but while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are ukraine's, the campaign is an american creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. funded and organised by the us government, deploying us consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big american parties and us non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in europe in belgrade in 2000 to beat slobodan milosevic at the ballot box. richard miles, the us ambassador in belgrade, played a key role. and by last year, as us ambassador in tbilisi, he repeated the trick in georgia, coaching mikhail saakashvili in how to bring down eduard shevardnadze. ten months after the success in belgrade, the us ambassador in minsk, michael kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central america, notably in nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the belarus hardman, alexander lukashenko. in the centre of belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the centre for non-violent resistance. if you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young belgrade activists are for hire. they emerged from the anti-milosevic student movement, otpor, meaning resistance. the catchy, single-word branding is important. in georgia last year, the parallel student movement was khmara. in belarus, it was zubr. in ukraine, it is pora, meaning high time. otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to milosevic. a logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.
Brazil