Crowds of protesters and a repressive police response. This scene is all too familiar across Europe. What about Georgia though…who has more to fear? The government, Russia, or the protesters?
Protesters may think they have history on their side, but their opponents may want to halt or at least delay it.
The crackdown ordered by the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party shows that Moscow has not forgotten the damage color revolutions have dealt to its authority in other post-Soviet republics. In an early foreshadowing of pro-independence transitions elsewhere, the Chechen Revolution in the early 1990s proved that Russia may not be able to salvage the whole body of the rotting Soviet behemoth. The Chechens managed to wrestle out their sovereign state – Ichkeria – which would exist until the year 2000, when Russian forces captured its capital, Grozny.
November 2003 saw the Rose Revolution bloom in Georgia. Unfolding in the wake of disputed parliamentary elections, this nonviolent change of power brought about the resignation of President Eduard Shevardnadze and an end of the Soviet-era leadership in the country.
Just like in Georgia, indignation and opposition to massive corruption, voter intimidation, and electoral fraud in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election run-off, made Ukrainians take to the streets of Kyiv en masse to demand market-based economic and political reforms. Only several months later, Kyrgyzstan saw the Tulip Revolution overthrow President Askar Akayev. The reason for the public unrest was Akayev’s alleged intention to continue ruling the country through one of his two children, both of whom got the highest results in the rigged 2005 presidential election.
Now Moscow is risking losing its grip on Tbilisi again in circumstances similar to those that triggered the previous color revolutions. Depending on how the protests in Georgia continue, the country may share the fate of the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020 or see Russia’s Georgian Dream go up in smoke.
Join Jan Darasz and his guest Grigol Julukhidze, an Associate Professor at the Caucasus University for How We Got Here
#GeorgiaProtests #ColorRevolutions #Russia #PostSoviet #GeorgianDream #RoseRevolution #Democracy #Chechen #EasternEurope #Revolution
#Caucasus #Protests #HowWeGotHere #Geopolitics #HumanRights #SovietLegacy
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