Sarah Paine

Well, hello, hello, right?

So read what they have to say and read what others have to say.

Then you need to read things in...

The Russian language.

I read a lot of things.

Read more broadly than whatever your topic is because it's the unknown unknowns is what you're after.

What are the things that are truly important and you have no idea about?

The only way you get to those is archives or reading broadly where you bump into things.

That turns out to be important.

Well, you can, but Russia and China have these territorial differences.

And the issues I listed there of fighting to the last Chinese in the Korean War, Mao didn't really like that.

There are a lot of Chinese who die in the Korean War where the Russians sort of get them in there and then you're stuck.

You have to, for prestige reasons, stay there.

And the really big one I didn't discuss in any detail.

So Stalin's really worried about a two-front war, Nazis in the West and Japanese in the East.

And so he brokers the second united front between the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese communists under Mao at a place called Xi'an in late 1936.

And so it's called the Xi'an incident where Chiang Kai-shek was reputedly kidnapped and up there.

But really what's going on is it's setting up the Second United Front and then the Japanese go ballistic.

And that's when they invade all the down the coast and up the Yangtze River.

And that means the Chinese are fighting Japanese for you.