After the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly independent republics faced a plethora of internal and external challenges related to democratization and integration into the capitalist system on their own, the problems that were not foreseen before the actual processes took place. Former Soviet States have been facing serious tests in what concerns human rights, ensuring the right to vote and to be elected, and rotating political elites through elections. In the meantime, conflicts between former parts of the union over territorial claims against each other (over Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria) and intrastate civil wars on ethnic grounds (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Russia/Chechnya) posed another set of challenges to stability in respective regions. In the process of modernization, the former Soviet states also had to maintain fine balance between security and freedom. Those balancing policies in turn strengthened power of the existing regimes and the authoritarian trend in them. The integration process of the former Soviet states with the West had to be based on economic and political frameworks and the democratization of those states had to include internalizing the European norms and rules. However, the relationship established between the republics and the West revealed over time that the balance between security and freedom was observed in the domestic politics of the former Soviet states. The West’s policies to meet its need for energy (oil and natural gas) supply from this region facilitated it turning a blind eye to violations of democratic rule and human rights. Therefore, the dilemmas that emerged as a result of observing this balance between security and freedom in domestic and foreign policy of the former Soviet states, not only hindered the democratization process, but also took the states in different directions. The reason for the emergence of these differences is the unique cultural, social and economic conditions of those states. For this, the search for a ‘third way’ by these states enabled the transformation of the current regimes’ discourse on preserving their power and the emergence of a ‘controlled’ democratization process. Over time, it became clear that the process of democratization of these newly established countries did not go the same way in all of them, diverging instead due to the different models of political development and concepts that accommodated it, like ‘color revolutions’ or ‘sovereign democracy’. The ‘color revolutions’ that took place in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, in turn, caused these countries problems with powerful neighbors, majorly with Russia. At the same time, the processes of political change in the ‘sovereign democracies’ or in countries that followed the ‘Nazarbayev Model’, ignited competition between elites/clans and occurrence of civil wars. When we compare the two models, it becomes clear that each entails different risks for the states that followed them. The purpose of this study is to look at the characteristics and nature of the risks that the post-Soviet states and their political elites encountered. The reasons to or origins of these risks are also discussed in this paper. For this purpose, in the first part of the article, the socio-economic and political causes of the ‘color revolutions’ on the post-Soviet space are examined; in the second part, the meaning, concept and manifestations of the ‘sovereign democracy” model proposed by Russian ideologues are examined. In the last part, internal and external risks, their basis and mechanisms of emergence within both models present in the post-Soviet republics are put in a comparative perspective.