Eternity is contingent

Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been populated by entirely different individuals.

…

Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 5-7.