Russia's Post-Orange Empire

Publication date: Thursday 20 October 2005

This insightful article by Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria warns of a new kind of 'civil society building' - à la the Krelmin.

An excerpt:

Stability and preservation of the territorial integrity of the post-Soviet states is no longer a primary objective of Moscow’s policies. Russia’s new strategy in the making is – in a distorting echo of the “guerrillas without guns” model pioneered by youth movements in countries to its west and south – based on exporting its own version of democracy and building pro-Russian constituencies in the post-Soviet societies. The major objective of this policy is to develop an efficient infrastructure of ideas, institutions, networks and media outlets that can use the predictable crisis of the current orange-type regimes to regain influence not simply at the level of government but at the level of society as well. Russia will not fight democracy in these countries. Russia will fight for democracy – its kind of democracy.

Moscow’s policy places civil society at the heart of its comeback strategy. In the view of one of the leading political technologists, Sergei Markov, the revolutions of the 21st century will be NGO revolutions. They do not have a coordination centre or a single ideology; they are planned and launched in a most public way. “NGO revolutions are revolutions in the age of globalisation and information. It is meaningless to protest against this reality”, Markov writes; “everybody who wants to take part in the politics of the 21st century has to create his own networks of NGOs and supply them with ideology, money and people”.