Society
Satinsky Archive at the Intersection of Policy and Lived Experience in 1990s Russia
November 19, 2025
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Daniel Satinsky
More than a historical record, the Satinsky Archive captures the cultural and economic upheavals of the 1990s through voices that reveal the hopes, failures and unexpected consequences of rapid change. In this article, Daniel Satinsky shares his motivation for establishing the archive.
For decades, the story of US-Russia relations has been told through the prism of geopolitics, but lived experience – that is, the choices and actions of individuals – reveals a more complex picture. History is not made only by statesmen or ideologues; it is also built from the ground up by people trying to make sense of extraordinary change. That idea lies at the heart of the Satinsky Archive, recently revised and updated here.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, it reshaped the world order, transforming not only global politics but the daily lives of hundreds of millions. In the newly independent Russia, the rapid and chaotic shift from a centrally planned economy to a market system introduced new norms, institutions and ways of life. For a brief time, the US stood unchallenged at the center of the global reordering. Yet the most direct and sustained contact between Americans and Russians in history occurred not in conference rooms or at summits, but in offices, factories and start-ups where entrepreneurs, officials and ordinary people navigated the new reality.
I experienced this historic change firsthand. It was an exhilarating period of possibilities for foreigners like me, while for most Russians it was almost a decade of economic collapse and social disorientation, followed by a dramatic recovery. My initial goal was to write a book preserving the experience of those Americans and other foreigners who had lived through the transition and had helped create the Russian market economy.
Over several years, I conducted more than a hundred in-depth interviews with Russian and American participants in the emerging economy – people who built whole sectors, founded businesses and confronted the limits of “Western” economic prescriptions. The book I eventually wrote distilled those stories into a focused narrative, but much was left on the cutting-room floor: the violence of privatization battles, the evolution of the energy sector, the collapse of Soviet industrial giants, and the moral and social upheavals of the 1990s.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, it reshaped the world order, transforming not only global politics but the daily lives of hundreds of millions. In the newly independent Russia, the rapid and chaotic shift from a centrally planned economy to a market system introduced new norms, institutions and ways of life. For a brief time, the US stood unchallenged at the center of the global reordering. Yet the most direct and sustained contact between Americans and Russians in history occurred not in conference rooms or at summits, but in offices, factories and start-ups where entrepreneurs, officials and ordinary people navigated the new reality.
I experienced this historic change firsthand. It was an exhilarating period of possibilities for foreigners like me, while for most Russians it was almost a decade of economic collapse and social disorientation, followed by a dramatic recovery. My initial goal was to write a book preserving the experience of those Americans and other foreigners who had lived through the transition and had helped create the Russian market economy.
Over several years, I conducted more than a hundred in-depth interviews with Russian and American participants in the emerging economy – people who built whole sectors, founded businesses and confronted the limits of “Western” economic prescriptions. The book I eventually wrote distilled those stories into a focused narrative, but much was left on the cutting-room floor: the violence of privatization battles, the evolution of the energy sector, the collapse of Soviet industrial giants, and the moral and social upheavals of the 1990s.
Boris Yeltsin at a press conference with American President Bill Clinton in 1995
ITAR-TASS
ITAR-TASS
The book emphasized the outsized influence of Americans in creating entirely new sectors of the Russian economy – such as real estate, private finance and media – and transforming existing ones like restaurants and telecommunications. American influence penetrated Russian economic and cultural life deeply, shaping the foundations of modern Russia’s market economy structures. The 1990s were a historically unique period in Russia, when the American impact on Russians’ lives, in areas like shopping, movies, restaurants, mobile phones, religion, gender relations and television, was much greater than most Americans realize. That penetration also provoked a conservative backlash under Vladimir Putin against perceived American dominance in business, ethics and culture.
Americans and Russians lived through the same events but interpreted them differently. At the height of “American exceptionalism,” many Americans believed that Russia had “lost” the Cold War and simply needed to learn how to run its economy and society in line with US practices. Russian reformers around Boris Yeltsin sought to modernize the country by borrowing advanced Western management and technology, following the examples of Peter the Great and, to some extent, Stalin – leaders who had opened up Russia to Western expertise to achieve modernization. Yet like their predecessors, Yeltsin-era reformers never intended to surrender control of key sectors of the economy to foreigners. Their goal was to rebuild Russia’s economy and restore its great-power status, often enriching themselves and their allies in the process. When the former KGB, the military and the Russian Orthodox Church recovered from the disorientation following the Soviet collapse, they coalesced around Putin and the pushback against “American domination” became explicit. Today, most American policymakers, scholars, businesspeople have fundamentally different understandings of the 1990s than those of Russia’s ruling elite – a chasm of misunderstanding that continues to shape the US-Russia relationship.
Americans and Russians lived through the same events but interpreted them differently. At the height of “American exceptionalism,” many Americans believed that Russia had “lost” the Cold War and simply needed to learn how to run its economy and society in line with US practices. Russian reformers around Boris Yeltsin sought to modernize the country by borrowing advanced Western management and technology, following the examples of Peter the Great and, to some extent, Stalin – leaders who had opened up Russia to Western expertise to achieve modernization. Yet like their predecessors, Yeltsin-era reformers never intended to surrender control of key sectors of the economy to foreigners. Their goal was to rebuild Russia’s economy and restore its great-power status, often enriching themselves and their allies in the process. When the former KGB, the military and the Russian Orthodox Church recovered from the disorientation following the Soviet collapse, they coalesced around Putin and the pushback against “American domination” became explicit. Today, most American policymakers, scholars, businesspeople have fundamentally different understandings of the 1990s than those of Russia’s ruling elite – a chasm of misunderstanding that continues to shape the US-Russia relationship.
Pizza Hut sign in Moscow, Russia, just before the store opened, 1990
George Garrigues / Wikimedia Commons
George Garrigues / Wikimedia Commons
The Satinsky Archive exists to bridge that gap and explore this divide. Unlike the book, the archive is not bound by a single author’s perspective. It allows readers and researchers to explore the full interviews, draw their own conclusions and test long-held assumptions about post-Soviet Russia. The 1990s were a time of enormous disruption and reinvention – arguably as transformative as the 1917 Revolution – but they are too often seen as merely a “return to normalcy”: capitalism, democracy, rational markets. The archive provides the raw material to engage with that narrative.
Today, as Russia has taken another dramatic turn – with the reassertion of state power and the rejection of liberal democracy – understanding the 1990s has never been more urgent. The interviews do not provide all the answers, but they do illuminate the cultural, economic and psychological foundations of modern Russian life. They capture the voices of those who built restaurants, media and markets where none had existed before. These are vibrant, fascinating life stories – often as compelling as fiction.
The Satinsky Archive was created as a resource for historians, scholars and anyone curious about how societies change from the ground up. It is an indispensable source of primary information for understanding modern Russia and for exploring possible pathways forward in the US-Russia relationship.
Today, as Russia has taken another dramatic turn – with the reassertion of state power and the rejection of liberal democracy – understanding the 1990s has never been more urgent. The interviews do not provide all the answers, but they do illuminate the cultural, economic and psychological foundations of modern Russian life. They capture the voices of those who built restaurants, media and markets where none had existed before. These are vibrant, fascinating life stories – often as compelling as fiction.
The Satinsky Archive was created as a resource for historians, scholars and anyone curious about how societies change from the ground up. It is an indispensable source of primary information for understanding modern Russia and for exploring possible pathways forward in the US-Russia relationship.
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