Moscow’s oldest distance-learning business school celebrated its 10-year anniversary indown Moscow on June 11 at the Novaya Opera. Representatives of the school and dignitaries from the Russian government and several international organizations gathered for the International Institute of Management LINK’s most recent graduation ceremony and to honor the school’s decade long run in Russia. In 1992, LINK came to Moscow’s wild entrepreneurial landscape with the dream of introducing management education to Russia.

LINK was one of a handful of business and management schools that came with the intention of teaching Russians the finer points of management and business skills essential to working in a Western company. In addition to its MBA programs, the school offers a “corporate manager”program for students looking to boost their management skills, courses in finance, English-language for business students and courses in marketing. With the support of the UK’s Open University, LINK opened the first network of business schools in Moscow and elsewherel. They now have 90 locations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakstan, Armenia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Using distance-learning programs, LINK has allowed students in many isolated and smaller cities to take advantage of Western-style business education. The program has attracted a large response and has already trained 40,000 managers and LINK hopes to have trained more than 100,000 graduates in Russia by the year 2010. Open University Pro-vice-chancellor Geoff Peters told reporters during the school’s Jubilee celebration that he was optimistic about the next 10 years. He said that LINK would take advantage of what it has learned over the last decade to introduce more education programs specifically tailored to Russia.

Russians have proven to be excellent students in the world of business education, showing equal, if not stronger results than their Western counterparts. “Students, especially motivated students, don’t really differ all that much anywhere in the world,” said Peters, adding that Russians were “very entrepreneurial”and “driven students.” Students were excited to have completed the program and were positive about their futures. But they were careful to point out that their educations were almost too advanced to be useful in older Russian companies.

“For me it was a question of personal development,” said Boris Veselov, chairman of the audit committee at Aeroflot and graduate of the school. “In Soviet companies they still don’t value MBAs, so I did it just to enrich my personal experience,” he added. In addition to representatives of the school, a number of dignitaries from the Russian government and international organizations turned up for the celebration, including Sir John Daniel, the deputy director for UNESCO responsible for education.