---

Commonwealth North's program series "A Conversation with . . ." is designed to afford a relaxed and informal atmosphere, focusing on audience participation and open exchange of ideas. The following transcript has not been edited and certain words may be spelled phonetically by the transcriber.

---

ALDEN TODD: Well, it's a little overwhelming to have a colleague here who has reached the high point of number 2 and pushing number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, which as most of you know, represents a cross section of sales in retail book outlets over the whole country. I believe it's the most authoritative of the best seller lists. Very quietly I found out that his sales to date of this book -- it's only a few weeks since September, right,.....

MR. WINCHESTER: Yes.

MR. TODD: .....has topped 100,000 which is just startling. My biggest best seller was about 9,000. And when you consider that Simon Winchester's book, this current one, is his thirteenth while holding down correspondence jobs with major British newspapers, he receives quite a work (inaudible). Simon Winchester has been over much of the world. He comes to us this week from the Russian Far East and he's going to devote some of his remarks this evening to that. In Argentina he got in trouble with the authorities and thrown in the clink for a month, but he turned a disadvantage to an advantage, he got a book out of it. If you look in the front of this book you'll see a list of his titles. And I looked yesterday at the Loussac in the definitive contemporary authors and that one had as the hottest new release a reference to his third book out of 13, it wasn't all that contemporary after all. He's a man who's been around a lot, he's seen a lot. He came from England. He decided to cross the Atlantic for journalistic assignments. Spent some time in Washington, D.C., as a correspondent and then in New York City. And has been, as I say, in Argentina and the Russian Far East and everywhere else. I'm sure he will share with us the words and the accumulated wisdom of a world traveler in the modern era, so with that I'll turn it over to Simon Winchester.
(Alden Todd is a Commonwealth North member, author and former Publications Director of the Deloitte Haskins & Sells CPA firm.)

MR. WINCHESTER: Alden, thank you very much. Can I remain sitting?

JUDGE HUNT: Absolutely.

MR. WINCHESTER: That would be lovely. Thank you very much indeed. Although I've been seated for most of the last 48 hours it's rather germane to what I want to talk about, which is the condition of contemporary Russia for a bit at least. I was coming over -- the last time I saw Alden, in fact, was about eight weeks ago when I flew in. I was also in Eastern Russia working on the same National Geographic job which I'll tell you a bit about in a second. But eight weeks ago when the Russian economy was in considerable better shape than it is now, both Alaska Airlines and Aeroflot were providing a service between Khabarovsk, which is the city I was in and Anchorage. Well, since then Alaska Airlines entirely prudently, I think, has pulled out of flying to places like Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Vladivostok and Magadan and Khabarovsk leaving only Aeroflot. And now Aeroflot has reduced their service to one a week.

And I was there for about a month and the weather about two weeks ago closed in really badly. It's becoming extremely cold and a lot of snow had fallen. And also Aeroflot was running out of fuel. It's not a very pleasant experience flying Aeroflot at the best of times anyway. And the thought that my flight, the one once a week link to the United States might be severed because of weather or because of a lack of fuel, or given Aeroflots conditions of their airplanes even more dramatic reasons, I thought I probably shouldn't rely on the flight that was due to come in early this morning. So what I did, in fact, was there happened to be a flight from Khabarovsk to Niigata in northern Japan last Friday. And I had essentially finished my work in Russia anyway, so I took that in the contrast of leaving the shuddery of old Aeroflot plane and getting on the bullet train at 3:30 from Niigata to Tokyo station, and then staying in the Akura (ph) Hotel for a night. The Akura compared to the Intourist hotel in Khabarovsk is a greater contrast than almost anything you can imagine. And I flew from Japan to Los Angeles and then Los Angeles, I knew that there would be no problem about getting a flight to Anchorage so I did that last night. Although there was a slight moment of hesitation because of the big storm coming in rolling through Chicago, it turned out that my connection came from Chicago to Seattle and that was late.

And so it struck me that it would be a tremendous irony if in doing this enormously long circum-pacific detour that the flight would ultimately be canceled because of a snow storm in Chicago. But in the end my flight arrived and the Aeroflot didn't arrive as far as I know, so I think it's just as well that I took it because otherwise not only would I not be here which would be, from my point of view, a great tragedy, besides Alden who very kindly mentioned has underwritten tonight, but it would also mean that I couldn't get to New York and I've got to be there for an important event on Friday. So -- but that is the kind of calculation you have to make in Russia these days because the state of the Russian economy is worse than one can imagine. You've probably seen a great deal on television and read about it in the papers, but I'm going to try and say a little about it and say something about the geo-strategic possibilities that may stem from that.

I want to go back and put this in a little more context and tell you why I was there. The Geographic commissioned me to write a piece about a year ago on the Amur River. Well, the Amur is a relatively little known river, but shouldn't be because it's the seventh longest river in the world. And the Amazon and the Nile and the Yangtze, obviously you all know those, and the Mississippi and Missouri system and most of the other great rivers, the Ramaputra and the Ganges and so on, but somehow the Amur most people don't know what it is or where it is. But it's 2700 miles long. It's called the Amara by the people that live on the Russian side of it, but what makes it an incredibly important river is not that there's an immense amount of industry on it like there is on the Yangtze, not that it flows through an area of astonishing wildlife as the Amazon does, not that it's associated with formidable early world history like the Nile is, but because it separates the two last great empires of the East. It's the border for a 1000 miles of its length between China and Russia.

And that's what when I first saw the river which was about five years ago, what really astonished and intrigued me about it because I had been -- I was at the time living in Hong Kong and I went up to Bejing and then went to Harbin, which is a city many of you have probably heard of. It's the capital of Heilungkiang, which is one of the three provinces of what used to be called Manchuria which is now called Dongbej (ph) means northeast of China. And Harbin a relatively famous city from a touristic point of view because every January they have this amazing ice festival which brings in competitors from all over the world to carve things in the ice. And I've never been, but apparently it's rather wonderful.

You can take a train north of Harbin for about 13 hours to a place called Heyhu (ph). Heyhu, Hey means black in Chinese. You're Taiwanese, right, so.....

UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible).

MR. WINCHESTER: Right. So you can correct me if my pronunciation is appalling. Her is river (ph). And so Heyhu or was a little insignificant town, significant for only one reason really which is that it lay on this river. And the first time I went there, get off the railway train and find a hotel to stay in, and then take a look around the city just to get a feeling for the place. And it's dominated by the existence of this river. And there's sort of a corniche, a walkway, along the bank of the river. And I walked along it, it was a Sunday afternoon in the summer, and lots of tourists, Chinese people just walking about for their afternoon stroll and taking advantage in many cases of paying one yuan to look through binoculars at the other side. Now, the other side isn't far away. It's 750 yards, in fact, and you can easily swim over. It's not a particularly fierce current. It's a relatively placid river. And you can see in the distance, no great distance, of course, all the buildings, football stadium, there's a power station. And can see cars rolling along the corniche on the other side. But what doesn't become apparent until you look through the binoculars is the people. And then you suddenly realize after a few seconds of looking at them that whereas everyone on this side of the river is Chinese with the exception of me, but everyone there has the same approximate physical appearance or at least to a westerner, they each their rice with chopsticks. Confucius is important, and their family system and so on and so forth. They are people essentially Mao is still or what was then important, of course, rapidly becoming more capitalist minded but in every sense they are the Chinese we know and love.

750 yards away, however, when you look through the binoculars are people just like most of us. In other words people with long hair or black hair or with no hair, which was evidently not black. They're clearly European people dressed in European clothes doing European things like see a football game going on. You see them walking their dogs. You see them doing things which you then suddenly remember are relatively unfamiliar where you are standing. You realize then that these people whereas everywhere else I've been in the Far East, Bejing, Harbin, Heyhu, the places that when I'm in Hong Kong, the places that I commonly go to, Toyko, Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia, wherever, I mean the whole region is my bailiwick.

All of a sudden 750 yards away is Europe. And you say to yourself how can this be? What is Europe doing in the middle of Asia? It's the same extraordinary feeling you get crossing into Israel from the rest of the Middle East. Somehow there's this European enclave in the middle of what should be the Middle East. But this is a far more dramatic piece of evidence of two -- the juxtaposition of two utterly different cultures. So I was intrigued right from the start that the Amur, a narrower river, separates -- and other rivers, the Danube, of course, separate countries, but very few rivers so dramatically separate cultures as the Amur. And so I mentioned it a long while ago to the Geographic and after awhile they agreed that it would be an interesting thing to do to go and have a serious look at the Amur.

The way the Geographic operates is that they give you a sum of money for expenses and they give you an amount of time. In my case it was eight weeks, in the photographers case 20 weeks. And I'm commissioned to go for three journeys. So I can go from New York to the Russian Far East three times. I've been once, now I've just come back after a second visit. And I'm going back for a third visit in May. And at the end of the day you write a piece, six or 7,000 words. And the photographer will have, I don't know, 25 pages of photographs. So we're going to, of course, try and illustrate the fact that this river runs through China as well as through Russia.

The Chinese are making it relatively easier for us, although as it happens on the Chinese side of the river there are relatively few towns. There's a town called Moher (ph) and a town called Heyhu and the capital of Fuwan (ph) is another one, but they're all relatively significant towns in the nature of China as a whole. Most of the countryside south of the river on what is the right bank of the river. I should actually show you on this map what we're talking about here. This is Russia. I don't know if you can see it. Moscow, of course, in European Russia here. But this river runs essentially here forming the border between China and Russia here. And then it eventually stops being the border and the last 1,000 miles of flowing essentially only through Russia to Cremorskykri (ph) which is the kri, the administrative region, of which is capital is Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, the kri, the kri of which Khabarovsk is the capital.

So for the first 800 miles of its existence it runs through China, then it becomes the border between Mongolia and China, then Mongolia and Russia, and then China and Russia, and then Russia alone. So it's administratively quite a difficult river to get permission to go along, but that permission is not difficult to get in China because China now isn't terribly concerned about her frontiers. It sounds rather trite and to say that she doesn't guard them as fiercely as the Soviet Union used to guard her borders. She has no particular fear about people getting in and out, not the same kind of fear that we'd read about in a John McCarrey novel in which still makes the Russians protect their border formidably. And that's really one of the things I wanted to talk about because getting permission to cover the northern side of the river, you have to deal with the one of the very, very few organizations in modern Russia which is efficient. And that's the body called the Poppinechnke (ph) which is the border police. And the border police have money. Their offices get paid or at least they get paid regularly frequently. They have a lot of weapons and they have a very big network of fences still which run along the northern side of this river.

We negotiated permission with them. It took a long time and there were many difficulties. I'm going to give you an example of the difficulty. I went last probably a week ago to a place called Skovorodino. Skovorodino -- to go back to this map, I realize it's not very easy for anyone to see. The northern end of that bulge there is Skovorodino. And it's a God forsaken little town of maybe 30,000 people. Now, I have a Russian correspondence visa which gives me permission according to the people in Moscow to go everywhere in Russia. There is now no longer any single city in Russia which is a closed city. That's what they believe in Moscow. And when they issue you the visa they say, don't worry, you can go anywhere. However, you get to places like the Russian Far East and, of course, they have never heard of such a visa and you run into all sorts of problems.

So to get to Skovorodino from Khabarovsk there is no airport. You go by train and three times a week, the Rough Sea (ph), the big Vladivostok Moscow train number 1 goes through and, of course, it's a get thrill to get to Khabarovsk station and to get on this mighty train. And I got off about 15 hours later at Skovorodino at about 6:00 in the morning, pitch dark, heavy snowfall, I mean tremendously romantic (indiscernible) I doubt many of you have been on the transit so each car has a sort of Samovar at each end of the car will you fill up, you know, for tea. The Samovar is fueled by coal. And so you have these wonderful wisps of coal fire, the marvelous smell of sulphur coal through every carriage. The snow coming down. All these people in fur hats. You can just see the outlines of the Barioske (ph) the white birch trees covered with snow. And it looks just like a scene out of Dr. Zhavago. It's -- I love it. I mean I adore Russia and go there as often as I can. But this sort of romantic interlude was interrupted after about two minutes when two soldiers came up to me and said why are you here? Because though I say we're all Europeans, but apparently it is very easy for Russians to tell a non-Russian just they say by the eyes. They say the eyes don't look as sad as our eyes do. A thousand years of Slavic sadness, apparently not too easy to recognize in an Englishman. So why are you here? And I said I'm here to go to a museum which is on the river, a place called Albezin (ph). Albezin, I should say parenthetically was a Cossack town which was besieged by thousands of Manchus in the 17th Century and led to the signing of the first treaty between the Russians and the Chinese or the Russians and the Manchus on the delineation of the border. In other words, the very border we're talking about.

And in those days this was 1690, when Peter the Great was in Moscow, the border was well north of the Amur because the Chinese believed that their writ should run essentially as far north as Peking as it was possible to ride. And these Europeans, the Cossacks that were sweeping in had no business. In other words, they were essentially with force of arms asking the same question that I was when I was standing on the side of that river, what are Europeans doing here? This is not Europe. Should they really -- do they really have any right? The Chinese asked that in 1690. They besieged the fort at Albezin. The Russians decided to sue for peace and wrung out of the Chinese a treaty which for 200 years became or delineated the border. But I wanted to go to the museum which is in Albezin but Albezin being on the border is right beside one of the most sensitive border patrol posts that the Poppinechnke, the border police, maintain.

Not only, however, is that terribly difficult to get to, but Skovorodino does not allow foreigners to go to it. It is a closed city. Oh, no, it's not, I say. There is no city in Russia closed today. They said no, no, no. Whatever they say in Moscow we're 6,000 miles from Moscow. It's as foreign a city for us as New York or Anchorage might be. They said we make the rules here. You'll have to come and get permission. And I had an escort an FSB man, FSB as you probably know are the initials to the old KGB, so he was a KGB man 26 years old. And we talked at great length. He believes to this day that Stalin is the greatest man that ever lived. And he believed that North Korea is the only paradise remaining on earth. He believes it implicitly. I argued with him until I was blue in the face about surely he must accept the freedom to go wherever I want or meet with whomever I choose or eat whatever I want or think whatever I want or read whatever I want, surely that is better than his life. No, he doesn't -- everything I was saying was a lie. Everything he sees on television about New York where, of course, racial discrimination and shooting and drug addiction are absolutely on the top of everyone's agenda, all of the good things we hear about the West are lies. Believe you me, there are pockets still in Russia where Stalin is still Soviet thought are still very, very much to the fore and Skovorodino, should any of you happen to go there, is -- it's just like walking through a museum, sort of Stalinist artifacts and Stalinist minds.

Anyway, I got in at 6:30. I, finally after paying 320 rubles, which is only $20, was able to get a visa to spend one day in Skovorodino. Even I knew there was no doubt about it at all that I had every right to be there, but you know, force of arms, they could march me and put me back on the train. Then I needed, having got that, permission to go to the museum at Albezin. And to do that you had to get the permission of the Poppinechnke, the border police. Well, the train back to Khabarovsk left at midnight, I think, and by 11:15 not only was it, of course, dark again and snowing, but it was very evident that I was never going to get permission so I left with my tail between my legs, although I did telephone Moscow and they sent a telegram to the general in charge of Skovorodino District saying you must let this man see the museum. He got the telegram at 2:30 in the morning and I was already on the train back to Khabarovsk. And he telephoned me, he did have the grace to telephone me in Khabarovsk the next day and say, so your permission has come through you can come, but I'm now 16 hours back again in the other direction. So I have assured them that I will be back the next time, it'll have to be May.

So the point I'm trying to make by illustrating this is that the border is tremendously, tremendously carefully protected by the Russians as well it might be because the Chinese, all of a sudden, are starting to look hungrily over the border as a land, as they see it, of opportunity.

The three kris that lie north of the river, well, kri and oblask mean more or less the same thing. (Indiscernible) oblask which has an area about the size of Europe and a population of about 150,000 so there's virtually no one living in it, but it is full of gold, of oil, of quite a number of every imaginable mineral as well as full of, and I did see one, not on this journey, but in August, Siberian tigers. They have 320 tigers there, none on the Chinese side because, unfortunately, the Chinese believe that tiger bones are good for putting lead in your pencil so they tend to shoot them and eat them and grind them up and make them into medicine. But there are lots of tigers, lots of bears, lots of wonderful wildlife, lots and lots of virgin forests, although parenthetically I should say that I came across on one occasion -- on this trip and on one occasion on the previous trip, arguably the most miserable places that I've ever been to in the world, which is North Korean labor camps set up in the Siberian forests. These are men, old men, maybe about 100 who are sent there for about 10 years at a time just to cut down lumber. And they live in the most appallingly squalid camps. You cannot imagine how bad they are. They're paid nothing. They're not allowed to have any communication either with the Russians around them or make any attempt to go back to North Korea. They're guarded by troops, their own troops. But they all above their beds have portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il that are dead and the others still very much alive, the leaders of North Korea.

So the tiaga, as it's called, that's t-i-a-g-a, not tiger the animal, is being harvested. There is tremendous economic potential and there are very, very few people. On the other hand, south of the river, Heilongjang and Jilin, and what's the other province in northeast China? Well, anyway, the three provinces have a total population of 65 million. So here you've got 65 million very economically active people who are still because it's out in the countryside not breeding at the rate of one child per family, but breeding at a greater rate, looking hungrily over the river 750 yards away where there is almost virgin territory. And they are asking just as I asked on my first visit what are these Europeans exactly doing here? Should they remain here?

Well, the third thing about now is that the Russians are beginning to ask the same question themselves because the economic situation in Moscow may be bad and in Petersburg it may be bad, and in Novosibirsk it may be bad, but it is terrible. I mean I have a very good friend in Novosibirsk, a woman of that certain age who has been saving for the last 20 years about 30 percent of her salary in Income Bank (ph) which is one of the big five banks in Russia in the hope of buying an apartment in Moscow because she believes that her life -- she's a single woman, she's had very little luck in finding anyone to be with. She thinks -- she's a very, very clever woman. She thinks her intellectual needs and possibly her romantic needs will be filled by going to the capital. And so she's been saving religiously for all these years a third of her pay to buy an apartment in Moscow and go and live there.

Well, as you probably know in June of this year Income Bank failed. She has no money. Every penny she's earned has been wiped out. She has no future. She hasn't been paid by her company since last January. And life for her, the experience that she's just had, dismal though it may be is being repeated hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of time in contemporary Russia. It is so wretchedly sad. I mean you hear stories that make you weep. These beggars on the streets. We have, of course, people in New York who are panhandling but somehow their condition at the end of the day isn't that bad.

I was speaking to a child in Blagoveschensk, which is the town over the river from Heyhu and I said to him, what are you -- he was selling newspapers or trying to. No one had any money to buy them because no one has any money. I mean the banks have no money. Such ATMs as exist in Moscow don't work. I would try and change money at a bank, try to change a hundred dollar bill, which you'd think they'd want. The banks have no money. So there is no money in the economy. It's not simply that the people are poor, there's no money. I don't know where it's gone. Well, I do know because you see the mafia. The mafia are everywhere and they drive big four-wheel drives, SUVs, which they've brought from Japan or the United States. And they wear big rings on their fingers and they've siphoned everything out of the economy. It's an appalling situation. And this little boy, I said, what are you going to eat tonight? And he said, oh, he was about seven, I think, and he said well, normally it was half a potato every night.

And somehow and I know one shouldn't say this and one shouldn't say it, one doesn't think it really, but yet it's always there in the back of our minds, is that somehow this shouldn't happen to Europeans. And you can see why I say it shouldn't. Of course, we shouldn't, but somehow it doesn't happen in Western Russia and it doesn't happen in Bulgaria and Rumania and it doesn't happen, obviously, in Sweden and England and Ireland. And the fact that these are people who seem in every way -- I mean they listen to Madonna and they watch football games and they have television sets and things, and yet they are hungry, they have no work, they are not being paid by their companies, and they're maintaining with difficulty, but they are maintaining a tremendous sense of personal dignity through all of this. And yet to see their reduced condition, its perpetual shabbiness and perpetually living on the end of hunger, something needs to be done. Some injection of hope in some way needs to be made.

Well now, you were mentioning earlier today and this is an experience -- I'm sorry to keep pointing at you but we had an interesting chat, I don't even know your name. I'm sorry. What is it?

UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible)

MR. WINCHESTER: Works for a bank. I gather one of the biggest banks. And like many banks in America and, indeed, all over the outside world people after Perestroika had begun to take hold thought that Russia was a place in which one should make investments. And a few American banks and a lot of German banks have made those investments. And almost to a fault these investments have proved worthless. People are not being repaid. The money has not gone to the people that it should have gone to and bankers are left shaking their heads saying what can we do to this country. A very old friend of mine whose sister lives here in Anchorage, I'm talking about Stevenson, well, her brother and Matthew whose daughter is one of my god children, he is a banker and works for the Bank of New York in Geneva and was helping to set up about five or six years ago the rudimentary banking system in Russia so that people could write checks and have checking accounts and saving accounts and thereby do something useful with such money as they earned. It all came to nothing. And Matthew was saying, I spoke to him the other day, from Moscow as Bank of New York, which is the bank he works for, is one of the few banks that has lent nothing. That is equally one of the few banks that has lost nothing in Russia because almost everyone else that's had that kind of level of dealing with Russia has lost a great deal. Of course, the German banks and Japanese banks who've got major exposure in Russia have lost a very great deal of money which is why all of a sudden the Chinese are beginning to look. The Chinese, you'll remember, are a country well used to a weakened condition and knowing what happens to a country in a weakened condition. After the opium wars in the 1840s when the British decided to make war on China because they weren't allowing us to sell opium to them, a fairly laudable thing to do in my opinion, they lost the war because they'd been so isolated from the outside world that they knew nothing about the manufacture of firearms. So we won the war.

And the great and at that time imponderable and apparently unassailable empire China suddenly became assailable. We took the treaty ports. We took Hong Kong. We started trading at Shangai, Tientsin and all these other places. And so other powers started picking like vultures over what was clearly a dying and corrupt empire. And so Shan Don (ph) Peninsula was taken by the Germans, the French took down by Hunan and eventually, of course, so did the Japanese and the Russians for awhile. So the Chinese who have now got back essentially with the exception of Macao and Taiwan all of what they regard as China proper. They know what it's like to have been in a weakened condition and to have foreign countries pick over them. And they're looking hungrily over the border now and saying hundreds of thousands of square miles almost unpopulated country, tons of mineral wealth, tons of space for our people to breathe, trees, lumber, minerals in abundance, diamonds, why don't we at least go over and do business with them.

And so every day three times a day and once the river has frozen many, many times a day Chinese are going over from towns which Payher (ph) used to look a little town, it's now a big town full of skyscrapers. They go over, they have six week visas, they settle down in Russia and they do business. And they bring their relatives over and they bring their goods over and they rent apartments. And now there's a huge China town in Blagoveschensk. There's a China town in Birobidzhan, which is where Stalin sent all the Jews in 1930s and still the capital of what's called the Jewish autonomous republic. There are Chinese who do have permission to be there in Skovorodino, the town where I wasn't allowed to go but will go back to in May.

The Chinese are over the border legally and the Russians all of a sudden in Moscow are beginning to think maybe this is the beginning of a big problem. Maybe all of Russia east of the Lena River, the great north/south river which really marks the end of Siberia and the beginning of the Russian Far East because where I've been is not Siberia. It's called the RFE, the Russian Far East. Maybe because that is so obviously in Asia, maybe because the Cossacks kicked out people who were obviously Asian aboriginal people the Evenku and the Nufku and the Rachen (ph), maybe the Chinese actually do have some legitimacy in thinking this could one day be ours. And that's the reason why the Poppinechnke, the border police, are by far the most well organized of all the various bureaucratic machines in Russia because they now all of a sudden have something to worry about. The question that they're thinking now do we Europeans really have a right to be in the Far East. We're not doing well in the Far East, possibly we should do a deal with these people south of the river. Possibly. That's why the Amur River is interesting.

It's interesting. I don't know if any of you have seen what I think is Kirusawa's best film which is a film called Desu Uzala (ph) which was made in 1975 and which one the Oscar for the best foreign film of that year. If you haven't seen it I recommend it to you. It can get it in most video stores. It shows you the beauty of this country because it is stunningly beautiful, but it is terribly poor and soon I think it's going to be up for grabs. So that is why the Amur is important. And because this is an informal evening I'll stop formally chatting away now, but I'm happy to have a dialogue if any of you if you want to talk about that or, indeed, about anything else. Is that all right.

JUDGE HUNT: Certainly. Certainly.

MR. WINCHESTER: Great.

JUDGE HUNT: Are there questions? Yes, Joe?

MR. HENRI: I enjoyed your presentation very much. My name is Joe Henri and I'm in a little group that's called the Bering Strait Tunnel and Rail Group. And the objective is to have rail connections to Europe from North America through a tunnel in the Bering Strait. We've had colleagues in Moscow working on this and this very day, I mean it's just apropos, what you were saying about the anxiety of the Russian border. And the call was from our main man in Moscow who said the Prime Minister Primakof is now interested in our rail connection. And he's got a top in his thinking hat and so this is some new -- certainly President Clinton and his group have never been the slightest bit interested in our idea.

MR. WINCHESTER: Is it called the Gord Chernimyrdan Commission, have they looked at it?

MR. HENRI: Well, we tried to make a presentation to them, but we really didn't succeed with it. It was one of the proposals that we made. Seattle had it all tied up about what they thought was primary.

MR. WINCHESTER: So where would it go from? Once you go onto the Russian side it would go what, down to Magadan and then join the Bam or?

MR. HENRI: Yeah. It would join the Bam.

MR. WINCHESTER: The Bam, if you don't know, is the Bako Amral Magastral (ph). Magastral is the word for a big railway. So the Trans-Siberian Magastral and the Bam are two big railways projects. It's a wonderful idea.

MR. HENRI: You probably explained this evening why Primakof is interested in this project.

MR. WINCHESTER: Yes, I can see why Primakof might be very interested. Primakof is quite a wealthy man. Chernimyrdan, of course, was astonishing rich because he was head of Gaspron (ph) which is the -- so he's a very, very wealthy man. I mean these guys that get to the top of Russia are not good peasant stock. Their ideologies are honed by Lenin and Marx. They are rich men whose ideologies are honed by the mafioso, I think. But oddly enough there's been a proposal on the table for the last three or four years to have a bridge over the Amur because as I keep saying it is only 750 yards, engineering-wise it'd be trivial to build. The Chinese are terrible are keen. The Koreans could fling one up in six months. The Russians, of course, say we don't have the money to build it, which is entirely true. But the Chinese say well, we'll finance it entirely or do it on what do you call it, a buy/operate which is the way they finance everything and then charge tolls to get the revenue back. But the Russians realized that once you put a truck route across you might just as well -- it's like opening a spigot and 65 million Chinese will pour in, take everything that's not nailed down and pour out again.

JUDGE HUNT: Other questions? Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Since the Americans and Japanese are in so much better shape (inaudible).....

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, I think the short answer to that is that they have been, but the Russians and the Japanese keep throwing up their hands in the air about the appalling nightmarish way they have to deal with the Russian bureaucracy or the Russian mafia or whoever. I mean very few people in my experience, maybe you've had other experience that have had dealings with Russian business in the last two or three years have come away feeling happy about it. The Chinese are sort of untried at the moment and they haven't tried, such as they have tried over the border they've done really rather well, but it's done on a very small scale. And I think they're just getting a taste of what the Russians and the Japanese have tasted and found not to their taste. It's just that the Chinese are willing to have another bash. But the other way around, why don't the Russians do business with them. I think the Russians want to do business with them.

I mean they're always asking me for investments. I not going to invest a nickel, but almost the parting -- in fact, when this General rang up from Skovorodino to say you now have permission. He said and by the way when you come back can you bring some people that might think of investing in some businesses here. I naturally enough wanted to say, think again, pal.

JUDGE HUNT: Your comment, yes?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Have you noticed over the years any significant change in the attitude or the behavior of the lower level bureaucrats you had to deal with between the old Cold War hostility and fear period and the present period?

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, in Moscow without a doubt. I mean Moscow is one of the easiest places to work in. It's also, I think, a lovely city. It's really coming alive. It's an exciting city to work in. But, for instance, I had to get a multiple entry visa and a correspondents card, two documents which five years ago would have taken me weeks to get. It only took about four hours. It is so easy and there are certain ministries, immigration is one, internal security. I mean if you go now you can go to the old KGB offices on Dujensky (ph) Square where they've, of course, taken the statue of Dujensky down, thank heavens. But you can go there and deal with KGB people. And they're tremendously friendly and they give you what you want.

I used to be a geologist a long time ago and an old geology colleague from mine from the University, we met in Nurita Airport. She was going to Peking and I was going actually up to Harbin. And so we met and she said this was amazing having met after 35 years. And we started e-mailing each other. She's a professor in northern Idaho now. And I told her I was in Khabarovsk and she e-mailed back, did you stay in the Intourist Hotel. And I said yes. And she said well, five years ago she was in a room on the eighth floor and there was some problem with the plumbing, so a plumber had to come in. And they opened a wooden tunnel on the left-hand side, which you go in through the door in most of these rooms in this hotel, you go in through a wooden vestibule. And the plumbing apparently is behind a panel on the left-hand side, which they opened with special keys, full of tape recorders. So there's vestiges of that. One assumes they've been switched off now. That's the difference or they can't pay their electricity bill so they've been switched off. But the mentality in the Far East, there's an odd mixture because in the Far East there is some of the buccaneering spirit that comes from the very fact that is the Far East, the same kind of pioneering spirit that drove Americans west, drove Russians east. And so you get people who are slightly tinged with entrepreneurial zeal and energy, but only slightly. I mean those fires were pretty relentlessly damped down by 70 years of Stalinism, but it's beginning to catch a little because of the proximity of China and Japan. But then again, the bureaucracy and the corruption. And I have to say the drink, I don't particularly want to go down that route, but I mean this laziness, corruption and drink are not a good combination for doing business I don't think. And there's a lot of all three. I'm so sorry. You're not an exporter of drinks to Russia, are you?

JUDGE HUNT: Milt and then Rose.

MILT: It's interesting. I have a footnote to provide for your presentation. In this very room, oh, maybe three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, a man named James Rogers made a presentation to a group of people such as this who he was and is a Wall Street financier who made a lot of money on Wall Street. He did a novel thing. He got on a motorcycle and traveled through the whole world and wrote a book about it. I remember his saying that the main investments during this trip in most of the countries he visited throughout the world were not in Russia. And when they asked him why he said it will take a century before the Russians can become capitalists.

JUDGE HUNT: Yes, he was correct.

MR. WINCHESTER: Yes. It's a terrible thing to say this because these are people you want to help. I mean I have so many Russian friends and I felt so sad leaving these people in Khabarovsk to go to Japan on Friday knowing that because of what James Rogers said and you've repeated, that it is likely that these people will live in as appalling an economic situation as they're in now for a long, long time. Maybe it's a century, I don't know. But it seems that to unlearn what Stalin did is going to take far longer time than Stalin's reign, if you like. And it's really, really depressing.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: But as a student of history surely you know that there are exceptions within every situation and that when I was in the Russian Far East I met many people who are doing quite well. I remember a translator who worked for me for half an hour who had taught herself English using old magazines and had saved her money and brought herself and her daughter to Yuzhno because it was, you know, a place of opportunity. And now her daughter is 18 and beautiful and speaking English and working as a translator, too.

MR. WINCHESTER: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: She wouldn't allow her children to speak Russian at the dinner table. They had to speak English. And her English is, you know, you can understand her. And her daughter is slowly working up to the point where she's as good and will surpass her. And within every period of history there are always exceptions, people who make their way, shine, overcome adversity.....

MR. WINCHESTER: .....exploit those riches. I mean there is gold in abundance. There is clearly wood in abundance. I mean there is titanium. There is beryllium. There are things that the world needs there.....

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: And surely they wouldn't do another sale like Alaska......

MR. WINCHESTER: I think there's no surely anymore. I really -- I'm certainly not going to say anything desperately foolish where one is tempted to. (Inaudible) sale of Russian imminent? No, I'd deny it. But it's about time that we begin to consider the unthinkable for Eastern Russia. I think Western Russia and west of the Lena it's a more benign climate. Moscow's clear resurgence is the capital despite what you said about 100 years. I mean there in Moscow the capitalist spirit is alive and reasonably well, and one assumes that that will spread to Novosibirsk and Krasnoyask and so forth. East of that it's really difficult, verging on impossible to imagine that that's going to happen in 50 or 100 years. And yet what they have there is clearly in demand by a world whose just thinking on a resource level, not thinking of space which is clearly in demand for the Chinese. There are resources there which the world needs badly and somehow a deal has got to be struck whether that involves a transfer of real estate. I doubt it because after all of look at those four disputed islands on the southern Kuriles. When I was on the Kuriles last year I actually went to that southern most one (inaudible), which one it is, it's an island, tiny. I mean it can be no more than about two miles by three. And there's Hokkaido in front of you, you can see the glint of the evening sun on fancy Lexis and Toyotas and such as they go down to the observation platform where Japanese are looking over at the Russians. And here we are on this miserable little island with a few shacks. And once again, members of the border guard are there protecting the Russian flag because as Peter the Great said wherever in the world the Russian flag is planted it will never be taken down.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: (Indiscernible).

MR. WINCHESTER: Oh, unbelievable (indiscernible).

JUDGE HUNT: Any other questions? Yes?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: (Indiscernible - away from microphone)....

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, the mafia are instantly recognizable. They look and dress and drive in a certain way and they hang out in certain places.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: (Indiscernible).

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, no, I don't think so. I've met a few, for instance, there is a factory in Birobidzhan which makes coats, quite good -- I mean very good coats and actually has a big contract at the moment through a South Korean intermediary to make garments for Old Navy and Polo, I think it is, anyway it's one of these Ralph Lauren lines. It's interesting to see, for a start, it's interesting to see Russian people in Russian sweat shops essentially, but because they're being made for American companies all the basic minimum standards; environmental, health, fire protection and pay, they are all met. But this is only done because it's being done through a South Korean intermediary.

Parenthetically what I was going to say that exactly the same garment was being made on two machines, one having an Old Navy label stitched into it made in Russia, and one having a Ralph Lauren label stitched into it made in Russia. And also the recommended retail price was being put in. It costs incidentally 80 cents to make each of these garments. That's total including everything. The recommended label that was going in at the behest of Old Navy said $18. The one on the other side of the aisle that was being attached to the Ralph Lauren was $58. So my advice to you, ladies and gentlemen, don't go to Ralph Lauren, buy the same garments and change the labels. But anyway, they both cost less than a dollar to make in Birobidzhan. But the boss of that factory was a thoroughly nice, educated, entrepreneurial man with a fine morale core to him. And he's the kind of man, kind of person that needs to be supported and built up in Russia.

There were two peace corp volunteers in this town who come from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and they led me to him. And they said most of the entrepreneurs in this town are completely sharks, that this fellow is a decent one.

The academic community in Russia is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. And also Birobidzhan, which is a pretty miserable little place, I was taken to a concert by students in a musical academy and we listened for an evening to Screobin and Debussy and Mussorsky and suddenly the poverty, you know, you forgot it. And there's also the church, well, the church is pretty corrupt I have to say, but I was approached by a Russian Orthodox who looked just like Rasputin as they all do, and he opened his robe and it was full of wrist watches that he wanted to sell me. And icons, but they weren't even icons, they were fake icons. So I haven't got much faith in the Orthodox Church. But the academic community is completely untainted by this corruption. And the bureaucracy to a large extent, it's strange, I mean the police are fairly riddled but the bureaucracy is pretty decent, at least to business and banking community it's not.

You were in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: And Khabarovsk.

MR. WINCHESTER: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: We just touched down Petropavlosk......

MR. WINCHESTER: Right. The power station, when I left Kamshosky (ph) on the rail, on the wireless it said that the power station in Petropavloski-Kamshosky was now getting enough fuel to give to the city one hour of power a day. It's going to be a miserable winter.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Did you visit the monument at the base of the Amur? (indiscernible).

MR. WINCHESTER: I did, too -- well, there's a big controversy about that. The one of Nicolette, General Morabia (ph) or Morsky or which monument?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: No, the one to World War II.....

MR. WINCHESTER: Oh, yes, yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: .....veterans.....

MR. WINCHESTER: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: .....all the people that died. I mean they must have just mowed them down (indiscernible).....

MR. WINCHESTER: I commend to you, maybe you've read it, Alden, this new book about Stalingrad, Antony Beaver.....

MR. TODD: No, I have not seen that.

MR. WINCHESTER: It is the most -- you then begin to understand the stoicism of the Russians. I mean that Stalingrad 950 day siege and the eventual defeat of the Sixth Army by the Russians, I mean the techniques that they used, the MKVD troops who would be shooting any Russians that fell back from the own front, they'd be shooting their own soldiers to make them go back and shoot more Germans, unbelievable. But, nonetheless, the story of the battle of Stalingrad tells you a lot about the nature of the Russian people who will put up with a winter where they only get one hour of electricity a day in Petropavloski and will put up with not getting paid since last December and unlikely to be paid another few months. They're amazing stoics.....

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Did you view the fields of unused aircraft just sitting there.....

MR. WINCHESTER: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: All those jets just rotting and rusting.....

MR. WINCHESTER: Yeah. It's an extraordinary country but it will go on.

JUDGE HUNT: Your question?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: (Inaudible).

MR. WINCHESTER: Ooh, what a horrible question. Yeah. You can soon. I mean actually it's not really a bad thing because it looks like a book, it's smaller than this. It's got a screen. You touch it, the page turns, you can increase or decrease the font size. You can bookmark things. And you just plug it into the wall and pay. That's why I'm pleased because you do have to pay to get the book squirted into your machine. And I think it's a great idea except I love books, acquire books. And this dictionary book that I've done has led Oxford University Press to do a special offer on the Oxford English Dictionary, a book which is 20 volumes $3,000 normally, costs 995, a promotion in connection with my book. And the real reason that they're selling this amazing book for $995 is that the CD rom is out and all sensible people by the CD. And they've got a warehouse full of 20 volume sets of books, but I maintain that is a wonderful thing to purchase simply because books do furnish a room. And it looks gorgeous and to feel them, but anyway I won't go on about it.....

JUDGE HUNT: Now, I have a question for you since we've shifted to the work. We made a list from one to 100 of subjects to suggest to you that you might write a book about. I'd like to see a show of hands of anyone who would include on your list the Oxford English Dictionary. So tell us the story of how this book came to you as something that should be written and that you should write it?

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, like you I know I can think of nothing less likely to be the subject of a book. But actually I had finished a book on the Yangtze River and was under contract to write a book about tramp ships. I was buying a tramp steamer, you can by disused tramp steamers in the Baltic for about 100,000 pounds. And I had a friend of mine who was a master mariner, a captain of a ship that shuttles between Bristol and the island of Saint Helene, David Roberts his name was, was very excited by this idea of buying an 800 ton tramp steamer and working it around the world for about a year and going to little itty bitty ports all over the world to write about the romance and trading by sea, but also the history of trading of sea because without meaning to be too boring about it most ships nowadays are what are called liners. They have a regular liner service between, let's say, Anchorage and Seattle. And the merchant will simply be told there is a ship every Wednesday and he gets his goods on it.

But in the old days the idea of a liner, it's a new concept, only about 100 years old. Before that ships were -- they were start off in Seattle and they would go to Ketchikan with a load of sheep, let's say, and then at Ketchikan being now empty they'd say has anyone got a cargo somewhere else. And someone would say, yes, we've got some people who want to be taken to Tonga. And so you'd say, all right, I'll take the people to Tonga. And then you'd get fertilizer in Tonga and take it to Japan. That is a tramp ship. In other words, it's a gypsy of the sea, but it was the way that all cargo used to be sent. So I thought it would be amusing to buy one of these old ships and to do that.

So I got a contract from the Yangtze book publishers and was -- I was in the Baltic looking for ships. And then I was back at my little cottage in upstate New York reading a book in the bath one morning about making dictionaries as one does, I suppose. And there was a footnote in this book and it said readers will be familiar with the extraordinary story of W.C. Minor (ph), the convicted American murderer who was such a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary. And I remember sitting up in the bath like sort of Archimedes must have done saying I never heard of this.....

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: (Indiscernible).

MR. WINCHESTER: .....Eureka, yeah. And I had the phone by the bath and I rang lexicographer, a friend of mine at Oxford who is called Elizabeth Knowles. And I said, Elizabeth, I'm sitting in the bath in New York reading this extraordinary book by Jonathan Green called Chasing the Sun. And she said, oh, yes, a very good book. And I said it makes reference to a man called W.C. Minor. She said, oh, yes, very famous at least in lexicographical circles and, indeed, you're ringing the right person because I, Elizabeth Knowles, wrote an academic paper on him about 20 years ago. And I went to the asylum where he was incarcerated and I saw the locked file on him. And it's never been seen. And I think if you saw that file, got permission to see it, there's a very good story to be told. So I got permission to see the file, wrote a proposal, and my publisher said no, you've got to write the book on shipping. So I said oh, come on, this will only delay me by two or three or four months because it's a short story. And they said, no. And I was giving up and I was on the steps of the Travelers Club, I remember, in London waiting to go to the Baltic Exchange to talk to someone about ships. And it was raining hard. And I got a taxi and it had just swept up to the curb and the porter came out and said there's a telephone call for you. And I said it will have to wait until I came back. And he said no, no, it's a gentleman from New York and he said it's very important. So I dismissed the taxi, went back inside, and it was the publisher of this publishing house saying I've read your proposal and I think you must do this book and here is a sum of money. A sum of money which I couldn't turn down. So I rang Holts and said what happened. And I said do you want to publish it, and they said no. And not only that but you cannot -- the contract says the shipping book is your next book and if you agree to do another book in the interim then we'll tear up the contract and you'll have to pay us all the money back, which I did. And we've never spoken since. But, unfortunately, Marian Wood, the extremely nice editor of the Yangtze book, she wasn't the one that made the decision. The person that made the decision is a German who has been sacked from Holt and is now ministry of culture in the new German government. So.....

JUDGE HUNT: Ah-ha. The equivalent of M&Ms, Mars candies turning down reeses when Steven Stillberg started to market the little candies for ET, a wonderful, delightful story.....

MR. WINCHESTER: I'll have to tell you incidentally, parenthetically I had to have -- you know it's been optioned for a film, perhaps you don't, but it has. And I was in Los Angeles yesterday and had to meet the two people who want to star in it, who are incredibly Mel Gibson wants to play Murray, and so I'd met him before in connection to this, but now the new person who wants to be the mad man, Robin Williams.

JUDGE HUNT: I knew it.

MR. WINCHESTER: So who knows. I mean there's many a slip, twixt, cup and lip, but it may happen.

JUDGE HUNT: That's delightful. Any final questions? Yes?

MR. TODD: May I add a remark not to top my friend here, but just to add to the thought of the publishers not knowing what lies ahead of them. This was a great movie maker. I had an agent friend in New York, Annie Laurie Williams, who is about 4 feet 10, keep specializing in selling book properties to motion pictures and to the stage. And she said to Sam Goldwyn I've got a story for you, a really good one. And he took the story home, came back, and said no, Annie Laurie the public will never go for a picture with a bitchy heroine. So he said no to Gone with the Wind. Sam, she said, you'll be sorry.

JUDGE HUNT: And there is a tale for another day. All right. Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: I just can't help but ask what your next book will be about?

MR. WINCHESTER: Well, very good question. It's all really to do with Alden. And the reason I came here, Alden in 1961 wrote or rather had published by McGraw Hill a wonderful, wonderful book called Abandoned, which I believe is going to be reprinted now by the University of Alaska Press.....

MR. TODD: Yes, next year.

MR. WINCHESTER: .....if I'm allowed to say that.

JUDGE HUNT: Good.

MR. WINCHESTER: The wonderful story which many of you may know of Adolphus W. Greely who was a true American hero who took a party of 24 soldiers into the very far northern arctic in 1881. They were essentially abandoned for three years. And when they returned only 6 lived, 19 died. There were allegations which dogged Greely because he survived for the rest of his life about cannibalism which were made much of by the New York Times in August 1884. And despite the notion that you never could invite Adolphus W. Greely around for dinner he, nonetheless -- I mean people like Peery said I will never, ever shake the hands of that cannibal. He went on to do things like found the National Geographic Society, be in charge of the San Francisco Earthquake Relief operations, put down and bloodlessly the last Indian rebellion in Wyoming, string the first cable to Alaska, telegraph cable, be essentially the founder of the National Weather Service, do wonderful, wonderful things. And it wasn't until he was -- and also he was very prescient about flying and was essentially although reasonably the claim has been taken by Billy Mitchell, was essentially the founder of the U.S. Air Force. And it wasn't really until the 1930s when he was in his nineties that the American establishment recognized truly who and what he was, and he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and then died just a few months later. So I'm thinking of doing his story, but it's very difficult when there is a definitive work already in print. And I'm wondering whether, how impertinent it is, but Alden is being very kind and generous.

MR. TODD: Well, I only covered three years of the man's life and he lived to age 91. And I do hope that Simon Winchester tells the biographical life of this very great man.

MR. WINCHESTER: I hope so too. I think it'll work.

JUDGE HUNT: Well, I can wait for the chapter that takes him up to the three years and then refers to Alden's book and then picks it up three years later.

MR. WINCHESTER: Yes. Exactly.

JUDGE HUNT: We are so pleased that you have been with us. And for a man of letters I would like to give you what we offer our guests which is a Jade handled letter opener that has Commonwealth North on it. And we hope that not only will you use it with pleasure, but that you'll remember your time with us.

MR. WINCHESTER: I certainly will. Thank you very much. That was very nice of you. Thank you.