Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new.
As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were “historically obsolete” and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously said that “history is on our side.” The Soviet Union was winning, he said, and the West was dying: “We will bury you.”
That's the historical background for the interview that the Financial Times conducted with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on the eve of this weekend's Group of 20 summit.