Is the situation in Russia ripe for an Orange Revolution? (01/02/05)

Is the situation in Russia ripe for an Orange Revolution?

by Julie A. Corwin
RFE/RL Newsline

"Will Ukraine's Orange Revolution spread to Russia?" might seem like an improbable question to ask in the absence of any rivals to President Vladimir Putin. After all, Mr. Putin easily won re-election in March. Yet, a torrent of ink has been spilled in the Russia media in recent weeks posing exactly that question. The answers reflect not just how the authors view events in Kyiv, but the desirability of participatory democracy in Russia.

Among the gamut of responses, perhaps the most "militant" was that of Viktor Militarev, vice-president of the National Strategy Institute. In an article for Rossiiskie Vesti, No. 42, he declares: "The main aim of the 'orange' revolutionaries is clearly being overlooked - [their target] is Russia. In Kyiv we can observe several processes occurring simultaneously. The forces at play are not simply dissatisfied with Mr. Putin. [They] are prepared for active engagement in the overthrow of the president of Russia. In the first place, I have in mind [former oligarch] Boris Berezovskii and [Yukos shareholder] Leonid Nevzlin."

In an interview with dni.ru on November 25, Marat Gelman, a political campaign consultant who is believed to have worked on Viktor Yanukovych's campaign, also floated the idea that opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko received financial support from Mr. Berezovskii. According to Mr. Gelman, it is Mr. Berezovskii's role that prompted President Putin to play such an active role in the Ukrainian race. Mr. Yushchenko's big mistake - according to Mr. Gelman - was taking money from Mr. Berezovskii in the first place, thus provoking the Russian president's ire.

Writing for RosBalt on November 24, Vladislav Kraev argues that the threat of a "velvet revolution" in Russia is a real one, but it exists primarily in the long term. According to Mr. Kraev, the experience of the last 10 years in the post-Soviet space shows that any kind of election is "risky," even when there is a "charismatic" leader such as Boris Yeltsin or an experienced politician such as Eduard Shevardnadze or Heidar Aliyev. "And when the acting head of the government is leaving then the risk doubles," he writes. "Russia in 2008 will confront the necessity of the search for an alternative scenario."

"Russian liberals," Mr. Kraev wrote, "sincerely enraptured by the revolution of their neighbors and their development of an active 'civil society,' for some reason do not want to hear that people on the streets say 'Ukraine isn't Russia.' This is really so! Therefore, any poorly concealed hopes [on the part] of politicians and political analysts for a future repetition of the velvet revolution in Moscow appear completely naive. My advice for the doubters: Remember October 1993!"

In an interview with RFE/RL's Moscow bureau on December 9, Vyacheslav Nikonov of the Politika Foundation echoed both Mr. Militarev's and Mr. Kraev's sentiments. Mr. Nikonov argued that what happened in Ukraine was the result of a long-planned "special operation" that was "successful only because the Ukrainian government simply capitulated before this special operation." The Russian government, he noted, will never do this. "It is completely obvious to me that if the president of Ukraine had been not [Leonid] Kuchma but [Boris] Yeltsin, then no kind of orange revolution would have had a chance," Mr. Nikonov said. "Mr. Yeltsin had a lot more will than Kuchma, as he demonstrated effectively and actively in 1993."

In an interview at RFE/RL's Moscow bureau on December 9, former Union of Rightist Forces leader Boris Nemtsov suggested that the stories about excessive Western influence in Ukraine might be a device that Russian authorities are using to avoid telling the truth about what really happened in Ukraine. He said Russia's authorities "treat their own people cynically and invent such arguments of the type that the West influenced [events], or the campaign consultants worked poorly - anything but the truth that the people were tired of the Kuchma regime, the people were living in despair and lawlessness, and their last drop of patience was spent when the election was falsified."

Speaking on the same RFE/RL broadcast, Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii declared that regardless of one's interpretation of events in Ukraine, direct parallels cannot be drawn with Russia as circumstances in that country are completely different from those in Ukraine. "Ukraine didn't have 10 years of war in Chechnya," he said. "There were no executions in front of the Supreme Soviet in 1993 by tanks. There was no privatization as it was done here in Russia. Ukraine doesn't have a resource-based economy. In addition, for 15 years everyone in Ukraine has been saying firmly and understandably that they want to be a European country, independent of what their leaders were really doing. And this means that in Ukraine the preconditions for the creation of a civil society turned out to be stronger as a result, and we are now observing this. In Russia, the situation is different."

So the answer to the question would seem to be "not yet" from both ends of the political spectrum - the conditions are not yet ripe for importing the Orange Revolution from Kyiv to Moscow. From the liberal point of view, civil society has not yet developed enough, and from the nationalist point of view, Russian authorities will not bend in the face of a Western-orchestrated uprising.

In the meantime, however, both sides can use events in Kyiv to further their own agendas.

In an article for RBK on December 1, Mikhail Chernov declared: "The harsh polemic around the 'Orange Revolution' sheds light on the existing situation in Russia: In our country there are sufficiently influential forces whose activities are directed against the existing government." Mr. Chernov went on to quote Aleksandr Sobyanin, director of the Strategic Planning Service of the Association of Cross-border Cooperation, who called for a "quick change of the elite at all levels of government power" because there are "representatives of Boris Yeltsin's business group, regional elites, the majority of the mass media and the PR community, [who] will not accept and cannot accept a widening of Russia up to the borders of the former Soviet Union."

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