Sarah Paine

They're busy rebuilding.

But then when you get to the mid-70s, they're going into terminal decline.

So when Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates have been either 1% to 2% less than U.S.

growth rates for the preceding decade.

And the compounding effects of that are pretty horrendous.

In addition to other problems, Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long years.

And not only did he collect cars, that was apparently the go-to gift for him, but in addition, he was collecting a bunch of non-performing pals across the Third World because this is manifesting Russian power, but it's expensive, and he doesn't have much of an economy to pay for it.

And if you look at oil prices, they're very much associated with the decline of the Soviet Union, rise of Vladimir Putin.

And it's because in the Soviet era, government budgets relied as much as 55% on oil or energy revenues.

And so piggy banks are going to shrink if oil prices aren't doing very well.

And so Gorbachev repeatedly said, you know, we can't live this way anymore.

And so he wanted and he did initiate political and economic reforms to try to save communism, except he really ruined the sclerotic patient doing what he did.

And there are massive territorial implications for what he did.

And it's the loss of empire in Eastern Europe and also the loss of the ethnically based constituent republics of the Soviet Union.

So I'm going to show you Russia's territorial odyssey in maps.

So this is 38.

It is before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi-Soviet Pact, where they're dividing up Poland and parts of Eastern Europe, Nazis and Soviets, and what they want.

This is before then.

But by the time you get to the end of the war, Russia's got the Baltic states, it's got Kaliningrad, it's got all of Belarus, all of Ukraine.

And then, of course, it gets Eastern Europe.