Today, Americans have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics. To peace activists on both sides of the Cold War divide, digital technology was the answer a stuck world was waiting for. What they lacked, the thinking went, was the means to communicate. And in some ways that was true.

All the telephone trunk lines between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. went through Pittsburgh. And there were only 33 of them for the Soviet Union, a nation of close to 300 million. (By contrast, Costa Rica had some 600 circuits to the U.S. at that time). Calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had to be scheduled days if not weeks in advance, and even then the quality was terrible. The operators caught a lot of flack.

Then suddenly, with satellite links and then the early Internet, that contact became theoretically possible. And two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to make conversations between the two countries happen.

In the early 1980s, Joel Schatz was working as an energy advisor to the governor of Oregon. He found the Reagan administration’s approach to the U.S.S.R. alarming. Schatz had Russian-born grandparents and resented the way the Cold War kept people of the two empires isolated from one another. So Schatz and his wife Diane decided to raise funds to travel to the U.S.S.R. as “citizen scouts.” They left in late August 1983.

At that time, former KGB head Yuriy Andropov held the U.S.S.R. in his sclerotic grip. While Joel and Diane were in Moscow, the Soviets shot down Korean Air flight 007 over the Pacific, killing 269 people including a U.S. congressman. It was a grim time even for the grim pageant of the Cold War. But none of that mattered to the Schatzs’ hope of using technology to bring Russians and Americans closer together, because through their interpreter, they’d met a man named Joseph Goldin.

Here it’s perhaps best to quote Adam Hochchild’s fantastic Mother Jones piece about the Schatzs and this unlikely Soviet man:

Joseph has no official connection to any institution, a fact that has apparently sometimes gotten him in trouble with the authorities. But clearly he is Joel's counterpart in the Soviet Union, another cultural repairman. In a country where all professionals have business cards in the same format—last name, first name and patronymic, academic degree, title, address—Joseph has stationery showing a drawing of a man's head: The lower half is a face gazing at you intently, the top half is a partially completed, many-floored Tower of Babel. Around the edge of this head scrolls the Russian inscription: EXPEDITION TO HIDDEN HUMAN RESERVES.

“Hidden human reserves” were, in Goldin-speak, akin to the untapped “human potential” theories popular among New Age thinkers in the U.S. at the time. And indeed, Goldin was on the board of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, a group that had tried to forge telepathic links with Soviets before satellite technology made the paranormal less of a first resort. With Goldin’s wide, baby-ish face and staccato tumble of English, he enchanted many Americans in search of a free-thinking counterpart behind the Iron Curtain. Joel Schatz remembers thinking, “Here was someone we could work with.”