Khodorkovsky is richest man. And he lost everything when Putin arrested him and took his company away, and essentially took his company away, sold it, and gave it to other people, and enriched them. So, he's a complicated figure as an opposition leader, and people admire him - he was in prison, and he was very brave, and he's written some good things since then, and so on. But at the end of the day, people see him as being part of the corrupt system that has done so much to undermine the Russian system since the 1990s, and I don't know that he can ever be a really popular leader.

I believe democracy can survive. But it's certainly true that the euphoria of the 1990s - an era when democracy was spreading and more and more people found it attractive - has ended. Trump is not a cause but rather a symptom of this change.

The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.

I have been told by people close to Trump that "Brexit Britain" is the only foreign policy issue that interests him, because he thinks the UK referendum paved the way for him. He hopes to help Britain leave the EU, and possibly to damage the EU, by offering a trade deal.

Putin is not a mass murderer. But, having said that, he is a product of the KGB, and the KGB was, of course, the secret police force of the Soviet Union.

A lot of the Russian economy is built around people who are one way or another milking the state and taking money from the state and recycling it into their private bank accounts. And there are a lot of people who are taking advantage of that, so it's not just one person. It's a kind of web of people doing that, and that's how the system stays in power and how people stay in control.

I don't think Americans realize the degree to which they are the main subject of Russian television news. Every night there's news from the United States and scandals about the United States, and every night the United States is shown to be an enemy of Russia over and over and over again. And this is, of course, useful to the Russian president, because it's, we have this big and important enemy - you need me here to fight back.