Putin’s New American Fan Club?

Their board includes a famed ex-senator. Their goals couldn’t sound more benign. But a new outfit to promote “debate” between the U.S. and Russia has a decidedly pro-Putin lineup.

It is, most would agree, a worthy goal: to promote “open, civilized, informed debate” on Russian-American relations and bring about “a conclusive end to cold war and its attendant dangers.” But there are reasons to believe that the American Committee for East-West Accord, which is having its formal launch with a Capitol Hill event scheduled for November 4, may be involved in a less admirable mission.

“The more organizations there are having country-to-country conversations, exchanges and partnerships, the better, [especially in] an increasing atmosphere of anti-Americanism there and anti-Russianism here,” New School international studies professor and writer Nina Khrushcheva, a granddaughter of the late Soviet leader, told The Daily Beast in an email. Like several other analysts, however, Khrushcheva voiced concern that the group’s potential positive role was compromised by some of its members’ knee-jerk tendency to blame all tensions on the West while excusing the Kremlin’s and Vladimir Putin’s actions.

The committee’s seven-person board of directors includes former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, and former Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper. But its co-founders are two men who were part of the group’s forerunner, the American Committee on East-West Accord, a pro-détente organization that existed from 1974 to 1992. Stephen F. Cohen, the Russian history scholar, earned a certain notoriety last year with his dogged defense of Putin at the height of the Russia-Ukraine conflict; Gilbert Doctorow, a like-minded Brussels-based U.S. expatriate and self-styled “professional Russia-watcher,” has had a long career in multinational business as well as scholarship and punditry.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Cohen credited both himself and Doctorow with the idea of an advocacy group to counteract the new Cold War. “The model I had in mind was the American Committee, and it began to fester in my mind to re-create the equivalent,” says Cohen; the change from “on” to “for,” he says, was intended to make it “more proactive.” Both men began to publicly promote the initiative in early 2014. Doctorow, as ACEWA’s European coordinator, organized its first events in Brussels, including a panel last March that featured Cohen as well as Nation editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel, Cohen’s wife and frequent co-author on Russia-related issues.

Actively promoted in The Nation, ACEWA is clearly something of a Cohen-vanden Heuvel project. While vanden Heuvel is not a board member, Cohen told The Daily Beast that she “does help,” sometimes by mentioning the group’s activities to her contacts in Congress. Her father, William J. vanden Heuvel, a retired career diplomat and former United Nations ambassador, serves on the committee’s board and was even listed as its president in its incorporating papers. ACEWA also appears to have close ties to his philanthropy, the Melinda and William J. vanden Heuvel Foundation: The address listed on the committee’s tax filing last March is the foundation’s Manhattan address (and that of the investment firm Allen & Co., in which he is a senior adviser). None of the ACEWA representatives contacted by The Daily Beast would comment directly on whether the organization—whose U.S. budget is listed at $30,000 for this year—is financed by the vanden Heuvel Foundation; but both Cohen and Doctorow confirm that for now, its funding comes from board members.