TBILISI, GEORGIA -- — She's a soldier in a different kind of war.
Every few months, Nini Gogiberidze is deployed abroad to teach democracy activists how to agitate for change against their autocratic governments, going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, September 07, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Velvet revolutionaries: A Sept. 3 article in Section A about pro-democracy activists in Georgia said the International Republican Institute was a source of funding for the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies. The institute does not fund the group.
Gogiberidze is among Georgia's "velvet" revolutionaries, a group of Western and local activists who make up a robust pro-democracy corps in this Caucasus country -- so much of it funded by American philanthropist George Soros that one analyst calls the nation Sorosistan.
"Velvet revolutions require the same type of discipline as military revolutions but without the guns," the 28-year-old Georgian lawyer says. "People, if they stay united and disciplined, can change a lot of things."
Georgia's status as a kind of laboratory for such groups is a little-explored dimension of the recent battle between Moscow and Tbilisi. It is a conflict between imperial ambitions rooted in the 19th century and the soft power of 21st century electronic media and global culture -- the iron fist versus the velvet glove.
The velvet revolutionaries, whose name comes from the peaceful 1989 uprising against communist rule in Czechoslovakia, have racked up numerous successes, including Georgia's Rose Revolution, which brought Soros protege Mikheil Saakashvili to the presidency in 2004; the Orange Revolution later that year that toppled the Kremlin-backed government in Ukraine; and the Cedar Revolution of 2005 in Lebanon that led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops.
The Kremlin openly despises Soros. Along with other authoritarian governments, it views the so-called color revolutions as U.S.-sponsored plots using local dupes to overthrow governments unfriendly to Washington and install American vassals. Moscow regards Saakashvili and his crowd with the same disdain as it views the English-speaking, laptop-toting liberals who it believes brought post-communist Russia to financial ruin in the 1990s.
'These do-gooders'
Critics say the velvet revolutionaries are naive, trying to graft foreign political solutions onto countries with long histories and regional realities.
"These do-gooders, thinking themselves to be doing good, walked themselves into a trap, sensing they could do whatever they wanted regardless of the long and tangled history of this place," says Thomas Goltz, an American journalist and scholar who lived for years in the Caucasus and has written books about Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
