MOSCOW, April 22. /ITAR-TASS/. Foreseeing threats to national security is almost tantamount to the ability to devise and take measures to ward them off, the director of the Military-Political Studies Centre at the international relations university MGIMO under the Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexei Podberyozkin, has said in connection with the political and economic crisis in Ukraine and the foreign sanctions against Russia.
The long string of ‘color revolutions’ the world has seen over the past fifteen years, in which legitimate governments in many countries were toppled or had to step down, forces politicians and political scientists to look for measures that might help prevent the dismantling of states.
“Color revolutions” have replaced political regimes in a number of countries in the territory of the former USSR, Eastern Europe and the Arab world. Political scientists have devised no end of exotic names for those events, Podberyozkin recalled.
The overthrow of Yugoslavia’s authorities in 2000 was called the “bulldoze revolution”, because police cordons guarding approaches to the parliament building were penetrated with a bulldozer, brought from a province. The change of power in Georgia in 2003 was dubbed the “rose revolution”: “peaceful” demonstrators in Tbilisi were holding flowers in their hands, which did not prevent them from eventually using force, though. In 2004, the “orange revolution” in Ukraine followed. Next year, Kyrgyzstan saw the “tulip revolution”. In 2005 there was also the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon. Then there followed the Arab spring in the Middle East and North Africa. These days the eyes of the world public are riveted to the so-called Euromaidan — the forcible overthrow of Ukraine’s authorities by the opposition, determined to secure the country’s accession to the European Union.
Podberyozkin believes that the modern algorithm of dismantling states Western spin doctors have devised looks like a logical chain of events.
“The ousting of the authorities begins as prolonged criticism of the internal problems of this or that state. Any country has its own problems. But when outer forces or internal opposition blow these problems out of proportion, a certain agenda begins to be dictated to the population. As far as Russia is concerned, one can already hear a chorus of voices speculating about alleged “stagflation.” However, an economic growth rate as low as 1.5% is not a disaster yet. In Japan, for instance, a picture like that has been observed for decades,” the scholar says.
“The fanning of negative sentiment creates pretexts for protest demonstrations. Even if an outbreak of anger has occurred at an individual industrial enterprise, it is presented as mass unrest,” the analyst said.
“If protests grow far and wide, the masterminds of these actions hurry to invent ‘pseudo-victims’ in order to discredit the authorities. That was the case in Kiev at the beginning of rallies in protest against President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to put his signature to an agreement of association with the EU. A woman journalist went missing and the police and security forces were at once accused of abducting and torturing the victim. The woman journalist eventually showed up safe and sound, but nobody paid any attention to that. Then the puppeteers usually provoke a situation in which some real casualties occur, which we were able to see well in Kiev when demonstrators attacked the Berkut riot police,” the analyst said.
“Then there follow appeals to the international community with demands to prevent genocide by the authorities of their own people. This serves as an excuse for interference in the country’s internal affairs and creates a background for mass terror by the protesters against representatives of the legitimate authorities,” Podberyozkin said.
“It all begins with moral terror, with attempts to persuade the police to side up with the protesters in order to strip the authorities of key leverage. Next, the law enforcers and members of their families begin to be threatened by telephone, through leaflets and insulting inscriptions on the walls. Physical violence, beatings, Molotov cocktails and shootouts are the next stage. Examples are close at hand. The members of the Berkut crack unit in Kiev had first-hand experience of these technologies and sustained losses,” Podberyozkin said.
“All of the previous stages of destructive actions were aimed at discrediting and ruining the bodies of state power in cities, districts and regions of the country and at worsening the people’s material position. The net effect of this algorithm is the emergence of a puppet government, which we have been able to see in Ukraine,” Podberyozskin said.
In his opinion “in the modern world in the era of globalization the worst risks are posed not so much by military threats to states, but by special technologies of ruining them, which drift from the international level to the intra-state one and become ever more complex. Politicians and analysts should closely study the newly devised tools of dismantling states and actively resist them.
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