With far-off Kyrgyzstan in revolt Friday, senior Russian politicians and pro-government analysts voiced concerns for the first time that populist revolutions in the former Soviet Union hold ominous portents for Russia's prestige, stability and security

With far-off Kyrgyzstan in revolt Friday, senior Russian politicians and pro-government analysts voiced concerns for the first time that populist revolutions in the former Soviet Union hold ominous portents for Russia's prestige, stability and security. "The impact will be bad," said Sergei Markov, one of the architects of President Vladimir Putin's quasi-authoritarian policy of "managed democracy." "The Central Asian region now faces a risk of Islamization," Markov said. "In addition, drug trafficking from Central Asia to Europe via Russia will certainly grow." Whether democratic fever will spread to Russia eventually is the larger question. A liberal opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, suggested Friday that "if President Putin at least draws some lessons from these revolutions, Russia can avoid such a scenario. "And if he doesn't, then anything is possible." The Kyrgyz uprising is the third pro-democracy revolt in the former Soviet Union in the past 18 months, following Georgia's Rose Revolution and Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Although Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet republic that inherited a Soviet-style strongman as its leader, the country is markedly different from Georgia and Ukraine: It's landlocked, Asian, predominantly (and moderately) Muslim, with an almost feudal economy and no history of pluralism or liberal democracy. Its revolution has been different, too: bloody, spontaneous, disorganized, marred by looting. The sobriquet "Velvet Revolution" (Czechoslovakia, 1989) doesn't quite fit.