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Building Soviet Democracy: U.S. Philanthropic Foundations and the Gorbachev Reforms, 1986-1991

Thu, June 30, 3:30 to 5:00pm, Campus Ersta, Sal 4

Abstract

Beginning in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms rendered the formerly “closed,” centralized Soviet Union more accessible, pluralistic, and unstable. For U.S. foundations, these developments created unprecedented dangers and opportunities. On the one hand, the new Soviet openness seemed to offer an unparalleled chance to foster the growth of an emergent Soviet civil society and promote the USSR’s democratic evolution. However, rising centrifugal nationalism and political instability demanded new models for understanding the Soviet state-society relations and raised the specter of the violent disintegration of the multi-ethnic, nuclear empire.

This paper examines how U.S. philanthropic foundations conceptualized and endeavored to promote Soviet democratization from 1986 to 1991. It traces the expansion and transformation of U.S. foundation activity in the USSR by comparing the efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). It contends that Gorbachev’s reforms shifted the attention of U.S. foundations from improving in the bilateral U.S.-Soviet relationship to promoting the USSR’s internal evolution into a more democratic state. However, it shows that U.S. foundations defined this objective differently and placed competing pressures on U.S. policymakers.

The neo-conservative NED viewed the collapse of communist rule and the imperial Soviet state as essential prerequisites for democratization. Drawing upon émigré networks, it funneled aid anti-communist, nationalist, opposition groups, pressured the Bush administration to support Baltic and Ukrainian independence and lobbied against economic aid that might perpetuate the bankrupt Soviet system.

By contrast, the Carnegie Corporation-funded network and George Soros embraced the notion that gradual reform was possible within the parameters of the Soviet system. Soros viewed Gorbachev as committed to creating an “open society” and collaborated with the Soviet regime to establish a Moscow foundation funding the growth of civil society. Soros and key CCNY grantees also urged the Bush administration to provide economic aid to the USSR to encourage Gorbachev to pursue market-oriented reform and ameliorate the social suffering that those reforms were likely to incur. Large-scale aid, they argued, was essential to preserve popular support for market and democratic reform and to prevent unrest that could provoke the violent, destabilizing collapse of the USSR.

The efforts of the CCNY network, Soros, and the NED had significant, but mixed results. The Carnegie network played a key role in securing U.S. aid for Soviet defense conversion and helped avert the danger of nuclear proliferation. However, the efforts of Soros and the NED to promote Soviet democratization by bolstering an increasingly radical “third sector” had a destabilizing impact. The flow of U.S. aid to Soviet independent organizations, particularly from the NED to democratic opposition and national independence groups, bolstered Soviet conservative claims that the United States was trying to provoke the collapse of the USSR and helped discredit democracy as a subversive weapon of U.S. power. Moreover, it undermined and contradicted the official Bush policy of support for Gorbachev, creating a tension in the U.S. approach that would become entrenched.

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