Fear of the color orange spreads

Fear of the color orange spreads

By Aussiegirl

Russia and Kazakhstan fear "Revolutionary fervor created by Western spin doctors" spreading to Central Asia and Russia.

Ironic, huh? The original revolutionaries fearing the very thing they supposedly loved above all else. Only in the Alice in Wonderland Kremlin world-view could black be really white and white really black -- and up be down and down be up. Gotta keep those countries barefoot and pregnant, dontcha know.


Read some excerpts from EurasiaNet:

Russia is bolstering strategic relations with Kazakhstan in an attempt to keep alive Moscow's dream of establishing a Eurasian economic and political union of former Soviet republics. Many political analysts in Moscow, however, believe that in the wake of revolutionary developments in Georgia and Ukraine, the concept of a Eurasian union is no longer viable.

(ya think?)

Two meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbaev

(dontcha love that name?)

in January underscored the two leaders' growing concern with what the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has characterized "the third wave of liberation", the popular protests that forced incumbent governments from power in Georgia and Ukraine over the past 16 months directly challenge the notion of "managed democracy" espoused by Putin, Nazarbaev, and other CIS leaders. The bloodless revolutions have dealt an additional blow to Russia, as both Georgia and Ukraine have shifted their geopolitical orientation away from Moscow toward the West.

(Those darn pesky bloodless revolutions)

Moscow has long viewed Ukraine and Kazakhstan as the two key members of its pet integrationist project, known as the Single Economic Space (SES). In the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Kyiv's interest in the SES has evaporated. Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yushchenko, has made European Union membership his country's ultimate strategic goal. Symptomatically, immediately after Yushchenko's inauguration, Georgia's foreign minister, Salome Zourabichvili, noted that "a new important factor is emerging in European politics--a democratic axis of Tbilisi-Kyiv, or even Tbilisi-Kyiv-Warsaw."
. . . Makbat Stanov, the president of the Institute of Development of Kazakhstan, called on Russia and Kazakhstan to "work out a coordinated strategy of action toward [post-revolutionary] Ukraine," in a commentary posted on the Kreml.ru website.
. . . The more immediate political concern, however, is what Russian analyst Alexei Makarkin calls the "export of revolutionary technologies." Both Nazarbaev and Putin appear to view recent developments in Georgia and Ukraine as a foreign-sponsored effort designed to upset the established order in the region. Significantly, Kazakh experts do not exclude the possibility that Georgian/Ukrainian-style revolutionary fervor could spread to Central Asia.

(democratic revolution IS foreign to these guys)

Kyrgyzstan, which held parliamentary elections on 27 February, is widely considered by regional analysts to be the Central Asian state most vulnerable to revolutionary pressure. (oh, that revolutionary pressure)

Kyrgyz President Askar Akaev has himself acknowledged his country's vulnerability by repeatedly expressing alarm about a "velvet revolution scenario."

(this is only a problem for despots)

In comments published on 19 February by the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Akaev claimed that "hundreds of spin doctors" who helped bring about regime-change in Georgia and Ukraine, have arrived in Kyrgyzstan to ply their propagandistic trade before and after the country's parliamentary election.

(I'm shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- at all this plying of propagandistic trade)

Stanov, the Kazakh expert, suggested that if anything resembling the developments in Ukraine happens in any Central Asian nation, upheaval could easily spread "to all countries of the region no matter where they are located" close to or far away from the [revolutionary] epicenter.

(And this would be bad because?)

These concerns are clearly shared in the Kremlin. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in mid-January, Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov asserted that for Moscow, interest in CIS countries, including its defense and security aspect, "is a [strategic] priority."? That is why, he warned, Russia will "react very sharply to the export of revolutions to the CIS countries.

(There are those threats again)

A few analysts draw comparisons between the Kremlin's present-day support for ex-communist rulers in the Caucasus and Central Asia and Russia's conservative policies within the framework of the monarchist Holy Alliance in the first half of the 19th century. Back then, Russia also tried to prevent the spread of the "revolutionary plague [of 1848]"? and dispatched troops to Central Europe to quell local revolts. But this type of political conservatism, notes one commentary posted on the Gazeta.ru website, commits Russia now, as it did in the past, to supporting regimes that are inherently unstable and apt to collapse sooner or later

.
(Well, duh)