About Carnegie Corporation

Strengthening Scholarship and Research in the Former
Soviet Union

President's Essay - From the 1999 Annual Report
by Vartan Gregorian

The past two years have marked a turning point in Carnegie Corporation’s programs in international affairs with the decision to support scholarly research and communication within Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. Our motives stem both from deep concern for the future of this region, which has cast such a long shadow over the world’s stage, and from the recognition that countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) can contribute greatly to international peace and stability. Russia remains a great power even in its weakened state. Reaching across eleven time zones from Europe to Asia, with a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, huge reserves of natural resources, and enormous intellectual capital, it can still influence the course of events abroad. We must do what we can, drawing on our experience in advancing education and scholarly understanding, to help Russia and her neighbors regain their bearings and evolve into mature democracies with respect for the rule of law.

Our new initiative, which we call the Higher Education in the Former Soviet Union (HEFSU) program, is aimed primarily at rejuvenating scholarship in the newly independent states, particularly the social sciences and humanities — fields that have been comparatively neglected by Western donors in their emphasis on the natural sciences. The core of the program will be the establishment of Centers for Advanced Study and Education in selected universities throughout the region. In Russia the centers will be organized in cooperation with the Washington, D.C.–based Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the Moscow Public Science Foundation, the leading Russian organization concerned with the reform of higher education in the post-Soviet era. As presently conceived, these centers will serve as umbrellas for advanced interdisciplinary research; they will create new opportunities for research at traditionally teaching-oriented universities; and they will increase mobility, collegiality, and the cross-fertilization of ideas among faculty members, researchers, and intellectuals nationwide, who are today by and large isolated and inadequately supported.

HEFSU will augment our long-standing programs to improve U.S. scholarly, scientific, and public understanding of, and relationship with, the Soviet Union and its successor states. From the early 1980s on, we have funded not only independent policy-related research and scholarly communication in the United States but exchanges with Soviet/Russian counterparts in trying to resolve major Cold War issues. The new thrust proceeds from the view that a private foundation such as ours, with a strong record of grantmaking on behalf of world peace and security, can do no better for our country than to encourage the growth of humanistic education, study, and practice in an area undergoing a wholesale political and economic transformation.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the knowledge community and the institutions that supported it suffered dramatic reversals. Untethered from central political and administrative control and from an ideology that, for better or worse, had given it purpose and direction, the higher education system and the research institutes of the newly independent states faltered. What was formerly an intellectual and scientific force to be reckoned with was thrown into disarray. Institutions of higher learning were facing drastic budget cuts; scientists and scholars, seeing their incomes and prospects wither away, were abandoning their professions or seeking opportunities outside the country; the underpinnings of scientific and humanities study were rapidly eroding. In short, this once far-reaching empire, for centuries at the center of history’s greatest dramas and now dissolved from within, was in danger of losing its best and brightest for national reconstruction and the development of a democracy and civil society.

In the transition, Western governments, multinational organizations, and private foundations have attempted to stem the losses, financing academic exchange programs and scholarships and awards, forming various kinds of partnerships with national and regional universities and academy institutes, or creating new educational institutions, some attempting to forge a closer link between research and teaching. All parties involved have been imbued with the desire to revitalize an intelligentsia that over time has played a vital role in the development of Russian and non-Russian culture, science, and scholarship and in the process immeasurably enriched world civilization. If, in the past century, this element was at the helm of the Russian revolution, it was also pivotal in the liberalization of the Soviet Union, leading ultimately to the demise of Communist rule. We on the Corporation’s board and staff believe we must, within the compass of our charter and emphasis on education, help to conserve this extraordinary heritage. We must, furthermore, seek ways to nurture a rising generation of thinkers and leaders who can give voice to the values of orderly democratic change.

Carnegie Corporation and the Growth of Russian Studies
Like so many other interests of Carnegie Corporation, the field of international affairs was close to the heart of Andrew Carnegie himself. The Peace Palace at The Hague, the International Court of Justice in Costa Rica, the Pan American building in Washington, and the creation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace all testify to Carnegie’s lifelong quest for the keys to enduring world peace. The inexorable buildup to World War I in the first decade of the twentieth century kept Carnegie in a high state of agitation in his advancing years. A reluctant conscript to the organized peace movement, he preferred to go his own way, pursuing behind-the-scenes talks with those in power and convening any number of international peace conferences in Europe. He fought militarism with every ounce of energy he could muster in his diminutive frame and even launched a somewhat vainglorious correspondence with Kaiser Wilhelm II to tamp down the saber rattling and war mongering — to no avail. Carnegie died in 1919 despondent over Europe’s and America’s failure to prevent war, although he derived satisfaction from his role in promoting a League of Nations as a means for preventing future wars. Had he lived, he would have been sorely grieved to see another and still worse global conflict breaking out twenty years later, with its protracted and terrible aftermath in the Cold War.

The Corporation’s past activities in international affairs were tied to our central interest in the improvement of higher education in the United States, although in the early years our grantmaking was weighted toward the Carnegie Endowment. More than any other event, the Second World War brought home the gravity of the United States’ international responsibilities and how uninformed were the American people and their leaders about affairs beyond their borders, in particular about our looming adversary, the Soviet Union. In the late 1940s the foundation sought ways that research, training, and scholarly communication could enhance our understanding of little known but strategically important places in the world, in the belief that many of our gravest problems are unsolved simply because we do not know enough. To our way of thinking, national and international security depended ultimately on having the knowledge to act wisely in our self-interest and that of our allies. Yet the times found few venues where scholars could collaborate on questions of mutual concern. Most of those working in a foreign area were conducting their research in isolation, unmindful of insights gleaned from outside their own fields. Shortly after the war, therefore, the Corporation explored a new avenue of grantmaking in foreign area study, establishing centers at major universities to draw together relevant knowledge and research across the disciplines in order to take a more comprehensive look at countries or areas.

Until the end of the Second World War, American scholarship on the Soviet Union was sparse. While serious interest in Russia (and Eastern Europe) had been undertaken as far back as the nineteenth century, by 1914 Russian language and literature were being taught at only three major universities and Russian history at only two. Between the two world wars, little more than a dozen Americans possessed the scholarly skills and credentials to study this region. Even though Russia’s expansionist dreams predated Bolshevist ambitions by centuries, the volume of U.S. research on the country and its satellite states was negligible. Nor was there any United States research center carrying on extensive, long-term research on Soviet behavior, culture, and society. Astoundingly, at war’s end in 1945, only one leading university center was concerned with the Soviet Union — the Russian Institute at Columbia University — and it was devoted primarily to graduate education rather than research. There was "literally," as Corporation documents reveal, "no qualified group of any substantial consequence working on the fundamental problems of Soviet domestic and international conduct."

Carnegie Corporation’s president John W. Gardner and the program staff agreed that continued ignorance of this burgeoning superpower could be ill-afforded by the leading nation of the "free world." Discussions with policymakers in Washington, with business leaders, and with members of the academic establishment supported the notion that independent research in depth on the Soviet Union was badly needed and would be welcomed. After making a careful survey of universities that might be capable of undertaking major research responsibilities in the Russian field, the foundation chose Harvard University because of its willingness to make the best use of the social sciences and social psychology in understanding Russian behavior, going beyond the current emphasis on history and languages. This, in Gardner’s view, exemplified the "new approach to area studies." The first grant to Harvard in 1947 was for a feasibility study, followed in 1948 with full-fledged support to establish the Russian Research Center. Within a few years the new center emerged as a major source of interdisciplinary activities relating to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and served to stimulate more research of the kind elsewhere. By 1956 the Corporation had given well over $1.5 million to the center, an impressive commitment at that time. This and other foreign area study centers made possible or co-funded by the Corporation filled a reservoir of knowledge for the upper reaches of government and attracted talented young scholars and students into the field. The centers, in the view of knowledgeable observers, infused Russian studies with new disciplinary rigor and methodological competence.

The successful Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 gave further impetus to the growth of Soviet and East European studies in the United States. Through 1962 the Corporation provided grants to Dartmouth College for its program in Russian studies; Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a study of Soviet scientific and engineering education; Columbia University and MIT for studies, respectively, of Soviet higher education and public education; Duke University for research on Soviet international law doctrine; and Columbia for travel grants enabling Russian specialists in the U.S. to visit the Soviet Union. Numerous grants were also made for foreign language teaching and language study programs abroad, some of which stressed Russian.

By the early 1960s, however, aside from its programs in Commonwealth Africa, the Corporation began to close out its grants in international affairs, largely in response to mounting demands for equal justice and equal opportunity among disadvantaged groups at home. As new causes dominated foundation thinking during the 1970s and early 1980s, private support for Soviet and East European studies declined overall. The Ford Foundation’s own allocations for international studies, which had surpassed $47 million in 1966, were a mere $2.2 million in 1979. Government grants and contracts for such research also waned and in any case tended to reflect the government agenda. Much of the work being carried out during this time was of marginal significance to policy development. The competence of Washington analysts to understand and interpret Soviet affairs was increasingly brought into question.

Nearly fifteen years passed before the Corporation, at the urging of its new president David A. Hamburg, once again moved the Soviet Union to the forefront of foundation thinking. By 1982, U.S.–Soviet relations had reached a dangerous standoff, with each side having the capacity to wage large-scale nuclear war and each riven by intense fear and mistrust of the other. The military-technological competition was spurring expensive new nuclear arms production on both sides, paradoxically leaving each less secure rather than more. Fears of a nuclear war seemed well founded. Surely there had to be some alternative to the policy of deterrence based on mutually assured destruction.

In this situation, the Corporation decided to launch an all-out effort to gear up independent research, policy analysis, and dissemination among scientists and leading members of the policy community, aimed at reducing East–West tensions and in the long run at improving the superpower relationship (at this time an almost inconceivable prospect). Even though area studies had lost some of their vitality, there still existed in the major research universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California a cadre of outstanding specialists on Soviet society and politics. First-rate nonpartisan research was also being conducted in nongovernmental organizations like the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, and the Kennan Institute, established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars by Ambassador George F. Kennan in 1974. The International Research and Exchanges Board since 1968 had been promoting Soviet–American scholarly exchanges and joint research between United States and Soviet bloc countries. Scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society were sponsoring valuable policy-related research and communication on strategic arms control, nuclear proliferation, missile defense, and related matters. Several prominent organizations were also engaged in government monitoring and public education on the issues. The Corporation turned to these agents and others, giving priority to ways that the scientific and policy research communities — on both sides — could contribute to nuclear risk reduction and confidence-building; it additionally financed activities to alert the press and the public to the realities of the nuclear danger, the possible pathways to war, and the consequences of using the weapons.

The election of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Union in 1985 ushered in an unprecedented era of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring) in Soviet society, but it also set in train events that culminated, in 1991, in the attempted coup against Gorbachev by hard-liners and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent states, with Boris N. Yeltsin emerging as president of the Russian Federation. The loss of Moscow’s authority over the successor states ironically brought with it new anxieties, especially with respect to the disposition of the nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction, but also concerning the potential of ethnic strife to spill over borders or give rise to particularly lethal forms of terrorism. There were ominous signs that even the Russian Federation might fragment into autonomous republics, further weakening control of weapons materials and heightening international instability and insecurity. Russia, the fearsome ideological adversary of established democracies for almost a century (except when they were allies during World War II) desperately needed the assistance of the capitalist West in coming to grips with the complexities of democratization, transitioning to a market economy, decentralization, denuclearization, military conversion, and education and training shorn of Marxist-Leninist ideology. These challenges now became the context for Corporation grantmaking to analyze and promote forms of cooperative engagement between the U.S. and FSU states. One notable outcome of the fact-gathering and analytical work of nongovernmental scholars and scientists financed by the Corporation was the Nunn-Lugar Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991, since renewed, aimed at helping the FSU dismantle and safeguard its nuclear weapons, warheads, and materials.

A crisis in the making was the prospective brain drain of the FSU’s scientific and technical talent to so-called "rogue" nations, to other regions where such expertise would be better remunerated, or internally to jobs unrelated to their academic fields. Clearly, it was in the interests of the United States to help Russia and the other post-Soviet states preserve their basic science capability, not only to protect military-related knowledge, but to direct indigenous scientists and scholars toward the economic and cultural revitalization of their countries. U.S. and European donors, including the Open Society Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation, and our own foundation, have sought to address these problems, often working in partnership with governments and institutions of the successor states.

Understandably, priority attention was given to the fate of the scientists and engineers formerly employed in the vast military-industrial complex of the FSU. Private and governmental sources joined in fostering research collaboration by U.S. and European scientists with their counterparts in Russia and elsewhere, the immediate aim being to retain them in their home countries for work on defense conversion and nonmilitary-related projects to strengthen the civilian economies. In this early phase, however, less prominence was given to the condition of the humanities and certain of the social sciences, as the importance of these fields to nation building and international security was less clear.

The State of University-based Science and Humanities Scholarship in the FSU
In Soviet times all educational institutions were fully financed by the central government; there was no system of private education like that in the United States; education was free for all. The majority of outstanding university students went to the best institutions in a few very large cities, like Moscow or Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Most young people were expected to choose their career paths early and take a prescribed set of courses leading to their specialty; there was no tradition of liberal education in the arts and sciences or the possibility of elective courses.

Higher education in the former Soviet Union has differed from that in America or Europe mainly by its emphasis on research as the central mission of the academy institutes, such as the Russian Academy of Sciences, and on teaching as the province of the universities. Some mix of the two is beginning to emerge in universities such as Moscow State and St. Petersburg State, but, overall, universities in the FSU have never been strong in basic research. In 1997, only 8.5 percent of all researchers in all fields in Russia with doctoral degrees were in universities, according to a recent article in Science magazine. With all the financial pressures upon institutions, the teaching load for most university professors is heavier, leaving them very little time for research.

While institutions of higher learning in the FSU have been largely freed from control by their respective governments, the drastic decline of federal support for universities, university researchers, and graduate students, not to mention researchers in academy institutes, has devastated the infrastructure for science and engineering and indeed for nearly all specialties in the post-Soviet period. Tuition fees have been introduced in many institutions, and the ability to pay is beginning to have more influence than talent in determining a student’s academic future. In the early 1980s, as Science has reported, the Soviet Union had the largest community of scientists and engineers on earth, larger than that in the United States. Today, dramatically reduced research budgets have spelled the departure or dismissal of more than half of all Russian scientists and engineers active in 1990. Less than one-third of Russians with a science or engineering education are now at work in their specialties.

Local reformers and academic entrepreneurs have succeeded in pulling some of their institutions into the new era, although few anticipated the deepening financial and administrative crises at all levels of education. A wide range of programs, some designed and financed by Western organizations, to rebuild higher education, to create private nongovernmental colleges and universities in Russia and elsewhere, or to support individual scholars has certainly yielded important benefits. Between 1993 and 1997, according to Science, the number of higher education institutions in Russia increased by 40 percent to 880, 302 of them nongovernmental. Hundreds of professors whose salaries would have been cut drastically or their opportunities for advancement blocked have received generous teaching appointments as well as grants and awards.

But individualizing opportunities does not address the structural problems of institutions, and institutional strategies often require open-ended support from outside donors. The new nongovernmental institutions tend to benefit only those fortunate enough to be associated with them. Most emphasize teaching in the areas now popular with students in Russia and elsewhere in the FSU, such as management, law, and economics, international relations, psychology, religion, and journalism. While they may introduce more pluralism and choice into Russia’s system of higher education, their facilities in the natural sciences tend to be very weak. Some newly created institutions are attempting to integrate research and teaching and are attracting progressive scholars and students. But they, too, benefit only a few scholars at a time and are negatively perceived by some as "Western." Existing institutions, on the other hand, are still many of them hampered by Soviet-style bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the Russian government is prompting more integration of teaching and research and has attracted support from foreign foundations to help achieve this goal. One important innovation is the government-financed Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), roughly equivalent to the U.S. National Science Foundation. Between 1994 and 1997 the RFBR gave financial assistance to Russian scientists totaling more than $122 million, considerably overmatching the financier George Soros’ grants of approximately $65 million offered in that period through the International Science Foundation. The RFBR, however, provides considerably less money to university than to academy researchers, who are thought to conduct the best science. The Russian science ministry is attempting to bridge the structural divisions in a program called Integration, which spent $32 million in 1998 promoting collaborations between researchers in the academy institutes and professors and students at universities.

Another promising avenue for revitalization is the BRHE program of the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation, based in Arlington, Virginia. Under this program, high-quality "research and education centers" are being established at selected Russian universities, with the aim of strengthening their capabilities in basic research in the natural sciences. Like some other foreign-supported academic ventures, the BRHE program is stressing the bond between research and teaching. Financed by the MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, the Russian Ministry of Education, and Russian regional resources, the first three grants of $3 million each were awarded in September 1999 to the Far Eastern State University in Vladivostock; Krasnoyarsk State University in Siberia; and Rostov State University, Kuban State University, and Taganrog State University of Radioengineering in southwestern Russia for a joint program. (A demonstration Research and Education Center for Scanning Probe Microscopy at Nizhny Novgorod State University is in its second year.) The U.S. foundations’ share covers one-half of the program costs for new instruments and equipment as well as for teaching and research stipends (as experience has shown, the adequacy of equipment is as vital to the success of an innovation as salaries).

If there are growing complaints that the natural sciences are much less popular in Russia than formerly, the social sciences and humanities in traditional institutions have not fared so well either. Many individual scholars are facing debilitating barriers to the pursuit of their professions. As reported by Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute, and his colleagues Susan Bronson and Nancy Popson in a needs assessment conducted for the Corporation and the MacArthur Foundation in 1998, professors and scholars in the provincial universities of Russia and in other independent states are finding it harder to access libraries and archival repositories, government documents, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts. Archives are having to charge fees to survive, or they have closed down altogether. Libraries are struggling to preserve books at a time when they are wondering how to catch up to advances made in digital equipment and databases. Journals and academic publishers have had to pull back. Furthermore, as transportation and communication costs have risen, collegial interaction among institutions and scholars — the life blood of academia — has lessened, and access to the Internet is far from universal. With university professors’ salaries ranging anywhere from $50 to $200 a month in Russia and the other former Soviet states, it is little wonder that many university researchers are turning to more lucrative enterprises. One result is that younger scholars are without mentors, who have either left the field or are otherwise unavailable. Even dedicated younger intellectuals are without critical support and guidance.

Some aspects of the social sciences have fared better than the humanities. As former belief systems have collapsed, historians are coming to terms with the distortions introduced during the Soviet regime; political science is emerging as a new discipline, and some subfields, such as opinion polling, have taken on a new life. Humanities fields, however, have been perceived as less directly integral to the reform process. Many smaller fields in which Soviet scholars have always performed at world-class level, such as Sanskritology and iconography and some subfields of philology, are shrinking. Internationally respected Byzantinists, Sinologists, and medievalists languish for lack of funding (although these fields are beginning to attract students again).

The demise of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the search for a reasserted Russian identity have led many of Russia’s intellectual and political leaders to call for the renewal of the humanities in the Russian education system. But while the hold of the old creed over education has been broken, a satisfactory substitute has yet to develop. Whatever the outcome, it will have profound consequences for the future. Many scholars see an urgent need to find cultural expressions of national identity that affirm rather than repress diversity and that go beyond old ideologies and dogmas to find a respected place for each social group within a country and for each country and region in the global society. There can scarcely be a greater challenge to the intelligentsia and to the humanities than this.

Renewal of the humanities and the related social sciences includes the question of who will teach the new material once it is introduced. Reform over the long term will depend on a new generation of teachers, working in countless institutions from local primary and secondary schools to the great national centers of higher education. Of special interest is the Russian National Humanities University, a public institution with headquarters just off Red Square. Founded in the post-Soviet era through the energetic entrepreneurship of Yuri Afanasiev, a medieval historian, the university is working to develop a new cadre of teachers for Russia and for the other FSU nations as well.

With $1 million from Carnegie Corporation’s 21st Century Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a longtime U.S. academic contact for Soviet and subsequently FSU scholars, in 1998 organized a grants competition to support leadership in the humanities in the region. The foremost objective was to sustain mid-career scholars with short-term project support at a time when the economies of Russia and other post-Soviet states had nose-dived, the ruble had lost almost two-thirds of its value against the dollar in three months, and research budgets were shaved to razor-thin levels. Concentrated on Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, applications were solicited by "grants-consultants" in these three countries who conducted personal interviews with the candidates in their home institutions. Emphasis was on diversity of location, language, discipline, and type of project. Forty-five awards of $4,000 each were made in 1998; a further fifty-five were made in 1999. This past year the Corporation’s grant was renewed to permit seventy more awards, with the additional objectives of promoting networking among the scholars and providing publication support for previous recipients. The aim is to assure the healthy development of the scholarly community and continued leadership in humanities fields, covering history, art history and theory, philosophy, archeology, literature and linguistics, film studies, cultural studies, study of the visual and performing arts, and gender studies.

As previously noted, awards such as these help scholars in immediate need and serve to retain them in the professions; and they promote ongoing research on critical topics. But they may not of themselves bring about enduring change; nor will structural reforms succeed until and unless the innovations become self-supporting. We at the Corporation have therefore been exploring a middle course between the individual and the institution — one that embraces elements of both and that, we believe, has the potential for rebuilding professional life, overcoming academic isolation, sustaining intellectual communities, and erecting a supportive structure for "the invisible university."

The Centers for Advanced Study and Education
Following the initial grant to the ACLS, the Corporation began exploring the feasibility of organizing a more ambitious program to strengthen higher education in the former Soviet Union, concentrating on the humanities and social sciences — fields that, as pointed out, stand to be essential players in the societal transformations under way. The operational questions were, what can we do more broadly to preserve and strengthen the capacity of scholars and their academic institutions to conduct independent research in the humanities and social sciences, to engage in the exchange of ideas with colleagues both domestically and internationally, and to render advice and service on behalf of their country?

One of the issues confronting higher education in the successor states is the extreme disparity that still exists in the capacity for research and analysis between institutions in the capital cities and the rest of the country, giving rise to debates among donors as to the best course of action. Historically the elite national institutions have attracted the most able students from the provinces. Most students today, however, cannot afford to study far from their homes. One effect of this change is that the quality of the students in outlying universities is rising as those who would formerly have gone to Moscow are seeking advanced education close by. If this trend continues, it will intensify pressure on these institutions to upgrade their offerings, facilities, libraries, equipment, and staffing in order to compete for the higher-caliber student. More and more, provincial universities, cut loose from political control but also the certitude of money flows, will have to seek their own destiny. These considerations have been important in finding investment in institutions outside Moscow and St. Petersburg an attractive proposition for the Corporation.

In the Kennan Institute’s needs assessment for the MacArthur Foundation and the Corporation, the authors were asked to review existing programs of reform and to provide a conceptual framework for a new program to stimulate intellectual and creative vitality in the region. During 1999, the Corporation’s staff conducted its own investigation, making site visits to FSU institutions and benefiting greatly from the insights and advice of the Open Society Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation — philanthropies experienced in promoting science, scholarship, and higher education reform in the FSU. The Moscow Public Science Foundation, established in 1991 with Western foundation, multinational, and Russian support and led by the political scientist Andrei V. Kortunov, also provided invaluable assistance to the Corporation in thinking through alternative modes for programmatic intervention.

The Kennan Institute’s report argued emphatically for a middle ground strategy for rebuilding professional life as the most sensible point of entry. The idea as it has developed is to strengthen an institution’s capacity to rejuvenate from within, by forming "centers of excellence" that can serve as a hub for promoting advanced interdisciplinary research, professional training, and networking among FSU scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Fellows will be drawn not only from the host university but from universities and institutes across the country. They will receive grants for team research and take part in a plethora of networking and mentoring activities, including seminars, conferences, summer school, and collaborative research with foreign scholars. Library and publication support will also be provided.

The interactions thus fostered, it is argued, will stimulate interdisciplinary research projects among area scholars, attract further support to the social science and humanities fields, and lead to institutional and intellectual renewal nationwide. The scheme will also encourage closer relations between senior scholars and young students, a particular strength of the American university system that has not been characteristic of the Russian academy institutes.

The Corporation in adopting this strategy has invited the Moscow Public Science Foundation to act as co-partner with the Kennan Institute in implementing the prospective program to establish the new Centers for Advanced Study and Education (CASEs).

Targeted will be major state universities spread across the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet states that already have strong reputations, outstanding faculties, and a reform-oriented rector likely to be receptive to the idea. In the fall of 1999, Corporation staff members, together with Andrei Kortunov and several other advisors, visited universities in Krasnodar and Rostov in Russia’s south; Yekaterinburg and Izhevsk in the Ural region; Saratov in the Volga region; and Tomsk in Western Siberia to sound them out. All these institutions are experiencing significant hardships, though most have come through the Soviet period and its aftershocks maintaining a creditable level of teaching and scholarly excellence. Another set of site visits to Russian regional universities will be made in the spring and summer of 2000. Based on the conversations we have held with our Russian colleagues and their favorable responses, we have asked the Moscow Public Science Foundation and the Kennan Institute to assist us in establishing the first three centers at universities in the Russian Federation, chosen on a competitive basis among solicited proposals. If all goes well, as many as twelve such CASEs may be supported within the next few years — six in the Russian Federation and six in other post-Soviet states. Meanwhile, additional funding for the program will be sought from the Russian Ministry of Higher and Professional Education and from other American foundations. The Open Society Institute has earmarked funds to support curricular development and Internet-related activities in the host institutions.

The Corporation’s grants toward the Soviet Union, and Russia in particular, go back many years. Establishing university centers for interdisciplinary area studies, network building, and scholarly communication is not new to the foundation. What is new is the addition of the humanities into the mix of disciplinary interests that we support — that and our decision to make grants for higher education reform within the former Soviet Union, operating through U.S. institutions. The shift follows the simple logic of our international programs, which have evolved from an almost exclusive focus on strengthening U.S. social science expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe, to a program linking the social sciences and hard sciences in an effort to reduce the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation, to an emphasis on cooperative engagement with Soviet and especially Russian counterparts, to the current thrust toward building scholarly capacity in FSU institutions. The latter is hitherto unknown territory for us. Fortunately, we have experienced partners, a wise group of advisors, a solid professional staff, the support of a strong board, and a history of making effective use of private funds for the public good. The stakes are high, the risks are great, but the opportunities are immensely exciting and the outcome potentially groundbreaking. We will report back.

Vartan Gregorian
President 

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