Democracy Assistance in Post-Communist Russia: Case Studies of the Ford Foundation, the C.S. Mott Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy

This research report specifically focuses on The Ford Foundation, Early Explorations, and Motivations. Historic changes brought about by perestroika, glasnost, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet communist system in the late 1980s and early 1990s offered an unprecedented opportunity for the international community to support transitions to democracy and social transformations in a region that had long known totalitarian rule. Only a few years prior, few could have imagined that democracy's chief global rival -- communism -- would fall so dramatically and so rapidly in the USSR, transforming the day-to-day lives of millions of people who had lived under one-party rule, a command economy, and ideological and institutional control for decades. While financial and technical assistance to support transitions flowed into the region from the governments of industrialized democracies including the United States and many individual member states of the European Community, from international financial institutions, and from multilateral organizations, also among the key institutional players engaged in providing support were U.S. grantmaking institutions.