Douglas Brunt

And he's still trying to, you know, financially engineer an outcome for himself.

No one expects the Bolsheviks to last.

But he's really without a state sponsor at this point.

You know, Emmanuel Nobel went from being offered Russian citizenship by the czar and having a very cozy relationship with government ministers to having only opposition politically within Russia.

So he thinks, well, who better than Standard Oil, who's always enjoyed a very cozy relationship with the State Department?

If I can align with them, suddenly I have the Americans behind me.

They would never let their crown jewel of a company, Standard Oil, be taken for a ride by the communists.

So it's an incredible story.

Well, it certainly feels a little on fire now, but I would say even so, I think things were probably more volatile then.

What happened in 1917 and then the Russian Civil War in the 20s is just madness on a scale that we don't see that today.

That's just totally hard to imagine that now.

But there's so many things that you – the opening epigraph of the book is there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again.

And that really resonates in Russia.

Since the time of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great to Putin, they're obsessed with Crimea and controlling the coastline of the Black Sea for a warm water port year round to access the Mediterranean.

Russians generally believe that's Russian land.

The conquest for oil, you know, whether it's in Baku or, you know, that Russia has new oil reserves in in western and eastern Siberia.

But, you know, like oil is still deciding the fate of nations everywhere.

And then also the Russian people just generally seem more.

willing to be governed by an autocratic form of government.

You know, I mean, if you go back to prior to the great war, the czar was not only an autocrat, he was like a demigod, you know, he was God's man on earth.