In the summer of 2009, fifteen young tourists made a pilgrimage to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. After walking them around the city’s square, the tour guide, a lanky Serbian in his midthirties, regaled them with stories about the country’s recent history of inflated potato prices, free rock concerts, and wars with neighboring countries. But as the guide sprinkled his comments about Serbia with references to Monty Python humor and Tolkien fantasies, the tourists grew impatient. They weren’t just an ordinary group of travelers. They had come to Belgrade to learn how to overthrow their own country’s dictator.
Searching for a way to fight back against a tyrant, they asked the tour guide about how his countrymen had defeated the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. You don’t need to take big risks, the guide told them. You can demonstrate your resistance in small ways—drive slower than usual, throw Ping-Pong balls onto the streets, or put food coloring in fountains to make the water look different. The foreigners scoffed at his advice: such trivial actions wouldn’t make a dent in an iron curtain. It can never happen in our country, a man insisted. If we stand up to him, a woman challenged, our dictator will simply make us vanish. How can we even plan a revolution, when he has made it illegal to gather in groups of more than three?
They didn’t know it, but the tour guide had heard all these objections before. He heard them in 2003 from Georgian activists, in 2004 from Ukrainian activists, in 2005 from Lebanese activists, and in 2008 from Maldivian activists. In each case, they overcame fear and apathy and took down their respective dictators.
The tour guide, Srdja Popovic, had trained them all.