Was the August Coup the blueprint for the Arab Spring?
Sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky says no. “The only thing the Arab Spring and the end of the USSR have in common is that they happened to involve large crowds. It’s like comparing a political rally with a football match, or the French Revolution with a rock festival.”
But Egyptian dissident and democracy fighter Saad Eddin Ibrahim says the anti-Mubarak uprising was informed by the successes as well as failures of post-Communism. “We learned quite a bit from our Soviet colleagues about how not to fall into some of the mistakes they did.”
In today’s magazine article for The National, I explore the connections between these two epochal events, and find that it is the differences between the two movements that give reasons to be optimistic about this region’s future.