WP: Another Russian Revolution? (youth adopt Orange spirit)

[DeepModem Mom]

Another Russian Revolution?
Youth Movement Adopts Spirit of Uprisings Nearby

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 9, 2005; Page A17


MOSCOW, April 8 -- Suddenly in Russia, everybody's talking about a revolution.

In a country with a popular president, a growing economy and a fragmented and weak opposition, Russia does not seem ripe for the kind of revolt that toppled governments in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan over the past 17 months. But as Lenin once said, "a revolution is a miracle," and the Kremlin and its political opponents seem bewitched by the possibility of one.

"There is an Orange spirit in Russia," said Andrei Sidelnikov, the young head of the new Russian youth group Pora! (It's Time!), which took its name from the young activists at the heart of the street protests late last year that ultimately brought Viktor Yushchenko to power in Ukraine. "We are living through a new era of street politics. Our young people are becoming more and more active. . . . They might explode when they can't take it any longer."

Sidelnikov's assessment, delivered at a Moscow news conference this week, would have seemed ludicrous a few months ago. But following the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the government of President Vladimir Putin was unexpectedly shaken by thousands of retirees who took to the streets to protest cuts in their benefits. They were joined by the youth wings of opposition political parties.

The government quickly backed down and the challenge dissipated, but the fear or expectation of radical change has lingered....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38431-2005Apr8.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. I wonder how much of this branding is

our own making

[GHOSTDANCER]

2. I was sadly thinking the same. People will do the darnedest things for $$$

They should make a reality TV show called that.With Reaganist black book project CIA blank checks dating back to the 80's anythings possible.

[happyslug]

4. Or Spin, look at who is protesting, these are from the LEFT

Not the Right. I remember reading all during the 1990s about how the Communist Party was in decline in the than new Russian Republic. That Yelsin did not have to fear the Communists for they wer ein terminal decline (Being based on Pensioners and Bureacrats). Than after 2000, you heard NOTHING of the Communists and arely of the oppoisition to Putin. Why? In my opinion, the reason why is the American media does NOT like the idea that the oppositionot Putin is from the LEFT, not from the NEW parties that developed after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Communist Party.

The Communist party had declined all through the 1990s but that decline bottomed out in the late 1990s. Since 2000 the Russian Communist party has EXPANDED. The Russian Communist party is no longer just a party of bureaucrats and pensioners of Russia, a lot of younger people who had rejected it in the early 1990s are now joining. Is it the Party it was 1917-1991? No, but it is in a Stronger position than it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thus while the spin in the American Press has been the opposition to Putin, the Spin has made an effort to show it is NOT from the left, while if you look into the situation the only effective opposition to Putin is the Communist party and the economic left.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. the left in general is making a come back all over the wrold

we may be getting ready for a revulution folks, a world wide revolution and the kind our oligarchs will not like...

Assuming this is what is going on in russia... I will have to check on things... but even here, I have the feeling more people are starting to look at things they have not in literally decades

[jrthin]

3. It seems democracy is popping

up all over the world, except for America.

[chlamor]

6. Mythology of People Power- Reality of US-Backed Coups

Not saying this is the case in Russia but certainly fits the pattern. We'll see.

The Mythology of People Power
The glamour of street protests should not blind us to the reality of US-backed coups in the former USSR

by John Laughland

Before his denunciation yesterday of the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" which overthrew him last week, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power.

Originally used as a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa, before being adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which details how western-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year - after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas - means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country's control over the western hemisphere.

Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: "supporting democracy".

But for some reason, many on the left seem not to have noticed this continuity. Perhaps this is because these events are being energetically presented as radical and leftwing even by commentators and political activists on the right, for whom revolutionary violence is now cool.

<snip>

This myth of the masses spontaneously rising up against an authoritarian regime now exerts such a grip over the collective imagination that it persists despite being obviously false: try to imagine the American police allowing demonstrators to ransack the White House, and you will immediately understand that these "dictatorships" in the former USSR are in reality among the most fragile, indulgent and weak regimes in the world.

Even Young admits that Kyrgyzstan is the largest recipient of US aid in central Asia: the US has spent $746m there since 1992, in a country with fewer than 5 million inhabitants, and $31m was pumped in in 2004 alone under the terms of the Freedom Support Act. As a result, the place is crawling with what the ambassador rightly calls "American-sponsored NGOs".

The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA director James Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in Ukraine. It set up a printing press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60 opposition journals. Although it is described as an "independent" press, the body that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican senator John McCain, while the former national security adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The US also supports opposition radio and TV.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0402-26.htm