The Technologies of the Cultural Cold War and Their Application in the Post-Soviet Space
A Dor Moriah Center analytical paper. Ukraine as the largest and best-documented case of a technology in continuous use since the 1950s. Igor Kaminnyk
What the article is about
In 1999, the British historian Frances Stonor Saunders laid out the documentary record showing that the Congress for Cultural Freedom — a nominally independent association of intellectuals that published Encounter, Preuves, and Der Monat — was in fact bankrolled by the CIA through a network of pass-through foundations. The book was a sensation not because the underlying fact was new. It was not. The sensation was in the documented description of the mechanism: how government money gets converted into “independent” intellectual output through layered intermediaries, negative selection, and built-in career ladders.
After the Congress was exposed in 1967, the mechanism did not go away. It was institutionalized in the open — through NED (1983), USAID, and the Open Society Foundations — and scaled up. Aggregate “democracy promotion” budgets grew from millions into the billions. Since 1991, the United States alone has invested more than $38 billion in Ukraine through non-military programs.
The article reconstructs that technology and traces its genealogy from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to the grant infrastructure of the post-Soviet space.
The central argument
How does an ideology without mass electoral support become state policy?
The Ukrainian case gives us clean numbers. In the 2019 elections, the combined coalition of all far-right parties — Svoboda, the National Corps, Right Sector — took 2.15 percent of the vote. The single nationalist candidate in the presidential race that year: 1.6 percent. The numbers are stable: 0.36 percent in 2006, 0.76 percent in 2007, a one-off spike to 10.44 percent in 2012 driven by anti-Yanukovych voting, a collapse back to 2.15 percent in 2019.
And yet the symbolic agenda of those 2.15 percent — decommunization, language legislation, the glorification of the OUN-UPA, the ban on the Communist Party — became official state policy. The article calls this gap the paradox of electoral marginality and identifies the infrastructure through which it reproduces itself.
What you’ll find in the text
Institutional archaeology. The technology traced from the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 through NED, USAID, and the Open Society Foundations to the grant infrastructure in Ukraine. A comparative table showing the shift in scale: from $100–200 million at the CCF over twenty years to $38+ billion in Ukraine over thirty.
The paradox of electoral marginality. The gap between a radical ideological group’s electoral support (single-digit percentages) and its institutional weight on the corresponding agenda (up to 100 percent of state policy on the issues it cares about). Paradigm case: Ukraine 2019.
The mechanism of grant-based legitimation. Selective funding that turns a marginal ideology into the mainstream not through direct propaganda but by structuring the field of possibilities — who gets the grant, the fellowship, the seat on the editorial board, the conference slot, the English translation. It operates not at the level of content but at the level of reproduction.
Concrete documentary material. The interim financial statement of Hromadske TV for 2013 — on the eve of the Euromaidan: 793,089 hryvnia from the Dutch embassy, 399,650 hryvnia from the U.S. embassy, 247,860 hryvnia from Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation. The key funding figures for Ukraine programs are supported by statements from Nuland, USAID documents, and Soros foundation filings.
A structural analysis of the function of nationalism. Three mechanisms through which the nationalist frame operates as a functional substitute for class analysis.
Integration into the Dor Moriah research program. Grant-based legitimation is treated as the infrastructural loop that reproduces the state of the ontological bubble — the center’s core research object. The author has been analyzing the mechanism since 2008, first on Ukrainian material and subsequently on Israeli material.
Who the article is for
Political analysts and researchers of the post-Soviet space — get a reconstructed institutional history and a verifiable empirical base on the Ukrainian case.
Journalists and commentators — get working conceptual tools: the paradox of electoral marginality, grant-based legitimation, the distinction between the level of content and the level of reproduction.
Israeli readers — get a mirror in which the same techniques and their possible trajectories become visible. The Dor Moriah Center was founded on the task of preventing a Ukrainian-style managed-chaos scenario in Israel. Understanding the technology is a precondition for responding to it.
Readers engaged with Saunders’s book — get a contemporary extension of her research. What Saunders showed on 1950s and 1960s material is traced here into the 2020s.
Key figures in the article
- 2.15 percent — the combined far-right coalition in the 2019 Verkhovna Rada elections
- 1.6 percent — the single nationalist presidential candidate in 2019
- 100 percent — the share of this group’s symbolic agenda embedded in state policy
- $38 billion — cumulative U.S. non-military investment in Ukraine through 2024
- $180 million — International Renaissance Foundation (Soros) spending in Ukraine through 2015
- 793,089 / 399,650 / 247,860 hryvnia — Hromadske TV funding in 2013 from the Netherlands, the United States, and the Soros foundation respectively
Methodological framework
The article draws on Saunders’s documentary record (The Cultural Cold War, 1999) as an independent historical source for the 1950–1967 period; on open data from NED, USAID, and the Soros foundations; on the official results of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission for 2019; and on financial statements from Ukrainian media projects. Conceptually, the article is embedded in the Dor Moriah Center’s theoretical program on the ontological bubble and the mechanisms of its reproduction.
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Language of publication: English
