A Policy in Tension: The National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Response to the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Abstract

The failure of a hardline coup attempt in the Soviet Union in August 1991 spelled the end of Communist Party (CPSU) rule in the USSR and left the Soviet state teetering on the brink of dissolution. In a September 1991 article in the Washington Post, David Ignatius attributed the coup’s defeat—as well as the crumbling of Soviet-style communist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989—in part to a new weapon in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal: independent, overt democracy aid. “[T]he old era of covert action,” Ignatius proclaimed, “is dead.” Instead, over the past decade, a new “network” of private democracy organizations based in the United States had been “doing in public what the CIA used to do” covertly. By providing assistance to anti-communist groups in the Soviet bloc, he argued, these organizations had played a key role in nurturing the growth of democratic opposition movements across the Soviet empire.1 Ignatius’s analysis illuminates an important but understudied development in the final years of the Cold War: the rise of private democracy organizations as tools of U.S. foreign policy.2 Most accounts of the influence of independent actors in U.S. Soviet relations during this period focus on the role of transnational human rights and peace networks in ending the Cold War by fostering “new thinking” in the Soviet Union and the amelioration of superpower tensions.3 Less attention has been paid to analyzing the nature and impact of efforts by newly established independent democracy organizations based in the United States to make inroads in the increasingly accessible USSR.4