If this issue of Civil Society--East and West has a theme, it is the growth and development of nonprofit organizations, or nekommercheskii organizatsii, as they are known in Russia. Bob Bowie's account of the workshops he and Lilya Wagner gave in Kiev and Minsk reports that oblast level Red Cross organizers are already engaging in fund-raising activities typical of Western nonprofit organizations.

In this issue readers will also learn about Lester Salamon's Third Sector Project, to which hundreds of nonprofit leaders in Central and Eastern Europe have responded enthusiastically. Next to that story is news of a remarkable directory of Russian charitable organizations which United Way International's Moscow office published late last year. It describes 540 independent charitable organizations in Moscow and St. Petersburg alone!

All this is basically good news. I am also recently back from my fourth trip to Russia since 1986--and my first since the failed "putsch" of August 1991. The amount of private sector activity that now exists in Moscow is impressive. Much of it is still at the level of "kiosk capitalism," and privati-zation has a very long way to go still, but it remains dramatic to see any private economic activity in Moscow.

So why do so many Westerners sound cynical and disparaging when talking about Russia today? Five years ago, if you opened a conversation with an American in Red Square, odds were that you would hear about the wonderful Russian people and "the shift in global consciousness from separation and fear to unity and cooperation." Today, expect to hear a litany of com-plaints about "the Russian mentality."

Yes, Russia has many serious problems. Whether a legacy of communism or an older feature of the culture, some aspects of "the Russian personality" offend, or simply clash with, the assumptions and expectations of Westerners. It is very difficult to get things done in Russia and relia-bility is a very big problem. Rates of inflation and unemployment not unusual in some Western economies, but previously unknown to Russians, are hurting the poor and elderly and widening the gulf between them and the well-to-do. A swarm of mafias has accompanied the growth of a class of honest entrepreneurs, making ordinary city life more dangerous.

There are other dangers, too, not least among them the wars killing thousands in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Tajikistan--and which the West prefers to ignore. Still, the basic fact is political and economic reform, despite all the obstacles. It is occurring in Russia at a pace not seen in a very long time. Importantly, the impulse for change is now rising upward from the society, instead of descending, Soviet style, in ukases from the political leadership.

Tanya's Example

I visited Tanya again last month. Today she works as an attorney for an insurance company, and loves the challenge of her work. She has won a couple of cases, and the proceeds of these victories have allowed her to buy the apartment she has lived in for many years Last fall she was able to travel abroad for the first time, and she spent a month in Paris, staying with friends who had emigrated in the eighties. Recently Tanya bought herself a car and she is now taking driving lessons. Feeling the need to upgrade her legal skills, she is also now thinking about going back to school for more education in the law.

Stories like Tanya's exist by the thousands. They offer grounds for confidence in Russia's future. Yet such stories are rarely told today.

Bonner's Guarded Optimism

Today Bonner speaks with a different voice. She is more hopeful than ever before--mainly, she says, because of the young Russians who spoke so forcefully for democracy in the April referendum. It is therefore something of a paradox that when so much progress has occurred in Russia, and when seasoned democratic activists such as Bonner are for the first time speaking positively of that nation's political prospects, from the West comes a chant about Russia that mentions only mafias, crime, dirt, corruption, duplicity, laziness--in short, a picture of a nation whose moral depravity is without bottom.

Examples of this phenomenon abound today. Suffice it to say that the "new and improved" Western view of Russia, while in some ways more realistic, is as false and extreme in its one-sidedness as was the West's earlier love affair with Gorbachev. Like other waves of public sentiment, let us hope that this one, too, will pass. Elena Bonner said of the young voters who went to the polls by the millions in April: "These young people are Russia's future. They will not give up on freedom and we should not give up on them."

--Holt Ruffin

Note: The Bonner quote is from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College in May.

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