Coloured Revolutions: The View from Moscow and Beijing

Abstract

Both the Russian and the Chinese leaderships were deeply disturbed by the outbreak of the coloured revolutions in the post-Soviet space between 2003 and 2005, perceiving them as both an external and an internal threat. The Russian and Chinese political elites were not only intensely troubled by the occurrence of the coloured revolutions but shared a common assessment of their causes and domestic implications. In their different ways, the two leaderships attempted to devise a domestic policy that would maintain their commitment to market transition and to a circumscribed form of civil society while simultaneously staving off potentially destabilizing influences from abroad.