Douglas Brunt

And that was our first mechanized war.

So suddenly by 1914, oil is more important than food for an army.

What happened to Emmanuel Nobel in the wake of World War I and then the subsequent Russian Revolution was the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984.

You know, the lines in that book where they talk about they tore down the statues, they changed the street names, they rewrote the history.

That's exactly what happened to Emmanuel Nobel.

So within Baku, there are little vestiges of it still remaining even today, but they turned him into a political unperson.

And Stalin, very effective at doing this.

I mean, he did this even to his Bolshevik allies.

You go back and look at these pictures of Lenin that had Trotsky next to him.

Suddenly, Trotsky's not in the photo anymore.

Lenin has rewritten all his early Photoshop.

No, you're right.

I mean, Russia was slowly moving along more toward a constitutional monarchy.

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

They were coming along toward more of a Western form of

And Lenin, you know, really largely because of the Great War, World War I, and a very feckless leader in Nicholas II, who was undermined by Rasputin and all these crazy, you know, fun stories, but crazy stories.

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