Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, large scale privatization of public enterprises became rampant in Russia and other former republics of the Soviet Union. All kinds of "experts of nation-building on a capitalist basis, especially neoliberal economic advisors from the United States, played key roles in crafting those highly scandalous privatization schemes. By virtue of privatizing public property on the cheap, many of the leaders of the newly independent states managed to become very rich very quickly "they have since come to be known as oligarchs. (Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, calls them "kleptocrats, denoting corrupt ruling elites that seek power and personal gain at the expense of the public.)
But the newly acquired private fortunes needed freedom from the remnants of the Soviet-era legal and institutional "constraints such as labor laws (that guaranteed life-time employment), universal healthcare, cradle-to-grave free education, and the like. To break free from these "restraining laws and traditions, the oligarchs also needed political or state power that would go along with their economic power, i.e., would allow them to conduct their economic affairs according to unhindered market mechanism.
The oligarch's desire to bring about legal, political and institutional changes to better serve their nefarious economic interests coincided with the globalization designs of US imperialism to bring about "regime change in those countries in order to carry out pro-American economic and foreign policies. This explains the convergence of the interests of the imperialist and the home-grown bourgeoisies on removing "undesirable regimes from power.
Most commentators trace the origins of the US doctrine of "color revolutions, and the concomitant concept of "soft power or "non-violent struggle, to the 1990s. But a number of political historians, including Thierry Meyssan, president of the Voltaire Network, trace it back to the 1970s:
This concept appeared in the 90s, but its roots lie in the American public debate of the 70s-80s. After a string of revelations about CIA-instigated coups around the world, as well as the dramatic disclosures of the Church and Rockefeller Senate Committees, Admiral Stansfield Turner was given the task by President Carter to clean up the agency and to stop supporting ˜local dictatorships.' Furious, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA) left the Democratic Party and sided with Ronald Reagan. . . . After Reagan was elected, he charged them with pursuing the American interference policy, this time using different methods. This is how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1982 and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in 1984 [4].
Philip Giraldi, former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, presently a partner in an international security consultancy (Cannistraro Associates), describes the US designs of "soft power and/or "color revolutions as follows:
Where regime change coming out of Washington might once have been done covertly by the CIA, it is now done openly by a number of organizations that are ostensibly "private" but are in reality funded by the government, the NGOs and others that Vladimir Putin and others have been complaining about. . . . The money and effort that is being channeled through NGOs is being used to change the way many countries are governed, to make them become more democratic or at least more cooperative with Europe and the United States.The countries on the receiving end are more often than not completely aware of what is going on.Frequently, the western media jumps on the band wagon to complete the job, hailing the arrival of democracy in yet another poor benighted land while carefully ignoring the corruption of the newly minted democratic leaders.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with its bipartisan International Republican Institute and its National Democratic Institute wings, is the chief culprit, but the US Agency for International Development also is involved, funded under the Freedom Support Act.The National Endowment for Democracy, which funds changing governments overseas and has virtually no oversight, would in any other guise be proscribed as a dangerous underground group. . . . What do these organizations do when they set out to overturn a government? They would not be so unwise as to appear adversarial or cast themselves as revolutionaries, so they instead describe themselves in the most benign terms while becoming enablers for others who wish to "create democracy." They understand above all that the ability to protest and force the change of governments is not new but that the new technologies have changed the entire game [5].
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