Dominic Lieven is a writer on Russian history, empires and emperors and on European aristocracy.
Speaking to Times Radio Breakfast, Lieven said: "The surprising thing is that less that there is a lot of bloodshed and horror now than that so little, actually, in the years when the Soviet Union collapsed.
"Its collapse was astonishingly peaceful given the fact that it was a brutal empire with a pretty ferocious tradition of repression.
"So watching it disintegrate with barely a shot fired and its defence was astonishing, and did actually feed into some of the illusions in the West about us living in a sort of ever more liberal, evermore progressive and peaceful world."
He added: "The empire disintegrated peacefully to a great extent because Russia didn't fight to defend it.
"On the contrary, Russia helped to undermine and destroy it.
"What you've had in the last 25 years is gradually reemerging at the top of Russian power, fundamentally, the old security forces above all, the old KGB, and this is their revenge for their failure to hold the Soviet Union together 30 years ago. It's more complicated than that but there's a lot of truth to that.
"And these people are fueled, and Vladimir Putin himself is fueled by a sort of nostalgia for Empire, which elites tend to have, their sense of prestige, their sense of status, their sense of world historical significance, is linked to Empire because it means Empire is power. It means they matter."
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