The Time of the Rebels by Matthew CollinLeadtext: It was twenty minutes past eight in the evening and the city was already in darkness when one of the leaders of the youth resistance sent a text message to my mobile phone.The temperature was eight degrees below zero and I was standing in October Square in the centre of the Belarussian capital, Minsk, where thousands of people had gathered on the frozen grey stones for another tense night of protest against the country''s indomitable president, Alexander Lukashenko. A late winter breeze was chilling the bones, and my Belarussian friends were stamping their feet in time to the heavy rhythms thrashing out of the sound system in an attempt to keep themselves warm and raise their spirits high enough to beat back the fears about what might happen next, at least for as long as they could manage it."City Hall. Near pyramid of glass near trees. In 15 mins," read the text message. I knew he wouldn''t wait if I was even a few minutes late; he had said as much earlier. There were too many armed police on the streets that night to hang around for long, especially for someone who was under surveillance: he truly believed that he was a wanted man.

As he emerged from the gloom into the frosty silence of the deserted park, I recognised him immediately, even though he wasn''t wearing any opposition badges or stickers; this would have been far too risky for someone involved in organising protests which the authorities had warned could be prosecuted as terrorist acts. He was a tall, dark youth in his early twenties, and he was extremely edgy, gabbling nervously about some of his comrades who had gone missing a couple of days beforehand, presumably detained by the police after the night''s demonstration had ended. Nobody knew where they were being held; the police were saying nothing; their parents were frantic with worry. Such stories were not so unusual, that week in Minsk.He led me on a long, twisting route through the city''s snow-covered backstreets, sometimes doubling back, sometimes changing direction abruptly as if to confuse anyone following him, flitting in and out of bars and restaurants, scanning the tables for plainclothes state security officers or off-duty policemen enjoying an evening refreshment. When we finally found a café where he felt secure enough to talk quietly, he demanded to see my passport to check that I was who I said I was. He was apologetic, but insisted that it was necessary: in this country, not everyone is who they seem, he said. At the time, I thought him a little paranoid, but as it turned out, they were out to get him.

A few days after we met, he was arrested by the secret police.Minsk was the final destination on a series of journeys through turbulent times, through days of chaos and uncertainty and nights of hope and wonder, and this young Belarussian was just the latest of many who had committed themselves to the cause of peaceful resistance. At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of revolution began to sweep across former Communist states, from Serbia to Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Dramatic images filled the television screens of the world: fresh-faced youths marching proudly under brightly-coloured banners; rows of hardy tents pitched on grand boulevards, flying flags of justice and freedom; revellers chanting and dancing amidst gusts of tear gas and the fierce crack of plastic bullets; crowds of jubilant insurgents bursting into parliament buildings, the police unable to hold them back. At first these fairytale uprisings looked like a sequel to the ''velvet revolutions'' which hastened the fall of Communism across eastern Europe at the end of the nineteen-eighties: ''people power'' revolts which challenged the might of an authoritarian state not with weapons, but with the pure force of righteousness. They sang to soldiers, laid flowers upon riot shields, met repression with defiant humour. Freedom can''t be stopped, they declared.But although they targeted the old functionaries who had held on to power since the fall of Communism, this was not simply 1989 revisited; at the heart of all these revolutions was a new kind of youth movement, a product of its own time and place.

Otpor in Serbia set the template which the others were to follow: a tiny faction of disaffected students which grew into a subversive network spanning the entire country. Otpor had one simple goal: complete democratic transformation. Its activists had learned from the liberation movements of 1989, but their methods were resolutely modern: the marketing techniques of the advertising industry, the new technologies of the internet and the mobile telephone, the graphic possibilities of desktop publishing, the seductive signs and symbols of popular culture. This was politics with a smart logo and a pulsing beat. It made regime change fun.There were also echoes of 1968, the last mass outbreak of student unrest in Europe, when hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets of Paris, Berlin, London and other cities to protest against the Vietnam War and demand socialist liberation. But this time, the fight was for liberal democracy and the values of ''the West'', at least as they were imagined: free speech and free markets. The new student revolutionaries didn''t consider themselves militants or radicals, but noble dissidents and genuine patriots.

Otpor''s members had seen other former Communist countries move towards the promised land of the European Union while their own, Yugoslavia, regressed into isolation and armed conflict. They wanted, they said, to reverse the decline, to ''become part of the world'' again, to ''live a normal life''. My first direct contact with Otpor came in January 2000, when one of its leading members, a literature student, visited the apartment where I was staying in Belgrade. We talked about rock music and the nature of betrayal that day, and about the fury she was feeling about Serbian bands who were collaborating with record companies which had links to the government of Slobodan Milosevic. It was a time for taking sides, she said, and they had chosen the path of darkness, sold out their own generation - her generation - for some small ugly reward. "They are giving an alibi to the corrupt," she insisted. She said she didn''t join Otpor when it started because she thought it would be just another pointless political project - she hated politicians and their sordid posturing - but she quickly realised that this was something very different; that it had an enthusiasm and a sense of purpose which the Serbian opposition had lacked for years. Over the coming months, as the fall of Milosevic approached, I got to know more of the Otpor activists, and came to appreciate the sheer imaginative daring which put them one step of the authorities.

They were great storytellers, too, with a powerful sense of the absurd. One of them recalled an incident when their office was raided, and one policeman - lacking anything else to seize - tried to confiscate a pair of her trousers, as if they were some kind of subversive talisman. It was this sort of everyday idiocy which kept them in fine spirits and nourished their sense of destiny. The authorities were serious, but the Otpor youths were just laughing at them, like the whole thing was just a ludicrous movie spooling ever faster towards the final credits.Every few years, an idea comes along which connects with a generation in a deep and powerful way, setting off reactions which could never, even with the best of foresight, have been predicted. Otpor was like a viral explosive which detonated in the consciousness of like-minded youths; a thrilling flash of revelation which set them dreaming and scheming. The Serbian youth movement was followed by Kmara in Georgia and then Pora in Ukraine, both using similar logos, T-shirts, stunts and pranks, as the virus spread into the former Soviet Union. I already knew about Pora when I arrived in snow-covered Kiev during what would become known as the Orange Revolution - like the others, they had an English-language website - so I headed straight for their office, a dusty basement near the foreign ministry, cluttered with posters, stickers and half-finished cups of coffee, with muffled rock music playing from a computer somewhere in the background, like a scruffy student common room.

It could almost have been Otpor''s old office on Knez Mihailova street in central Belgrade. A short walk away, thousands of Pora activists were camping out on the city''s main street - until victory, they insisted. It was clear that after the revolutions in Serbia and Georgia, the emergence of Pora was more than a coincidence: a new phenomenon had emerged. After the Orange Revolution, I spent the next year tracing the story through the region, meeting hundreds of brave and determined young people. They were bound together not just by their audacious struggles for democracy, but by their commitment to the philosophy of non-violent resistance. It was, they explained, all about targeting and undermining what they called the ''pillars of the regime''. They believed that authoritarian governments were not impregnable monoliths but a series of vulnerable institutions which depended on individuals who could be convinced or shamed into defecting. "Even a dictator can''t collect taxes on his own," one of the Serbs told me.

"He can''t deliver the mail, he can''t even milk a cow: someone has to obey his orders or the whole thing shuts down. The task is to convince them to disobey. When they change sides, the government starts to fall." The other decisive factor they all spoke about was the need for meticulous strategic planning: "It won''t happen without a strategy, without structure, without unity," a young Georgian explained. "You need. well, it''s like Lenin said, it''s all about organisation, organisation, organisation."Around the same time, the international media became e.