Power to the people

Matthew Collin tells how revolutionary youth movements from Serbia to Ukraine have made their mark in The Time of the Rebels, says Jon Savage

Saturday September 22, 2007
The Guardian

The Time of the Rebels
by Matthew Collin
224pp, Serpent's Tail, £12.99

At dawn on October 5 2000, thousands of young Serbs descended on Belgrade, the capital of Slobodan Milosevic's regime. Some had armed themselves with petrol bombs and clubs, others were intent on less violent forms of protest: when one group met a roadblock on the edge of the city, they simply lifted the policemen - who had disobeyed their orders to fire on the protesters - and dumped them by the side of the road.

The protesters were determined on one thing: the president must go. Despite the fact that the democratic candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, had attained a majority in the presidential election, Milosevic refused to step down. Once in Belgrade, these young activists - marshalled by "urgent electronic beats" - made for the Serbian parliament. Bursting through police lines, they set the building ablaze. On the next day, Milosevic admitted defeat.

The vanguard in this extraordinary display of people power - as thousands upon thousands of Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade - were members of a youth movement called Otpor ("resistance"). Originating in 1998 - the year that Milosevic had tightened the regime's control over the universities - this loose, shadowy group had avoided conventional politics in favour of snappy sloganeering, absurdist gestures (derived from Monty Python) and outright mockery.

Inspired by western youth culture and revolutionary theorists such as Gene Sharp - whose book From Dictatorship To Democracy lists 198 peaceful ways to resist and undermine dictatorships - Otpor aimed at nothing less than "a revolution in the mind". The sense of possibility that they sought to awaken both harked back to 1968 - "the year of the barricades" in Paris, Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade - and projected forward into the 21st century.

The Time of the Rebels traces Otpor's influence on the peaceful revolutions that swept through the former Soviet Union in the first few years of the current decade. In each case, the agenda was the same: fury at institutionalised corruption and repression, and a deep longing for democracy. For those involved it was a heady time, as they stepped over the line between acquiescence and resistance. "All my previous life," one young female activist remembered, "was now going away, like the sand through my fingers."

In Georgia, the youth group Kmara ("enough") took Otpor as their inspiration in their attempt to undermine the long-standing president, Eduard Shevardnadze. Copying the Serbian group's logo of a clenched fist, they disrupted official ceremonies and daubed their slogans around the capital Tbilisi. In the run up to the election of November 2003, they travelled through the country attracting bored teenagers through a mixture of "entertainment and activity as well as a political vision".

Their hard work paid off in the flashpoint that followed Shevardnadze's disputed re-election. As 100,000 people gathered in Tbilisi's Freedom Square, Kmara activists interrupted the president as he was making a speech in the Georgian parliament. Shevardnadze was bundled away in ignominy, while Kmara activist Mikheil Saakashvili got up on the podium and, with fine impudence, fi nished the president's glass of tea.

For a while it seemed like the domino theory in reverse, as state after former Soviet state plunged into democracy. In January 2004, the Washington Post primly reported the Russian president Vladimir Putin's pungent comment on what was happening: "All the leaders of the CIS (the union of former Soviet states) are [expletive deleted] in their pants." The momentum that had begun in Berlin during 1989 seemed unstoppable.

It was Ukraine's turn next. Former Otpor activists were involved with the radical youth movement Pora - meaning "it's time". Again, the activity was centred around a disputed election that made international news when the principal opposition candidate, the west-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned by a potentially lethal dioxin. In the confusion that followed the election, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians thronged their capital. Pora activists were at the forefront of the tent city set up in the Maidan, the Independence Square at the heart of Kiev. Creating an instant republic - part Glastonbury, part Paris Commune - they were supported by their countrymen over the next two months. That's as long as it took for the intense public pressure - the "orange revolution" - to see Yushchenko declared president against the odds.

Collin traces the story of these uprisings with economy and clarity. He notes how Otpor, Kmara and Pora shared key characteristics: small beginnings among disaff ected students, the lack of a conventional structure, a single issue focus, crossparty support, plus lightning-fast, technology-led activism that inspired through pop culture savvy and a cheeky, situationist sense of humour. They succeeded because they chimed with the national mood in their respective countries.

Just when you think that Collin might be a little too starry-eyed about the nature of political youth groups - for they can be both democratic and totalitarian - he mentions reactive movements such as the Russian Nashi ("our guys") which, as he writes, were "set up in Moscow after Ukraine's orange revolution to counter the potential influence" of the student resistance. He also takes care to end with accounts of the revolutions that failed, in Kyrgyzstan and Belarus.

Despite its bare bones production - no map, no index, no photos - The Time of the Rebels is a serious work that is an important addition to youth literature. It flows naturally from Collin's previous two books: 1997's Altered State, which traced the spread of ecstasy culture, and 2001's This Is Serbia Calling, the story of the Belgrade radio station B92.

It also suggests a whole new field for youth historians - there is still no survey in English of post-revolutionary Soviet youth movements and culture. At the same time, Collin's first-hand reportage and new research casts an unflattering light on the current state of youth publishing in the UK, dominated as it is by premature, if not banal pop memoirs. There is life beyond the self.

· Jon Savage's Teenage is published by Chatto & Windus. To order The Time of the Rebels for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

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