Douglas Brunt

You sort of want to move through things chronologically.

You've got to advance a number of different storylines at once.

So you can't make a 20-year run on one thing and then come back from 1910 all the way back to 1890.

That's just too whiplashy for a reader.

It really should feel natural and sort of easy to follow.

And making it feel that way is organizationally a challenge.

So there's a lot of organization that goes into the book.

It's like a massive...

Totally.

There's a great book called The Mystery of Capital by this Peruvian economist saying the great leap forward is when an asset could hold a parallel value.

And there's a legal framework around it to say, okay, I have a house, which is worth the amount of money, so I can take out a loan and start a business based on the asset of my house having a parallel life and ability to get a loan.

Yeah.

And so in overnight, they nationalized more than 9,000 businesses, most of the heavy industry, the oil.

Stalin was very early in Lenin's ear to say, go do this.

And then Lenin was a little more nervous saying, well, how are we going to operate it?

There's no one in our communist government who knows how to run an oil rig in a refinery.

Like the production could dwindle to nothing and then we're really in trouble.

So he was soliciting help from the oil industrialists to come along and

participate post-nationalization and make sure production didn't dwindle down to nothing, but you're exactly right.

So Emmanuel Nobel is sort of in this refugee town, buffered by the white army while the red army is heading toward Baku, Azerbaijan to take over the oil.