be liberal. But as it turned out, you know, they didn't know enough about Vladimir Putin. And of course, he has almost a psychosis as Macron said the other day on CNN about the Soviet Union falling. And so, and I think that, you know, Boris Yeltsin and even Mikhail Gorbachev wouldn't like that, you know, the Soviet Union to sort of disintegrate. I don't think either of them would have been for that. But under the current conditions, I think both men would have reacted much differently. And I think what they failed to realize, so to put it in sort of a historical perspective, Mikhail Gorbachev was a westerner going back to the 19th century. And these guys always, these politicians and philosophers always looked to the west and saw the west as a beacon of light. And there was another group called the Slavo files of the 19th century. And they thought of greater Russia and only great Russia can do this. And we have our own morality and stuff like that. And actually Vladimir Putin fits right into that. And so did Boris Yeltsin know this when he appointed Vladimir Putin? Probably not. He didn't think that Vladimir Putin would be the kind of guy that he is. So that's my sort of elusive way. How do you think that Boris Yeltsin and for that matter, Mikhail Gorbachev would approve of what Putin has done since and what Putin is doing now? Well, I think that although, at least in that the things I've read about Gorbachev in the last few weeks or so, it's clear that he was disappointed in the way that Putin had been directing Russia away from his reforms. And I have to believe that because it's my impression of Yeltsin is that he was an even stronger reformer in that way. I think that he was much more of a Democrat, lower case Democrat than Gorbachev was. And so I think that both of them, I mean Gorbachev was, I don't know, maybe he wasn't explicitly, I don't know how verbal he was about it, but it seemed like he was pretty obviously disappointed in the direction that Putin had taken the country and my suspicion is that Yeltsin would have been even more so. Looking back at your trip 30 years ago, actually a little more than that, and then integrating that with what we read in the newspaper these days, especially over the past five months, would you go back to Russia now? Even if Karl asked you nicely. My family and I have had a pending trip that we have been hoping to take for the past two, three years, maybe even longer, where we would take the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way across Russia with some of our Russian friends. That has been postponed for various reasons. I would love to go back, assuming that it's safe to do so. I would love to go back and see Sochi again, see Moscow again, see how things have changed and things have not changed. They say that the Trans-Siberian Railroad is only terrible if you spend your time on the vodka. I'd rush back to that, or I'd rush back to that, never mind. Karl, let's try to make sense of this. What, if any, influence do you think that Gorbachev had now that he's dead on the Russian people? For example, is it a sad moment that he died? Did they miss him? Was there a big funeral? As I recall, Putin did not attend the funeral. He had something else on his schedule that day. But, you know, query, what do the Russian people feel about Mikhail Gorbachev now that he died? It seems to me a mark in history, but maybe a lot of people don't feel that way. And what influence do you think he had on today's Russia, today's Putin? Well, I think that, you know, he was admired by many people who admired democracy in Russia. And remember, it was just a brief experiment. And, you know, it went from 1991 through, actually, you know, a part of the century, you know, at least five or 10 years. And then Putin is, you know, I mean, still they have a, you know, quote-unquote democratic elections, and they have some notion of free press, but that's limited. So I think that to answer your first question, it was a well-attended funeral. Vladimir Putin came earlier with flowers, but he didn't attend the official ceremony. So I think that people have mixed reactions. Most Russian have mixed reactions about Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a time of economic problems. So they remember that if they're old enough. Younger people probably have great enthusiasm for him because they're the ones that are developing their capitalist interests and, you know, they're used to the new philosophy and if they remember him at all. But, you know, people liked that sort of liberal flowering, but they also had problems with his economic policies. So I think that sort of puts it in perspective. And I think that, you know, his legacy is this, I think, is that there is a democratic movement in Russia, and I think that's his legacy. That's his long-term legacy. And whether it turns out to be the kind of, you know, Republican democracy that we have in the United States, we'll have to see. Because Russians tend to like, you know, because of the century of very strong rulers, they tend to like, you know, as they say, Sylvain Chelevec, a strong leader. And it was interesting that they really liked Kennedy during my early years in the 60s when I was there. And they thought of Kennedy as a very strong leader. And of course, he was the main enemy of Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I thought that was interesting, but it shows where they gravitate. And I think a lot of people in the world today, if you look at Italy, are gravitating towards, you know, some right-wing dictators. Of course, the German example is just the opposite. So in any case, I think that the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev is the democratic spirit among the people, the Russian people. And you can see what's happening now. And of course, the other legacy is that, you know, he did not invade. He didn't invade Germany. He didn't follow the Brezhnev doctrine. You know, the Brezhnev followed in 1968 under, you know, when Czechoslovakia wanted to go a little bit more liberal. So, you know, the Russians, for the, you know, for the most part, do not want war. They learned in Chechnya that they're going to have, you know, their Russian children come back in body bags. So I think the two legacies of Mikhail Gorbachev are peace and also the democratic spirit. Okay. I was going to ask you, you know, what Vladimir Putin would say about the influence that Gorbachev had on him. And I think that speaks through the fact that he really did not make a full, a full attendance at Gorbachev's funeral. There's a statement there. What do you think, what do you think he would say? What do you think Putin would say about the influence on him of Gorbachev? I think that, as Karl pointed out, I think that he, that the psychosis, is that the word that you refer to? I think that that's fairly true. I think that, that through that lens, you, I mean, whether it's just the psychosis or if it's just simply a fixation through that lens, you can sort of explain away a lot of what Putin has done over the last 10 to 15 years, trying to reclaim the glory of both the Soviet Union and the emperor, the imperialistic Russia before that. Yeah, so he would not be too happy with Gorbachev. He was trying to reverse what Gorbachev had done. I do think that that's a lot of what motivates his, certainly his foreign policy, is directed at restoring that, that position in the world that Russia apparently, at least in his mind, once had. Rob, I want to ask you one more question. You were 17, you were impressionable. You were, you know, how do you define a 17-year-old student? And you got, you know, you had a lot of surprises. The trip was filled with surprises of one kind or another, thrills and chills all around Russia. You know, you must have talked about it for months, maybe longer than that. And of course, if you have a trip like that, even without the surprises, it helps you appreciate a place. It helps define that place in your mind and memory. And of course, I would expect that you have followed the events in Russia more than most people, more than people who've never been there, for example. And here we are 30 years later, and you're a little reluctant to take the Trans-Siberian Redway or otherwise spend time in Russia again. But how do you feel about the country today? How do you feel about what is happening in the protests in Moscow? What is happening in the Russian, the young Russian people? Some of them who might be your age right now today who are trying to get out of there any way they can, including a lot of software developers like you, I might add. How do you feel about Russia in the, what do you want to call it, Carl referred to this, in the transformational transitional times between when you were there and now? Certainly the current moment is fairly disheartening. Leading up to, I would say, leading up to probably the, shortly after the Sochi Olympics, it seemed like there was still optimism and that spirit that I remember from those days is still present. And there are certainly pockets of that, and I certainly know people who have more direct experience who still share some of that optimism. But overall, when I open up the virtual newspaper every day these days, it's like a real flashback to those final days wandering around Moscow. Talk about flashbacks, Carl. 30 years later, what do you think of Rob looking at him today versus as a 17-year-old on the trip with you? Well, the interesting thing about Rob, and this is also true of my Milani and Punahou students, is their faces don't change all that much. They just, people get taller. The kids were from 15 to 17, and they were mostly Rob's age and stuff like that. And Jay, the thing that I wanted to convey is that when we landed back in New York, the parents were there, and of course the parents had no idea what was going on. We barely could get information out. Luckily, I had a friend in the State Department, and he tried to do wonders, and he lives in Honolulu, by the way, in Hawaii. Jay, just for that information. But it was, the students were remarkably resilient. Let me also ask you, finally, one last question. Would you go back with a bunch of kids today to Russia, Carl? My answer is not today, but sometime in the future, and maybe I'll join Rob in his transcibility and railroad venture with my family, because my girls want to go, and they say, Dad, we have to go before you get too old, because you can still speak a matter of Russian. I hope you go, and I hope you come back, too. And I hope you join us for another retrospective on life in Russia as a student group, observing what is happening around you. It's really fascinating to consider all the changes. On the other hand, when you consider those changes and you compare them to the changes in this country, we are no less full of surprises. Well, thank you very much, Carl. Carl Ackerman. Rob Matthews, really appreciate you coming around and talking about the good old days. Aloha. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.