Viktor Chernomyrdin

1995.

Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin sign a secret memorandum, not a public treaty, not something submitted to the Senate for ratification.

A private understanding between two governments.

The substance.

You know that the cooperation was really implemented through the vice president.

You already mentioned that by Vice President Al Gore and his counterpart, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, this famous Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.

And this also was a sign of the succession and the dissolution of the Yeltsin governing system is that one prime minister after another took over after he fired Chernomyrdin.

in the mid-1990s.

You know, it's when you have good working relationships that can intensify to solve really complex problems.

That's when you have the potential to move forward through thick and thin.

And we saw that, again, in the creation of the International Space Station project with Dan Golden, who was the administrator of NASA at the time, and his counterpart at Roscosmos.

They developed a really close and intensive working relationship and were able to convey that message to those below them to say, hey, we are going to figure this out no matter what it takes.