Sarah Paine

So I can't totally answer the question because there are a lot of Russians and a lot of Chinese whose decisions together aggregate to what they do.

So, yeah, tell me about how... Well, his version of communism is Russians invented it, or actually they didn't, Marx invented it, but they're the guys who think, well, we operationalize it, so we should run it forever.

So, of course, it's going to be, Russia is going to be the big communist country.

So, and a bunch of Chinese upstarts, from their point of view, are claiming, no, no, no, we're going to run the show forever.

Unclear, because in his lifetime, right, because it's a long horizon, in his lifetime, he's about initially communism in one country, right?

And then communism on your borders, which is what he's working on.

As for the rest of the world, it takes Brezhnev to start going all deep into Africa.

Stalin wasn't interested in, say, India because he thought they're a bunch of lackeys of the British, right?

How do they let themselves be colonized by the British?

There's something wrong with them.

So you have to also think about where history is at a given moment.

So he dies in 53.

It's not that long after World War II of how it's all going to turn out.

And his relationship with China, as far as he's concerned, is going swimmingly when he's in power.

Mao goes there and basically kowtows in Moscow and does what Stalin wants him to do.

That's Stalin's experience until he, I don't know, chokes on his Cheerios or whatever happened to him that morning.

I think grievances would still exist.

I think Stalin's death, dictator's death profoundly weakened their systems because they've got no good succession.

So it means you're guaranteed a cat fight royale going on.

And so, I mean, that's what year one waits for, for when Putin, eventually the man will die one way or another, and there will be a cat fight royale for what happens to him.