The Moscow School was planned as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness allowed the exhumation of the suppressed people, histories and literature of pre-Soviet times and the USSR’s early years. Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov were Soviet intellectuals, she an art historian, he a philosopher; comfortably placed in the official intellectual hierarchy, uncomfortable in their Soviet skins. They were the planners — planning to illuminate how freedom might be used.
They were guided by Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. “Russia,” he told an American interviewer in 1989, “jumped out of history and committed the metaphysical suicide of trying to bypass reality for the ideal.” The task this middle-aged couple took on was to help Russians, especially the rising generation, to construct a grounded reality of democratic process, civil society, rights and, above all, responsibility.
Thus the Moscow School of Political Studies, later the Moscow School of Civic Education, was founded as the USSR crumbled. From the start its funding was largely foreign: a succession of western ambassadors told their governments that here was a centre to which support could be given that would not be wasted or diverted to Switzerland.