BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Published: April 3, 2005

What Would Happen if Russia Exploded in Protest?

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW - The political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan arrived like another fresh breeze of democracy blowing across the former Soviet republics, one that supporters of democracy in the region hope will also sweep aside the other ossified autocracies that emerged from the Soviet collapse.

It may do the opposite.

For those in power in Central Asia, in the Caucasus, in Belarus and, above all, in Russia, the popular uprisings in Kyrgyzstan and, before that, in Georgia and Ukraine, have provided lessons all right - but ones that may lead to a squelching of embryonic dissent before it spills into the streets.

Askar Akayev, the Kyrgyz president who bolted for the safety of Russia after protesters swept his capital, Bishkek, said as much, urging leaders of neighboring states to react more harshly than he had when faced with what he called an anticonstitutional coup.

"If a forceful seizure of power is planned, I think force has to be used to protect democracy," he said in a telephone interview. "This is the lesson I have drawn from the events of Bishkek." He says Kyrgyzstan's government was not the authoritarian regime depicted by opposition leaders.

In Russia, where the uprisings in its neighborhood have been viewed with something close to alarm, Mr. Akayev's opinion seems to mirror a consensus, one with ominous portents for Russia itself and for other countries facing discontent after 13-plus years of corruption, half-promises and stifled freedoms since the Soviet Union fell.

"Akayev does not seem to me to be a staunch fighter," Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, president of the Politika Foundation, a research group in Moscow, said dismissively in a radio interview last week. "If he had been a fighter, he would not have let power slip from him so easily."

The paradox is that the democratic uprisings that have succeeded in the former Soviet republics have toppled governments that were, relatively speaking, more democratic - if only because of their desire to keep the good will of the United States and Europe.

Mr. Akayev's government was marred by corruption and cronyism, but he, like Eduard A. Shevardnadze of Georgia and Leonid D. Kuchma of Ukraine, allowed opposition parties to work, independent news outlets to survive, and foreign nongovernmental agencies to spread their ideas of rights and freedoms. Those became the nuclei around which dissatisfaction crystallized and grew.

"They used to be more democratic countries than their neighbors," Mr. Nikonov said of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. "And they let the opposition work there. They let all sorts of external forces, nongovernmental organizations and the like operate there. Kyrgyzstan's neighbors may now draw the conclusion that to prevent such events it is necessary to toughen control, to prevent opposition activities and give foreign centers no opportunity to work on their territory."

That has already happened, in the extreme, in Turkmenistan, where President Saparmurat Niyazov has declared himself president for life, closed his borders and his society and imposed an ideology that revolves around his own personality.

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus has done likewise, suffocating the opposition, the press and private business while arranging the election of a pliant Parliament and pushing through a referendum that lets him run for re-election indefinitely.

A day after Mr. Akayev fled Kyrgyzstan, more than 1,000 protesters gathered in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to challenge Mr. Lukashenko's rule. Club-wielding security forces dispersed them, injuring or arresting dozens.

Will the protests in Belarus end there? Andrei Y. Klimov, an outspoken opposition leader, thinks not, and for now, at least, Mr. Klimov remains defiant, hopeful and free. Late last year, Mr. Lukashenko jailed another opposition leader, Mikhail Marinich, who was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing computers that the United States Embassy in Minsk said it had given him. A few months earlier two opposition figures were jailed for defaming Mr. Lukashenko by publicizing a skiing trip he took to Austria.

In Azerbaijan, which holds parliamentary elections in November, and Kazakhstan, which votes for a president next year, similar if less severe steps have been taken.

The real test of freedom's march in the former Soviet Union will be in Russia, which President Vladimir Putin insists is on an irrevocably democratic course even as he consolidates near-absolute political control.

He has imposed state control over the media, especially television; ended direct elections of governors, and raised the bar for forming new political parties, with opposition parties in disarray. The government's legal assault on Yukos Oil and its former chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been seen as the silencing of a potential challenger.

Still, the uprisings around Russia's borders have clearly sent a shudder through Putin's Kremlin. Almost immediately after Ukrainians balked at Kuchma's efforts to install a chosen successor through electoral fraud, speculation arose over Putin's intentions when his second and, by law, final term ends in 2008.

When a youth group modeled on the ones in Georgia and Ukraine appeared here, the Kremlin created its own alternative. A Putin aide met recently with Russian rock stars in an effort to persuade them not to join opposition forces, as their Ukrainian counterparts had last fall.

Before any latent discontent coalesces into any sort of uprising in Russia, those dissatisfied with life there must overcome the centralized power of Putin's authority - one, it is safe to say, that will not crumble as quickly as Akayev's.

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/weekinreview/03myer.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/03/news/russia.html