The Kennan Institute, a Washington-based center for advanced research on the countries of the former Soviet Union, has an illustrious, decades-long history. The Institute was co-founded in 1974 as a joint initiative of Ambassador George F. Kennan, James Billington, who was then the Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the historian S. Frederick Starr. The Institute was named in honor of Ambassador Kennan’s relative, George Kennan “the Elder” (1845-1924), a nineteenth-century explorer of Russia and Siberia. 

Since its inception in 1974, the Kennan Institute has been a meeting place for serious conversation about policy and ideas. It has offered expert assessments to the executive and legislative branches of government, and it has been a place for the generation of knowledge, from policy briefs to academic monographs. Its mission did not fundamentally change after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, despite the many alterations to the regional map and to the regional environment that came about in the 1990s and thereafter. 

In 2025, the Kennan Institute separated from the Wilson Center and became an independent institution. Its mission is today as it has long been: to produce high-quality, non-partisan analysis of the former Soviet Union, to convene meetings and conversations aimed at contributing to policy debates and to policy formation, to cultivate new generations of strategic thinkers, to engage in extensive public outreach and to serve as a bridge between “the world of ideas and affairs in Washington,” in the words of James Billington. For the past fifty years, this mission has been critically important, and so it remains today.