Our History

• Hosted Academician Abel Aganbegyan, then Rector of the National Academy of the Economy, for his first tour of the United States as one of Gorbachev’s chief economic advisors. This led to the development of a management-training program in Moscow with senior executives from across the Soviet Union.

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• Hosted a delegation of Soviet economists from Academician Leonid Abalkin’s Economics Institute, USSR Academy of Sciences. On this trip came an initiative from the Furth Foundation to generously donate funds to create an international competition for the best proposal offering a practical solution to the question of ruble convertibility as a problem of international trade. Esalen committed itself to work with the Furth Foundation and the USSR Academy of Sciences to conduct the competition. Prize money totaling $42,000 was awarded to the authors of six of the over 600 papers submitted to the competition. Award recipients were chosen in May 1990.

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• Hosted a second delegation of eminent Soviet writers including Vladimir Karpov, First Secretary of the USSR Union of Writers, satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky, playwright Viktor Rozov and short-story writer Tatiana Tolstoy who toured the United States and met with Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and other American writers to facilitate the entry of the Soviet Writers’ Union into the International Pen Club, which monitors government censorship and freedom of expression around the world. The Writer’s Union did indeed join the Pen Club as a central event of Soviet glasnost. Esalen and TRACK TWO consider this to be one of their most important contributions to the Soviet Union’s opening to free speech and democracy.