Michael Malice

Are you spoiling that chapter?

It's called Die Hard.

Why?

Because the ending that's a Christmas story is just like, I know everyone reading it's gonna go Google it, be like, these can't be real, but it was real.

That it was on Christmas, yes, true.

I hate that I can never remember, ever, ever remember if this was Hemingway.

No, it was Hemingway.

No, it came down two ways, gradually then suddenly.

The thing with the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact, these were a bunch of nations run under communism, but they were all, almost all, under the sway of Moscow.

So if they were going to make big changes, Moscow had to prove it.

It was in the 50s when Hungary decided to rebel or not rebel, liberalize.

And they even were thinking of leaving the Warsaw Pact.

and the Russians send in the tanks.

And you have the development of what was called the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the idea that it is the duty of all the Warsaw Pact nations if another country tries to, and this was also in 68 in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, if a nation wants to leave socialism, it is incumbent on those socialist nations to do whatever is necessary to make sure there isn't a counter-revolution.

So they were

very much under Moscow's thumb.

And one of the big ways it changed was one man, and that was Mikhail Gorbachev.

And he was the first Russian leader to be born after the October Revolution.

He grew up and his grandfather was arrested for being a Trotskyite, and the other one was arrested for this or that.

He saw his village starve as a result of Stalin.