Chapter 19: The Color Revolutions and Their Discontents

In a student apartment in Belgrade, in the autumn of 1998, a group of young Serbians read a book that changed the way they thought about power.

The book was Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship to Democracy, a slim handbook that had been translated into Serbian by a local NGO and passed from hand to hand. Sharp — an eighty-year-old scholar at the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston who had never overthrown anyone — had spent decades studying how power works and concluded that it flows not from the top down but from the bottom up. A dictator rules not because he possesses force but because institutions, businesses, bureaucrats, soldiers, and citizens choose, however reluctantly, to comply. Remove the compliance and the dictator is a man in an empty room.

Srđa Popović, one of the students, later described the experience of encountering Sharp's work: "Seeing the knowledge of how power operates — written systematically in one place — was quite an amazing thing." He and his colleagues built Otpor! — "Resistance!" — a student movement that used Sharp's framework to train over a thousand activists in forty-two Serbian cities. Their target was Slobodan Milošević, the architect of the Yugoslav Wars. Their method was ridicule, discipline, and mass noncooperation. In October 2000, after Milošević attempted to steal an election, Otpor-organized protests brought hundreds of thousands into the streets of Belgrade. The parliament building was occupied. The police stood aside. Milošević fell.

The revolution was broadcast live. And people were watching.

Within three years, Otpor's methods had crossed borders. In November 2003, mass protests triggered by manipulated parliamentary elections in Georgia forced President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign. Protesters carried roses — hence the "Rose Revolution." Their leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, had studied law at Columbia and knew how to speak to Western cameras. He was elected president with ninety-six percent of the vote.

A year later, in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution erupted when exit polls showed the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko winning an election that official results awarded to Viktor Yanukovych. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, wearing orange, occupied the Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square — in Kyiv for seventeen days. The Supreme Court nullified the fraudulent results. A new election was held. Yushchenko won.

In March 2005, Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution overthrew President Askar Akayev after disputed parliamentary elections. The pattern seemed unmistakable: stolen election, mass protest, regime change, democratic transition. Western commentators spoke of a "fourth wave" of democratization. Freedom was on the march.

Then the march stopped.

Popović and his colleagues at CANVAS — the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which they founded in 2003 — had trained activists in Georgia before the Rose Revolution and in Ukraine before the Orange. The training was openly acknowledged. So was American funding: the National Endowment for Democracy granted Otpor over $282,000 in 2000 alone, and total US appropriations for Serbia operations ran to tens of millions, though these supported far more than a single movement. None of this was secret. It was congressionally appropriated, publicly reported, and proudly claimed by the organizations involved.

From Moscow, it looked like something else entirely.

Vladimir Putin's government watched the color revolutions with a clarity sharpened by paranoia — or perhaps by a mirror-image of the same pattern recognition these pages have been practicing. Where Western observers saw organic pro-democracy movements assisted by international solidarity, Russian analysts saw rehearsed operations — externally funded, systematically trained, following a replicable template designed to install Western-friendly governments along Russia's borders.

Both readings contained truth. Both were incomplete.

The scholarly consensus — held by researchers like Mark Beissinger at Princeton, Lucan Way at Toronto, and Valerie Bunce at Cornell — occupies the uncomfortable middle ground. US government-funded organizations did provide real financial and logistical support to civil society groups in post-Soviet states. This is documented and was never hidden. But describing this as "the US orchestrated color revolutions" confuses providing resources with controlling outcomes. The domestic conditions — stolen elections, endemic corruption, authoritarian abuse — were the primary drivers. External assistance amplified existing movements. It did not manufacture them from nothing.

Beissinger characterized the color revolutions as "modular political phenomena" — revolutions that spread by emulation, constrained by local structural conditions. Each country's movement learned from the previous one's success. But whether the imported template worked depended on domestic factors that no external actor controlled.

Russia's response was not merely rhetorical. It was institutional.

Vladislav Surkov — First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration, a man who had come to politics from corporate PR — constructed an architecture of counter-revolution. In 2006, he introduced the concept of "sovereign democracy": the assertion that Russia had the right to its own democratic form, which meant, in practice, a system with one dominant party and several smaller parties that provided the appearance of opposition without challenging Kremlin power. It was a framework explicitly designed to prevent a Russian Otpor.

The 2006 NGO Law restricted the independence of nongovernmental organizations. The 2012 Foreign Agent Law required any organization receiving foreign funding and engaging in "political activity" — broadly defined — to register as a "foreign agent." Unlike the American equivalent, which targets those acting on behalf of foreign principals, the Russian law presumed foreign control from any foreign support. Seventy-three organizations were labeled, including environmental groups, human rights defenders, and charities. The law's purpose was less prosecution than chilling effect: the designation carried Soviet-era connotations of espionage, and self-censorship extended far beyond those formally targeted.

State-sponsored youth organizations — Nashi, "Ours" — were created specifically to occupy the social space that Otpor-style movements might fill. If the revolution's raw material was young, idealistic, networked citizens, the counter-revolution's strategy was to recruit them first.

General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff, published an article in 2013 describing how "a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict" through propaganda and subversion. Western analysts seized on this as the "Gerasimov doctrine" — Russia's playbook for hybrid warfare. Mark Galeotti, the scholar who coined the term, later retracted it publicly, admitting it was a placeholder that had taken on a life of its own. Gerasimov, Galeotti explained, was not prescribing a Russian strategy. He was describing what Russia believed the West was doing to it. The article was a threat assessment, not a battle plan.

The irony is precise. Russia saw the color revolutions as Western hybrid warfare. The West saw Russian counter-revolution as hybrid warfare. Each side attributed to the other the strategic coherence and conspiratorial control that messy reality denied to both.

Ukraine would test these competing narratives to destruction.

In November 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych — the same Yanukovych whose fraud had triggered the Orange Revolution nine years earlier, now legitimately elected after Yushchenko's government imploded — suspended Ukraine's EU Association Agreement under Russian pressure. Students protested. The police beat them. And the Maidan erupted again.

Survey data collected on the ground by political scientist Olga Onuch tells a story that neither Western nor Russian narratives fully capture. The median protester, Onuch found, "rallied for the rule of law, rather than for European integration, Ukrainian nationalism, or the partisan opposition." Top motivations included quality of life, human rights, and outrage at police brutality against students. The EU Association Agreement was the trigger, not the cause. For many Ukrainians, the agreement symbolized not geopolitical alignment but the concrete governance standards — anti-corruption measures, judicial reform, regulatory transparency — that came attached to it. They were protesting not for Brussels but against the corruption that made daily life an exercise in degradation.

The protests were genuine and bottom-up, though organized opposition groups attached themselves to the movement. Social media facilitated information flow, but pre-existing social networks — personal ties, community relationships, organizational memberships — were more influential in actual mobilization. The revolution was not orchestrated by Washington. It was also not purely spontaneous. It was the product of a society that had been building civic capacity — independent media, anti-corruption organizations, human rights networks — for a decade.

Yanukovych fled in February 2014. Russia annexed Crimea within weeks and fueled a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. The revolution's aftermath was shaped not only by its own internal dynamics but by the geopolitical earthquake it triggered.

The color revolutions' outcomes tracked with structural conditions, not revolutionary fervor.

Georgia, under Saakashvili, achieved the most dramatic anti-corruption transformation in the post-Soviet space: from 124th on Transparency International's index in 2003 to 45th by 2020. Sixteen thousand traffic police were fired in a single sweep and replaced with a rebuilt force that became the most professional in the region. Tax reform funded basic state functions. The improvements were real.

So was the authoritarian drift. Saakashvili concentrated power in a small circle. In November 2007, his security forces violently dispersed peaceful opposition protests — tear gas, rubber bullets, 508 people hospitalized — and shut down an opposition television station. The revolutionary who had come to power through protest used force against protesters. The pattern that had repeated from Cromwell to Lenin to the post-colonial leaders documented in Chapter 13 repeated again: the revolutionary becomes the thing he replaced.

Ukraine's first revolution, the Orange, failed more plainly. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, the revolution's co-leaders, fell into a destructive personal feud. Economic growth collapsed. Yushchenko received five percent in the 2010 election. Yanukovych — the fraud whose stolen election had sparked the revolution — won the presidency legitimately. It was a textbook case of revolutionary leadership failure through coalition fragmentation.

The Maidan, a decade later, produced more durable reforms — partly because Russia's military intervention created external pressure that sustained coalition coherence. But corruption remained embedded. Reform was ongoing, painful, and incomplete when Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 transformed Ukraine's political trajectory entirely.

Kyrgyzstan was the clearest failure. Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who replaced the ousted Akayev, "quickly imitated his predecessor, placing his brothers, sons, and other relatives into high-profile political and economic posts." His family ran the national economy, including the drug trade. He was overthrown in a second revolution in 2010. The replacement government established a parliamentary system — the most democratic institutional reform in Central Asian history. But the cycle of revolution-without-transformation had already deposited its lesson: regime change that preserves the patronage architecture merely rotates the beneficiaries.

The color revolutions and their aftermath deposited a lesson that no previous chapter could teach: in the twenty-first century, revolution is never purely domestic.

The revolutions were real. The grievances were real. The courage of the people who stood in squares and faced security forces was real. The external assistance — training, funding, moral support — was real but not controlling. The counter-revolution was also real: sophisticated, well-funded, and operating according to a coherent strategic logic.

The Fresco test applies with particular force here: did the color revolutions change the environment, or just the operators? In most cases, they replaced one set of operators in an institutional architecture that rewarded patronage, corruption, and power concentration. The architecture persisted. The operators rotated. Georgia's Saakashvili became his own predecessor. Ukraine's Orange coalition fragmented. Kyrgyzstan's Bakiyev replicated Akayev.

But the deeper problem was geopolitical. When revolution becomes a proxy in great-power competition — when Moscow sees Western regime change and Washington sees Russian interference — the feedback loop between a movement and its own society is disrupted by international actors whose interests have nothing to do with the greengrocer's dignity or the student's desire for rule of law. The revolution's signal gets intercepted before it reaches the system it was meant to reform. External powers amplify, distort, or suppress the feedback according to their own strategic logic — and the revolutionaries, who began by trying to be heard by their own government, discover that the loudest listeners are in foreign capitals.

This was the condition of the twenty-first century: revolutions that were simultaneously genuine and geopolitically instrumentalized, locally rooted and globally contested. The question they deposited — can revolution escape the gravitational pull of the international system it occurs within? — would find its answer not in the streets but in the slow, unglamorous work of institutional design.

That is the subject of the next chapter. And it begins, improbably, in a resort hotel outside Stockholm.