Sestanovich, a former director for policy development at the National Security Council (NSC), to breakfast. Abramowitz was eager for Sestanovich to lead the Carnegie Endowment’s effort to build a program in Russia. “His first proposal to me was one I wasn’t interested in,” Sestanovich recalled, “but he kept coming back to me each time describing not only my job as a bigger one but expanding his own conception of what it is he wanted me to do.”
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After several breakfasts, Sestanovich finally accepted the offer to direct the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia and Eurasia Program. “A sense of social and systemic collapse” prevailed in Moscow, said Sestanovich. “To come in with a concept of building a new institution seemed sort of outlandish.” Suitable office space was hard to come by, but with support from the MacArthur and Starr foundations, the Carnegie Moscow Center opened its doors the following year. From the beginning, the Moscow Center was determined to invite Russians from across the political spectrum. “That was not easy,” said Michael McFaul, who spent a year-and-a-half at the center. “Remember, [in] 1993 Yeltsin bombs the parliament and arrests a bunch of people and fascists and communists are part of that; and we deliberately one day decided to jump into this breach and have people that were arrested, people that were literally on the other side of the barricade being bombed, and we invited them” to the Moscow Center. The decision set an important precedent. Maria Lipman, the editor of Pro et Contra, the Moscow Center’s quarterly journal, said that events in the early years “were extremely exciting on top of being highly professional.”
The atmosphere of decay heightened sensitivities to a foreign presence. “Most of our interlocutors assumed we were CIA and explicitly said so, often at times in print and media,” McFaul said. Even the catering at center events became a point of contention. For most visitors, free food and drink was a welcome sign of generosity. Yet if the provisions seemed too generous, some would be offended by what they saw as an ostentatious and condescending display of American wealth.
“An Independence of Mind” From the outset, the Moscow Center sought to hire associates capable of working together closely with their Washington counterparts and demonstrate a clear sense of intellectual candor and freedom. Two of the center’s earliest hires turned out to be its most successful. Dmitri Trenin has been part of the center since its inception and now serves as its director. He retired from the Russian Army in 1993, shortly after serving as a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, the first Warsaw Pact officer to do so. Lilia Shevtsova joined the Moscow Center in 1994. Previously, she had served as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies, an affiliate of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both Trenin and Shevtsova had “an unmistakable independence of mind and that’s what we were looking for most,” explained Sestanovich. Trenin recalled the enthusiasm that animated the center in its early years. “It was seen by people on both sides as an adventure,” he said. “Human relationships were struck . . . and they were extremely durable.”