Rebels in 'The Times'

A review of my new book, 'The Time of the Rebels', in The Times:

Revolution with a smile on its face
Europe’s new activism is captured in a gripping study, Andrew Mueller says

IN JUNE 2005, SOME YOUNG folk gathered for a weekend in Tirana, Albania. To the staff of the hotel hosting them, they probably appeared unremarkable: an ebullient bunch in standard urban camouflage of jeans and T-shirts, occasionally distinguished by an eyebrow piercing or artfully dishevelled haircut.

In fact, they were the most extraordinary gathering of revolutionaries in recent history. These few dozen kids, from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, sported badges bearing the emblems of organisations with names such as Otpor, Kmara, Pora and Pulse of Freedom.

They had helped to overthrow four governments – in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Lebanon – and had come together to discuss which might be next. A key plank of their plans was an abhorrence of violence. In an age dominated by the wretched failure of grand designs to spread liberal democracy at gunpoint, the story of how regime change was effected by the wit, ingenuity and bravery of these determined people is as timely as it is heartening.

I didn’t see Matthew Collin, who tells the story of the movement in his new book The Time of the Rebels, at the Tirana Activism Festival – although my recollections of the weekend are not to be entirely trusted. I did, however, meet several of those he interviewed and he succeeds in capturing their irreverent spirit.

The character who looms largest in the book is the one who did most to animate the Tirana weekend – the thirtysomething patriarch Ivan Marovic, unimprovably conjured by Collin as “a baby-faced schemer who specialised in wisecracking satire and sardonic soundbites”. He was a prime mover behind Otpor (“Resistance”), the Serbian protest movement whose dogged ridicule of the gangsterocracy of Slobodan Milosevic helped to create the mood for its demise.

Otpor was inspired by the Situationists of 1968 Paris, Martin Luther King, the writings of the nonviolent resistance guru Gene Sharp and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It amplified the absurdity of Milosevic’s regime to the point where it became impossible for anybody to take him seriously. To a soundtrack provided by the renegade Belgrade radio station B92, its activists staged street theatre, invited passers-by to take a baseball bat to a barrel emblazoned with Milosevic’s face, sold irreverent postcards and covered Serbia’s cityscapes with posters and graffiti.

Otpor’s slogan “Gotov Je!” (“He’s finished!”) was common currency months before the October 2000 revolution – by the time that Milosevic finally slunk from office, it had the feel of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Otpor’s buccaneering style inspired youth in other Eastern European countries whose “liberation” after the collapse of the Soviet Union had been more cosmetic than actual. In Georgia, Kmara (“Enough!”) borrowed Otpor’s clenched-fist logo and their tactics, helping to prompt the 2003 “Rose Revolution” that terminated the rule of the elderly Soviet relic Eduard Shevardnadze.

A year later, in Ukraine, the “Orange Revolution” brought about the annulment of a rigged election. The flame reignited in Lebanon in 2005, and has flickered, if with less sensational consequences, in Belarus, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan.

Collin’s book follows the phenomenon from Serbia across a broad swath of “second-world” countries – places where the middle-aged who govern them still operate with mentalities sculpted by tyranny and antiquated dogma, and where the young yearn to embrace the freedom that they have been led towards by Western popular culture.

Collin’s interviews reveal a bright, funny bunch whose focus is unswervingly practical – they take the desirability of democracy, free enterprise and secularism as given. For these reasons, they have been happy – and largely transparent – about accepting funding from NGOs and Western governments, including the US and Great Britain.

Inevitably, this has caused some – mostly those on the lemon-sucking Left who were never fully persuaded that Eastern European socialism was a bad thing – to decide that these movements are a huge US conspiracy.

“Postmodern coup d’état” was one verdict on Kiev. But while it is unarguable that these movements have been less successful where their aims have not coincided so neatly with Washington’s, it is difficult to see why American support should attract derision – there seems a clear moral difference between giving peaceful activists money for mischievous posters, and shipping guns to the Contras.

Besides, as any bulletin from Iraq will confirm, US money and wishful thinking cannot conjure democratic revolutions out of nothing. As the Ukrainian activist Mykhailo Svystovych puts it: “We are grateful we got that support during the revolution, but if it hadn’t happened, we still would have won.”

Neighbour from Hell

My Tbilisi comrade, Paul Rimple, has just published a vicious character assassination of his former next-door neighbour - "a wiry old jackal ... with a constitution full of vodka, piss and vinegar", as Paul puts it. Fiercely funny. Read it here.

The Time of the Rebels

My new book, 'The Time of the Rebels', has just been published. It's the story of the youth movements involved in the recent revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia. It tells how courageous and creative young people used dramatic non-violent protests, satirical humour, new media technology and influences from rock'n'roll and techno culture to inspire mass resistance, despite the constant threat of beatings and imprisonment.

It's full of bizarre incidents, bitter jokes and unusual characters - like the US colonel who became a revolutionary icon, the Serbs who were inspired by punk rock and 'Monty Python's Flying Circus', the Georgians who were labelled gay Russian spies, Ukrainians with molotov cocktails under their bed or a 'bomb' in their oven... and various tales of narcotic oranges, poison plots and suitcases stuffed with banknotes, clandestine meetings with American officials and the dubious thrills of dodging batons and bullets.

More details from my British publishers, Serpent's Tail, here.

Holding Hands with Shevardnadze

A few months ago, I went to visit a man who helped to end the Cold War - Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister of the Soviet Union. After the USSR collapsed, Shevardnadze returned to his home country, Georgia, where he served as president until he was overthrown during the Rose Revolution in 2003. He's now in his late seventies and still lives in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. This is the text of a radio report I did afterwards.

My strongest memory of meeting Eduard Shevardnadze is not anything he said, fascinating though it was. Nor is it the way he looked, although that has changed significantly. What I remember most vividly is the warmth of his hands.

When I arrived at his house in a wealthy suburb of Tbilisi, we shook hands – but he didn’t let go as I was expecting. Instead, he maintained his grip and led me slowly around the room towards a huge leather sofa.

Mr Shevardnadze still evokes strong emotions because of his actions, both brave and unpleasant, during more than thirty years in power, first as the Communist leader of Georgia, then as the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and finally as the president of independent Georgia. It was somewhat disconcerting to be walking around holding hands with a man who had played a leading role in the most critical events in this region’s recent past: someone who had genuinely made history.

Mr Shevardnadze has aged visibly since he was ousted from the Georgian presidency. He appears frail, moves uneasily, and is hard of hearing. His famous shock of white hair has receded to a mere frizz.

He seems to have been spending a lot of time sifting through his memories, and reflecting on the momentous changes which he helped to set in motion. But then, in his twilight years, with no role in public life after decades as a world statesman, there isn’t much else left for him to do.

I began by asking him about the suggestion made by President Putin of Russia that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a ‘tragedy’. No, he insisted - no. Maybe for Putin it was a tragedy, but not for most of the people who lived under Soviet rule.

Actually I knew the Soviet Union would collapse, he said. What kind of future did it have? I was sure it would happen, although of course because I was the foreign minister, I couldn’t talk about it in public. I was only wrong about one thing – it happened earlier than I thought it would.

Mr Shevardnadze is proud of his role in ending the Cold War, the long ideological and military stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States which brought the two super-powers to the brink of a third world war.

He was keen to reminisce about his relationship with Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States at the point when relations slowly began to improve in the 1980s. And yet the atmosphere at their first meeting was unpleasant, Mr Shevardnadze recalls. President Reagan began by reading from a pre-prepared note, accusing the Soviet delegation of being the leaders of an ‘Evil Empire’.

But their second meeting suggested there could be hope. This time President Reagan didn’t mention the ‘Evil Empire’, but spoke instead about preventing war. Afterwards they had dinner, and Mr Reagan raised a toast to peace with his Soviet visitors, before launching into a stream of jokes.

The rage was gone, said Mr Shevardnadze. Something had started to change. Photographs of his meetings with senior American officials still decorate the walls of his study in Tbilisi. Over the years that followed, these men, who were once the bitter enemies of the Communist bloc, were to become friends.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Mr Shevardnadze returned to Georgia as head of state. At that time the newly-independent country was in chaos, at war with itself. Mr Shevardnadze helped to restore order and establish the basis for a democratic society, surviving several assassination attempts in the process – although his successes were overshadowed by his failures.

He never managed to bring prosperity to Georgia, and he was never widely loved in his home country. Discontent about poverty, corruption and rigged elections eventually led to the Rose Revolution in 2003, when protesters stormed the Georgian parliament and drove Mr Shevardnadze out.

He insists that he made a courageous decision by deciding to resign instead of ordering troops to crush the uprising – although by that time it was probably too late to stop it.

Were you sad about the way your political career ended, I asked. Did you feel that you should have left office as a national hero, not in disgrace?

No, I wasn’t sad, he replied. My wife died a few months afterwards; we had been together for 30 years. That was real unhappiness. And after all, as she told me, you can’t be president forever.

As I left the house, Mr Shevardnadze’s bodyguard unexpectedly put his arm around me, and led me into the garden. He said he wanted to show me something – it was the grave of Mr Shevardnadze’s wife.

And when his time finally comes, he wants to be buried there too, in the garden, right next to her.

Summertime in Sukhumi

It's the height of the tourist season in Abkhazia, the Black Sea region that's been trying to assert its independence from Georgia since a war in the early 1990s. From my column in The Moscow Times, 10/9/07.

The seafront at Sukhumi in Abkhazia is full of ghosts. Ghosts of those who died during the war, and of those who fled, taking whatever possessions they could with them. Ghosts of the people who once played, loved and fought here. Ghostly buildings, like the once-grand Hotel Abkhazia, gutted by rocket fire and stripped to its skeleton. If bitter memories of the desperate Abkhaz war still fester here, 14 years after its end, it’s partly because signs of destruction are all around.

Not that any of it seems to bother the Russian tourists who return to Sukhumi year after year. For them, this is still the subtropical Black Sea playground of the Soviet years, if a little less upmarket these days. “I like the wildness of this place, and its feeling of freedom,” one woman told me. A man sitting on the grass nearby offered a sharper analysis: “Generally speaking, it’s so good here in Abkhazia that everyone wants to have this piece of land.”

The Russians even have their own sanatorium complex, with its own bars and restaurants – part of the huge compound occupied by the Russian peacekeeping troops who’ve been here since the war. A little piece of the south Caucasus that will be forever Russia - or so they seem to believe. Russian soldiers police the beach-front compound’s main gate, where a huge portrait of Lenin gazes down sternly at the holidaymakers.

The compound mainly caters to military types, and the night I went for a meal there, sunburnt squaddies and their wives were grooving drunkenly to a recent Russian pop hit which celebrates army life. For some of them, the ruins of Sukhumi are no more than an unusual backdrop for holiday snaps. Near the compound, I watched a tanned, blue-eyed youth taking a photo of a blonde in a tiny bikini amid the rubble of a half-demolished cottage. A family used to live there, before the war. Georgians, probably, and unlikely to return any time soon. The ruined houses scattered around Sukhumi are the only signs that there was once a Georgian population here.

A few months ago, I dropped in to a little café in Sukhumi’s brutalist Soviet-style suburb, Noviy Rayon. Back in the early 1990s, some of the worst of the fighting took place in the depths of this forest of tower blocks. Many of them are still blackened and burnt, half-derelict or abandoned, like weird apocalyptic sculptures looming out of the dirty streets. Inside the café, an old man offered vodka and camaraderie. But when the talk turned to Georgians, his mood soured instantly. “They will never be able to come back and live here,” he growled. “If they did try, they would be killed.”