Sarah Paine

So he absolutely believed in it.

Well, what I did for my doctoral dissertation, so I wrote a history of the Sino-Russo-Chinese border when it was figured out, which is between 1858 and 1924.

This is when all this territory went.

And what I did is, so most of this isn't Soviet, right?

It's 17 to 24 is the Soviet part.

But you go to archives in Russia, you see what they'll let you see.

This is when you could go to those archives.

They're closed now.

And I went to Beijing, saw the archives you were allowed to see.

And then in Nanjing, there were some other ones there.

And then in Taiwan, the ones they would allow you to see.

And then Japan, the ones they would allow you to see.

And they're all lying about different things or covering up different things.

So it's a jigsaw puzzle.

You put it together that way.

So that was how I did it.

And also for the whole Kremlinology is pay attention to what dictators say.

Because they've got to communicate at some level to their own populations.

They quite often tell you exactly what they want to do, and you think, that's insane.

Who would do that?