The international version of Speigel Online had arecent article titled, “Fearing Uprising, Russia Backs Moldova’s Communists” about the student uprisings in in Moldova to protest the Communist rule of that country.
Riot police took back the Moldovan parliament and presidential buildings on Wednesday, and Thursday was calm in Chisinau. But a large protest in the capital was brewing on Friday — organized on a Twitter stream tagged #pman, which stands for the initials of Chisinau’s biggest square– with protesters claiming the government would use the threat of a Romanian coup as a reason to arrest people illegally.
“Communists block students in their classrooms and threaten them with exmatriculation if they protest,” claimed one Twitterer on Friday. “Somebody help Moldova pleaseeee,” wrote another.
In the West, the uprising looked like another post-Soviet “color” revolution, a people’s movement against an old-guard Communist regime, such as Georgia’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” or Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution.” From Moscow’s perspective, that’s exactly the problem. “The Moscow authorities are afraid of spontaneous mass protests in the regions … and, for this reason, Russian television is showing what is happening in an exclusively negative light,” Dmitry Oreshkin, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Reuters. “It is beneficial for the Kremlin to show the consequences of peoples’ protests to justify why it needs to be tough.”
It will be interesting to see how authoritarian governments react to these tactics. The United States Government is already starting to go down that path. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would federalize control over the nation’s internet infrstructure and according to the EFF:
“One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds.”