After Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, there is now a second chance for repentance by the hundreds of Western and non-Western commentators and researchers who have over the last 17 years argued that mingling by the United States, European Union, and/or Geoge Soros had been a necessary pre-condition for the post-Soviet color revolutions to start and succeed.
Ever since the Rose Revolution of 2003, there has been a formidable camp in international punditry and academia whose members, under such headings as “realism” or “geopolitics,” have shamelessly objectified Georgian, Ukrainian or/and Kyrgyz protesters as naive pawns in a much larger game that they could never hope to understand and that is played by much more important actors than them.
In Belarus now, for the second time, a color revolution is taking place that, like in Armenia two years ago, happens under conditions where the decisive Western impact would be even more absurd to claim than in the uprisings of Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and 2013-2014, or Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Against the background of the unfolding dramatic events in Belarus, we should now brace ourselves for a wave of emotional announcements written by our “realistic” colleagues and titled “How I was for years publicly misrepresenting the origins and nature of the Orange and EuroMaidan revolutions” (not).
Andreas Umland is a senior expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv, and editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society”
