EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - You Say You Want a Revolution?

EURASIA INSIGHT

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?
Giorgi Kandelaki 1/19/05
A EurasiaNet Commentary

Many Georgians experienced a feeling of déjà vu as they watched the pictures broadcast from Kiev’s Independence Square last December. The events that followed Ukraine’s November 21 presidential election led many to conclude that a new wave of democratization was about to take the former Soviet Union by storm.

Neither before nor during the mass protests that followed Georgia’s November 2003 parliamentary election, though, would opposition activists in Tbilisi have dreamt of one-tenth of the support the Ukrainian opposition received from Western countries and institutions. After all, in October 2003, Western ambassadors and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had looked the other way when Azerbaijan’s rigged presidential election led to a brutal crackdown on opposition protestors.

Georgia’s Rose Revolution, however, showed Western governments that voters can indeed bring about regime change in the former Soviet Union and that their protests will not � as was predicted by the Western media in Georgia’s case � lead to civil war. Though Ukraine’s political weight is heavier than Georgia’s, the fact that the international community reacted as it did to an election scenario that did not differ strongly from that of Azerbaijan or Georgia is a dramatic improvement.

Georgia and Ukraine’s political cultures are quite different � Georgians opted for Mikheil Saakashvili’s dynamism, while Viktor Yushenko’s more reserved image prevailed with Ukrainians � but both countries illustrate the willingness of citizens in the post-Soviet era to take charge of their own political destinies.

Young people stood at the center of this phenomenon. Like Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, the 2004 Ukrainian Orange Revolution featured a new type of radical youth movement that encouraged voters to believe in their ability to bring about change. Modeled after Serbia’s Otpor and Georgia’s Kmara movements, Pora (It’s Time) blockaded the prosecutor general’s office, took charge of the opposition tent city in downtown Kiev and convinced the police to refrain from violence.

Unlike Georgia, there is no national election monitoring non-governmental organization in Ukraine that would have the legal right to receive copies of protocols from precincts and conduct impartial parallel vote tabulation. Instead, Pora observers organized "night watch" units, made up mostly of volunteers that stationed themselves at polling station doors on the lookout for possible voting irregularities. Activists also posed as journalists and queried polling station officials about absentee voting numbers in an attempt to detect potential patterns of "carouseling" or multiple voting.

Unlike Kmara, though, Pora featured diverse, primarily domestic funding sources. Scenes of ordinary people or businessmen coming to Pora’s offices with donations of food, money or equipment were not infrequent.

Already, leaders throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States are taking steps to make sure they are not faced with a similar show of people power. Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko has vowed to fight "orange spots which have started appearing" and has ordered crackdowns on opposition activists. In Kyrgyzstan, authorities are casting government critics as foreign-financed stooges intent on chaos for its own sake.

Will the new wave of democratization hit Russia? Maybe. For now, Ukraine and Georgia have mostly spurred conspiracy theories in Moscow that the uprisings in Kyiv and Tbilisi were well-staged coups orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Sadly, only a handful of Russian politicians and liberal-minded students traveled to Kiev to support the Ukrainian people. The opinion expressed by analyst Stanislav Belkovsky in a November 26 Nezavisimaya Gazeta piece that Ukraine’s "revolution was inevitable because the existing model of power in this country . . . wore itself out" is altogether a rarity.

Yet even in Russia, eventual change might be in the wind. "Events in Belgrade, Tbilisi and Kiev prove that those in the Kremlin’s offices who still think about a greater Russia have a good chance of witnessing major shakeups at home," recently wrote Vladislav Inozemtsev, editor of the Moscow-based Free Thought-XXI journal.

One potential shake-up in the works: nationwide street protests by thousands of Russian pensioners and war veterans who claim the state shortchanged them when it recently revamped its benefits policy. Media reports describe the demonstrations as the largest display of anti-government sentiment in the five years since Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power. One senior member of the ruling United Russia party has already noted that the protests could drive Putin to dismiss his entire cabinet.

As Yevgeni Gontmakher of The Center of Social Research and Innovation noted in a January 18 commentary in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the protests show that the Kremlin must "re-establish [a] direct dialogue" with the people. "Otherwise, Russia does not have future . . . if in a year or two the spring of public discontent unwinds and gives a start to a wave of uncontrollable events, the global community will not stay aside, and we will face a Yugoslavian version of social crisis rather than the Ukrainian one."

Such demonstrations show that even a tightly centrist government such as Russia’s may be called to account for its actions. As in Tbilisi in 2003 and Kyiv in 2004, the forecasts of naysayers were inevitably proven wrong once voters’ eyes were opened to the need for democracy and the bankruptcy of authoritarianism. That realization will come to the CIS. It’s only a question of when.

Editor�s Note: Giorgi Kandelaki is a freelance writer based in Tbilisi.

The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website, meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed debate about the social, political and economic developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is a program of the Open Society Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open societies around the world by supporting educational, social, and legal reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues.

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