Sarah Paine

So the Russians looked at how when Italy surrendered to Western allies, that they basically just ran the show in Italy.

So the Russians are going, well, when we accept surrenders, we're going to run the show in Eastern Europe.

But the Russians want to take advantage of the absolute turmoil that wars cause.

Also, wars often lead to war economies where you've got a lot of centralized government control to run the war effort.

So the Russians want to leverage that one.

And then they've got this big Red Army presence.

Use all of those things, which they do.

And here's their template.

They're controlling the power ministries.

What are they?

Defense and interior.

If you do that, you're going to monopolize coercion and eliminate your opposition.

If you control the justice and information ministries, you're going to arrest or kill at will, and then you control all the stories that are never told about this.

And then if you control agriculture, particularly in those days, you're going to buy a lot of allegiance by redistributing other people's lands, and that's going to wipe out

Class enemies, collaborators, all sorts of people you don't like, and the original elite that had been running rural areas.

And they also had a story that they told about this.

It's the big lie.

Remember communism?

What is the really bad people in the communist story of how we all live?

It's the imperialists, right?