Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But did Stalin as a communist think, “Okay at some point the whole world is going to be communist.” He thought that he personally would be managing the whole world? Unclear. It’s a long horizon. In his lifetime he’s initially about communism in one country, 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. How do they let themselves be colonized by the British? There’s something wrong with them. You have to also think about where history is at a given moment. He dies in ‘53, not that long after World War II. How is it all going to turn out? His relationship with China, as far as he’s concerned, is going swimmingly when he’s in power. Mao goes there and 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. If Stalin hadn’t died, do you think a Sino-Soviet split was still inevitable? Yes, there wouldn’t have been Khrushchev’s secret speech. Obviously Stalin wouldn’t have condemned the cult of personality. But the grievances you mentioned would still exist.…

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