Stephen White Foreword

Foreword It was, we were told, the ‘end of history’ when the USSR collapsed in 1991 and its various republics became independent states. Lenin, so far, has stayed in the mausoleum on Red Square. But across the entire post-Soviet region ruling parties were overthrown, official ideologies were repudiated, and red flags gave way to tricolours. In Warsaw, the party headquarters became the stock exchange; in Moscow, the Marx and Engels Museum became the Noblemen’s Club; in Tashkent, Lenin was replaced by Timur. Meanwhile, the international networks that had sustained communist rule were being dissolved – the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in June, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation in July 1991. The following year, Russia led the other post-Soviet republics into the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. We were, apparently, all democrats now. In the event, the changes that took place from 1989 to1991 were often cosmetic. Ruling parties, in some cases, had simply changed their name. The new leaders, it emerged, were often the old ones, who had transferred their allegiance to a more promising agency of political control without losing their authoritarian habits. Privatization, meanwhile, had been more successful in transferring property into the hands of a new elite than in distributing it among the population as a whole. With a weak legal system and an economically precarious, often subservient press, the opportunities for personal enrichment were too powerful to resist. Levels of corruption, however it was to be defined, rose sharply, and social differences widened. The ‘new rich’ did well, as did their friends in politics; women, the old, the young, the handicapped and the state-funded lost ground, in some cases spectacularly. But regime change, it became clear, had not come to an end. Corruption, social divisions, external intervention and other factors all played a part. Still more central to the irregular regime changes that took place from 2000 onwards were ‘stolen elections’: the attempts that were made by incumbent leaderships to maintain their position by falsifying election results so crudely that they precipitated widespread and apparently spontaneous popular resistance. Often, it was an exit poll that cast doubt on the official results, and it was this that led most directly to the public demonstrations that forced a new election and a change of leadership. It was these eruptions of popular discontent that became known as the ‘colour(ed) revolutions’, and they are the focus of this collection. For understandable reasons, others have colour_revolution_02.indd xv 14/05/10 5:17 PM xvi Foreword called them ‘electoral revolutions’; others still are doubtful that the extent of social change justifies a revolutionary terminology of any kind. As the editors define them, ‘colour revolutions’ should be considered as a ‘single phenomenon’, a sequence of ‘non-violent protests that succeeded in overthrowing authoritarian regimes during the first decade of the twenty-first century’. Their focus is the middle years of the decade, when first Georgia, then Ukraine and finally Kyrgyzstan saw incumbent leaderships thrown out of power as they attempted to usurp the ballot box; but they and the various contributors place these events within a wider sequence of political change ‘from below’ that can be traced back to pre-modern times. The colours, in fact, were often accidental: as the editors explain, the opposition in Kyrgyzstan had not yet made up their own mind on whether they should adopt a symbol (a lemon or a tulip) or a colour (purple, yellow or pink), and it was eventually President Akaev who decided the matter by calling it a ‘tulip revolution’. It is one of the strengths of this collection that it focuses as much on the absence of colour revolution as on its presence. How can we understand what brought about irregular exchange change in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan unless we examine the same factors – and others – in different locations? There was nothing uniquely post-Soviet about these changes. For many, they began no later than 2000, when a ‘bulldozer revolution’ forced Slobodan Milošević from power as he attempted to subvert the results of a presidential election. For others, they were part of a much wider movement, what Samuel Huntington called the ‘third wave’, which had its origins in the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 and which certainly included the upsurge of ‘people power’ in the Philippines in the late 1970s. For the editors, it is a sequence of changes that is still continuing, as we witness political turbulence in Myanmar, Iran and other locations around the world. But the postSoviet republics have much in common, and this makes them an ideal ‘laboratory’ in which the causes and consequences of a series of momentous and apparently related changes can be considered. Quite properly, the emphasis in this collection is on political change that did not take place as well as on political change that did. Accordingly, the various contributors look much more widely than the three most obvious ‘colour revolutions’ among the 15 post-Soviet republics; they also consider the cases in which a relative stability prevailed (such as Kazakhstan), and at the cases in which a potential insurgency was checked by force of arms and even bloodshed (most obviously in Uzbekistan in 2005). What was it that explained political change in some post-Soviet republics, but not in others? To what extent was it domestic factors, and to what extent external ones – direct intervention, or demonstration effects? If domestic factors were primary, then which ones: level of development, degrees of social inequality, or nothing more complicated than the balance of influence among competing elites? There are other themes that recur in this collection: for instance, the international dimension that has just been mentioned. It used to be ‘reds under the bed’. Now, apparently, it was non-violent movements of youthful activists, with a copy of Gene Sharp’s manual in their hands. Or at least that was how it seemed to the colour_revolution_02.indd xvi 14/05/10 5:17 PM Foreword xvii Kremlin, which spoke of a ‘stream of money from abroad’ (to quote Putin’s 2007 parliamentary address) that had been used to bring about domestic changes that advanced the interests of the foreign states that provided it. But the Kremlin was spending money as well; it just didn’t seem to be able to get such a good return on its investment. Ideally, we would like to go beyond elite games to the wider movements of activists, examining their characteristics and motivation. How much of the initiative came ‘from above’ and how much from the society itself? A time of civil insurgency, however, is not always a good time for social science: the action is on the barricades and within the crowds of demonstrators, not sitting at home and answering the kind of questions that seem meaningful to social scientists from other countries with their own agendas. What this collection does achieve is to bring both sides into sharper focus: not only elite manoeuvres, but also the popular movements that confronted them. It does so by using a common framework, and engaging specialists with a first-hand knowledge of a varied set of cases. Often, we hear from interviews with high-level participants, and from local publications in the indigenous languages. We hear from NGOs, and from ordinary members of the society, and come close to the events themselves – events that had their own dynamic, quite apart from the circumstances that might have brought them about. It would be too much to say that any collection of this kind can resolve all the issues of interpretation to which the ‘coloured revolutions’ have given rise. It would not be too much to say that the editors and contributors of this book have given us a firmer, more comprehensive and insightful body of analysis than we have so far had at our disposal in any language. Stephen White James Bryce Professor of Politics, University of Glasgow colour_revolution_02.indd xvii 14/05/10 5:17 PM