What Color is Your Revolution?

One of the reasons that paranoia about the Yugoslav example was so powerful was that it contained an element of truth: the United States had been quite open about supporting pro-democracy movements in the post-Soviet space; this was a significant part of their activity in Russia after 1991 (when Yelstin's government welcomed the assistance). As long as democracy was considered to be an ongoing national project, it was possible for foreign aid in democratization to look beneficial rather than sinister (even if the heavy hand of American assistance in propping up Yeltsin for his 1996 reelection was not a ringing endorsement of the democratic process). 

But in the aftermath of the NATO bombing, Otpor, and Milosevic's ouster, such activity looked suspicious. In the early twenty-first century, Putin and his advisors looked on as neighboring countries went through what came to be called "color revolutions": the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the following year, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan the year after that.  Though "color revolution" has become a term of art in Russia, the names of these three uprisings were as fortuitous as they were programmatic: protesters stormed the Georgian parliament with roses in their hands; orange was the color adopted by the Ukrainian opposition candidate, and the tulip is the national flower of Kyrgyzstan. Nevertheless, these names highlight an important commonality that Putin's regime has not ceased to harp on: the influence of American political scientist Gene Sharp (1928-2018).

“Color revolutions will not succeed: Moscow and Belgrade stand firm!”

Founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, an NGO devoted to the study of nonviolent resistance, Sharp is perhaps best known for his 1994 book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.  In all his works, starting with this first book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), Sharp developed Gandhi's ideas about the efficacy of nonviolence within a particular theory of government:  it is the subjects of the state that grant power.  Should the subjects (that is, the citizens) withhold their consent to be governed, the state can respond with violence, but that is usually playing into the hands of the resistance.

Sharp insisted that he was a scholar rather than an activist, but From Dictatorship to Democracy, which was has been translated into dozens of languages, easily serves as a handbook for would-be revolutionaries. Given that he frames the question of revolution as a struggle against dictatorship, Sharp has been widely acclaimed throughout the Western world.  His ideas, and the support of the Albert Einstein Institution, played a role in the 1980s Baltic separatist movement, Otpor in Serbia, and the Arab Spring, among other uprisings.  

There is nothing neutral about a revolution or supporting a revolution, and so Sharp remains the subject of heated polemics, not only in the countries where resistance movements have followed his playbook, but also on the Western Left.  Sharp had strong ties to the foreign policy establishment of the 70s and 80s; could his writings just be Cold War ideology repackaged as popular liberation? In 2019, Marcie Smith published an essay calling Sharp “one of the most important Cold War defense intellectuals that the U.S. has produced," whose critique of the centralized state is another form of neoliberalism. Despite the popularity of his writings among American Leftist protesters, Smith sees Sharp as a fellow traveler for neoliberal and corporate interests. Sharp has a point, but she also displays a common fallacy among the American Left in her interview with Jacobin's Branko Marcetic:

And it seems Sharp was right. The USSR is dead, vestiges of socialism in Eastern Europe have largely been eliminated through the Color Revolutions, Yugoslavia was destroyed, and so on, all nonviolently.

Blaming the Color Revolutions for destroying the "vestiges of socialism in Eastern Europe" is a misunderstanding of the both these revolutions' goals and the character of the regimes they attempted to overthrow.  They were aimed at the government, not at the welfare state.  Equating Eastern European regimes (dictatorial or otherwise) with the "vestiges of socialism" is a matter of sentimentality more than anything else, a desire to see the postsocialist regimes so often denounced by Western leaders in terms of their countries' previous commitment to a socialist project.   Yet so many of these regimes, Russia's included, are following a neoliberal path of their own.  In Russia, it was the Putinist neoliberal attacks on the social safety net that caused significant unrest back in the days when street protest was not an automatic ticket to prison.  A 2005 law replacing a set of benefits for retirees, veterans and the disabled with meager cash payments brought otherwise apathetic Russian citizens out into the public square, picket signs in hand. As  late as 2018, a law raising the retirement age sparked rallies and demonstrations throughout the Russia's major cities.  

Whatever some Western Leftists might think about Sharp, he, like Soros, became a useful folk devil for Putinist propaganda, featured in news reports about the West's plans to dismantle the Russian Federation (as they supposedly, and successfully, plotted to destroy the USSR). . The "Color Revolutions" his work helped inspire ultimately became a set of buzzwords used to scare and intimidate: whatever "color revolutions" actually were, they would not be tolerated in the Russian Federation.  Protesters against Putinist policies were, by definition, either hired hands or dupes of Western security forces scheming to destroy the RF.  By the time of Russia's second invasion of Ukraine, opposition was tantamount to treason.

 Next: The Language Police