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Freedom House

Authoritarians on Color Revolutions

"In my opinion, everything that happened in Ukraine shook Russia.... Young people began to discuss and think about Russia’s direction."
—Ivan Mostovich, press secretary of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi, April 2005

"We’re only afraid these changes will be chaotic.... It’ll be a banana republic where the one who shouts loudest is the one who wins."
—Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, September 2005

"We have sympathy with [Arab governments] because they did not read warnings that they should have read. That things were changing because of the wishes of their people, and because of machinations of the imperialists."
—Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, June 2011

"It is hardly likely that the US will admit to manipulating [Hong Kong’s] ‘Occupy Central’ movement, just as it will not admit to manipulating other anti-China forces. It sees such activities as justified by ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘human rights’ and other values."
—People’s Daily commentary, October 2014

"Hostile forces have always attempted to make Hong Kong the bridgehead for subverting and infiltrating mainland China.... The illegal Occupy Central activities in 2014 came as minority radical groups in Hong Kong, under the instigation and support of external forces ... orchestrated a Hong Kong version of a color revolution."
—Gen. Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of general staff, People’s Liberation Army, March 2015

"Various human rights organizations, think tanks, and simple NGOs of the U.S. and its allies in Europe, concealing their true goals, have established a huge network of affiliates around the world.... It is they who act as the ‘fifth column.’"
—Ramiz Mehdiyev, head of presidential administration, Azerbaijan, December 2014

"The sides noted that Russia and China had a common approach to the key problems of regional and international security and expressed readiness to counteract ‘color revolutions.’... Russia and China suffered the biggest losses during WWII and should be resolutely opposed to any attempts to revive fascism and falsify the results of the bloodiest conflict in human history."
—Russian Security Council, statement on security consultations with China, May 2015

role of the United States as puppet master. Yet neither the Kremlin nor likeminded regimes have advanced credible evidence that the various civic movements were inauthentic. The American role in the Orange Revolution of 2004–5, for example, was limited to funding for voter training, upgrading of election technology, and other measures designed to assist authorities in ensuring fair balloting. There is no evidence of direct American government help to the Orange forces. If the United States influenced the eventual outcome, it did so by making it more difficult for the Ukrainian authorities to rig the election results.⁸

Strangled by law
Over the past decade there has been a steady stream

of laws that restrict the funding and operations of NGOs. While more than 50 countries have passed such legislation, the most aggressive campaign to bring civil society to heel through legal constraints has been carried out by the Russian authorities.

There are 11 laws on the books in Russia that deal solely with civil society organizations and another 35 that mention NGOs. Yet nowhere are NGOs defined. This vagueness is deliberate. It gives officials the discretion to decide which civil society organizations should be prosecuted and harassed and which should be left alone or encouraged. It enables them to penalize, for example, a foundation that supports scientific

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