Douglas Brunt

Russia was slowly moving along more toward a constitutional monarchy.

They were implementing liberalizing reforms around free speech, freedom of assembly.

They were coming along toward more of a Western form of government.

And it all kind of implodes.

And so Lenin and the Bolsheviks are nominally in charge of Russia, which has vast natural resources that everybody wants.

The war is still on.

The Bolshevik revolution still happened during World War I.

And so Germany and the Allies are both treating him with kid gloves because they don't want to throw him into the arms of the other.

Because of the war and these external events, even though he is barely hanging on to control even domestically, he threads this crazy needle and survives despite everyone

around the world thinking, oh, these Bolsheviks, they're going to hang on for like three weeks.

Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, they've never run any kind of organization, let alone this crazy empire.

And yet they do it.

We almost had a 20th century in which communism doesn't appear in Russia and therefore in China or Korea, Cuba, Vietnam.

I mean, there was almost a 20th century with no communism at all.

That's a great way to get into it because I only know about Emmanuel Nobel through Rudolph Diesel.

So Diesel invented the diesel engine.

in 1897, and as you say, a grossly underappreciated figure in the 20th century, and the diesel engine powers everything to this day.

And when he introduced the diesel engine in the late 1890s, he would license it out by national territory for the exclusive rights to market and manufacture.

The person who took the license for Russia was Emmanuel Nobel.

who was the leading industrialist of the Russian Empire under the Tsars.