“It all started as a hobby,” he told me. A freshwater-biology student with a yen for politics, he organized march after march to protest Milošević’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But the marches had no effect: the president stifled criticism, defanged the press, and repeatedly waged war on Serbia’s neighbors, converting the inevitable surges in nationalism and anxiety into greater political power for himself. It was then that Popovic and a group of close friends had the idea of making regime change fun.

They painted Milošević’s face on a barrel and invited people on the street to bash it as hard as they could with a bat. The gimmick presented a quandary for police: Go after the angry citizens and their bats, and you risk provoking rage. But try to haul the offending object away, and you guarantee a front-page newspaper photo of an officer placing a barrel under arrest—which is exactly what happened, enhancing the mystique of Popovic and his friends. Marching under a banner featuring a tightly clenched fist, they gradually accumulated more than 70,000 supporters, and in September of 2000 they helped drive 72 percent of all eligible Serbian voters to the polls. A few weeks later, Milošević was out.

Popovic was elected to parliament as an ally of the reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. But when Djindjic was killed by a police officer working for the Serbian mob, Popovic lost his passion for electoral politics. He missed the freedom of the grass roots, the marches in the streets, the theatrics. So in 2003, he quit politics and started CANVAS.

Almost immediately, aspiring activists from all over the world came calling. “It was amazing for me to see that people from Zimbabwe or Belarus are getting inspired by the Serbian political revolution,” he told me. Putting together a curriculum for a five-day seminar, Popovic began teaching everything he knew. “We cover 20 different issues,” he said, “from understanding nonviolent struggle to the nature of political power, pillars of support, how power is expressed in society, and then moving on to how you build your vision of tomorrow.” The training is far from abstract, focusing on matters such as fund-raising, resource management, and campaign tactics. CANVAS offers its training to activists for free, and sends easily reproducible materials—DVDs, PDFs—to those who can’t make the trip to Belgrade.

A few months after its founding, CANVAS registered its first success, when a number of its Georgian trainees helped lead the protest movement that elected the young Mikheil Saakashvili president. A year later, the group played a similar role in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In each case, analysts in the East and the West alike had predicted that efforts to democratize the former Soviet regimes would prove futile, and that what had worked in Belgrade was doomed to fail in Tbilisi and Kiev.