Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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. I think the grievances would still exist. Dictators’ deaths profoundly weaken their systems because they’ve got no good succession. It means you’re guaranteed a cat-fight royale going on. That’s what one waits for with Putin. Eventually the man will die one way or another, and there will be a cat-fight royale for what happens after him. Stalin was pretty old when he died and Russians in those days had a lousy diet. I can’t remember if he smoked. His generation mostly did. So I don’t know how the future would have run with good old Uncle Joe there for longer. The Korean War would have still gone on longer. It’s really his death, why that war ends then. With the Korean War going on and on, I don’t know what the implications are for us or for Mao. This is a really interesting thing to consider from this lecture. In retrospect, maybe one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that happened in the 20th century, is the Chinese Civil War. At the time, you wouldn’t think of this as a major event, especially since World War II had just happened. If you were living in 1948 or 1949, you wouldn’t think of this as the main thing happening in the world. But given that we know in retrospect this is a really big country with a huge population, we should be paying a lot of attention to its internal political development. I wonder if we should apply the same logic today where there are other countries with huge populations where we don’t think a lot about what’s happening. India or Nigeria. I really couldn’t tell you the first thing about Nigeria even though I know that it’s a big country with a huge population.…

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