THE RUSSIA INITIATIVE

Try to imagine what life would be like had the United States government declared in 1991 that democracy and capitalism were bankrupt experiments. That, in the space of three years, the dollar became worthless, factories and farms closed, Social Security dissolved and most people lost their life savings. Imagine reliving the Great Depression, where physicians grow their own food to survive, school teachers are paid with cases of bourbon for use as barter and parents become so desperately helpless they entrust two million children to orphanages. As this societal chaos unfolds in your mind, try to imagine America’s disintegration — as a dozen states secede from the Union, the nation loses its superpower status and defaults on foreign debts. And abroad, our European allies switch allegiance, turning their backs on us and embracing our Cold War enemy.

If you could imagine this nightmare then you have a sense of what the Russian people have been living through.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has changed at lightning speed, but politics and policies have been slow to change, distorting the prospect of peaceful relations between Russia and the U.S. — which even now have thousands of nuclear missiles, on hair triggers, aimed at each other. There is an international gap in trust and understanding.

Carnegie Corporation of New York, in its 90-year pursuit of international peace through the spread of knowledge, has produced Russia: Facing the Future, a video documentary and scholarly report on Russian society today. With words and pictures, the package paints a vivid portrait of Russia’s economic, political, military and social upheaval — as well as Russian anxieties about national security, fueled by the West’s sometimes warm, sometimes cold welcome.

This package represents more than a year’s work by filmmakers and scholars in Carnegie Corporation’s project, which is called the Russia Initiative. Four task forces, each with an multidisciplinary array of Russian and American experts, assessed Russia’s economy, military, democratic reforms, societal problems and possible futures, ranging from the fragmentation of the Russian Federation to the reimposition of Soviet-era totalitarianism. The scholarly papers were synthesized into the final report and they provided the intellectual substance for the documentary. All these materials--the final report and the four scholarly reports (in PDF format in both English and Russian) and the video (in English only) are available here.

Russia: Facing the Future (PDF, English)
Russia: Facing the Future (PDF, Russian)

The Russia Initiative: Reports of the Four Task Forces (PDF, English)

The Russia Initiative: Reports of the Four Task Forces (PDF, Russian)

Russia: Facing the Future (RealVideo, English only)
28k .ram | 100k .ram

Press release (HTML, English only)

Listen to a panel discussion on the Diane Rehm Show involving Peter Reddaway, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and one of the scholars who participated in the Russia Initiative; the subject is the recent meeting between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.