Hooked on Grants
A Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who earned billions on currency speculation and the stock market, Soros could not have been more perfectly cast as either a crusader against illiberalism or as conspiratorial mastermind hell-bent on undermining a country's sovereignty and traditional values. As of 2017, he had spent twelve billion dollars of his own money on poverty reduction, government transparency, and higher education, and yet by that point, he had been thoroughly demonized in many of the countries that benefited from his largesse. In 1993, Soros founded the Open Society Institute (later rebranded as the Open Society Foundations, or OSF). That year, Soros-sponsored programs gave one time grants of $500 to 25,000 Russian scientists to support to support them when funding had all but disappeared, as part of a plan to fight Russian brain drain. Soros and OSF bought equipment for research laboratories and financed purchases for over 100 research libraries throughout the Russian Federation. For more than a decade, the OSF administered a grant program that funded faculty, students, and schoolteachers at a cost of more than 100 million dollars. The OSF provided Internet access to 33 Russian universities for five years.
George Soros, apparently unaware that he is imitating Mr. Burns from The Simpsons
With a foundation named for Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Soros's agenda was clear, and also consistent with the overall ethos of the 1990s: Russia (and the rest of the Eastern bloc) had to break with its past and embrace the institutions and approaches characteristic of liberal democracy. The OSF funded Russian human rights organizations such as the Team against Torture, Agora, and Memorial. In addition to their Soros funding and the character of their activism, these organizations all have one other important feature in common: since the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, all of them have been declared foreign agents by the Russian Federation (and only the Team against Torture is still operating). Effectively, the change in the official stance on Soros, NGOs, and liberal democracy has retroactively criminalized activity that in the 1990s was welcomed and acclaimed. Soros-sponsored books started to be removed from libraries in 2015, with Soros himself now persona non grata. That same year, Putin railed against "so-called foreign foundations... that hook high school graduates on grants and take them away.”
The crusade against Soros is not unique to Russia; indeed, it is even more prominent in the philanthropist's birth country, Hungary, which, under Viktor Orban (himself a former recipient of Soros funding), has always been ahead of Russia on the path to illiberalism. It also represents a new trend in the circulation of ideas and talking points among the anti-globalist global far right: if, in the 1990s, Russia's right wing forces gained financial and intellectual support from anti-abortion evangelical Christians and conspiratorial nutcases like Lyndon LaRouche, now the postsocialist world was rehearsing scripts that would make their way to Fox News, where Soros is a popular folk-devil. [1]. Like most of the ideas that have made their way into mainstream Putinism, the demonization of Soros had begun on the fringes of Russian political culture before being embraced by the country's leadership and media.
In Russia after 1991, distrusting the motivation of foreigners--particularly foreigners from the alliance of countries long thought of the enemy--is understandable. Even humanitarian aid was, in addition to testifying to Russia's humiliation, inscrutable and strange. Why is the United States flooding our shelves with free chicken legs, or providing spicy, leftover Gulf War MRE's for Russian grandmothers who grew up on much more bland fare ? Why are the same countries flooding the country's streets with evangelists and prostelytizers for new religious movements? Are these would-be businessmen who have come to Russia here to aid our development, or simply rob us of our natural resources and spirit away "our" women?
Note
[1] Another example is the "anti-gender" movement, which, though begun in the Catholic countries of Western Europe, gained serious momentum in Russia and other postsocialist countries, before becoming a MAGA talking point in the U.S..
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