information:filtering, information:classification, structural:expansion
Central and Eastern Europe

According to Waldemar A. Nielsen, an authority on American philanthropy, " has undertaken... nothing less than to open up the once-closed communist societies of Eastern Europe to a free flow of ideas and scientific knowledge from the outside world". From 1979, as an advocate of ' open societies ', Soros financially supported dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary with a budget of $3 million.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Soros's funding has played an important role in the newly independent countries. A 2017 study found that a grant program by George Soros which awarded funding to over 28,000 scientists in the former Soviet republics shortly after the end of the Soviet Union "more than doubled publications on the margin, significantly induced scientists to remain in the science sector, and had long-lasting impacts". His funding of pro-democratic programs in Georgia was considered by Georgian nationalists to be crucial to the success of the Rose Revolution, although Soros has said that his role has been "greatly exaggerated". Alexander Lomaia, secretary of the Georgian Security Council and former Minister of Education and Science, is a former executive director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation), overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2.5 million.

Former Georgian foreign minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratization and that all the NGOs that gravitated around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. She opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.

Some Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Ercis Kurtulus, head of the Social Transparency Movement Association (TSHD) in Turkey, said in an interview 2006 that "Soros carried out his will in Ukraine and Georgia by using these NGOs... Last year Russia passed a special law prohibiting NGOs from taking money from foreigners. I think this should be banned in Turkey as well." In 1997, Soros closed his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for "tax and currency violations". According to The New York Times 1997, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has been widely criticized in the West and in Russia for his efforts to control the Belarus Soros Foundation and other independent NGOs and to suppress civil and human rights. Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society".

In June 2009, Soros donated $100 million to Central Europe and Eastern Europe to counter the impact of the economic crisis on the poor, voluntary groups and non-government organisations.

Since 2012, the Hungarian Fidesz government has labelled George Soros as an enemy of the state, due to his humanitarian and political involvement in the European refugee crisis. The government has attacked OSF, the international civil support foundation created by George Soros, and tried to revoke the licence of Central European University (Budapest) (which failed mostly due to significant public outrage). In response, Soros called the government "a mafia state".

As the 2018 election period started, the government introduced public posters with a photo of Soros to create hostility in the general public towards him, using statements such as "Soros wants millions of migrants to live in Hungary", and "Soros wants to dismantle the border fence ". The government also prepared a three-part law plan called the "Stop Soros package" (which followed other various law changes in the same year, hindering the workings of several international NGOs in Hungary), which would include various steps against NGOs doing volunteer work related to the refugee crisis.

In March 2017, six US senators sent a letter to then secretary of state Rex Tillerson asking that he look into several grants the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have given to groups funded by "left-wing" Soros. In the same context, the conservative group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State and USAID compelling them to release records regarding $5 million transferred from USAID to Soros's Open Society branch in Macedonia. The suit alleges that the money was deliberately used to destabilize the Macedonian government. The Open Society Foundation has said its activities in Macedonia were aimed at ethnic reconciliation with the Albanian minority and other forms of assistance since the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In January 2017, the "Stop Operation Soros" (SOS) initiative was launched in Macedonia. SOS seeks to present "questions and answers about the way Soros operates worldwide" and invites citizens to contribute to the research. In a press conference held during the same month, Nenad Mircevski, one of the founders of the initiative, stated that SOS would work towards the "de-Soros-ization" of Macedonia.

On May 16, 2018, Soros's Open Society Foundations announced they would move its office from Budapest to Berlin, blaming the move on an "increasingly repressive" environment in Hungary.