Harvard's Russian Research Center has received a $10 million gift from Kathryn W. Davis and the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles announced yesterday.

In recognition of the gift, the center will be renamed the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian Studies in April of this year.

"This very generous gift will add to the strength of one of Harvard's most distinguished and dynamic centers for international and area studies," President Neil L. Rudenstine said in a statement to the press yesterday.

Mrs. Davis has served on a visiting committee at the center for several years, according to Marshall Goldman, associate director of the Russian Research Center.

"This is not the first gift she's given us," Goldman said yesterday. "When I asked for the grant, she was very generous."

Goldman said the gift will be used to support "up to five Russian graduate students in the social sciences to learn about and take home with them a sense of democracy in America."

Goldman emphasized that the gift will support a broad range of programs, including sponsorship of visiting dignitaries and a planned undergraduate conference next April.

"It's the difference between struggling and thriving," he said. "Every other Russian center in the U.S. is having fiscal problems. Now we can demand the best faculty as well as stability."

The Davis Foundation grant is the second major gift received during the five-year, $2 billion University Campaign to an international center.

The first such gift was made in 1994, the first year of the campaign, to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.