National Endowment for Democracy

The organization arose under President Ronald Reagan , and the US Congress directly participated in its creation, whose role so far is to form the cabinet of directors or the Board of Directors of the NSF (it is formed from congressmen), as well as a special monetary fund from which the NSF allocates grants throughout peace for the fighters for democracy. When the fund was created, the budget amount reached $ 30 million, but then increased, and in 2002 amounted to 43 million. ^[5]

The president of the NFD is Karl Gershman ^[6] . The foundation’s board includes Vin Weber , a former congressman and vice president of Clark & ​​Weinstock ; Wesley Clark , former NATO commander; Ralf Gerson , President, Guardian International Corp. ; Frank Carlucci , former Secretary of Defense, chairman of the investment firm Carlyle Group ; Morton Abramowitz , former adviser to President Reagan, chairman of the International Crisis Center (ICC); Lee Hamilton , former senator, member of the Presidential National Security Council.

One of the members of the board’s board of directors was Zbigniew Brzezinski , an American political scientist , sociologist and statesman.

The fund was founded in 1983 by the US Congress with a budget of $ 30 million. The fund was attended by figures related to the American special services - John Negroponte , Henry Chisneros , Elliot Abrams .

Fund President Karl Gershman explained the creation of the fund by the fact that for "democratic circles around the world" it would be undesirable to receive funding directly from the CIA ^[7] . Therefore, according to Gershman, the foundation was created ^[7] . One of the founders of the foundation, Allen Weinstein, noted in 1991 that much of what the foundation does was formerly the work of the CIA ^[8] .

As reported on the fund’s official website, NED funded the opposition Solidarity movements in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Otpor in Serbia ^{[9] [10]} .

The fund’s activities are financed from the state budget as part of the State Department’s expenses for the US Agency for International Development . In 2004, the fund received about $ 80 million mainly from government sources ^[11] .

A small portion of the funds comes from private organizations - the Smith Richardson Foundation , the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lindy and Harry Bradley Foundation . From 1987 to 2005, these organizations transferred about $ 2 million. ^[12] All of them, in turn, are financed through federal contracts.

About half of the funds the fund spends on the activities of 4 associated organizations:

• American Center for International Labor Solidarity .
• Center for International Private Enterprise . The leader is Thomas J. Donahue , President of the United States Chamber of Commerce .
• International Republican Institute . The leader is Senator John McCain .
• National Democratic Institute of International Affairs . The head is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright .

The foundation publishes the Journal of Democracy , as well as the meeting magazine, for distribution in Cuba .

Foundation and Russia

In the early 2010s, the sponsorship role of the Fund in the Russian Federation was small: in 2010, funding for various political and scientific projects in Russia amounted to $ 2,783,000, and in 2012 increased to $ 3 million ^[13] . In 2013–2014, the Fund provided financial assistance to Russian commercial and non-profit organizations in the amount of about 5.2 million US dollars ^[14] .

On July 28, 2015, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia recognized the activities of the Russian branch of the organization as undesirable in the country and, in accordance with Federal Law No. 272-FZ of December 28, 2012, urged the Ministry of Justice to include the fund in the appropriate list (“patriotic stop list”), which was done 29 July ^[15] . The American Foundation was the first organization recognized as undesirable in Russia ^{[14] [16]} .

The Democracy Award has been awarded annually since 1991 by the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy to people and organizations that and protect human rights around the world ^[18] .

Laureates receive a statuette of the Goddess of Democracy , which is a small copy of the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, which was installed on Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the student movement for freedom and democracy in 1989 .

In 2013, the award was given to Vera Kichanova , a municipal deputy in South Tushino from Moscow and activists from Pakistan , Zimbabwe and Cuba ^[17] . The Cuban received the award posthumously, he died in a car accident under unclear circumstances ^[19] .

According to critics, the National Democracy Fund is a pseudo-public organization ^[4] , and its activities are closely related to the CIA . As one of the founders of the foundation, Allen Weinstein, said in 1991, “a lot of what we do today, the CIA did secretly 25 years ago” ^[20] .

In 2004, the fund provided a Reagan-Fassell research grant to the Chechen separatist Ilyas Akhmadov , whom the Russian Foreign Ministry called the “accomplice of terrorists,” and law enforcement agencies said that they “have evidence of Akhmadov’s ties with Maskhadov and the leader of Chechen gangs, Shamil Basayev ” ^[21] .

Human rights activist Oleg Popov wrote that the fund financed the Russian organization, the Society of Russian-Chechen Friendship , which supported the separatist military-criminal regime of Dudaev in Chechnya ^[5] . In addition, the fund financed the Moscow Helsinki Group of Lyudmila Alekseeva and the movement “ For Human Rights ” by Lev Ponomaryov ^[5] .

In 2011, the Wikileaks portal published data according to which the fund supported Arab youth movements, which subsequently took an active part in the series of revolutions that broke out in the Middle East in 2011 ^[22] .

According to some experts, NED impedes the development of civil society in Russia. ^[23]

• Official website
• Anti-state activity in human rights “clothes” (Oleg Popov - member of the human rights movement)
• American “charity” funds and Russian human rights organizations
• Criticism on Media Transparency
• US secretly backed a Syrian opposition