Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…Oh, you think even more so than after Tiananmen or during the Soviet Union? It's more hostile now than then? We were in the Soviet Union while Gorbachev was in power. And I actually got into the foreign ministry archives there, but only for the Tsarist period. And in China, you could still get into various archives. I was using the Qing archives and then the nationalist archives were much more closed. Now the archives are just plain closed. Go to Russia now, you will get yourself arrested. And China likewise, they've shut down all of these archives. So to compensate for that, for the last 10 years I’ve spent two months every summer going to the U.S. presidential archives. Starting with, we didn't do it quite in the same order but, Truman, Eisenhower, and then this last spring, we just did the George Bush Sr. archives. And now I'm in Britain using their wonderful national archives, looking particularly from the 1917 to 1945 period researching the Cold War. You might go, “Well, but the Cold War didn't begin in 1947. ” I would argue the Cold War began in 1917 because we have this notion that, “Oh, I decide when wars begin. ” Not quite if the other side declares war on you. And the Bolsheviks made it very clear that they had declared war on the capitalist order. Britain was much more attuned to this and worried about communist ideas filtrating to labor movements and all this other stuff. So I'm reading their archives, whereas the United States was much more asleep at the switch. To what extent did the educated classes being naive about communism play into the delay of the United States into recognizing the Cold War? You talk about this in your books about the Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow.…

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