Stricter controls over grants and donations to Russian NGOs from foreign organizations have been long anticipated.  It’s certainly a positive development.  There is nothing “draconian” about it.  Among other experts in the country, scholars at the Russian Government’s Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law have been speaking (and not only speaking) about the necessity of imposing such controls since the mid-1990s.
There is hardly any visible correlation between foreign grants to NGOs and development of civil society in Russia.  Although foreign inputs can support the creation of infrastructure to nurture fledgling democratic institutions, a truly democratic and civil society is to be founded on a solid domestic ground.  Democratic institutions derive their legitimacy from people and not from foreign sponsors of “regime change”.  The current situation in Russia, where the non-governmental sector «is still dependent on Western funding» (as admitted in the 2001 Ford Foundation Report), is utterly unhealthy.  For instance, NGOs working in collaboration with the (now defunct) Russian Foundation for Legal Reform revealed that on average they used to have eight main sources of funding of their activities with “foreign foundations” constituting the largest source among all of them - 22.7%.  Actual foreign support is even bigger, because the additional 12.6% of the budget coming from “sponsor dues” does not necessarily mean that such sponsors are “domestic”. 
Russian NGOs cannot be accused of being too prude and selective with respect to their sponsors.  Not many other things could damage the reputation of the Sakharov Center or the Moscow-based International Foundation for Civil Liberties more in the eyes of common Russian folks than generous financial support (to be precise, 3 million U.S. dollars in the first case, and one million in the other) to the Sakharov Center from a robber baron in exile, Boris Berezovsky.
A recent proposal by two American scholars (Timothy J. Colton & Michael McFaul) to replace the “old formula for democracy ‘Get the institutions right, and the people will follow’”, with a new one “‘Represent the will of the people within the state, and the institutions will follow’”, can be right only when the “will of the people” is voiced by the people and not by their foreign mentors.  In reality, Colton-McFaul’s proposed change of strategy of foreign aid from “technical assistance for the crafting of democratic institutions, be it democratic electoral laws, constitutions, courts, or political parties” to, in their words, “pro-democratic elements in Russia’s society” and “those brave people in Russia still fighting for democracy”, is a sly attempt to keep providing foreign money to the same small clique of corrupt and morally bankrupt pro-Western “reformers”, the main recipients of American “aid” in the 1990s, who were thrown by the Russian voters from the Duma to the ditch of “educational” NGOs (like Gaidar’s Institute of Transitional Economy) or “public” associations (like dwarf organizations of Filatov, Shumeiko, Rybkin, and other survivors of Yeltsin’s cleptocratic regime).
What American aid to the non-governmental sector actually means can also be illustrated by a Belarussian example.  Although the main (if not the only) reason for Washington’s dissatisfaction with the current regime in Belarus is President Lukashenko’s pro-Russian policy, the U.S. authorities put pressure on the Belarussian government for its alleged “campaign against civil society and independent voices in Belarus” (the U.S. State Department statement of July 26, 2004) or because it “blatantly and repeatedly violated basic freedoms of speech, expression, assembly, association and religion” (from U.S. Congressman Christopher H. Smith’s statement on Belarus of July 15, 2003).   Surprisingly, we in Russia never heard similar criticism from the U.S. officials either when Yeltsin (an “explicitly pro-American, pro-Western, pro-market” president, who kept Russia “on a pro-Western track”, as he was characterized in the U.S. Congress) shelled the Russian parliament and suspended the activities of the Constitutional Court, or when Russia’s «dream team» (with support of American consultants and foreign money) staged the 1996 presidential election farce.
In a truly amazing admission, Michael G. Kozak, a former U.S. Ambassador to Belarus, bluntly stated in a letter to The Guardian that America’s “objective and to some degree methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua, where the U.S. backed the Contras against the left-wing Sandinista Government.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Minsk told The Times that the embassy helped to fund 300 non-governmental organizations and admitted that «some» of them were linked to those who were “seeking political change”.  “Helped” is certainly an understatement here.  Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty was more precise: “Many groups in Belarus rely on foreign money for their activities”.   Christian Science Monitor revealed that Washington spent million in 2000 to support NGOs and opposition groups in Belarus, and was going to spend even more next year.   According to Russian press, support to Belarussian opposition through the Eurasia Foundation, for instance, grew from 0,000 in 1996 to .5 million in 1998, and to about million in 2001.  That’s in a country where National Bank reserves do not exceed 0 million! 
To what extent such groups in Belarus, created and funded by the U.S., can be considered “independent” (i.e. “not governed by a foreign power; self-governing; free from the influence, guidance, or control of another or others; self-reliant”) is certainly a big question.
To look at this from a more concrete perspective, 300 Washington-funded NGOs is one organization for every 34,000 citizens of a 10-million person republic.  What would be the reaction of American people and the Bush Administration if some foreign country (for instance, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Russia) would set up and provide multibillion funding to some 8,250 “civil society” groups (one for every 34,000 Americans) aimed at “seeking political change” (read: “overthrowing the President”, “changing the political regime”) in the U.S.?
The Belarussian experience with foreign interference into the internal affairs of that republic under the disguise of Western “aid” to “civil society” groups is not much different than the Russian experience. As stated in the Russian Democracy Act, “United States Government democratic reform programs… have led to the establishment of more than 65,000 non-governmental organizations… and numerous political parties” (Sec.2(a)(3)(A)).  In other words, the U.S. law-makers openly admit that the U.S. Government and American money are behind every fifth out of 300,000 registered NGOs in Russia.  The figures are even more impressive than those in Belarus.  For every 2,100 citizens of Russia, we’ve got one “public” association “established” and at least partly, if not fully, funded by Washington.
It’s hardly an excuse that the real number of U.S.-funded NGOs in Russia is certainly smaller.  Many such organizations exist on paper only and were established by clever Russians with the only purpose of milking the rich cows of the U.S. Agency for International Development and various Western foundations.  It only corroborates my final observation.  The continuation of U.S. reliance on a narrow circle of pro-Western liberal intelligentsia and “agents of democratic change” (mainly concentrated in Moscow and half a dozen other urban centers) proves to be wasteful, eventually unproductive for the U.S. interests (if those interests are not aimed at the ultimate subordination of Russia and further aggravation of her socio-economic problems) and detrimental to the interests of long-term institutional legal and democratic development of Russia, including development of her civil society. 
What Western governments and experts should do, instead of continuing their futile and ridiculous attempts to «pull Russia into the West» (Michael McFaul), threatening Russia with «negative consequences», and frightening themselves and their communities with horror stories that if Russia does not continue “reforms” “following strategies developed in Western capitals», then “it most likely will have become a dictatorship and a threat to Europe” (McFaul again), is to agree with Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. (of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies) that the failure of American “reform strategy” “has probably destroyed Russians’ trust in the West for generations to come” and follow his advice: “Those of us who care about the advance of democracy in the world should make it our foremost intellectual and practical task to find out why our reform strategy went wrong in so much of the former Soviet bloc”.
Back in 2001, I wrote in Nezavisimaya gazeta that “U.S. aid to Russian ‘reformers’ should be stopped by the U.S. Administration before it’s interrupted by the Russian Government” (NG-Dipkurier, 22.03.2001).  Adoption in 2002 by the U.S. Congress of the notorious Russian Democracy Act (pledging an additional 50 million dollars a year to pro-American “political parties and coalitions” in Russia, “democratic activists”, “democratic forces”, “reform-minded politicians”, and the like) became just another confirmation of the unwillingness of U.S. authorities to stop America’s interference into Russian domestic affairs.  The Russian Government finally decided to react.  It should have done so long before.

Alexander Domrin has an academic degree of Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  He is a Senior Associate of the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law (under the Russian Government), a member of the Council on Constitutional Legislation under the State Duma Chairman, and currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.