También metió mano para destruir Yugoslavia
Polonia, Hungría, la URSS, República Checa, en todas estuvo el tío, incluso físicamente
De la propia fundación
With Eastern and Central Europe firmly under Soviet control, Soros first began giving scholarships to the handful of dissidents who dared to challenge the system, allowing them to travel to study in the United States. He also began funding dissident groups such as Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity labor union in Poland, and for the Sakharovs and their allies in the Soviet Union. By the early 1980s, with Hungary in economic trouble, the Communist government allowed Soros to establish a foundation that would offer open scholarships, and fund cultural events and academic exchanges. The new foundation began spending around $3 million a year, seeking when possible to support groups and individuals who were exploring the limits of political and cultural tolerance. The Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev launched new policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), aimed at revitalizing an increasingly moribund one-party system. That same year, Soros was allowed to open a private foundation in Poland, ***owed in 1987, as restrictions eased, by an office in Moscow. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November was the culmination of a gradual collapse of Communist control that began with Hungary’s removal of the 149 mile-long electric fence on its border with Austria. The freedom to travel meant the end of the controlled economies and politics of the East Bloc. Soros was now able to open more than 20 national foundations across the region in what he called an “explosive period of growth,” supported financially by the enormous success of his hedge fund, creating the core of what has become today the Open Society Foundations.
Artículo de Soros publicado en 1989 por el Washington Post
George Soros | How to Help Poland
My proposal was received enthusiastically in Poland—both the government and the economic experts of Solidarity have endorsed it—but it encountered a much more reserved attitude among Western officials. Many of the objections can be ascribed to bureaucratic caution—the IMF finds the situation in Poland too chaotic for initiating a program, and most governments seem to prefer a step-by-step approach, extending all aid short of help. But there is one objection that I must acknowledge as substantive: any debt reorganization scheme that disturbs the status quo of the Paris Club debt creates a precedent that could be used by other countries. The problem can be delayed because the actual debt reorganization would not take place for at least three years, but it cannot be avoided forever. The question arises whether the Western governments should avoid doing something real in order to preserve a fiction: nobody can claim the Polish debt is worth 100 cents on the dollar. In any case, there is much more at stake than just the debt. There has been no instance yet of successful economic reform in a Communist country; success in Poland would influence the entire region.
Y aquí lo cuenta todo el mismo Jorge
underwriting_democracy-chap-1-2017_10_05.pdf (georgesoros.com)
My newly created Open Society Fund also offered a number of scholarships in the United States to dissident intellectuals from Eastern Europe, and thiswas the program that led me to establish a foundation in Hungary. Selecting candidates became a problem after a while, because we had to go by word of mouth, which did not seem to be the fairest arrangement. It occurred to me that it would be advantageous to set up a selection committee in Hungary and have a public competition. I approached the Hungarian Ambassador in Washington, who contacted his government. To my great astonishment I got a positive reply.
Luckily for us, the propaganda apparatus of the Communist party put a ban on publicity concerning the activities of the Soros Foundation. We were allowed to advertise in newspapers and publish an annual report in accordance with our agreement, but that was all. As a result, the public became aware of our existence only gradually, and then only in connection with some activity that we were supporting. We made a policy of supporting practically any initiative that was spontaneous and nongovernmental. The name of the Soros Foundation kept on cropping up in the most unexpected places. The foundation attained a mythical quality exactly because it received so little publicity. For those who were politically conscious, it became an instrument of civil society; for the public at large, it was manna from heaven.
Encouraged by the success of the Soros Foundation in Hungary and aware of the reform movement in China, I put out feelers in the spring of 1986 to find out whether China might be ready for a foundation similar to the Hungarian one
Not long after China, I also established a foundation in Poland. The Open Society Fund had been operating a very successful Polish scholarship and visiting fellowship program at Oxford University under the direction of Dr. Zbigniew Pelczynski, and it was also supporting other Polish causes. Pelczynski, who visited Hungary regularly to select students for our Oxford scholarship programs, persuaded me to try my hand in Poland.
I visited Warsaw only occasionally, for a day or two at a time. Almost instantaneously, I established close personal contact with Walesa’s chief adviser, Bronislaw Geremek. I was also received by General Jaruszelski, the head of State, to obtain his blessing for the foundation. We had a very interesting conversation. I suggested that he sit down and negotiate with Solidarity.
The amount of time, money, and energy I devoted to the tras*formation of Communist systems increased tremendously when I decided to set up a foundation in the Soviet Union. I took my cue from Gorbachev’s telephone call to Andrei Sakharov in Gorky in December 1986 asking him“to resume his patriotic activities in Moscow.” (Sakharov told me later that the telephone line had to be installed especially for the purpose the night before.) The fact that he was not sent abroad indicated to me that a significant change had occurred in the Soviet Union. I was hoping to base my foundation on Sakharov as my personal representative. I went to Moscow in early March 1987 as a tourist. I had two introductions from Franz Alerdinck,a Dutchman who had set up a foundation in the Netherlands to sponsor media contacts.between East and West. One was to a high- ranking official in the Novosti news service and the other to the free-lance Soviet journalist Michael Bruck, who was the late Armand Hammer’s contact in the Soviet Union
We created our own rubles by donating some computers. I was visiting the head of the Institute for Personal Computers, who told me about his grandiose plans to produce millions of computers for the schools. He mentioned in passing that he had permission to import one hundred IBM ATs and the license was about to expire, but he did not have the dollars to pay for them. I volunteered to supply the dollars if he would give me rubles. “How many?” he asked. I took a chance: “Five rubles to the dollar.” The black market rate for tourists was about three rubles at the time. “Agreed.”
We started to branch out to the republics. I visited Kiev in the late spring of 1989. I timed my visit so that an expatriate Ukrainian business school professor whom I had gotten to know previously, Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, would also be there. On the first evening the leaders of intellectual life assembled at a meeting to put forward their ideas
In the fall of 1989 I visited Estonia and Lithuania. It was more like a state visit than a business call: I arrived everywhere by private plane with the crew of 60 Minutes trailing me. I was the first foreigner ever to land at Tartu in Estonia.
There was a period of about nine months when I was so involved in the Soviet Union that I neglected my Hungarian home base.
We had assisted Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest in a program to reform its curriculum. Over a three-year period, we sent some sixty lecturers, representing about 15 percent of the teaching staff, abroad to attend a business course, which they would then teach after their return. I was also a founder of the International Management Center in Budapest
After the Gentle Revolution in Prague in November 1989, the Charter 77 Foundation of Stockholm, which I had supported since 1981, sprung into operation inside Czechoslovakia fully armed like Pallas Athena. Frantisek Janouch, founder and executive director, flew toPrague, and I joined him a week later on December 13.
As I began writing this account (January 11, 1990), I was about to go to Romania, meaning to visit Bulgaria shortly afterward.
I tried desperately to reach President Bush before his meeting with Gorbachev in Malta, but I got only as far as Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. That is when I decided to write Opening the Soviet System
El mismísimo Viktor Orbán recibió en su día una beca de la fundación de Soros para estudiar en Oxford en 1987
Polonia, Hungría, la URSS, República Checa, en todas estuvo el tío, incluso físicamente
De la propia fundación
With Eastern and Central Europe firmly under Soviet control, Soros first began giving scholarships to the handful of dissidents who dared to challenge the system, allowing them to travel to study in the United States. He also began funding dissident groups such as Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity labor union in Poland, and for the Sakharovs and their allies in the Soviet Union. By the early 1980s, with Hungary in economic trouble, the Communist government allowed Soros to establish a foundation that would offer open scholarships, and fund cultural events and academic exchanges. The new foundation began spending around $3 million a year, seeking when possible to support groups and individuals who were exploring the limits of political and cultural tolerance. The Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev launched new policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), aimed at revitalizing an increasingly moribund one-party system. That same year, Soros was allowed to open a private foundation in Poland, ***owed in 1987, as restrictions eased, by an office in Moscow. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November was the culmination of a gradual collapse of Communist control that began with Hungary’s removal of the 149 mile-long electric fence on its border with Austria. The freedom to travel meant the end of the controlled economies and politics of the East Bloc. Soros was now able to open more than 20 national foundations across the region in what he called an “explosive period of growth,” supported financially by the enormous success of his hedge fund, creating the core of what has become today the Open Society Foundations.
Artículo de Soros publicado en 1989 por el Washington Post
George Soros | How to Help Poland
My proposal was received enthusiastically in Poland—both the government and the economic experts of Solidarity have endorsed it—but it encountered a much more reserved attitude among Western officials. Many of the objections can be ascribed to bureaucratic caution—the IMF finds the situation in Poland too chaotic for initiating a program, and most governments seem to prefer a step-by-step approach, extending all aid short of help. But there is one objection that I must acknowledge as substantive: any debt reorganization scheme that disturbs the status quo of the Paris Club debt creates a precedent that could be used by other countries. The problem can be delayed because the actual debt reorganization would not take place for at least three years, but it cannot be avoided forever. The question arises whether the Western governments should avoid doing something real in order to preserve a fiction: nobody can claim the Polish debt is worth 100 cents on the dollar. In any case, there is much more at stake than just the debt. There has been no instance yet of successful economic reform in a Communist country; success in Poland would influence the entire region.
Y aquí lo cuenta todo el mismo Jorge
underwriting_democracy-chap-1-2017_10_05.pdf (georgesoros.com)
My newly created Open Society Fund also offered a number of scholarships in the United States to dissident intellectuals from Eastern Europe, and thiswas the program that led me to establish a foundation in Hungary. Selecting candidates became a problem after a while, because we had to go by word of mouth, which did not seem to be the fairest arrangement. It occurred to me that it would be advantageous to set up a selection committee in Hungary and have a public competition. I approached the Hungarian Ambassador in Washington, who contacted his government. To my great astonishment I got a positive reply.
Luckily for us, the propaganda apparatus of the Communist party put a ban on publicity concerning the activities of the Soros Foundation. We were allowed to advertise in newspapers and publish an annual report in accordance with our agreement, but that was all. As a result, the public became aware of our existence only gradually, and then only in connection with some activity that we were supporting. We made a policy of supporting practically any initiative that was spontaneous and nongovernmental. The name of the Soros Foundation kept on cropping up in the most unexpected places. The foundation attained a mythical quality exactly because it received so little publicity. For those who were politically conscious, it became an instrument of civil society; for the public at large, it was manna from heaven.
Encouraged by the success of the Soros Foundation in Hungary and aware of the reform movement in China, I put out feelers in the spring of 1986 to find out whether China might be ready for a foundation similar to the Hungarian one
Not long after China, I also established a foundation in Poland. The Open Society Fund had been operating a very successful Polish scholarship and visiting fellowship program at Oxford University under the direction of Dr. Zbigniew Pelczynski, and it was also supporting other Polish causes. Pelczynski, who visited Hungary regularly to select students for our Oxford scholarship programs, persuaded me to try my hand in Poland.
I visited Warsaw only occasionally, for a day or two at a time. Almost instantaneously, I established close personal contact with Walesa’s chief adviser, Bronislaw Geremek. I was also received by General Jaruszelski, the head of State, to obtain his blessing for the foundation. We had a very interesting conversation. I suggested that he sit down and negotiate with Solidarity.
The amount of time, money, and energy I devoted to the tras*formation of Communist systems increased tremendously when I decided to set up a foundation in the Soviet Union. I took my cue from Gorbachev’s telephone call to Andrei Sakharov in Gorky in December 1986 asking him“to resume his patriotic activities in Moscow.” (Sakharov told me later that the telephone line had to be installed especially for the purpose the night before.) The fact that he was not sent abroad indicated to me that a significant change had occurred in the Soviet Union. I was hoping to base my foundation on Sakharov as my personal representative. I went to Moscow in early March 1987 as a tourist. I had two introductions from Franz Alerdinck,a Dutchman who had set up a foundation in the Netherlands to sponsor media contacts.between East and West. One was to a high- ranking official in the Novosti news service and the other to the free-lance Soviet journalist Michael Bruck, who was the late Armand Hammer’s contact in the Soviet Union
We created our own rubles by donating some computers. I was visiting the head of the Institute for Personal Computers, who told me about his grandiose plans to produce millions of computers for the schools. He mentioned in passing that he had permission to import one hundred IBM ATs and the license was about to expire, but he did not have the dollars to pay for them. I volunteered to supply the dollars if he would give me rubles. “How many?” he asked. I took a chance: “Five rubles to the dollar.” The black market rate for tourists was about three rubles at the time. “Agreed.”
We started to branch out to the republics. I visited Kiev in the late spring of 1989. I timed my visit so that an expatriate Ukrainian business school professor whom I had gotten to know previously, Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, would also be there. On the first evening the leaders of intellectual life assembled at a meeting to put forward their ideas
In the fall of 1989 I visited Estonia and Lithuania. It was more like a state visit than a business call: I arrived everywhere by private plane with the crew of 60 Minutes trailing me. I was the first foreigner ever to land at Tartu in Estonia.
There was a period of about nine months when I was so involved in the Soviet Union that I neglected my Hungarian home base.
We had assisted Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest in a program to reform its curriculum. Over a three-year period, we sent some sixty lecturers, representing about 15 percent of the teaching staff, abroad to attend a business course, which they would then teach after their return. I was also a founder of the International Management Center in Budapest
After the Gentle Revolution in Prague in November 1989, the Charter 77 Foundation of Stockholm, which I had supported since 1981, sprung into operation inside Czechoslovakia fully armed like Pallas Athena. Frantisek Janouch, founder and executive director, flew toPrague, and I joined him a week later on December 13.
As I began writing this account (January 11, 1990), I was about to go to Romania, meaning to visit Bulgaria shortly afterward.
I tried desperately to reach President Bush before his meeting with Gorbachev in Malta, but I got only as far as Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. That is when I decided to write Opening the Soviet System
El mismísimo Viktor Orbán recibió en su día una beca de la fundación de Soros para estudiar en Oxford en 1987
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