Sarah Paine

It is just unbelievably difficult.

Oh, and another piece of the brilliant Soviet management, in order to maintain control over the empire, instead of building things all in a place...

You'd build some plane parts here, some plane parts there, some plane parts all over the empire.

So when the empire goes, great, I've got a quarter of a plane.

And then where do I get the other parts?

So all of that fell apart.

So when Putin suddenly has a lot of money

And then he starts spending it on people, because initially there's plenty of money.

Russian standard of livings do go up.

And so, of course, they like him, and they give him credit for all of that.

But then that runs its course, right?

And then it's less good, and then he's more excited about, well, it's his mindset anyway.

When you get more money, you want to get the empire back.

And then Russians also like that, right?

Well, they've been always much more connected to Western Europe.

Czechoslovakia before the war is a full-up, highly developed country, absolutely tied to the West.

Poland, I believe Copernicus is from a place like Poland, right?

It's a center of the Enlightenment.

But when I was using the...

George Bush senior archives.