Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci
Bestselling Historian: The Revolution That Shouldn't Have Happened - Douglas Brunt
28 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What were the early political reforms in Russia before the revolution?
Russia was slowly moving along more toward a constitutional monarchy. They were implementing liberalizing reforms around free speech, freedom of assembly. They were coming along toward more of a Western form of government. And it all kind of implodes. And so Lenin and the Bolsheviks are nominally in charge of Russia, which has vast natural resources that everybody wants. The war is still on.
The Bolshevik revolution still happened during World War I. And so Germany and the Allies are both treating him with kid gloves because they don't want to throw him into the arms of the other. Because of the war and these external events, even though he is barely hanging on to control even domestically, he threads this crazy needle and survives despite everyone
around the world thinking, oh, these Bolsheviks, they're going to hang on for like three weeks. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, they've never run any kind of organization, let alone this crazy empire. And yet they do it. We almost had a 20th century in which communism doesn't appear in Russia and therefore in China or Korea, Cuba, Vietnam. I mean, there was almost a 20th century with no communism at all.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today, best-selling New York Times author, host of Dedicated, Douglas Brunt. But what a great book. The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanoff's Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World.
I learned so much in this book, but it reads, it's just an awesome book because I feel like you have figured out a way to create page turning in history.
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Chapter 2: How did World War I influence the Bolshevik Revolution?
So we want to talk a little bit about your writing style at some point too. But let's go, I want to go, if you don't mind, I want to go to Rudolph Diesel, who's another towering figure, underappreciated industrial figure. You wrote about him in the last book, which I love, which caused me to buy this book. And so talk about these two figures together, if you don't mind, to get this started.
And then we'll get into the book, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.
That's a great way to get into it because I only know about Emmanuel Nobel through Rudolph Diesel. So Diesel invented the diesel engine. in 1897, and as you say, a grossly underappreciated figure in the 20th century, and the diesel engine powers everything to this day.
And when he introduced the diesel engine in the late 1890s, he would license it out by national territory for the exclusive rights to market and manufacture. The person who took the license for Russia was Emmanuel Nobel. who was the leading industrialist of the Russian Empire under the Tsars. He had a factory in northern Russia by St.
Petersburg that was building boilers and steam engines, diesel engines, and munitions for the Tsar's army and navy. He also, along with his father, had established the Russian petroleum industry in southern Russia by the Caspian Sea in Baku, modern-day Azerbaijan, but then part of the Russian Empire.
And it will get, I guess, more into this, but it becomes the largest oil concern in the world, surpassing even standard oil by 1900. So it's funny, my editor and I would joke that one writer's footnote can be another writer's book. And so in this case, one of my own footnotes, which was a sort of tangent piece about Emmanuel Nobel in the Diesel book, then Nobel became my own whole next book.
Well, I mean, the reason I'm bringing him up is I had no idea who he was. And I have to confess to you, I guess I'm a little ignorant because I didn't realize that Diesel was actually named after somebody, you know, like someday I hope we have a Brunt engine or a Scaramucci engine. I mean, think about the impact that this guy had on our lives, but, uh,
For many people, though, when they hear the word Nobel, they think of Alfred Nobel and they think of the Nobel Prize. But Emmanuel Nobel was bigger and he had larger scope as a human being. So tell us who he was. But also, why did history, I feel like history has erased him.
You've brought him back to life, but he should be a way bigger, in my opinion, after reading your book, he should be a way bigger industrialist and a way bigger part of the Industrial Revolution story.
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Chapter 3: Who was Emmanuel Nobel and why is he significant?
The Bolshevik revolution still happened during World War I. And so Germany and the Allies are both treating him with kid gloves because they don't want to throw him into the arms of the other. You know, Germany's saying, well, we kind of got to be nice to Lenin because we don't want him to give all the oil over the Allies. The Allies are sort of thinking the same thing.
We got to be nice to him or he's going to release all these 2 million German POWs and throw them with Germany and then we're in a real... So he, because of the war and these external events, even though he is barely hanging onto control, even domestically, you know, he certainly doesn't have any kind of military power to take on a foreign power. He can barely hang on to St.
Petersburg, but because of the external circumstances of the war, he threads this crazy needle and survives despite everyone around the world thinking, oh, these Bolsheviks, they're going to hang on for like three weeks. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, they've never run any kind of organization, let alone this crazy empire. And yet they do it.
We almost had a 20th century in which communism doesn't appear in Russia and therefore in China or Korea, Cuba, Vietnam. I mean, there was almost a 20th century with no communism at all.
That's the thing I learned from your book. And this is the thing I always like to tell you. You have a lot of young viewers and listeners, thank God. It's just... how sensitized history is to different timelines.
One of the more fascinating books, and it became a streaming series, is The Man in the High Castle, which is this alternative history where a bomb, God forbid, is dropped on Washington, D.C., and Hitler and Tojo are controlling the United States. They've got the thing split, and you say to yourself, well, that could never happen.
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Chapter 4: How did the Bolshevik nationalization affect industry in Russia?
We have this Hollywood view of history where it's scripted a certain way, But there are so many improbable things. I want to talk about innovation here. There's another thing I learned from your book. These guys were out innovating the United States, who was sort of the first to the whole oil markets.
Tell us a little bit about that and tell us what we learned from them, actually, through the process of extracting oil, etc.,
One of the advantages that the Bells had is, as I mentioned, they were building boilers and steam engines and diesel engines and munitions up in northern Russia. They get an order for 100,000 rifles from the Tsar.
So they send one of the brothers down to the southern Russia in the Caucasus region where they have these walnut trees where they can access wood to build the rifle stocks for this order. And while he's down there in southern Russia along the Caspian Sea, it's this ancient land of the internal flame where constant seeping gas is ignited. And so they have this internal flame.
Pools of petroleum are forming on the surface where people skim it and use it as a lubricant or a salve. And he says, well, geez, I'm not going to spend this bag of 25,000 rubles on wood. I'm buying land. And we're going to start getting in the oil game. This is 1873. There's almost no technology down there. People are digging up oil with shovels.
Standard Oil was founded three years before and Rockefeller had pioneered a number of techniques to use technology to drill. So he's got sophisticated drilling rigs, he's built in pipelines, refining technology is really advanced.
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Chapter 5: What innovations did Emmanuel Nobel bring to the oil industry?
So the Nobels already technically competent come down there and copy the American playbook initially. And they're like, well, let's not reinvent the wheel. Rockefeller's doing some really smart things already. We can just copy that because we're pretty good as well. But then they take it a step farther.
And at this time, even Rockefeller and certainly in Russia, when they transported the oil, they were putting into these wooden barrels and then loading that on the back of a trailer pulled by mules or onto the deck of a ship. And constantly these barrels were leaking or they would just crumble. There was a lot of breakage and waste. in the transportation.
So Ludwig Nobel, Emmanuel's father, is naturally an engineer, having built all these engines and worked with metal. He's like, let's build these steel cisterns inside the hull of a ship, and we can transport oil that way. Because mostly, they were going over water. Out of southern Russia, if you wanted to get to St. Petersburg, there's this expression, the Volga, the Volga River.
The Volga is a good horse. So they would send ships up the Volga on the river systems to get the oil around Russia. So they were naturally using ships already. So he goes around to all the other oil drillers and refineries and said, let's go in on this together. It's going to be very expensive and he can't get anyone to do it because they don't believe it can work.
So he just designs his own oil tanker and builds it and pioneers the first river going and then ocean going oil tankers, which totally takes even Rockefeller by surprise. And suddenly he's putting oil out of the international markets in a way that Rockefeller, I really get sort of knocked back on his heels.
Thank you for tuning in to open book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming and now back to the show. Something about you, Doug Brunt, where you go after these stories. that are these uncovered, I mean, they're covered treasures. Let me rephrase it.
There's something about you, Doug, where you go after covered treasures. I feel like, you know, I mean, even, you know, Daniel Yergin said that this is sort of a, you know, amazing story about what might've been. And I feel like you're this, almost like this treasure hunter in history where you're digging up stuff that we should know about, but we actually don't know about, but for Doug Brunt.
So what is it about your personality that gravitates you to these sorts of things?
I've always been, and I think you are the same, totally curious about history. And I was joking, there are some connections. Certainly you can see something like, how is Nobel connected to all this? And you know the story's a little bit hidden. It's logical that Stalin would have covered up and appropriated some of the achievements of the Nobels for his own, then retold the story.
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Chapter 6: What was the impact of the Russian Revolution on Emmanuel Nobel?
But this is really a companion book to Diesel. You can read it in any order or independently, one, not the other. But I came to the Nobel story through the Diesel story. It's the same time period. It's really the same decades of, you know, the 1850s through the war. So this was more like three years because I had so much foundational, atmospheric research was done. Right.
So it'd be sort of five, three, and three by the time the trilogy is done.
Okay. So the thing about this, I can take 30 hours of my life and I can read a condensation of 10 years of your research. And you are a brilliant writer. I do want to get into your writing style in a second, but- But this is what I try to tell young kids. Think about this. When we were kids, Doug, you could say for $10 and 10 hours, you can get 10 years of somebody's thought pattern as an author.
It's $30 today because of inflation, but you get my point. But for me, with your writing... Um, you are a, uh, I mean, you've written some, not, you've written some fiction as well. So give us the writing stuff. Give us the formula where you make a, what should be a boring industrialist. You make them into this great protagonistic figure where you got to get to the next chapter.
So tell us a little bit about your writing style and how you think about these things, how you frame the story. Are you, are you writing screenplays for Hollywood? Yeah.
No, I love- What are you doing? I love the narrative history, the nonfiction narrative history, like the Diesel and the Nobel book. I would love for this to make it to the screen and someone better at writing screenplays, I hope will do that one day. But there's a great Rudyard Kipling line that says, if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
And that's one of the guiding lights for this. History should be fun. These history textbooks are so dense. And they're not meaningful either. It's like an itinerary of events. Like that doesn't, how did it, it's much more interesting to know how did it change a person's life? Like from one day to the next, right? We had this 1905 Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg.
What's really happening on the streets? How did that affect people's lives? When you experience it through a narrative, it's indelible and it also is more meaningful. You can relate to it and get a sense of the history more than just some itinerary. So in terms of structuring the books, There is a lot going on both in this book and the Diesel book.
There are political, industrial, military forces all at play in the midst of this life. You sort of experience all of it through the microcosm of this family, you know, against the very broad canvas of like macro events of world war, et cetera. And organizationally, it's tough to sort of bring it forward. Generally, chronology is your friend.
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Chapter 7: How does the story of Emmanuel Nobel connect to modern political themes?
So it's an incredible story.
I mean, it's thought-provoking on many levels. I guess, do you see parallels between today's political instability in pockets of the world and general vulnerability of... I don't know. I mean, I sit here as a capital allocator and I say, okay, world is getting slightly less stable. And am I putting enough risk premium in the measurement of the capital that I'm allocating?
Or would you tell me based on your historical view, everything is fine? Even though the house is on fire, Doug, but everything's okay, right? You know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah.
Well, it certainly feels a little on fire now, but I would say even so, I think things were probably more volatile then. What happened in 1917 and then the Russian Civil War in the 20s is just madness on a scale that we don't see that today. That's just totally hard to imagine that now.
But there's so many things that you – the opening epigraph of the book is there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again. And that really resonates in Russia. Since the time of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great to Putin, they're obsessed with Crimea and controlling the coastline of the Black Sea for a warm water port year round to access the Mediterranean.
Russians generally believe that's Russian land. The conquest for oil, you know, whether it's in Baku or, you know, that Russia has new oil reserves in in western and eastern Siberia. But, you know, like oil is still deciding the fate of nations everywhere. And then also the Russian people just generally seem more. willing to be governed by an autocratic form of government.
You know, I mean, if you go back to prior to the great war, the czar was not only an autocrat, he was like a demigod, you know, he was God's man on earth. And so he actually was, it was closer to like an Eastern, you know, Japanese where the, the God is a form of deity. So it's like a hundred years ago, the Russians thought their, their leader was a deity. Yeah.
Listen, I mean, you just have to read Dostoevsky, right? I mean, the whole concepts of choosing bread over freedom has always been embedded in the system. It could be weather-related. It could be culture-related, the combination of everything. But just to me, it's a story that could have ended differently.
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Chapter 8: Why is Emmanuel Nobel often overlooked in history?
So he feels like these teachers, these Russian occupiers, And very, you know, really ironic given what he becomes as the, you know, the leader of Russia, who later invades Georgia, you know, as the leader of Russia. So there's a lot of ironic twists to his life, but the common thread is his utter ruthlessness.
I find him to be the guy that we as a group of people didn't understand because he acted so far out of the bands of what we were all willing to do. I mean, maybe Churchill got him better than most, but Roosevelt certainly didn't get him. And in fairness to Roosevelt, he was very sick at the time when he was trying to negotiate with Stalin.
Yeah.
But we're still living in so many ways in the Russian revolution in the world of Stalin in terms of the repression that's out there. There's 5.8 billion people that live in some level of autocracy around the world. This is why I'm always concerned about the rhetoric that comes from us because we're supposed to lead people out of that. We got to be super careful. Okay. This is the last word.
It's two words. I'm going to give you the last word. Emmanuel Nobel.
underappreciated, you know, not to mispronounce his last name, but he was a noble man. And when Alfred died, he had rewritten his will to establish the prizes. You, you of course know the story cause it's, it's in the book. Um, And there was a lot of it. He had 33 million kroner when he passed away. 31 went to the prize.
Two went to a range of relatives who all said, wait a minute, we were expecting about 15 times as much. Where's all the money going in this prize? Well, Emmanuel Nobel was the custodian of the will. And the translation of that in the Russian language is custodian of the soul, which is a role he took seriously.
And so even the king of Sweden was saying, Emmanuel, this prize your uncle wanted to do, he was sort of over-influenced by this pacifist movement. You really shouldn't do this. Take care of your family. The family, of course, is saying, give us the money. And he tells the king, forget it.
He brings the whole family together in a meeting and he persuades them that we need to honor Alfred's wishes and establish these prizes. So... you know, against great adversity, he's the reason the Nobel Prizes even exist. And it's just a little, he was never looking for the spotlight. He, you know, even in the years subsequent, you know, he didn't die until the 1930s.
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