Category Revolutions

Some comments on Kazakhstan

As I am sure a lot of people have noticed, Kazakhstan has been in the news this week. The protests there have been large and violent. They are now saying that at least 164 people have died, including 18 police. It has put an end to the influence of the longest serving FSU (Former Soviet Union) dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He had been in office since 1990 (when the Soviet Union still existed). Good riddance, although I am not sure he is going to be replaced by anyone any better. It does not look like this is going to turn into a budding enlightened democracy any time soon. With Russia troops in the country, who knows exactly what path this will take.

The intervening force is CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), which had been around since 1992/1994. It has six members, Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kygyzstan and Tajikistan. Russia has the largest military of the six, with 900,000 active troops. The next largest military is 45,000. I gather most all of the members have sent troops to Kazakhstan, but clearly Russia is the dominate player. The current secretary general of CSTO is from Belarus.

At the moment, I don’t have much to say beyond what is being reported. Life has become uncomfortable for certain leaders in the FSU. The democratically elected but Russian aligned leader of Ukraine, Yanukovich, was thrown out of power in 2014 in the Euromaiden protests; the leader of Armenia, Sargsyan, was removed from office in 2018 (the Velvet Revolution); the leader of Belarus, Lukashenko, came pretty close to being thrown out of power in 2020/21 (the Slipper Revolution); and now the longest serving dictator in Kazakhstan has been thrown out of power in 2022. One does wonder who is next.

Update (1/13/22):

  1. CSTO sent around 2,500 troops.
  2. They are supposed to pull out by 19 January.
  3. Update 1/19/22: At least 225 people were killed, according to the Kazakhstan prosecutor general’s office. 
  4. Update 1/19/22: Russian and CSTO have stated they have withdrawn their over 2,000 troops deployed to Kazakhstan.

Variable 4: Is there a problem with internal turmoil and unrest in China?

Depressions begat revolutions. Now it ain’t so simple as that, but there is a big enough correlation here that every time there is a economic downturn, a nation’s leaders should be looking over their shoulder in concern. If they are a democratic government, it probably means they will now have time to write their memoirs. If they are a dictatorship, they could end up dangling from a meat-hook.

The seminal quantitative work on this subject was two separate studies done in the 1960s by Ted Gurr and the couple Ivo and Rosilind Feierabend. Ted Gurr’s work was summarized in his book Why Men Revolt, while the Feierhabend’s never issued out a book (which is a shame as their work was as significant). There has not been much of significance done since then (which I think is fairly bizarre actually… it is not like revolutions are a dead subject).  We have blogged about this before.

So Variable 3 is “How is the economy of China doing?.” As long as the China economy is growing and thriving over the next 20 years, then this only increases the danger to Taiwan. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons to doubt that their economy will continue to thrive over the next 20 years. If the economy is not growing, then this fourth variable comes into play: Is there a problem with internal turmoil and unrest in China?  This affects the odds that China will decide the invade Taiwan in five ways:

  1. The reduced economic growth probably reduces their “defense” budget.
  2. If there is unrest or political turmoil, it probably distracts the government to worry about internal issues, vice invading their neighbors (although it some cases, it can actually do the reverse).
  3. It may result in a leadership change:
    1. This leadership could be even more internally absorbed.
    2. This leadership could be even more nationalistic.
    3. This government could be unstable.
  4. It may result in a change of the form of government:
    1. Communism collapses.
      1. It becomes a democracy
      2. It becomes a dictatorship.
      3. The new government could be unstable
      4. Central government may collapse entirely.
    2. Communism is reinforced (sort of another cultural revolution)
    3. Communism is de-stabilized, but returns back in control.
  5. It may result in no government at all (more on this later).

So, what are the odds that China will have a economic slow-down in the next 20 years? Is it 25%, is it 50%, is there no chance at all? 

If there is an economic slowdown, what is the chance of political turmoil, and then what is the extent, nature and virulence of this political turmoil? Is it a bunch children of “princelings” that can be run over with tanks, or is something more broadly based.

The problem with revolutions, is that once they start, they gets pretty hard to predict where they are going to go. For example, when the Shah of Iran abdicated in 1979, much his vocal opposition came from the left, often college students. The country ended up being taken over by Ayatollahs. The Russian revolution started in 1917 with the moderately liberal Cadet Party and Alexander Kerensky running the country in a somewhat democratic manner and ended up with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in charge. The Russian revolution of 1991 ended up with Boris Yeltsin in charge of a developing democracy and ended up with Vladimir Putin in charge. The Arab Spring of 2010-2012 resulted in demonstrations and revolts in 17 or so different countries. In four of those countries the governments were overthrown (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen). Only one ended up with a democratic government in its aftermath. 

And then there is always the possibility that China could end up with no central controlling government at all. This is not all that far-fetched. China has spent almost of much of its history broken up into smaller states as it has spend unified as a single state. There is no strong reason to assume that over the next decades that China will remain unified. There is no history that suggests such a pattern.  

Modern countries do break up. Yugoslavia comes to mind. There are significant independence movements in Catalonia (Barcelona) and Scotland. So the image of China as a dominating unified state may not be the image moving forward.

Anyhow, I suspect we are looking at maybe a 50% chance of a major economic slowdown in the next 20 years (this is just a wild guess, I have no idea what the odds of such an event are). If there is an economic slowdown, then I am guessing maybe a 50% change of unrest and turmoil. So….there is no guarantee that China will be in a position or place to even consider invading Taiwan in the next 20 years. Maybe a 50% chance that this is the case.

 

Related blog posts:

Why Men Rebel? | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

Why Are We Still Wondering Why Men (And Women) Rebel? | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

Quote from America’s Modern Wars | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

Ted Gurr Has Passed Away | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

Protests in Russia – week 2

 

Well, not really week 2 of protests in Russia as there has been protests going on in Kharborovsk since July 2020. There are also still scattered protests in Belarus and there have been pro-Belarus (anti-Lukashenko) protests in St. Petersburg. Protests are actually becoming quite common in the FSU (Former Soviet Union).

Anyhow, certainly tens of thousands of protestors showed up across the nation over the weekend. The Russian government sealed off downtown Moscow, so as to avoid the optics of tens of thousands of protestors in and around Pushkin Square. Over 5,000 protesters were detained/arrested in rather heavy handed police tactics.

Meanwhile, the Aleksei Navalny video has 107 million views.

Picture above is from St. Petersburg, courtesy of Reuters/Anton Vaganov.

Anyhow, it is hard to see how this resolves. It is large and virulent and in the middle of winter. What reforms and changes to does Putin offer to calm down the protests? An anti-corruption campaign when he is clearly at the center of it? Sell the palace that he supposedly does not own? Release Navalny? Institute democratic reforms? I suspect he has no choice but to continue arresting protestors each weekend until they tire. This could go on for a while. I also fully expect the protests in Belarus to continue. I am guessing that more people will start coming out as the weather gets better. Also, the protests have occurred in over 70 cities in Russia, so it is kind of widespread.

Not sure this is the end of Putin’s regime….but I do think he and his large collection of cronies will be pretty uncomfortable for a while. They got too corrupt for their own good.

Protests in Russa

People attend a rally in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow, Russia January 23, 2021. REUTERS/Yuri Belyat

Well, large protests in Belarus have disappeared but they are still doing a number of smaller protests. This weekend the Belarus police detained/arrested around 100 protestors. Meanwhile protests have exploded in Russia. On Saturday, they started in the far east in the Siberian cities of Vladivostok and Kharbarovsk and erupted across dozens of cities across Russia (90 cities according to one count). They culminated in large protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian government claimed 4,000 protestors in Moscow, but it looked like a lot more than that in the videos I have seen  One estimate was 15,000 gathered in and around Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow (picture of protestors in Pushkin Square is shown above). The police have detained/arrested over 3,300 according to one independent Russian source (OVD-Info). 

We have seen continued protests in Kharborovsk that have been going on since July  2020, but this is a nation-wide explosion. Not sure how to evaluate it or measure its impact. We have seen several governments overthrown in Eastern Europe: Euromaiden (Ukraine: 2013-2014),  the Orange Revolution (Ukraine: 2004-2005) and the Rose Revolution (Georgia: 2003). Is this serious enough to threaten Putin’s hold on power? I have no way of evaluating that at the moment. I did think that Lukashenko, President of Belarus, was close to being removed, and that may well be the case yet, especially if the protests in Belarus get rejuvenated.

By the way, the Aleksei Navalny video that is partly responsible stirring up these protests is here: Дворец для Путина. История самой большой взятки – YouTube

It is two hours, in Russian with English subtitles and I heard it is worth watching, is well researched and makes a fairly convincing case. It has 84.6 86.4 93.3 million views so far.

Disputed Elections – week 21

Well, it kind of looks like this is over for now. There has been Christmas, New Years and no new significant large protests. I gather there are still flash mobs and small protests, but nothing like the tens of thousands in the street that there was. Two days ago the archbishop of Minsk resigned his post. He has been critical of Lukashenko and has been blocked from re-entering Belarus. Meanwhile Lukashenko is busy planning for a referendum on his constitutional changes. No date as to when that would be.

So, it appears that Lukashenko remains in power for now. The opposition is still out there and there are still small protests (including in St. Petersburg, Russia). Suspect this will simmer for a while. Who knows if there will be a spark that re-ignites the protests in mass or if Lukashenko has safely preserved his rule until the next election (which I gather is in 5 years) or his new constitution is adopted. This is his sixth term as president. He is 64. The main opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya remains in Lithuania with her children. Her husband, a political activist, is currently in jail in Belarus. She is 38. Lukashenko says he will resign as president once the new constitution is put into place. Right now, it is not known what that constitution says and when it will be in place.

This is probably the last I will blog about this until something significant happens. It does appear that for now, Lukashenko has managed to put down a protest that had at one point maybe 200,000 people in the street. Early on, he was fairly heavy handed. This seems to fuel the opposition. He then backed down and waited, arresting/detaining several hundred protestors each week. This seemed to work. One wonders if there is a lesson there, which would be, if one tries too hard to crack down on protestors, one just fuels them. In the end, the protest resulted in the death of 4 protestors according to most counts. In contrast, the successful Euromaiden protests that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 was done at a cost of at least 104 people, and some provide much higher figures (up to 780). According to one rumor I heard, during the Euromaiden protests President Putin of Russia kept insisting that Viktor Yanukovych, President of Ukraine, crack down harder on the protestors. At the time, Yanukovych had deployed snipers to shoot at protestors but he apparently told Putin that it was politically impossible to do anything further.

When I first starting blogging about this on 13 August 2020 I laid out six possible scenarios:

1. Lukashenko manages to remain in power.
2. Lukashenko is replaced by someone in his entourage.
3. Lukashenko is overthrown and replaced by a democratic government.
4. Lukashenko is overthrown and replaced by a government that becomes an oligarchy or another dictatorship.

5. Russian intervenes.

6. Lukashenko forms a combined government with the opposition so as to head off Russian intervention.

 

Russian intervention could have several forms

1. To prop up Lukashenko, possibly in exchange for signing a treaty that surrenders some or much of their sovereignty.
2. To prop up a replacement for Lukashenko, also in exchange for signing a treaty that surrenders some or much of their sovereignty.
3. Russia annexes Belarus.

 

See: Events in Belarus | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

For now, it appears that scenario one is the case. Suspect that will still be the case in twelve months from now. Who knows where we will be at in five years. Dictatorships have a tendency to survive for only one generation and Lukashenko is no longer young. 

 

 

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from previous months, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews. I still do no know if she had been released, although many protesters have been detained, charged, convicted and later released.

 

 

 

 

Disputed Elections – week 19

The protests in Belarus continue to shrink. They report thousands of protestors in scattered locations this week, and over 100 arrested/detained (or 146 according to “Vesna”). This is the lowest arrest figure that I have seen in a while. I assume this is because there are less protestors, as opposed to the police becoming “kinder, gentler.”

A couple of personal stories:

  1. Jewish female Belarussian WWII sniper arrested: https://www.jta.org/2020/12/16/global/this-holocaust-survivor-in-belarus-was-fined-for-flying-a-symbolic-protest-flag-shes-not-backing-down
  2. Miss Belarus 2008 released: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/miss-belarus-2008-released-after-42-days-in-prison-for-anti-government-protests/ar-BB1c6ITc?%25253Bpfr=1%253Fc
  3. The IIHF (Hockey) championships banned in Russia but not Belarus: https://tass.com/sport/1236889

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from previous months, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews.

Disputed Elections – week 18

Pretty much the same-old-same-old with Belarus. The protests in Belarus drag on with no clear end in sight. The demonstrations this weekend were stated to include “thousands” of demonstrators protesting at a reported “more than 70 different sites” or “more than 120 marches.”

Clearly it is no longer “tens of thousands” protestors and far from more than hundred thousand protestors that we saw on some of the weekends. The strike called last month didn’t seem to do much. Does that mean that the protests are losing virulence, or are they just hunkered down for the long term? The Belarus opposition is now opening up “People’s Embassies:” in a dozen countries and has support in many countries in Europe. Meanwhile, Belarus has closed its borders to try to combat the Coronavirus. Considering that Lukashenko has never taken the virus seriously before, most likely it is to try to stem the “brain drain” of talented and young people bailing out of Belarus.

This is beginning to look a whole lot more like the failed protests in Venezuela than the various color revolutions in Eastern Europe that overthrew the governments of Ukraine and Georgia. Lukashenko may be able to suppress/contain the protests but it will be at considerable long-term cost to the economy. The country already has a declining population (see graph below). Turning a country of 9.4 million into a new type of Gulag in hardly the basis for a modern, growing economy.

There were more than 130 or 170 protestors detained/arrested this weekend. Many news reports state that over 30,000 people people have been detained in Belarus since the start of the protests in August. Many accounts are reporting that four people have died since this started as a result of government crackdowns.

 

 

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from previous months, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews

Disputed Elections – week 17

The protests in Belarus drag on with no clear end in sight. The demonstrations this weekend were stated to include “thousands” of demonstrators. This is clearly a lower figure than the “tens of thousands” were have seen claimed before and from the more than a hundred thousand protestors that we saw on some of the weekends. Does that mean that the protests are losing virulence, or are they just hunkered down for the long term? The strike last month didn’t do much.

There were more the 300 protestors detained/arrested this weekend. Lukashenko and his son were banned by the Olympic committee from the games. Lukashenko leads the Belarus Olympic Committee and his son is the first vice-president of the committee.

 

 

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from previous months, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews

Disputed Elections – week 16

Well, the protests in Belarus drag on. Not sure where this is going. Major events this week:

  1. Thousands protested this weekend. Was it tens of thousands?
  2. They switched the protests to a “march of neighbors,” meaning instead of protesting in the heavily policed downtown, they did about 20+ separate protests across the various neighborhoods in Minsk. I gather this is an attempt to complicate the police’s job and to reduce the number of people arrested. It is a change of tactics.
  3. 313 people were detained/arrested
  4. Lukashenko claimed he would step down after a new constitution is adopted. “I am not going to shape the constitution to suit my needs. I am not going to be the president once the new constitution is in place.” He has been in power for 26 years.
  5. Have no idea what is going to be in the new constitution or when it will be completed. It does not appear that the opposition are putting much faith in the process, or have any role in it.

Anyhow, it appears to be more of the same for several more weeks. 

 

 

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from last month, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews

Disputed Elections – week 15

Protests in Belarus continue as before. One protestor, 31 year old art teacher Roman Bondarenko, died last week in a hospital, probably as a result of a severe beating by plain clothes police officers (of course, their interior ministry denies this). His funeral on Friday was attended by 5,000 people and there were again tens of thousands of protestors this weekend in Minsk (see picture above). There were 345 protestors arrested/detained this weekend compared to over 900 last week. At least four protestors have died since the protests have begun.

The strike, which was called for on 26 October, has not really taken hold. So for now, it appears that Lukashenko has the advantage although there seems to be no end in sight for the protests. How long does this continue and what is the eventual outcome?