Sarah Paine

And Dwarkash, as a result of all this, I'm getting emails from all over the place.

So let's talk about who's grateful to whom.

Anyway, I'm devoted to your generation.

And anyway, thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming and being such a warm audience.

Really appreciate it.

People are worried about whether there's going to be an enduring relationship with China and Russia.

And if you look at this picture, the relations look more glacial than cordial.

And the little one's hauling on the arm of the big one.

And one wonders about that.

So it turns out my expertise is on Russo-Chinese relations, and that's what I studied in graduate school.

My dissertation was a history of their border from the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century until Outer Mongolia was snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere in the 1920s.

So

It's fun to talk about this particular topic.

Before I get going, I'm going to do some terminology.

I'm going to use the word Russia to refer to the czarist Soviet and modern periods, the same way that you use France to describe its many monarchies and many republics.

The Bolsheviks thought they were special, so they came up with special words for special people.

Soviets, Soviet Union.

But it turns out they were temporary and Russia is the enduring thing.

So that's it on terminology.