When you walk through a storm

How will the global economic crisis affect the Kyrgyz Republic?
Up until recently, the view was widely held that countries such as the Kyrgyz Republic would to a great extent be protected from the effects of the global credit crunch by their lack of integration with international financial markets. In late 2008, however, the global financial and economic crisis, having surfaced in the US property market a year earlier, deepened and spread rapidly across eastern Europe. From September the crisis swept over Russia, the region's largest economy, as investors withdrew, and the Russian Central Bank (RCB) was forced to make massive drawdowns on its reserves to increase liquidity in the banking system and to try to prevent a rout of the rouble. Kazakhstan had been an earlier casualty of the drying up of the international credit markets. Because of their size, the spillover of the world financial crisis into the real economies of the two countries has sharply worsened the short-term outlook for regional economic growth. The question of the likely impact on the Kyrgyz Republic has thus become more pressing, and has already forced an adaptive reformulation of Kyrgyz economic policy. At the same time, the country continues to grapple with the aftermath of a number of severe economic shocks from an earlier phase. By tracing some of the knock-on effects of these developments, the scale and complexity of the problems confronting Kyrgyz economic policymakers becomes apparent.

Impact of the regional economic slowdown
Reduced foreign demand. Between them, Russia and Kazakhstan bought around 40% of Kyrgyz exports in 2007. Most obviously, therefore, the regional economic slowdown will substantially reduce the growth in external demand for Kyrgyz goods, making the domestic economic growth rates achieved during the past couple of years more difficult to sustain. By tightening the limits on revenue growth to the budget, it will also constrain the ability of the government to deal with the multiple consequences of economic deceleration.
Reduced foreign investment. Russia and Kazakhstan are both heavily dependent on oil. Until the recent past, they were both also significant players in the international bond and syndicated loans markets. With these capital flows to the region drying up or declining significantly, and the price of oil plummeting from its mid-year peak, it would be prudent—based on purely commercial rather than geo-strategic grounds—to expect a scaling back of foreign investment. On preliminary figures from the National Statistical Committee (NSC), for 2008 as a whole, fixed capital investment from all sources, at Som29.2bn, was already down by more than 5% on 2007. In turn, a reduction in investment will have a negative impact on economic growth and add to difficulties in covering the widening external imbalance.
A slowdown in remittance inflows. Russia and Kazakhstan have been the main sources of inflows workers' remittances to the Kyrgyz Republic. At US$715m in 2007, according to the World Bank, remittances equalled almost one-fifth of the country’s GDP in that year, and were assessed at approximately the same level in 2008. At the beginning of November the head of the Kyrgyz State Committee for Migration and Employment estimated the figure for 2008 at between US$800m and US$1bn. Curiously, local press reports suggest that there has as yet been no large-scale return home of migrant labour from these destinations, but a slowdown in the growth of remittance inflows, particularly as the economic crisis takes its toll of the Russian and Kazakh property and construction sectors, is certain. This will restrain the expansion of household disposable income, and thus the pace of growth of private consumption. It could also add to unemployment and wage competition if migrants begin to return home in large numbers.
Spillover from the Kazakh banks. Although the Kyrgyz financial system has been protected by its underdevelopment and relative lack of international integration, the impact of the crisis in international credit markets on Kazakh banks—which own about half of the Kyrgyz Republic's commercial banks—has already seen a steep slowdown in the growth of "credit to the economy", which peaked at above 110% year on year in late 2007, according to the IMF, but slowed to annual growth rates of 20-30% a year later. The sharp deceleration in credit growth, in combination with a likely tightening up of lending criteria, will affect businesses that had been planning to expand by using resources from outside the firm, as well as the borrowing of households, thus subduing the expansion of private consumption and domestic investment demand.

The effects of other economic shocks
The inflationary surge. In the year from the middle of 2007, a surge in global prices for food and fuel was the main factor behind a rise in inflation, which peaked at 32.5% year on year in July 2008, although it has since tumbled, in line with falling commodity prices, to below 17% in October. According to preliminary figures from the NSC, consumer price inflation crept back up 20% in December 2008, probably under the impact of currency weakening. This compares with a target range originally set for the year of 12-15%. The Kyrgyz Republic’s peak rate was high even for the region. This is mainly because the Kyrgyz economy is heavily reliant on external sources for these items. Thus, as well as boosting inflation, the increased cost of food and fuel significantly raised the country's import bill in 2008, opening up the current account to more than 6% of GDP in 2008. The same development also put additional pressure on budget revenue, as the government tried to replenish its reserves of food and fuel, and to cushion the impact of the prices rises on the population.

A shortfall hydroelectric power. In 2008 a shortfall in domestic production of hydroelectric power because of low water levels in the Toktogul Reservoir constituted a second major economic shock. This necessitated further fuel and electricity purchases from within the Central Asian region (November 2008, Economic policy), at an additional cost of US$60m, on IMF estimates (the then minister of energy, Mr Balkibekov, put the figure at US$88m), widening the trade gap further, taking international reserves uncomfortably close to the "safe" level of three months of import cover, and adding again to unplanned government spending. The power shortages already appear to have had a direct impact on industrial production, which, excluding production from the booming Kumtor gold mine, contracted in real terms by just over 2% in 2008, according to NSC figures, compared with growth of over 10% in 2007. Over the same period, electricity output shrank by more than 20%.

Inflationary outlook. Although falling commodity prices and a slowdown in the economy has eased upward pressure on the price level from these sources, in 2009 other factors will work in the opposite direction. Thus, the new year saw another steep rise in the price of gas imports from Uzbekistan, to US$240 per 1,000 cu metres in 2009, from US$145 per 1,000 cu metres in 2008. Other factors likely to boost inflation include the raising of utility tariffs as part of the programme of energy sector reform, and the impact of imported prices through the sharp nominal depreciation of the som.

The path of despair

Hegel argues somewhere that an awareness of the inadequacy of our conceptions is what propels us towards self-criticism, making intellectual progress—which, for him, is the same as progress per se—possible. He calls this "the path of despair". Amid the current fad for shallow self-help books and studies of the "economics of happiness", it might be worth remembering that happiness is not the main goal of progress, freedom is. From the vantage point of enhanced freedom, people might be in a better position to hammer out whatever happiness is for them.

After the Iraq war, it became clear to me that, whatever the mainstream of Western left is, I'm not really a part of it, either in terms of philosophical outlook or political inclination. However, I do still consider myself a Marxist of sorts—in the sense that most of my political "starting points" come out of that tradition—and I still think that progress should be possible in extending the areas of popular political an economic control. I think of this as "socialism", although I don't suppose it really matters what its called. Is there an economics possible that raises living standards for most people on the planet and gives them greater control over their own lives? This has been our Holy Grail for some time, of course, but is still probably the most important question facing the left in this generation. There can’t be any socialism unless we get a plausible answer on this. But it is a huge task. To get anywhere would require a large number of like-minded, flexible-thinking, knowledgeable and talented people working closely together over many years. After Iraq, however, and the apparent retreat of many into the safety of the broad political dogmas that existed beforehand—most obviously, an oddly reactionary brand of "anti-imperialism"—it doesn’t seem as though the conditions are in place for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists". This would be only the starting point for such a programme, which would also have to turn its sceptical gaze in multiple directions, towards itself as much as to the outside world. Perhaps one reasons that this doesn’t happen very readily is that, for many, the left is something like a family, and, at the social-psychological level, not many family members want to risk becoming an outcast by speaking out of turn.

Right at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says this:“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.”

And, if you can get past the fancy language and the romantic metaphor, I think it’s the same with, say, Hayek, or neo-liberalism, or whatever is the left's current demonic totem. We should be asking: What in these outlooks is useful? What can be usefully absorbed? What remains after an all-out criticism to be absorbed? That is, there has to be an appreciation and a firm grasp of Hayek and of neo-liberalism, of their strong points and achievements, as well as their weaknesses and faults, before they can be superseded. The same applies to all previous intellectual and practical efforts towards developing a socialist economics, including the holy-of-holies, Capital. From the point of view of empirical investigation, it means distinguishing capitalist propaganda from results. For example, where have their development efforts or their standard macroeconomic policies been successful, and why? And where have they been unsuccessful? Do they have any tools that we can reuse? Despite the colossal scale of the current financial-economic crisis, I personally haven’t yet seen anyone coming close to grasping the nettle. Certainly not the so-called "hard" left, whose ham-fisted/ hare-brained attempts to oppose the injustices of capitalism somehow always reek of injustice themselves, appear not to have picked up any tips from the disasters of the 20th century and, somehow, intimate the preparation of something worse than run-of-the-mill late liberal/social-democratic capitalism. (Sometimes—who could have conceived it?—even the imperialists appear to be more progressive.) But also, if a bit more depressingly, not even intelligent Marxists such as Robert Brenner (to judge by his organisation's website), who otherwise looks pretty much correct, so far as I can see, about the causes of the current crisis being found in the monetary response to the problem of long-term decline in profitability in the advanced capitalist states.

Vinegar Hill

Unfortunately, I don't get many chances these days to write poetry, but I can't let another year go by without having a crack. I know what you're thinking: still using rhymes, at your age? It's a bit rum, I agree. But beggars can't be choosers, and it's the best I could do at short notice. I've decided not to use rhymes again, though.

Spat out each evening through the glass
revolving doors, he speeds like a dog-track hare
between shivering fronds and dripping shrubberies,
fleeing glaze-eyed through the urban square
the duff reggae as the festival crowds disperse;

glaze-eyed he slips down a narrow thoroughfare,
avoiding the outcasts in winter macs
who, standing in solitary pub doorways, stare
into ragged puddles as though at treasure maps:
mimicking vents, they wheeze an atmosphere

that chases him once more up Vinegar Hill;
again from a flowerbed bordering the fence
come pebbles flung by the grabbed handful
as if by a skulking, unseen malevolence:
the day's humiliations rain down like hail,

though if images wobble as on a screen
in front of him to roll like ripened pears
down into gutters and over the cobblestone,
the lines of the bards of despair are the bars
he grabs for his treadmill's steadying frame,

which means his gaze won't break, composure
sustained by the zesty scent of the limes
that line the walkway to the top, where
he's just in time to see in the mind's
intense Greek sunlight a galley disappear

over a blue sea between carnivorous rocks,
which doesn't ruffle the oarsmen, who are skilled
and determined—though this vision drapes
like a turf-green tablecloth over scaffold
hauled taut by a system of pulleys and knots

so that shaving each morning in the dim
half-light pre-dawn, it’s the jackdaw's caws,
ironic, mocking, cut through the illusion:
as he's plunged back down, the spectres
of the hellish tomb-world come back to him.

(December 28th 2008, Holborn)

One hand washes the other

This is the first chapter of a novel that I finished last Christmas (2007) but was never really happy with. I will try, at some point in the future, to rewrite it, perhaps taking a leaf out of the book of the Simsonian hamster: starting at the end and working backwards. In my mind, I called it My House is on the Outskirts, which is a Ukrainian proverb that means the equivalent of the English "see no evil".

Chapter 1
The armed guard stood at the entrance to the steam-baths as Arkady puttered up on his motorbike-sidecar was dressed entirely in black. He seemed to have modelled his outfit on the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, but it was as though he’d received the kit instructions over the telephone, on a poor connection, so that the effect was scruffy and ragged rather than menacing or sharp—a bit shabby, provincial, second-hand. Recognising the newcomer, the security man stepped aside to let him in. The steel door creaked on its hinges and a flake of its khaki paint helicoptered to the ground, unobserved.
Arkady’s contact with the “Donetsk Fellas” was Valentin Kulyeba, a petite Ukrainian who worked for the Russian crime clans. Arkady had dealt with him once before, “helping out” as the front man for a certain pyramid investment scheme. He hadn't exactly enjoyed the experience, but Arkady's attitude was “needs must when the devil rides”. Kulyeba was clever alright, but in the same way as a clockwork mechanism, or an elaborate statistical proof; he was a gifted minor administrator who would have been equally at home as a zealous official in a ministry of one of the totalitarian regimes of the previous century.
At the far end of the corridor Arkady Shapiro came to a heavily padded door, and a shiver of dread shot through him. Relax, relax, he told himself, and he knocked on the door and strolled into the room as breezily as he could manage. Kulyeba was sitting behind a low desk on the far side. He had a creamy white jacket draped over his shoulders, Napoleon-style. Hunched up over some paperwork, which seemed to absorb all of his attention, he looked for all the world as though he was doing the firm's accounts. On the desktop, to one side, was a black coffee steaming away in a white cup and saucer; on a large plate beside it, there was a selection of cold meats and pickles from which, from time to time, Kulyeba would pick out a morsel to munch. Under the desk, his leg shook obsessively. He seemed to breathe exclusively through a half-smoked panatella that had fizzled out some time before.
“Come through,” he said as he stood to his feet, gesturing to a low wooden chair in front of him. As he spoke, he stood up and wheezed phlegmatically into a hanky. “Come in. Come in and shut the door—stop those damned mosquitoes getting in.” Next to the refreshments on his desk there were two neat stacks of documents; a series of biros, laid out in parallel; three pads of yellow post-its, fanned out slightly; a metalworker’s rasp. Kulyeba was no more than five feet six, slim, with narrow shoulders. His movements were as staccato as his pattern of speech, conveying more irritation than anxiety—in no way compromising an implacable sense of self-belief. His dark eyes were emotionless, as if he was never fully engaged with anyone around him, looking over their shoulder for the next opportunity or risk. His hair was messy, like a sunburst in negative, and he was just starting to go grey at the temples. These elements combined to produce a crow-like impression about him, something of the scavenger.
On Arkady’s left, three of Kulyeba’s men were sitting at a round table playing cards. The youngest, jug-eared and shaven-headed, had on a long-sleeved paisley shirt in red and black. He looked the new arrival up and down, but, most likely judging him a negligible threat, went straight back to the poker game. Arkady pulled himself together and crossed over the cold stone floor. Kulyeba’s handshake was swift, limp, damp.
“We got your call,” said Valentin. “I’m only sorry we couldn’t get back to you sooner.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady, bearing his uneven teeth.
“We heard that you were in trouble,” said Kulyeba, and he brought together his palms with a savage slap, surprising an unlucky insect out of existence. The three men looked up from their card game and Arkady jumped. With an index finger, Kulyeba poked at a gap in his teeth to dislodge a shred of pork. Then he got round to the real reason he had called Arkady in.
Kulyeba, it turned out, had had a bit of a bust up with Irakliy Sashukian, "the Armenian", a rival leader from their home town of Utansk, where Kulyeba still took care of metals exports for Donetsk. A convoy of Kulyeba's trucks carrying steel pipes to China had been hijacked, and he blamed Sashukian. One of Sashukian’s men had been “picked up”—but hadn’t held up “under questioning”. The dead man was Misha Karbak, Sashukian’s cousin. Kulyeba couldn’t see what the fuss was about—except it was bad for business. Of course, no one wanted a return to the “dog eat dog” of the mid-90s, no one wanted a return to the "good old days". For a moment Arkady rolled to and fro on the balls of his feet, nervily. Then he said he could help.

“And how’s the family?” asked Kulyeba, escorting his visitor back out onto the dusty street. “I trust they are well”—perhaps intending to bolster an impression of concerned cordiality, though without going so far as to wait for a reply. Vazgen, his jug-eared associate, left with them, heading out for a bite to eat with his sallow-faced girlfriend, whom Arkady thought he recognised—but from where? She had long, black, shiny hair, and the imprints of dark half-circles under her eyes, as if she hadn't slept for days. Vazgen nodded to the scruffy guard at the building's entrance and made off in the direction of a café on the corner, arm-in-arm with his paramour. Kulyeba, meanwhile, had ventured as far as the kerb. At the sight of Arkady’s motorbike-sidecar, an ancient black Dnipr K-650 parked there, Kulyeba almost choked on his own glee. “What’s this?” he spluttered. “What happened to the Fabia?” Arkady didn’t feel like explaining that he’d sold the car to pay for his father’s trip abroad. “It's a long story,” he said.
“I hope you’re not going to turn up at the Armenian’s on that thing,” said Kulyeba. “We can’t have that,” and he pulled from a calf-skin wallet a slim green wad of $100-bills. “Here,” he said, “live a little, why don’t you? Get yourself something with a little more class,” and he pressed some cash into Arkady’s hand, which seemed to extend itself of its own volition, without consulting his will.

On the two-lane highway from the city, Arkady shivered. Interrogating the afternoon’s events, he had his gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead, scanning for potholes.
Could he deliver?
Changing gear, he overtook a struggling red Zhiguli.
Would he be able to deliver what he’d promised? Of course he would, no question, no question. Hadn’t he’d always been lucky?
But the low, hypnotic growl of the bike’s engine failed to reassure him, and the sidecar rattled, unutterably empty now he’d seen his father off for the flight to Kiev. (Through the double-glass windows from the first floor of Donetsk Airport he’d watched the "internal" short-haul passenger planes taking off and unsteadily landing, and when he’d looked down, he’d caught sight of the old man shuffling along the tarmac towards the airport’s shuttle-bus, with almost no luggage. He was probably in Kiev already—perhaps in the air on the way to Tel Aviv. Had Arkady seen his father for the last time? This thought pierced him sharply.)
Tall rows of poplars sprouted from a flat horizon that seemed to posses them in inexhaustible supply, with only the odd field of wilting sunflowers or a coal-pit's spindly winding gear, turning slowly, to relieve the monotony of the scrubby steppe. A wind stream whipped over Arkady's cheeks and pushed back his unkempt, curly hair. And if a militiaman were to stop him for riding without helmet, so be it (he kept a few 100-hryvnya notes in his back pocket for bribes), because the deal with Kulyeba seemed to offer a way out of a tight spot he'd got himself into with the tax department, who were now investigating his business affairs. Feeling lighter than he had in months, he steered the bike onto a slip road: it seemed to handle more easily now. As he drove past the football stadium, the artificial lake, he felt almost wholly calm, coming to a halt steadily at a red light ahead of a crooked, narrow bridge. Just over the bridge, at the centre of a roundabout, he eyed a huge glossy poster for New Superslims, the purple waves of its silky backdrop, the stylish arrangement of the delicate cartonettes somehow seeming to welcome him home. He pictured the dinner for two he had planned for later that night with his mistress, Mila. Above him, the sky seemed blue and hopeful, and there was no cloud cover. “Whatever happens, happens,” said Arkady to himself, as if to throw any remaining anxieties off the scent, the bike wobbling a little as he pulled away.

The drunken bath

I've always liked poems of journeys, perhaps for the same reason that, in a detective novel, I like a good description of the scene—urban or rural, I'm not bothered—in which the action takes place. I want to take in the sights, noises, smells, have a peek over the shoulder of the characters—especially if it's somewhere exotic in time or space, where life is lived differently, and where I'm unlikely ever to go—medieval Italy, for instance, or California in the 40s, or ancient Rome, or Tsarist Russia. As poems are a cross between music and words, for the senses as well as the mind, they can be particularly successful in this endeavour.

Yesterday, I got in touch again with my old mate from university, Burt, with whom I went on a number of travelling holidays around Europe—one fairly wild one, if I remember, to Hungary in about 1992 (I think), where I wrote this poem, which is a pastiche of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre (in those days, it had a compelling significance for me, and I wrote two or three things that were inspired by it).

The air in the bedsit was damp
and cold and smelt of gas, but it was home.
She dropped her bag as the front door slammed
and chose the yellow bathsalts saved from the fallout zone.

She poured herself into a bath and never
noticed as the chipped enamel bathtub filled
and the day, a beast immensely cold and clever,
dissolved on the bathtiles where the yellow bathfoam spilled.

Her face in a sodden flannel's shade,
she never saw the bath detach itself and float
as the citizens in the flooding districts prayed
and the bath slid from the window like a chipped enamel boat.

As the clawmarks in her skin healed over,
one more city sank in the sea. Alone,
she never saw the cliffs dissolve at Dover
or the Channel gulping the poison yellow foam.

And the Netherlands and Bohemia could not escape,
and Belgium held its nose as it went down
as a girl in a bath sailed through a sunken town
and an oilslick in hammer & sickle shape.

And Europe dropped from her mind that day
as the rich drop food from their plates.
Little she thought of why the ceiling had gone grey
or of escalating water rates.

Still more continents fell from the world that night
like clay pots from a windowsill,
but she never asked: Who turned off the light?
And she never said: Who ran up this bill?

And Death asked: Who dares at this ungodly
hour to creep in my room?
But all that remains of him is a cape and, oddly,
a wisp of smoke shaped like an ostrich plume.

(Rose Hill, Budapest, 1992.)

Europe in a coma

I was the only child on that plane, apart from the children:
the jets powered up and I braced myself for the climb
as passengers up in business class were getting to grips
with the price of zinc in Die Welt or Frankfurter Allgemeine,
but I just studied the nicks on the flexible armoured wing—
what were they for? Well, I wasn't exactly sure, but felt
reassured by the captain's polite Etonian intonation
("safe pair of hands") and the phrase "precision engineering".

Inwardly I whooped at the excellent sights below me—
whole rows of town roofs wound like African braids,
then fawn and ochre farms laid out as abstract art,
and on the coast, sports complexes curled like hearing aids,
as even nature began to put on a pretty good show,
eg with her fascinating light/dark 4:30 tremulations
as we swooped up over the greeny undulous sea.
Under us—mermaids, dolphins. (A dream? I don't know.)

Great clouds over Vienna, the misty tarmac: one thinks
of sinister gasses, the flight control an aussichtsturm,
or Freud with his dreambook doing a runner; one sees
the plague cathedrals, blue plumes on state bureaucracies
(Marxist senses tingling under the superstructural weight);
one uses the word "one" for the first time ever
and one's sentences move firmly to their inexorable conclusion,
apparently civilised and sedate.

And there in the charming half-light beerkeller,
you drink ein schwarzer Kaffe and, spying the LUKoil
office, the Soviet monument, your mind stares back and east—
gangsters in both directions hurtling over the good black soil,
forests and barns on fire in your eyes amid the harmless (?) talk:
"So, what do you think of this Haider thing?" (you overhear)—
consider then "the racial question", and stroke your beard,
noticing now on the menu a disturbing fixation with pork.

(Vienna, April 2000)

Spontaneous wishes

Thanks be to whatever-it-is that is
the nuclear fuel at the core of this
calm but nervy hunger I now
feel, restoring me to poise and power.
What high ideals are they I wish
as I sit on a broken bench one sad July
by grotty litterbins where the wishbone road divides?

Agonising overthought, paralysis:
these I'd side-step, these I'd give a miss,
have my desires negotiate, shake hands, or
see my spirit get up from the floor
cool and collected, wearing sunglasses.
What is there I've got to do but be?
How much I'd like to lose what's left of me

and just enjoy the clink of keys,
the dark green mass of trees
that shimmer above the underpass—
even the black bins lined up on the grass,
bolt-upright like buzzbied sentries,
bored stiff as me by rubbish duty
(hang in there comrades I say and give them a workers' salute).

O, why point the finger or be bitter?
Just sit and watch a piece of litter
blown free like a crumpled swallow—
there is the thought that you should follow
as it blusters over the perimeter
of bushes—shorn as for intensive care
last autumn, each now with a full head of hair!

(Blackheath, 1997)

Off the top of my head

Needless to say, I've had a bit of an interest in revolutions—and even The Revolution—for quite some time. What counts as a revolution? What are the different kinds? What are the common causes, trajectories and consequences? Of late I have found my interest turning to these issues again. My main interest is in contemporary political situation around the world, especially in eastern Europe. However, it seems to me best to start with "the classics". I have therefore begun to study the English, French and Russian revolutions, as well as state breakdowns in the Ottoman Empire, pre-modern China and Japan. Before I get too far into that, I had occasion to jot down some thoughts on the possible implications of the wave of political rebellion in the former Soviet Union in recent years known as the "colour revolutions".

Are colour revolutions a thing of the past in CIS countries?
The colour revolutions in a number of former Soviet countries in the early years of the present decade—the Rose in Georgia in 2003, the Orange in Ukraine in 2004 and the Tulip in the Kyrgyz Republic in 2005—came as something of a surprise to observers, many of whom thought that the cause of democratic development in these countries was either intractable or hopeless.

To understand the potential future relevance of this model of popular political rejuvenation, it is necessary to understand the features and processes that the separate events had in common. All of the political regimes then in existence in these countries might described as semi-democratic at best, in which elites from the communist era were in an alliance of convenience with business factions who had been able to enrich themselves by taking advantage of the market distortions that develop in the transition from planned economies. Additionally, each of the upheavals was sparked by fraudulent national elections, although in all cases extensive violence was avoided.

Operationally, the "colour revolutionaries" faced a weak or divided authority, headed by an unpopular leader who was linked in the public mind with corruption; crucially, the fault lines ran through competing branches of the security services, which made the use of force against the demonstrators more difficult. The revolutionaries were well organised, and used the media—which in all cases remained largely free—as well as modern technology, such as mobile phones and the Internet, to spread information quickly—for example, of the variance between exit polls and official vote results.

Another vital, but controversial, element in the mix was that of technical help from outside. This came not just from Western election-monitoring teams or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but, notably, from the leaders of the Serbian student movement, Otpor! (Resistance!), which was instrumental in mobilising the opposition that brought down the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. (For example, they ran workshops on how to raise funds, and how to "brand" the revolution.)

Not least, the colour revolutions came as a surprise to the region's incumbent governments—which is probably one of the main reasons for their success. We know now, however, that in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Russia's leaders and their political advisers held several high-level meetings to address the question of how to respond systematically to the challenge to their positions represented by these popular disturbances in the "near abroad". The actions of the Russian government since then—its crackdown on domestic opponents, the resubordination of most of the media, and the sparing of no effort to allow any semblance of real competition disturb the desired outcome to the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2007-08—testify to the likely conclusions of these meetings, and are behind the rise of the popular description of Russia's polity under Vladimir Putin as a "managed democracy".

There is some evidence that the "counterrevolutionary" methods so developed have been disseminated to other incumbent governments in the CIS—most recently, perhaps, in the practice in the Kyrgyz Republic in December 2007, where, for all the show of a vibrant and inclusive the parliamentary election, a comprehensive package of electoral, registration and security measures appear to have been in place to prevent the population opting for the wrong result.
Therefore, the short answer is that, yes, colour revolutions are likely to be a thing of the past in the CIS, because the same combination of circumstances is unlikely to recur in just the same way again—not least, because specific measures have been developed to prevent just such an outcome. This does not mean, of course, that the problem of political stability has been solved by the increased authoritarianism that has characterised many CIS regimes in the recent past—this would not be possible until the conditions giving rise to the instability are abolished—but, rather, that any popular, successful political convulsions in the future are likely to happen in creative and unexpected ways, reacting against the reaction.