Who will follow the orange revolution’s example?: Apricot, aubergine or
amber, popular uprisings in the former Soviet republics will continue

The Guardian – United Kingdom
Feb 25, 2005

The revolution in Ukraine was orange, and in Georgia the previous year
it was rose. Velvet revolutions, with their promise of closer links
with the West for former Soviet republics, are on a roll.

>From Kyrgyzstan to Moldova, the spectre of democracy is haunting
politicians and dominating the media. Design-conscious commentators
are guessing which colour the next uprising will adopt: claret in
wine-growing Moldova; apricot in southern Armenia; aubergine in
Azerbaijan; perhaps even amber in the Kaliningrad enclave where a wave
of unrest has hit dock workers. In Chisinau, the Moldovan capital,
nationalist leader Yuri Roshka has already booked the main square for
the period following the election on March 6. Banking on electoral
fraud, he plans to stage a repeat of the orange revolution.

Georgia and Ukraine are tempting examples, having overthrown their
ageing elites to usher in a new generation of western-educated
politicians committed to change. They seem to have reached the second
stage in the process of rooting out communism. And none too soon. Some
12 years after independence most of the republics have made little
real progress towards democracy. Having escaped from Moscow’s control,
many countries sank into one-party rule or outright tyranny.

The same corrupt elites, out of touch with popular demands, still hold
the levers of power, flogging to death Stalin’s maxim, “It’s not who
votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.”

Yet stuffing ballot boxes no longer works. In Ukraine and Georgia it
was the electoral fraud organised by the regimes in power that
triggered their fall. They wrongly assumed that voters were still
apathetic, whereas they switched roles and rose in protest.

“There will not be any rose, orange or banana revolutions in our
country,” the president of Belarus, Aleksander Lukashenko, assured the
press in January. Kyrgyzstan’s President Askar Akayev, facing a
general election on February 27 and a presidential election in
October, has criticised “attempts by provocateurs to prepare a velvet
revolution” in his country.

They have good reason to worry. In Kiev the young activists of the
Pora (It’s time) movement, which spearheaded the orange revolution,
are determined to spread the word across the former Soviet
Union. Carrying on where others started, they have contacted
opposition parties in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Russia sees these regime changes as underhand manoeuvres orchestrated
by the West. In the middle of the crisis in Kiev, the Kremlin’s spin
doctor Vyacheslav Nikonov warned: “If we lose Ukraine the West will
treat us as a banana republic.”

Reasserting Russian influence over its closest neighbours was among
the priorities for Vladimir Putin’s second term. But events have not
gone his way and Ukraine and Georgia are determined to join the EU and
Nato, following the example of the three Baltic republics.

The root problem is that Moscow has little to offer former Soviet
republics, apart from increasing energy dependency and one-sided trade
agreements.