Steven Bartlett

I mean, he was a FSB, he came from the KGB, and he was someone they chose because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltsin family and he wouldn't prosecute them.

Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union.

And what if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nemtsov, who was another leading Russian politician at the time?

You know, I don't know that he was a perfect Democrat, but he was very open-minded and he would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe, okay?

What if he'd become the leader of Russia?

We would be in a completely different world.

And there was nothing inevitable about that decision.

There are many random, completely out of the blue things that happen in history.

You can always say there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian, for example.

And there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively liberal or instinctively libertarian.

Because of just the way the human nature, people have different.

But what is the balance of that group?

How the leadership of the country encourages or discourages one set of values or the other?

You know, that affects, you know, who's winning the arguments.

And so I don't believe in inevitable cycles.

You know, I suppose there is a phenomenon whereby, yes, as people become comfortable, then if Frank Fukuyama actually had in his famous book about the end of history, he had a description of, well, what happens if we have to, you know, if everybody becomes a liberal democracy and everybody's pretty prosperous, then the next thing that will happen is some people will get bored.

And out of their boredom and out of their desire for change, they'll attack the system and want to undermine it.

It's kind of what happened.

So I suppose there's some human element like that, you know, that there will always be some part of the population that feels left out or feels discriminated against and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the country.

I mean, so you can see that.