A Visiting Scholar Joins Community Partners

Meet Igor Kokarev.  Seriously.  Come by the Community Partners office, kick off your shoes, and sit a spell with Igor Kokarev.  He’s joined us recently from Moscow, occupies a desk down the hall, and has delivered his considerable store of community development knowledge to our doorstep.  All we need to do is reach out and tap what he knows.

I met Igor about ten years ago.  He was visiting a mutual friend from UCLA on one of three extended study trips he’s taken around America.  One of those trips, a six-month coast to coast ramble with his pregnant wife, Eya, and his daughter, Jenka, the family stayed for a few weeks each in a series of very different “international communities.”  Igor’s curiosity about American civil society – suppressed for most of his life under the boot-heel of Soviet Russia’s totalitarian regime – fueled in him a burning passion.  A dedicated child of Communism and an outstanding member of the Komsomol youth movement, he longed to discover everything he could about the independent side of that odd phenomena called Soviet “democracy.”  He wanted to explore what freedom was like for people who created places in which, for better or worse, they could chart their own destiny free of all government and other outside interference.

Perestroika – the great thawing and openness that led eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s – freed Igor to form and lead a civil society organization he came to call Citizen Foundation.  I saw the foundation’s work up close when Igor invited me to participate as a speaker in a citizen participation summit in Moscow in October 2003.  Arriving on Igor’s doorstep, I realized that I had been invited into the company of one of the leading social entrepreneurs in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, all of which rose up with the fall of the Iron Curtain.  Knowledgeable as a scholar of democracy, civil society, and believe it or not, Soviet and American popular films, Igor stoked his colleagues’ hunger to learn more, grow freer faster, and brand a unique form of democracy all their own.  USAID, the Ford Foundation, and the Mott Foundation, impressed by Igor’s energy, financed that work for an entire decade.

Now that the Russian political elite have seized power and are crushing civil society to re-mobilize an authoritarian regime, Igor has made a life transition and Community Partners is proud to help him along.  We’ve named him a “Senior International Community Development Fellow” and provided him with a desk and a phone from which he can write, research, and share what he knows with our staff, our Project Leaders, and our communities.  He’s too humble to say so himself, so I will.  Igor is a gifted scholar, published author with eight books to his credit, a respected internationalist, and an ardent democracy advocate and activist.  American immigration laws are tough and highly restrictive these days.  Yet, despite the hurdles, Igor succeeded in convincing the United States government to grant him immigration status under the “persons of exceptional merit" exemption in the law.  With this particular designation, crossing the border and obtaining a green card – the key to the freedom to work – is instantly and irrevocably yours.  It’s a rarely granted status reserved for Nobel Prize recipients, outstanding artists, great scientists…and for Igor Kokarev, a scholar of something we take for granted in the United States, but which in modern Russia, is as fragile as fine china: citizen participation in democracy and the freedom to build community in whatever way works best for those who want it.

We think Igor has valuable life and civil society lessons to teach.  We hope you take the time and opportunity to stop by and take advantage of what he knows.  You’ll be glad for your effort and inspired as he shares with you his privileged, hard-won insight.

Paul Vandeventer, President & CEO, Community Partners

July 2008