In the summer of 1985, a young commercial attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow sat down with two representatives of the California computer company Apple who were visiting the heart of the Soviet empire. One was an “older guy,” the attache, Mike Merin, recalls. The other was “this lanky, thin guy with this straight hair, and kind of impatient.”
By Carl Schrek
Image Attribute : USSR Patch / Source: Marijuan, Creative Commons Italia 2.5
Steve Jobs Portrait / Source: Flickr (Creative Commons)
In the summer
of 1985, a young commercial attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow sat down with
two representatives of the California computer company Apple who were visiting
the heart of the Soviet empire. One was an “older guy,” the attache, Mike
Merin, recalls. The other was “this lanky, thin guy with this straight hair,
and kind of impatient.”
The older
man’s business card identified him as Apple’s general counsel, “which I figure
is a big deal,” Merin tells RFE/RL. “And the other one...it doesn’t give me a
title, and I don’t think anything more of it.”
The visitors,
Merin says, told him of their plan to open a manufacturing facility in the Soviet
Union to produce Apple computers. He says he warned them this would violate
“massive numbers” of export regulations aimed at keeping sophisticated
technology out of the hands of the United States’ Cold War enemy.
This did not
sit well with the younger man.
“This tall
lanky guy stands up and starts yelling at me: ‘Who are you? You’re just a
bureaucrat! You don’t know what you’re doing!’” says Merin, who was 25 at the
time. The older man, Al Eisenstat, stepped in to calm his colleague down.
Speaking on
the eve of the 40th anniversary of Apple’s founding, Merin chuckles when he
recalls the incident. Only after taking the two men to an exclusive Georgian
restaurant that evening and talking up the South Caucasus nation’s famous meat
dishes, Merin says, did it register that the younger man whose business card
he’d ignored was Apple’s visionary co-founder, a renowned vegetarian.
“He says: ‘I
think I’m going to get a salad,’” Merin recalls. “And then the lightbulb goes
off, you know, fool that I was: 'Oh my god, this is Steve Jobs...' I thought
[he] was this young guy who was sort of tailing along, you know, who didn’t
really know how to behave with the older guy, who was the lead guy.”
Merin’s
encounter with Jobs came during the tech virtuoso’s first and only visit to the
Soviet Union. Since Jobs’s death in 2011 at the age of 56, a handful of fresh
details have emerged about his trip to Moscow shortly after reformist leader
Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power.
Here are five
more things to know about Jobs’s Soviet sojourn:
KGB Or CIA?
Jobs told U.S.
Defense Department investigators in 1988 that during his trip to the Soviet
Union he dealt with an international lawyer he felt “either worked for the CIA
or the KGB.” These were among the details in a Pentagon background check -- a
copy of which was obtained by Wired magazine in 2012 under the Freedom of
Information Act -- that Jobs was subjected to for Top Secret security
clearance. The name of the lawyer is redacted in the publicly released
document, though it cites the Apple co-founder as saying the individual was
from Paris and “helped communication between the United States and the Soviet
Union.” Jobs noted, however, that he had no evidence of the man's potential
ties to intelligence.
Then-Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev (left) gets an iPhone 4 as a gift from Jobs on a tour
of Silicon Valley in 2010.
Jobs also
suspected that a television repairman who came to his Moscow hotel room
“unsolicited, for no apparent reason” was spying on him, journalist Alan
Deutschman writes in his 2000 biography, The Second Coming Of Steve Jobs.
The Mac
Revolution
Prior to
arriving in Moscow for his two-day trip in early July, Jobs attended a Paris
trade show, where then-U.S. Vice President George Bush encouraged him “to get
computers into Russia in order to "foment revolution from below,” author
Walter Isaacson writes in his authorized 2011 biography, Steve Jobs. Merin
confirms to RFE/RL that during their Moscow meeting, Jobs told him of this
conversation with Bush, as well.
Jobs had already
been stripped of major responsibilities at Apple amid the company’s flagging
sales. Months later, he would resign as Apple chairman, only to return more
than a decade later and launch the series of products, including the iPhone and
iPad, that would revolutionize consumer electronics.
Jobs “had
pitched [Bush] this idea, which was to try and get Macs throughout the Soviet
Union, because if the Soviets had them, the Russian people had it, there would
be the possibility of newsletters, and printing things, fomenting revolution,
and, you know, all this stuff that would help the United States,” Merin tells
RFE/RL.
At the time,
however, Washington had restricted Apple sales of its new Macintosh computers
in the Soviet Union, though the less powerful Apple II was not restricted.
Isaacson quotes Jobs as telling Merin at the Georgian restaurant: “How could
you suggest this violates American law when it so obviously benefits our
interests?”
‘Bicycle Of
The Mind’
While in
Moscow, Jobs delivered a lecture to computer science students in Moscow. It’s
unclear whether any full transcript of his talk exists. But in 2011, veteran
computer scientist Viktor Zakharov of the Russian Academy of Sciences published
a partial version of the lecture, which he attended.
The accuracy
of Zakharov’s Russian-language translation of the talk is also unclear, but the
broad strokes appear consistent with Jobs’s typical talking points. It includes
one of his favorite spiels about computers, based on a science article about
the efficiency of animal movements he had read several years earlier.
“The condor
came in first place,” Zakharov quotes Jobs as saying. But a human on a bicycle
also becomes remarkably efficient, the Russian scientist adds in his
transcript.
To anyone
familiar with the Steve Jobs canon, this is the set-up to one of the computer
visionary’s favorite metaphors when discussing Apple, the company he co-founded
on April 1, 1976: the computer as a "bicycle for our minds."
A Trotskyite
Abroad
While in
Moscow, Isaacson writes in his biography, Jobs “insisted on talking about” Leon
Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader later forced into exile as an “enemy of the
people” and assassinated in Mexico on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s orders.
Isaacson writes that a “KGB agent” who was assigned to Jobs during the trip
suggested the Apple chairman “tone down his fervor.”
“You don’t
want to talk about Trotsky,” the agent is quoted as saying. “Our historians
have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.”
Isaacson
writes that this only made Jobs more eager to discuss the revolutionary.
“When they got
to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his
speech by praising Trotsky,” he writes.
If the speech
in question is the same one attended by Zakharov, the computer scientist from
the Russian Academy of Sciences, there is no mention of Trotsky in the partial
transcript he published.
Dacha
Disqualification
Isaacson notes
that Jobs and Eisenstat, the lawyer that Merin met together with the Apple
co-founder in Moscow, attended the U.S. Embassy's Fourth Of July party during
his trip. Merin, however, recalls that Soviet authorities prevented Jobs and
other U.S. executives from attending a separate celebration at the U.S. ambassador’s
dacha outside Moscow.
“They wouldn’t
let Americans, especially the businessmen, get out to the ambassador’s dacha.
And that was kind of a big deal,” Merin tells RFE/RL.
“They were
just being difficult,” he says. “It was another irritant in the relationship.
It wasn't a big deal, but it was just something else to say, you know, we can
do it, and we’re going to.”
Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
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