The figure of five hundred dead sounds suspiciously round, but it will stick. The regime's troops fired heavy machine-guns into the crowd of protesting Uzbeks in the eastern city of Andijan and launched rockets from helicopters: the death toll was certainly at least in the low hundreds. Besides, practically everybody hates President Islam Karimov, so they are more than willing to believe the worst. The question is whether that really means he is finished.

Precedent says yes. Three other autocratic rulers in three other post-Soviet republics have gone under to non-violent democratic revolutions in the past two years. Islam Karimov is a far nastier item than any of the other rulers, best known for his practice of boiling prisoners alive, so he should be next up for retirement. But he clearly doesn't intend to go peacefully.

Karimov, an old Communist apparatchik recycled as a pseudo-democrat, has always had a rather hands-on style of government. Opposition parties have been forbidden, civil society groups have been closed down, there are no independent media, and the predominantly Muslim population is only allowed to pray in government-approved mosques. There are an estimated 5 500 political prisoners : torture is systematic, and confessions extracted under torture are then presented to the American and Russian governments as proof that everybody who opposes Karimov is an Islamist terrorist linked to al-Qaeda.

Late last year Karimov arrested twenty-three prominent businessmen in Andijan and put them on trial for being members of a party that is allegedly allied to a London-based radical Islamist group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Uzbekistan. However, these men collectively provided a large chunk of the jobs in Andijan, a desperately poor city of about one-third of a million people, so last Thursday night a mob broke them out of jail. It was really mostly about jobs down to that point, but it was also a direct challenge to the authority of the state, so in came the troops, and up to half a thousand people died. The consensus says that having commissioned such a terrible massacre, Karimov should now be finished. But it ain't necessarily so.

The regime's two closest allies and supporters, the United States and Russia, were quick to come up with statements of support for Karimov. The US had been gradually trying to take its distance from the worst of his crimes, despite the importance of its air-base at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan to its operations in Afghanistan -- last July the US government cut $18 million from its annual $86 million in aid to Uzbekistan as a warning to Karimov to be more discreet in his repression -- but faced with the possibility of losing him entirely, Washington quickly shifted its ground.

"We have had concerns about human rights in Uzbekistan," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "but we are concerned about the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organisation that were freed from prison." The "terrorists" are presumably the 23 businessmen who had been arrested, and the "outbreak of violence" -- well, that's trickier, since there are no dead soldiers in Andijan but hundreds of dead civilians.

Karimov may get away with it, because there is an aspect of these now commonplace non-violent revolutions that is not often recognised: they do not work if the regime they are trying to overthrow is not to some extent self-deterred by its desire not to be seen as mere murderers. In particular they do not work when the regime is confident that it will not face international isolation even if it slaughters the non-violent protestors.

The Burmese generals got away with slaughtering thousands of student protestors in 1988, and they are still in power. The Chinese Communist regime did the same on Tienanmen Square in 1989, and it is still there, too. Karimov is confident that he can get away with murder, and he may be right.