Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Kennan Institute was founded in 1974 to carry out studies of the Soviet Union. It was established at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., with the involvement of diplomat George F. Kennan, Wilson Center Director James Billington, and historian S. Frederick Starr.
The institute is named after George Kennan, a nineteenth-century American explorer of Russia and Siberia. He was a much older cousin of diplomat George F. Kennan, the author of the U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In 2025, the Trump administration closed most programs of the Woodrow Wilson Center, which had housed the Kennan Institute since its founding. In response, the institute declared itself an independent non-profit and transferred its collections and endowment out of the Wilson Center's control.
The Kennan Institute has its main office in Washington, D.C., and operates a second office in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Kyiv office provides on-the-ground support to the Washington staff and maintains communication links with Ukrainian organizations.
The Kennan Institute studies Russia and the post-Soviet states, with recent research topics including religion in post-Soviet societies and migration in the post-Soviet space. It also offers residential fellowships to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as specialists from government, the media, and the private sector.
The Centers for Advanced Study and Education, known as CASE, was a program the Kennan Institute administered in cooperation with the ISE Center in Moscow. Supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, it established nine thematic research centers at regional Russian universities to foster scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.