Steven Bartlett

I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society, even briefly.

And I have really spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it was, how it worked, why people went along with it.

And I've also spent a lot of time more recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction.

You know, it's also not the thing I thought I would be doing.

I changed – you know, if you're looking at my books, you know, I wrote three history books.

I wrote the Gulag book.

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.