№ 5 - 2006
Mezhuyev B.V.
The “Orange Revolution”: a Reconstruction of the Context

An attempt is undertaken in this article to reconstruct the “revolutionary context” in which we are plunged by the revolution metaphor resorted to when the events in Ukraine are described. In the author’s opinion, the “revolutionary metaphor”, while inevitably perverting the perception of real sequence of facts, at the same time leads us, in the course of their interpretation, into some “big history”, where locally and temporally differing facts are most closely correlated. Applying it, we thus point not only to similarity of the events it signifies, but also to their genetic affinity. They turn out to be supposedly included into a certain logically consistent and irrevocable process, resistance to which appears by no means as simply maintenance of order or of power continuity, but, instead, as conservative reaction to “the inexorable course of history”. It is demonstrated in the article that, bearing the stamp of “revolutionism”, the said process acquires a whole number of characteristics due to this metaphor itself.