Follow the Leader

Askar Akayev's abrupt departure took everyone by surprise—especially the people trying to oust him. Indeed, the President of Kyrgyzstan fled last Thursday before his opponents could even decide what to call the latest revolution to rock a former Soviet republic—pink? Lemon? Tulip? "We were expecting at least a couple of days of picketing," says Alexander Kim, editor of the main opposition newspaper, MSN. "No one thought [the government] would collapse in half a day."

As in Georgia's rose revolution and Ukraine's orange one, Kyrgyzstan's leader was ejected following protests over contested elections. But where Ukraine's revolution unfolded peacefully over several months, and the Georgian uprising avoided large-scale violence, Akayev's dethronement was nearly instantaneous—the Thursday protest started tentatively—and the denouement was a spasm of rioting, theft and vandalism. But there were important similarities, too. The police no longer see dissidents as the enemy. "When the demonstrators reached the presidential offices, they commiserated with the cops about their $25-a-month salaries, and asked them to let them in without a fuss," says local journalist Tolkun Saginova. "The cops threw down their night sticks and left."

It's a disturbing sign for former Soviet states like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where opposition calls for reforms have been repeatedly repressed. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko put down a protest over the weekend, and some analysts believe the dominoes could even start falling in the Kremlin's direction, though Vladimir Putin's grip seems pretty secure. "Nobody rushed to defend Akayev," says Alexey Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "All these post-Soviet authoritarian regimes are proving colossuses with feet of clay."