Steven Bartlett

I wrote a history of the Ukrainian famine.

I wrote a book – this is a book about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe, how they sort of did regime change in Eastern Europe after the war.

You know, they're about things that happened, you know, in the distant past.

But I had a realization in about 2014, 2015 –

that I was living through a period of history myself.

In other words, there was a historical shift happening around me, and I felt the need to start recording it as a kind of eyewitness.

And so that book, Twilight of Democracy, was a description, I mean, it starts with a description of a party I gave.

And then the book is about how people I knew had changed.

I knew a lot of people who had been very radicalized.

I knew lots of people on the center-right,

You know, we were anti-communists, we were, you know, whatever, Thatcherites, Reaganites, and I saw many of them become more radical.

And I thought, this is a really important moment of change, and so I should record it as a witness.

And so that book is the first book that I wrote in the first person.

about something I'd seen.

And that was just me being affected by the world I live in.

Maybe it did matter that I was married to a politician because some things that you would have noticed in a more distant way affected me personally.

Maybe it was the particular circumstances of being both American and Polish and

seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places.

Either way, I felt that something important was happening, and I've really been motivated for the last decade to explain it to people and try and understand it.

What would regime change really look like in our countries?