What Comes After Rose, Orange and Tulip?
By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 3, 2005
Page B03
Shortly after the so-called Rose Revolution in the tiny republic of
Georgia, the leaders of the other nations that once made up the Soviet
Union gathered in the Caspian Sea oil town of Baku for the funeral of
Azerbaijan’s longtime strongman president. There the heads of state of
Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian republics paid their
respects to their fellow authoritarian even as they nervously eyed
the instigators of the democratic uprising in their midst.
It naturally fell to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in private
and sometimes in public has demonstrated a taste for earthy, even
crude language, to sum up the jittery mood. He walked over to one of
the leaders of the Georgian revolution, two Georgian officials later
told us, and declared pungently that all of the heads of state in
the room were “[messing] in their pants.”
As it turned out, those presidents were right to worry. Since that day
in December 2003, two more of the men who belonged to that exclusive
club have been unceremoniously pushed out of office by popular street
revolts, first in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution last December and now in
the March Tulip Revolution in the nomadic mountain state of Kyrgyzstan,
hard up against the Chinese border.
The swift spread of the revolutions has unsettled tyrants and inspired
democrats throughout the vast reaches of Moscow’s former empire,
generating excited, if overheated, discussion of what some analysts
over the last week were quick to dub “the second breakup of the
Soviet Union.” Some were even daring to ask the ultimate question:
Could Russia itself be next?
After four years as The Washington Post’s bureau chiefs in a country
where even the past, as the old Soviet joke goes, is unpredictable,
we learned that just about anything is possible. But we also spent
our entire tour watching Putin’s Kremlin systematically embark on a
project to avoid any threat to its rule, methodically neutralizing
alternative power centers that one day might conceivably challenge the
former KGB colonel’s grip on power. And the lesson he seems likely
to learn from Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan is not to open up the
political process but to crack down even harder.
The results of the Kremlin campaign that began with Putin’s election
five years ago last week are evident today — no independent television
to serve as a bullhorn for revolution, as it did in Georgia; a
divided, weak and unpopular reformist opposition unable to unite
around a single leader, unlike the broad coalition that formed in
Ukraine; and cowed businessmen unable or unwilling to finance rival
political efforts after watching the Kremlin jail Russia’s richest
man and confiscate his oil company.
Even in the early days of Putin’s presidency, when it was still
unclear to many where he intended to take the country, his advisers
were plenty clear about the project. “Putin has said he wants to end
the revolution,” his political consultant, Gleb Pavlovsky, told us
at the time, “not to start a new one.”
And so there was Pavlovsky last week, telling a Moscow news conference
confidently, “There is no threat that what happened in Georgia and
Ukraine may happen in Russia.”
Unlike the fading, aging leaders there and in Kyrgyzstan, Putin,
he intimated, would not hesitate to stop any such uprising by force.
“Weapons should be used against rebel groups and criminals who actually
stormed the parliament building in Bishkek,” he said, referring
to the Kyrgyz capital. “If the authorities fail to perform their
institutional duties in those cases, they give away power. . . . In
all cases where organized citizens promote this revolution scenario,
they should be suppressed.”
When he came to power, Putin was determined to end a revolution
— Boris Yeltsin’s. Even though Yeltsin had handpicked him as his
successor, Putin saw the 1990s not as the heady if flawed start of
a new democracy but as a period of roiling instability, economic
dislocation and crumbling state power.
“If by democracy one means the dissolution of the state,” he once told
a group of American correspondents when we asked him about his rollback
of democratic institutions, “then we do not need any such democracy.”
Elections were part and parcel of what Putin considered the unseemly
mess of democracy and his counter-revolution was all about making
sure they did not become the trigger for revolution as elsewhere
in the former Soviet Union. At first, his Kremlin tried to control
them, coming up with the idea of “managed” elections, whose outcomes
could be manipulated by authorities. When that proved troublesome,
Putin decided simply to cancel gubernatorial elections in Russia’s
89 regions altogether.
We got an indication of this attitude toward elections early in
our tour when we went to the next-door republic of Belarus for the
balloting that would hand a second term to Alexander Lukashenko, often
called Europe’s last dictator. While Western election observers trooped
around polling places amassing evidence of manipulation, we found the
head of the Russian monitoring team at a medieval castle outside the
capital being feted at a private lunch before touring the countryside.
The official was so confident in the election’s outcome that he had no
apparent need to actually monitor it — having already told the press
that it was being conducted in a free and fair manner. Appropriately
enough, the official was Alexander Veshnyakov, head of the Russian
Central Election Commission.
In the various corners of the old Soviet empire, we met hundreds
of activists over the last few years from political parties, human
rights groups and media organizations who dreamed of toppling the
repressive regimes that had emerged from the ashes of communism. In
Belarus, we watched burly police beat young boys on a Minsk street for
daring to hold an unauthorized protest. In Uzbekistan, we visited an
aging Soviet-era dissident who had taken up the cause of persecuted
Muslims imprisoned merely for wearing beards as a sign of faith. He
interrupted the interview to show us his bloodstained shirt from the
day police stormed into his apartment.
Nowhere was the discontent stronger than in Georgia, Ukraine and
Kyrgyzstan.
From the moment we set down in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, for
instance, we could find not one person outside government who still
supported then-President Eduard Shevardnadze. In a market one day,
vendors we interviewed grew so agitated that one woman began gesturing
with a butter knife and vowing that she would kill Shevardnadze if
she had the chance.
Some of the preconditions of revolution were similar in all three
countries: long-standing grievances over poverty; corruption; and
a distant, calcified government that had long since overstayed its
welcome. In each case, the ruler had evolved from an ostensible
democratic reformer to a dynastic ruler guarding his own family’s
interests — Shevardnadze’s son-in-law made millions in Georgia,
Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law became one of Ukraine’s biggest tycoons
and Askar Akayev’s son and daughter have just been installed in the
Kyrgyz parliament.
Perhaps most important, though, was that in each country there was
just enough political space for the opposition to operate, making for
noticeably more open environments compared with neighboring countries.
By contrast, in Azerbaijan, a tough-minded new president — son
of the old KGB general at whose funeral Putin made his comment to
the Georgians — quickly quashed street protests by the opposition
after his election, determined not to follow the revolutionary
script. It worked, and we watched as Baku’s Freedom Square turned
into a battlefield, with hundreds of baton-wielding police beating
demonstrators, many of them women and unarmed men. Opposition leaders
were then rounded up and jailed. No one thinks Azerbaijan is on the
brink of revolution today.
In a joint message to the Kyrgyz people last week, the leaders of the
Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor
Yushchenko, hailed the developments in Bishkek. “These events showed
that in our three countries the elections were just one of the reasons,
the last straw that broke the people’s patience and moved them towards
the uprising.”
But they also added an important caveat; for all the buzz
about democratic upheaval sweeping the former Soviet Union, such
revolutions can happen only when they are fueled by local conditions
and people. “Revolutions cannot be exported,” they wrote. “They happen
only where there are objective grounds in place.”
While many call this the second wave of democratization across
the Soviet Union, that may misjudge the nature of the regimes that
took hold when the union fell apart in 1991. In many of the newly
independent states, the old communist boss simply became the new
“democratic” president, and others who later took over, like
Lukashenko, were simply old apparatchiks.
“There wasn’t really a democratization wave 15 years ago,” a senior
Bush administration official told us the other day. “The old regime
crumbled, and it was replaced by local authorities. This is really the
first wave. It’s a delayed thing. These countries came out blinking
and confused into the light of sovereignty, not democracy, and they
were taken over by local strongmen. These strongmen sometimes paid
lip service to democracy, but the people knew the difference.”
Alexei Mitrofanov, a member of the Russian State Duma, the lower house
of parliament, is one of the most outlandish nationalist politicians
in Russia, but he put his finger on it when he told the newspaper
Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the revolutions around the perimeter of the
old empire mirrored Yeltsin’s revolt against Soviet power. “They’re
the equivalent of August 1991 with a 14-year delay,” he said, not
meaning it as a compliment.
If that’s the case, then, Russia may not feel the need to head down
the same road. To many Russians, revolution and democracy have become
tainted terms, equated with chaos and hardship, not freedom. Unlike
what we saw in Georgia, Belarus or Ukraine, we rarely encountered
deep-seated grass-roots discontent with Putin when we traveled the
Russian countryside. Outside the narrow circle of intelligentsia in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, many Russians agreed with Putin that a
little autocracy was a good thing, and they handed him a second term
in last year’s flawed but probably representative election.
But many uncertainties remain as Russia heads toward the crucial year
of 2008, when Putin’s second and final term under the constitution
expires. Many in Moscow believe he will try to find a way to
hold onto power, and the city is abuzz with various schemes he
could use to remain in control. “Well, who could stop them?” Olga
Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian elite, said in
Profil magazine. “The opposition? We don’t really have an opposition
at all.”
Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, recently broke a
year-long silence to criticize his ex-boss and seems to be positioning
himself to be a Russian Yushchenko. But many say they doubt he could
pull it off, especially given his own unpopularity with the masses,
who blamed him for anything they did not like in Putin’s first term.
And so, if there were a revolution in Russia, many worry that it
would not happen peacefully. The color of revolution in Moscow, then,
might be red for blood.
Authors’ e-mail: [email protected] [email protected]
Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, who finished a four-year tour as The
Post’s Moscow bureau chiefs in November, are authors of “Kremlin
Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution,” to be
published by Scribner in June.