Softer Russian Power.(World Affairs)(why former Soviet republics prefer to learn English)

Byline: Owen Matthews; With Anna Nemtsova in Tbilisi

Moscow once extended its reach through schools and language. No more.

It's been more than a century since a member of the Mebagishvili family of Tbilisi, Georgia, grew up not speaking Russian. Like educated families all over the Russian Empire, the Mebagishvilis viewed the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy as essential for anyone who wanted to get ahead--or to be considered fully civilized. But 20-year-old Helen Mebagishvili, a philosophy and social-science student at Tbilisi's Ilia Chavchavadze University, has chosen English, not Russian, as her first foreign language. She's studying another, too: French. "I do not feel any attachment towards Russia," she says as she packs the shelves of a new university library with Penguin editions of Mark Twain, James Joyce and Charles Dickens. "Once, Russia introduced European ideas to Georgia--but now we have direct access to European ideas."

All across the former Soviet Union, thousands of students are making the same choice--turning away from the Russian language to embrace English, as well as the education standards of Western Europe and America. "Our students want to integrate into the European community rather than keep up with their Russian," says Anatoly Bourban at one of Ukraine's leading universities, Kiev's Mohyla Academy, where courses are taught in Ukrainian and English only. Azerbaijan's leading private university, the Khazar University in Baku, teaches primarily in English and offers U.S.-style M.B.A. courses. So do the Georgian American University and the Black Sea University in Tbilisi, and the American University of Central Asia, based in Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek, which also offer Western syllabi and Western standardized tests--in part in order to enable their students to pursue studies abroad. "I have been watching the Russian language disappear in Georgia since 1992," says Prof. Charles Fairbanks of the Washington-based Hudson Institute, who teaches a course on great books at Chavchavadze University six months a year. "Now only one third of my students can read Russian," he says. "The majority communicate and read fluently in English."

The implications extend far beyond the classroom. The language and culture in which people educate their young say a lot about the world they expect their kids to grow up in. For many members of the elite in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic republics--and to a lesser extent Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan--the cultural center of gravity is no longer Moscow. "Russia has lost the soft-power war," says the U.S.-educated president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. His government is funding scholarships for 1,000 local students to attend top Western universities, and has recruited 300 U.S. and European professors to teach part time at major Georgian universities. Even Georgian university exam papers are now graded in the United Kingdom, although that's more to prevent corruption in admissions standards.

Many in the West (and in Moscow) see Russia as a resurgent power, pumped up by oil money and flexing its muscles around the world. But as Saakashvili points out, this bravado masks a deeper weakness. Moscow has asserted itself mostly by picking fights with its neighbors--with Ukraine over gas prices, with Estonia over ...