Paul Goble
Staunton, June 27 – Many Russian
analysts have suggested that the Kremlin views what is going on in Armenia as a
color revolution because it is incapable of thinking about any protests in the
former Soviet republics as anything but the actions of foreign governments in
general and the United States in particular.
But Yuliya Latynina suggests there
may be another factor at work here: Moscow is only to ready to declare some
event as the beginning of a color revolution so that when passions cool, the
Russian leadership will be in a position to claim that it has won another victory
over the West and thus impress the Russian population (novayagazeta.ru/columns/68983.html).
Street demonstrations have now
spread to five cities in Armenia, Latynina wrote in a commentary published in “Novaya
gazeta” yesterday, but she argues that these protests are “typical for a
post-Soviet country” in which people are being forced by the market to pay more
for electricity than they expected to at a time when they are being
increasingly impoverished.
Indeed, she suggests, “this is a
classic post-Soviet contradiction. On the one hand, there is the habitual view
of the poor population that electricity doesn’t cost anything; and on the
other, there is the market economy” and monopoly ownership of electric power
generators combined with a collapse of industry thus forcing the population to
bear even more of the real cost.
In time, “the impoverished
population must pay just as much [for electricity] as people do in developed
countries.” But the process of shifting from expectations inherited from Soviet
times to that condition inevitably creates problems and generates protests as
has happened in many former communist countries in the past and is occurring in
Armenia now.
In those countries where there is
still some industry functioning, firms can bear some of the higher costs of
energy. That is the case in the Russian Federation, Latynina says. But in
others where industry has collapsed as is the case in Armenia, there is no one
around to pay the higher costs except the increasingly poor population.
That not surprisingly sparks anger
and sometimes demonstrations, the Moscow commentator says, but “these protests
do not have any particular political subtext.”
The problem here is that “even without such subtexts, [those like in
Armenia now] hit Russia in a special way.”
On the one hand, she points out,
Armenian President Serzh Sargyan is “one of the few oriented toward the
Kremlin.” And on the other, Russian firms own the Armenian power producers.
Those two things alone are sufficient, Latynina observes, to set the conspiracy
theorists in the Russian capital to working overtime.
The Russian reaction is in fact the
most instructive thing about the current situation. “In that total paranoia in
which the ruling circles of Russia live, there is no explanation for anything
that happens in the world besides the machinations of the United States.” Indeed, she says, she is surprised someone
hasn’t suggested that “only prayers and FSB special operations have saved us
from the fall of the moon,” something the Americans supposedly have an interest
in.
But there is something more at work
in the Armenian case, she argues. “Our conspiracy theorists need phantom
victories over America, and when everything in Armenia calms down, they will
with pride describe it as their suppression of a ‘rates Maidan.’ And everything
will calm down in Armenia because that country doesn’t have any other way out.”
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