President’s Report

February 22, 2005

Dear Friends and Colleagues of CCI,

Pardon my absence from the President's Letter column. It's been a particularly busy last three months since we are designing new programs and taking the PEP program into sustainability to secure CCI's future.

As you can imagine, this is a challenging period. At the same time it's one of those periods of exciting ferment as we prepare for the next phase of our work in the Russia field. In March I'll report on "what's next."

As for Russia, the entire nation is going through a critical and rocky time which is needed if their evolution to a stable and orderly country takes place - which we are betting it will in the long run. My hope is that Putin will learn lessons after his sizable, but not fatal, blunders of the past few months. His government will likely see some replacements to demonstrate to the populace that he's listening. Hopefully the babushkas will continue their protests which could fast forward a citizen/public debate on social and other reforms. Russians haven't been willing, thus far, to get involved in democratic actions. So what we've seen with the elderly population in the streets is first-stage democracy in action. Citizen participation must happen if Russia makes it to a democratic state.

As for PEP, I'm delighted to report that almost a year after our State Department funding dematerialized, Russian participants are paying increased PEP fees on schedule, the same number of them are applying the US training, and our transition funds are holding fine to date. It looks like we will succeed at this unusual attempt to take a major US government program into self sustaining mode at the end of USG funding.

I leave for Moscow and St. Petersburg on February 23. Much has happened in Russia since early December when I was last there. I'm eager to go back, hopefully to get a better sense of what's really going on. More later from Russia.

Meanwhile I'm posting some of the different points of view on the various issues which are foremost in Russia today.

My best to you,

Sharon Tennison
President