By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker

Sunday, April 3, 2005; Page B03

Shortly after the so-called Rose Revolution in the tiny republic of Georgia, the leaders of the other nations that once made up the Soviet Union gathered in the Caspian Sea oil town of Baku for the funeral of Azerbaijan's longtime strongman president. There the heads of state of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian republics paid their respects to their fellow authoritarian even as they nervously eyed the instigators of the democratic uprising in their midst.

It naturally fell to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who in private and sometimes in public has demonstrated a taste for earthy, even crude language, to sum up the jittery mood. He walked over to one of the leaders of the Georgian revolution, two Georgian officials later told us, and declared pungently that all of the heads of state in the room were "[messing] in their pants."

As it turned out, those presidents were right to worry. Since that day in December 2003, two more of the men who belonged to that exclusive club have been unceremoniously pushed out of office by popular street revolts, first in Ukraine's Orange Revolution last December and now in the March Tulip Revolution in the nomadic mountain state of Kyrgyzstan, hard up against the Chinese border.

The swift spread of the revolutions has unsettled tyrants and inspired democrats throughout the vast reaches of Moscow's former empire, generating excited, if overheated, discussion of what some analysts over the last week were quick to dub "the second breakup of the Soviet Union." Some were even daring to ask the ultimate question: Could Russia itself be next?

After four years as The Washington Post's bureau chiefs in a country where even the past, as the old Soviet joke goes, is unpredictable, we learned that just about anything is possible. But we also spent our entire tour watching Putin's Kremlin systematically embark on a project to avoid any threat to its rule, methodically neutralizing alternative power centers that one day might conceivably challenge the former KGB colonel's grip on power. And the lesson he seems likely to learn from Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan is not to open up the political process but to crack down even harder.

The results of the Kremlin campaign that began with Putin's election five years ago last week are evident today -- no independent television to serve as a bullhorn for revolution, as it did in Georgia; a divided, weak and unpopular reformist opposition unable to unite around a single leader, unlike the broad coalition that formed in Ukraine; and cowed businessmen unable or unwilling to finance rival political efforts after watching the Kremlin jail Russia's richest man and confiscate his oil company.

Even in the early days of Putin's presidency, when it was still unclear to many where he intended to take the country, his advisers were plenty clear about the project. "Putin has said he wants to end the revolution," his political consultant, Gleb Pavlovsky, told us at the time, "not to start a new one."

And so there was Pavlovsky last week, telling a Moscow news conference confidently, "There is no threat that what happened in Georgia and Ukraine may happen in Russia."

Unlike the fading, aging leaders there and in Kyrgyzstan, Putin, he intimated, would not hesitate to stop any such uprising by force.

"Weapons should be used against rebel groups and criminals who actually stormed the parliament building in Bishkek," he said, referring to the Kyrgyz capital. "If the authorities fail to perform their institutional duties in those cases, they give away power. . . . In all cases where organized citizens promote this revolution scenario, they should be suppressed."

When he came to power, Putin was determined to end a revolution -- Boris Yeltsin's. Even though Yeltsin had handpicked him as his successor, Putin saw the 1990s not as the heady if flawed start of a new democracy but as a period of roiling instability, economic dislocation and crumbling state power.

"If by democracy one means the dissolution of the state," he once told a group of American correspondents when we asked him about his rollback of democratic institutions, "then we do not need any such democracy."

Elections were part and parcel of what Putin considered the unseemly mess of democracy and his counter-revolution was all about making sure they did not become the trigger for revolution as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. At first, his Kremlin tried to control them, coming up with the idea of "managed" elections, whose outcomes could be manipulated by authorities. When that proved troublesome, Putin decided simply to cancel gubernatorial elections in Russia's 89 regions altogether.

We got an indication of this attitude toward elections early in our tour when we went to the next-door republic of Belarus for the balloting that would hand a second term to Alexander Lukashenko, often called Europe's last dictator. While Western election observers trooped around polling places amassing evidence of manipulation, we found the head of the Russian monitoring team at a medieval castle outside the capital being feted at a private lunch before touring the countryside.

The official was so confident in the election's outcome that he had no apparent need to actually monitor it -- having already told the press that it was being conducted in a free and fair manner. Appropriately enough, the official was Alexander Veshnyakov, head of the Russian Central Election Commission.

In the various corners of the old Soviet empire, we met hundreds of activists over the last few years from political parties, human rights groups and media organizations who dreamed of toppling the repressive regimes that had emerged from the ashes of communism. In Belarus, we watched burly police beat young boys on a Minsk street for daring to hold an unauthorized protest. In Uzbekistan, we visited an aging Soviet-era dissident who had taken up the cause of persecuted Muslims imprisoned merely for wearing beards as a sign of faith. He interrupted the interview to show us his bloodstained shirt from the day police stormed into his apartment.

Nowhere was the discontent stronger than in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. From the moment we set down in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, for instance, we could find not one person outside government who still supported then-President Eduard Shevardnadze. In a market one day, vendors we interviewed grew so agitated that one woman began gesturing with a butter knife and vowing that she would kill Shevardnadze if she had the chance.

Some of the preconditions of revolution were similar in all three countries: long-standing grievances over poverty; corruption; and a distant, calcified government that had long since overstayed its welcome. In each case, the ruler had evolved from an ostensible democratic reformer to a dynastic ruler guarding his own family's interests -- Shevardnadze's son-in-law made millions in Georgia, Leonid Kuchma's son-in-law became one of Ukraine's biggest tycoons and Askar Akayev's son and daughter have just been installed in the Kyrgyz parliament.

Perhaps most important, though, was that in each country there was just enough political space for the opposition to operate, making for noticeably more open environments compared with neighboring countries.

By contrast, in Azerbaijan, a tough-minded new president -- son of the old KGB general at whose funeral Putin made his comment to the Georgians -- quickly quashed street protests by the opposition after his election, determined not to follow the revolutionary script. It worked, and we watched as Baku's Freedom Square turned into a battlefield, with hundreds of baton-wielding police beating demonstrators, many of them women and unarmed men. Opposition leaders were then rounded up and jailed. No one thinks Azerbaijan is on the brink of revolution today.

In a joint message to the Kyrgyz people last week, the leaders of the Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, hailed the developments in Bishkek. "These events showed that in our three countries the elections were just one of the reasons, the last straw that broke the people's patience and moved them towards the uprising."

But they also added an important caveat; for all the buzz about democratic upheaval sweeping the former Soviet Union, such revolutions can happen only when they are fueled by local conditions and people. "Revolutions cannot be exported," they wrote. "They happen only where there are objective grounds in place."

While many call this the second wave of democratization across the Soviet Union, that may misjudge the nature of the regimes that took hold when the union fell apart in 1991. In many of the newly independent states, the old communist boss simply became the new "democratic" president, and others who later took over, like Lukashenko, were simply old apparatchiks.

"There wasn't really a democratization wave 15 years ago," a senior Bush administration official told us the other day. "The old regime crumbled, and it was replaced by local authorities. This is really the first wave. It's a delayed thing. These countries came out blinking and confused into the light of sovereignty, not democracy, and they were taken over by local strongmen. These strongmen sometimes paid lip service to democracy, but the people knew the difference."

Alexei Mitrofanov, a member of the Russian State Duma, the lower house of parliament, is one of the most outlandish nationalist politicians in Russia, but he put his finger on it when he told the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the revolutions around the perimeter of the old empire mirrored Yeltsin's revolt against Soviet power. "They're the equivalent of August 1991 with a 14-year delay," he said, not meaning it as a compliment.

If that's the case, then, Russia may not feel the need to head down the same road. To many Russians, revolution and democracy have become tainted terms, equated with chaos and hardship, not freedom. Unlike what we saw in Georgia, Belarus or Ukraine, we rarely encountered deep-seated grass-roots discontent with Putin when we traveled the Russian countryside. Outside the narrow circle of intelligentsia in Moscow and St. Petersburg, many Russians agreed with Putin that a little autocracy was a good thing, and they handed him a second term in last year's flawed but probably representative election.

But many uncertainties remain as Russia heads toward the crucial year of 2008, when Putin's second and final term under the constitution expires. Many in Moscow believe he will try to find a way to hold onto power, and the city is abuzz with various schemes he could use to remain in control. "Well, who could stop them?" Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian elite, said in Profil magazine. "The opposition? We don't really have an opposition at all."

Putin's former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, recently broke a year-long silence to criticize his ex-boss and seems to be positioning himself to be a Russian Yushchenko. But many say they doubt he could pull it off, especially given his own unpopularity with the masses, who blamed him for anything they did not like in Putin's first term.

And so, if there were a revolution in Russia, many worry that it would not happen peacefully. The color of revolution in Moscow, then, might be red for blood.

Authors' e-mail: bakerp@washpost.com

glassers@washpost.com

Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, who finished a four-year tour as The Post's Moscow bureau chiefs in November, are authors of "Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution," to be published by Scribner in June.