The history of Rotary and Rotaract: worldwide and in Russia

The history of Rotary International worldwide

How a single club in Chicago grew into the world's oldest and largest community of service.

On 23 February 1905 the Chicago attorney Paul Harris gathered three friends: the mining engineer Gustavus Loehr, the coal merchant Silvester Schiele, and the tailor Hiram Shorey. Harris had come to Chicago from the provinces; the city struck him as cold and disconnected, and he wanted to gather around him people of different professions, so that friendship would serve their work and their work would serve the city. They met in turn at each member's office. Hence the name: Rotary, from rotation.

And so the world's first service club came into being.

It began as simple friendship. Yet within fifteen years clubs were at work on all six inhabited continents, the organisation had taken the name Rotary International, and service to society had become its central purpose. This came about by 1922.

In 1917 President Arch Klumph proposed establishing a charitable fund "for doing good in the world". The first contribution was 26 dollars. From that sum grew The Rotary Foundation, one of the largest private donors to humanitarian programmes in the world, from building schools to eradicating disease.

The Four-Way Test: the movement's code of ethics

In 1932 the Rotarian Herbert Taylor was rescuing an aluminium cookware company from bankruptcy. There was no money and no reputation left, and the only resource remaining was honesty in business. Taylor distilled it into four questions that employees were to ask themselves about every decision, word, and act.

The test proved so exact that Rotary adopted it as its own unofficial code. It still holds today, almost a century on. We set it out in full below, in the section on Rotary principles.

Polio and the global humanitarian campaigns

In 1985 the movement launched the End Polio Now campaign. The goal was set with great daring: to eradicate polio from the planet entirely. Since then cases have fallen by more than 99.9%, and billions of children across dozens of countries have been vaccinated through the efforts of Rotarians and their partners, including the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Today Rotary International brings together more than 1.2 million people in 46,000 clubs in almost every country on earth.

The history of Rotaract worldwide

The youth wing of Rotary International: from a single student club in the USA to a movement on every continent.

Rotary's youth programme was born almost six decades after the movement itself was founded. On 13 March 1968 the world's first Rotaract club was chartered in North Carolina, built on the same principles as adult Rotary: service, friendship, action. Only one thing was different, the age of its members: 18 to 30.

Traditions took shape at once. In the photograph above, members of the very first Rotaract club are planting a tree for each new country the movement reaches. They ran this project for many years together with their sponsoring Rotary Club of Charlotte.

From there the movement grew quickly. Within two decades Rotaract had spread across India, Australia, Europe, and Latin America, uniting students and young professionals around local and international projects, and by 2017, its fiftieth anniversary, it already counted thousands of clubs and hundreds of thousands of members.

The decisive change came in 2019. Rotaract clubs joined Rotary International directly, the upper age limit for membership was removed, and members officially became Rotarians on equal footing with those of the adult clubs.

Today there are more than 11,000 Rotaract clubs worldwide and over 200,000 members in more than 180 countries. Rotaract Moscow-East is part of that network.

The history of Rotary in Russia

Rotary's road into Russia was a long one: from the first diplomatic contacts in the Soviet era to today's District 2223, of which Rotaract Moscow-East is a part.

First steps: 1983–1990

The first known attempts to establish Rotary in Russia were made as early as 1983 by three Finnish district governors: Pentti Saaksjärvi, Yrjö Kaukiainen, and Teivo Ilmonen. They informed the General Secretary of Rotary International of their interest in forming clubs in the Leningrad region. In 1985 the initiative was backed by Rotary International President M. A. T. Caparas, and in August 1986 the press attaché of the Soviet embassy in Finland, Yuri Popov, received the first materials about Rotary.

From there events moved through diplomatic channels. On 18 February 1988 the USSR ambassador to Finland, V. M. Sobolev, sent his representative Pyotr Lillenurm to learn more about the movement, and the materials landed on desks in Moscow, with the people who could decide whether Rotary would come to the country.

The answer took more than a year. In April 1989 Yuri Popov, secretary of the embassy in Helsinki, approached the Rotary Club of Helsinki asking it to sponsor the first club in Moscow. The initiative was supported by past Rotary International President Rolf Klärich and sitting President Hugh Archer, who secured guarantees of support from the Soviet government.

1990: the first clubs are born

In early 1990 Rotary International adopted a plan for developing the movement in the USSR: one club in each of the 10 to 12 largest cities. It all took a single year. The Rotary Club of Moscow appeared in June, Irkutsk in July (chartered on 23 July), and Leningrad in October.

The geography turned out curiously: Moscow and Leningrad were placed in Finnish District 142, while Irkutsk went into District 5010, that is, American Alaska. Jorma Lampén, later a director of Rotary International, took an active part in founding the Leningrad club.

The 1990s: growth through hardship

In those first years the Irkutsk club took on some of the earliest social projects of Russian Rotary: a contribution to the Mercy Fund, 200,000 roubles for the oncology centre, the distribution of 34 tonnes of medical supplies from the German Red Cross to care homes, children's homes and hospitals, and the first school exchange between Oregon and an Irkutsk school. By 1994 hospitals in Irkutsk had received 2.5 million dollars in humanitarian aid.

In 1993–1994 Rotary International divided Russia into two zones, west and east of the Urals, assigning District 5010 to the latter. Almost immediately there was talk of removing Russia from its jurisdiction. The young district voted unanimously against and kept its independence.

By the end of the 1990s there were around forty clubs. For five consecutive years the committee for Rotary's development in Russia was chaired by Jack Randolph.

The 2000s: a growing network and the first Russian governor

In 2004–2005 a Russian became governor of District 5010 for the first time: Vladimir Donskoy of Irkutsk. By then the district ranked among the top twenty of the world's 530 districts for contributions to The Rotary Foundation, new Rotary and Rotaract clubs were opening from Vladivostok and Yakutsk to Barnaul and Krasnoyarsk, and twinning ties with districts in Korea and Taiwan were growing stronger.

2012: District 2225 becomes independent

The idea of dividing the vast District 5010, which covered all of Siberia and the Far East, had been discussed for five years. The decision came in 2012.

From 1 July 2012 the Russian part of the district became the independent District 2225, with Andrey Konyushok elected as its first governor. The district adopted its own governing documents, launched the site rotary2225.org, acquired its own anthem, and signed partnership agreements with districts in South Korea and Taiwan.

2015: 25 years of Rotary in Russia

In May 2015, for the first time in the history of Russian Rotary, a joint conference of two districts, 2220 and 2225, was held in St. Petersburg. The occasion was the movement's 25th anniversary in the country. More than 200 Rotarians came, from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad, along with guests from eleven countries.

The conference was chaired jointly by governors Mikhail Batkhan and Andrey Ibragimov; Rotary International director Julia Phelps sent her congratulations; and the discussions covered membership growth, the work of The Rotary Foundation, and partnerships with Germany, the USA, Bulgaria, India, Korea and Taiwan.

Today: District 2223 and our club

Today the Russian network is united in District 2223 of Rotary International: dozens of Rotary and Rotaract clubs working in contact with one another and with districts in other countries.

It was in exactly this tradition that our club appeared in Moscow in 2006. A private international community of young professionals, united by the same principles that brought together Paul Harris and his three friends a century earlier, and one that today builds its own partnerships with clubs in Ireland, Germany, Turkey and China.

The history of Rotaract in Russia

From the first clubs formed as Russian Rotary took shape, to today's network, of which Rotaract Moscow-East is a part.

Rotaract came to Russia in Rotary's wake. Through the 1990s and 2000s, youth clubs opened one after another alongside the new Rotary clubs, each under the wing of a sponsoring adult club. Ours came about the same way, in 2006.

By the mid-2010s this was already a substantial network. The 2015 district report counts 26 clubs and 391 members, and in a single Rotary year the two districts together ran 109 projects: support for children's and rehabilitation centres, special-needs schools and care homes, fundraising, and inter-club initiatives.

Today there are around sixteen Rotaract clubs in Russia, from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the Urals and the Far East, and all of them are part of an international network of more than 1.2 million Rotarians and Rotaractors across 200 countries.

Rotaract Moscow-East is one of them. Since 2006 we have run our own projects in Moscow, built partnerships with clubs in other countries, and remained part of District 2223.

The tradition that began in a small law office in Chicago in 1905 continues.