Matthew Collin was in Georgia recently, reporting for the BBC on President Sakashvilli’s response to civilian protests: truncheons, water-cannons and rubber bullets. Things move pretty fast in post-Soviet Europe. In ‘The Time of the Rebels’, Collin’s fascinating study of the youth groups that fomented non-violent rebellion
from Serbia to Azerbaijan in the last decade, Sakashvilli is the rakish young hero, pausing to sip from the cup of the fleeing Eduard Shevardnadze in the midst of the Rose Revolution. How different that gesture looks now.
The book is great journalism, using eye-level experience and dispassionate research to give the reader a rare insight into the events. Of course, what it can’t be, yet, is history. What the main players were doing, or intending to do, is still hotly disputed. We don’t know who won yet, or even who was on which side.
So Collin cannot fully silence the nagging voices of concern about the groups he is discussing. Links to George Soros and various CIA-linked evangelists for market capitalism have led to doubts in some quarters that all the groups were quite the spontaneous expressions of hope they appeared to be. Collin’s inspiration, though, is the young idealists he met in tents and newspaper offices at the time. From daring to put up posters of Milosevicplastered with the words ‘He’s finished!’, to impersonating Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko as an escaped lunatic, the groups’ brave invention is inspiring. They were less good, though, at deciding what to do next. Form a party? Collapse the organisation and leave a beautiful corpse? Roam the world advising protesters in countries as diverse as Lebanon, Zimbabwe and Venezuela?
Whatever the grubby realities of politics, Otpor (and Kmara in Georgia, Pora in the Ukraine, KelKel in Kyrgyzstan, Yokh! in Azerbaijan, and Zubr in Belarus) represented a moment of hope in the midst of the sort of grinding oppression that is thankfully unknown to most of us, and Collin has done us a service in recording that moment from his informed perspective.
