BELARUS: Alexander Milinkevich, the man at the centre of the Belarus pro-democracy protests, was for most of his life a physicist, not a politician, and is fond of using scientific metaphors when describing the chaos around him.
"There are natural laws," he tells me. "They are made by men like Newton, and someone who breaks them will have nature punishing him."
By which he means that his arch rival, President Alexander Lukashenko, accused of fixing Sunday's presidential election, is not so much evil as out of date.
While the rest of the former Soviet block has spent 14 years adjusting to democracy and the free market, Mr Lukashenko's Belarus has, says Mr Milinkevich, remained in its Communist past.
"Lukashenko has put the country into self-isolation," he says. "For 12 years the European Union was showing him how to do democracy, but even now, as we can see, he has not learned this lesson."
Mr Milinkevich cuts a dash with his white beard, bright blue scarf and dark coat specked with snow as he wanders among his supporters in October Square.
Born in Belarus in 1947, he grew up in what was then only a region in the USSR, becoming a physics teacher at the university of his home town, Grodno.
In 1980 he moved to Algeria to set up a physics faculty at a university in Algiers.
He was galvanised by news of the protests of Lech Walesa in Poland in the early 1980s, and by the arrival of the glasnost - free speech - and perestroika - reforms - of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
"I am a child of perestroika," he explains to me. "I am of that era."
Back in Belarus in 1990, he joined the civil rights movement forming as the country gained independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but remained an academic, shunning full-time politics.
In 1994 Lukashenko was swept to office as president on an anti-corruption ticket and, to Milinkevich's dismay, set about returning the country to its Soviet past.
Milinkevich joined Grodno city council, campaigning unsuccessfully for the opening of Belarussian-language high schools - Lukashenko has ensured schools teach only in Russian.
In 2001, Milinkevich ran the presidential campaign for one of Lukashenko's rivals, but with the opposition split, the president won a second term.
Last October, determined not to make the same mistake twice, the Belarus opposition held a congress determined to pick a single presidential candidate.
Milinkevich was not the obvious choice - a respected voice, but not a political heavyweight, and many were surprised, even dismayed, when he was elected as the best compromise candidate this fragmented movement could agree on.
But he worked hard to win friends, touring the country in a battered minibus on a permanent campaign.
His politics consist of a simple grab-bag of ideas: free market, democracy, stronger ties with the EU, although he is careful to say he wants to stay friends with his "partner" Russia, which has backed Lukashenko.
He also took his campaign abroad, meeting the French foreign minister in January and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Brussels in February. He also met British foreign secretary Jack Straw and German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is said to be his strongest supporter.
"There were doubts about him at first, but I would say he has certainly filled the shoes of a leader of the opposition," says one diplomat.
The foreign trips have probably secured him a certain immunity, even as his supporters are picked off and detained.
Whether this translates into persuading the population at large to join what remain a minority movement remains to be seen, but, ever the optimist, he insists this will come.
"There is a revolution already in people's souls," he says. "You can make a slave a free person, he will be happy, but it is impossible to turn him back into a slave and make him accept it."