Dr. Sarah Paine on Dwarkesh Patel: How Russia Bled Manchuria

1. 0:00 – 23:46

   How Russia took advantage of China's weakness

   1. SPSarah Paine0:00

      (instrumental music plays) Stalin's plan, his script for the Chinese works beautifully, because when the nationalists unite with the communists to fight the Japanese, they think he's also gonna provide soldiers. They don't get it. Once they're in, Russia is out of this thing. Chiang Kai-shek goes roaring up China. He reaches his home base in Shanghai, pause, and he turns his guns on the communists and just massacres them in droves. If you add up all the territory that the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence, it's greater than all U.S. territory east of the Mississippi. Russia has posed existential threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they've disappeared from the pages of history courtesy of the Russians. People are worried about whether there's gonna be an enduring relationship with, uh, China and Russia. And if you look at this picture, uh, the relations look more glacial than cordial and the little one's hauling on the arm of the big one. And, uh, one wonders about that. So, um, it turns out my expertise is on Russo-Chinese relations. In- that's what I studied in graduate school. My dissertation was a history of their border from the Opium Wars, the mid-19th century, until Outer Mongolia was, uh, snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere, uh, uh, in the 1920s. So it- it's fun to talk about this particular topic. Before I get going, I'm gonna do some terminology. I'm gonna use the word Russia to refer to the Czarist, Soviet, and modern periods the same way that you use France to describe its many monarchies and many republics. The Bolsheviks thought they were special, so they came up with special words for special people. Soviet. Soviet Union. But it turns out they were temporary and Russia is the enduring thing. So that's it on terminology. Before I speculate on what the future is going to look like, our only database that we have is whatever happened from this second backwards, what people call history, but it's just whatever is in the past. That's it. That's our database. And so I'm gonna look at when Russia was strong and China was weak from the mid-19th century to the mid, uh, 20th century, then the reversal of the power balance, and then in the recent period when China has been strong and Russia weak. China and Russia actually discovered each other late in their histories. It was the early part of their last dynasties when the Russians were after fur, very lucrative in those days, and that brings them out to the Pacific. But their relations were only episodic until we get to the mid-19th century where s- which is where my story is gonna begin. So in the 18th century, China was strong, Russia was weak. But that one doesn't last very long, and both empires followed the rules for continental empire, and if you wanna survive in a continental world, both... that's what both of them historically have been, you don't wanna have two front wars because you have multiple neighbors, any one of them that can come in at any time. And if they gang up on you, that's trouble. So you take on one at a time. Also, you don't want any great powers on the borders. This is the fundamental problem with their relationship, is because today's friend can be tomorrow's foe, and that is truly... that's problematic. So what do you do to solve that problem? Well, you take on your neighbors sequentially, you set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising and just the, uh, failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you wait the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. And of that is Vladimir Putin's game. But if you play this game, you're surrounding yourself by failing states because you're either busy destabilizing them or ingesting them. So the curious might ask how do Russia... are Russia and China unlucky with all the very dysfunctional pla- places that surround them or are they complicit? Also, there are no enduring alliances in this world because the neighbors figure it out that the hegemonic power offers nothing but trouble in the long term, and there's also no counsel on when to stop expanding. So both Russia and China are known for overextending, overdoing it, and then that may help explain some of their periodic implosions over their long and bloody histories. Very high mortality rates before, before you dismiss this paradigm. You've seen it operating in real time in Syria and Ukraine. There are people who do this, uh, and, and it also explains why all those ancient ruins are ruins. This sort of warfare is ruinous. But anyway, it lies at the basis of many of the great civilizations of Eurasia. This is how they did things. All right. So I'm gonna start my story in the mid-19th century when the Chinese were beset by a whole series of rebellions that just about wrecked them, and the Russians take advantage of all of this. Remember the second rule of continental empires, no great power neighbors. And the Russians repeatedly derail the rise of China by scripting the Chinese to do things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese interests but pretty good for Russian interests, and it takes the Chinese a long time to figure it out. Uh, they have g- governments coming and going in this period. Uh, it's a difficult period, but they eventually figure it out by the time Mao reunifies China in 1949. So I'm gonna go through each of those examples in turn starting with a really big one which are the Opium Wars. This is when Britain and France are coming at China in order to force China to trade on their terms, and this corresponds with the two biggest rebellions of China's period of rebellions, the Taiping and the Nian rebellion. So here's a big chart that's a simplified chart. The rebellions actually start in the late 18th centuries. The rebellion's a misnomer. These are civil wars. Either people are like minority peoples who want out of empire, they wanna secede. Other people who wanna overthrow the government in Beijing. The peak period is in red. The really big ones are in white. So China has got the two front war problem, right? It's got Europeans coming at them plus all of this. In fact, the Chinese have so many fronts they don't know how to deal with it. So the Russians come on in to the Chinese and say, "Hey, we can deal with the..."... uh, British and French for you, and solve that problem, then you can deal with all the internal stuff. However, we need to have you sign a couple pieces of paper for us." The Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the Treaty of Peking of 1860, what do they do? They cede to Russia large swaths of territory in Central Asia and the Pacific coastline. And the Qing, uh, dynasty, they were vague on geography. They're beset by these other things. They don't understand that Europeans think these pieces of paper are permanent things, and they figure that once they put their house back in order, they're gonna come back and get the territory later. Okay, the second example of ruinous Russian mediation that is going to, uh, keep China, uh, in turmoil. So in the first Sino-Japanese War, Japan trounces China, boots them from their tributary in Korea, and then the Japanese also want some territory on the Liaodong Peninsula that isn't labeled very well there. But anyhow, um, what the Chinese do is they go to the Russians to help them counterbalance Japan so that Japan doesn't take this territory, uh, Chinese territory in the Asian mainland. Russia gets its buddies, France and Germany, the so-called Triple Int- Intervention, to gang up on Japan. And Japan looks at it, three great powers, "I don't think so," so they, they bail. So th- for the, from the Chinese point of view, so far so good, except what the Russians promptly do is take for themselves the very territory that had just been denied to Japan. And the story gets worse, because all the European powers, or many of them, plus Japan come in and they carve out big concession areas throughout China so that China's not gonna have full sovereignty over its territory for several generations, right? So instead of one relatively small Japanese concession area, they get foreigners everywhere. And so think about second rule continental, uh, empire. No great, uh, power neighbors, not happening while this is going on. Well, the Bolsheviks come to power and then they're gonna apply these rules as well. When they do come to power, they're very weak because Russia's been devastated by World War I, and then the Bolsheviks don't win their own bitter civil war until 1922. And so then as now, they relied on a really cheap but incredibly effective strategy of strategic communication. The Russians really understand, uh, other people's emotional life and what sets them at odds with each other, and they know just how to, uh, to serve out the propaganda that sets people at each other's throats. And they're gonna, their propaganda is gonna help the Chinese really despise the Japanese and the, uh, Europeans, while Russia's even greater predations, the ones you've already seen, go unnoticed. So here's Lev Karakhan. He was a deputy foreign minister. In 1919, he sends, um, a missive, uh, his Karakhan Manifesto, to the Chinese foreign ministry and he says, "Hey, we're not imperialists. We're Bolsheviks. We're gonna return all the, the lands from those unequal treaties and be your friend from evermore. Unlike all the other evil imperialist powers, we're not like that anymore." And so the Chinese are looking at this and thinking, "Wow, here are the Bolsheviks who've gotten rid of their imperialistic government. They're, uh, putting together their shattered land." And so this offers hope to the Chinese that they can do likewise and it's a model potentially to follow and a mentor who might help them. Uh, except here's the detail. When the Bolsheviks started doing better in their civil war, they really dialed back what their offer was. The original offer was, "Tear up treaties, China gets all territory back, no payments necessary." Under the new version of the Karakhan Manifesto, which the Russian foreign ministry goes and, and, uh, telegraphs to the Chinese foreign ministry. I've seen the document, or at least a certain copy of it in the archives in Taiwan. They, they send it back and say, "We- we're willing to talk about these things. We're gonna hold some negotiations." Well, the facts are they didn't return these concessionaries to the mid-20th century, the 1950s, after the Westerners had returned almost all of their concession areas. And this is not trivial. And when we think of concessionaries in the age of imperialism in China, you think of British ones, right? Hong Kong. Well, Hong Kong isn't actually very big. The reason you know about Hong Kong is it makes lots of money, or at least it used to. And the Russian ar- concessionaries were huge, didn't make money. Nothing s- what else is new? But the Russians had by far the largest concession area of any other country. But from the Karakhan Manifesto is the origin of the myth of Sino-Soviet friendship, that the Russians somehow treated the Chinese nicely. And the foreign ministry officials who have known better, their government is overthrown within the decade, and presumably these documents just gather dust in the archives. All right, my fourth example of derailing China's rise concerns the first united front between the Chinese nationalists and Chinese Communist Party. Here's the leader of the Nationalist Party and also leader of its ar- armies, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Well, he led the northern expedition reunifying China, at least nominally, by either defeating or co-opting all those warlords there. You can see the different colors of the ma- where the major warlords were. And previous South China attempts to do this or e- or to secede from China, one or the other, had failed for lack of a proficient military. But Russia changes that. It provides aid, arms, and expertise and structures and things to found the Whampoa Military Academy, which is in Canton or Guangzhou. And that, uh, institution is going to, uh-... educate the officers, both communist and nationalist who would lead, uh, not only this but some of their civil, uh, civil war area officers that make this reunification of China possible. But the Russians had a price. Give them, uh, give the nationalists the aid, but the nationalists then have to let the communists into the nationalist party. That's what the United Front is. So, this all, uh, coincides with a bitter succession struggle in Russia. This is the problem with dictatorships. They really don't do succession well. It's why elections are so convenient. Uh, instead, you have Stalin and Trotsky going at it of which one was gonna be the big cheese. Stalin is all about socialism in one country. He thinks that Russia oughta fu- focus on its own internal development. Whereas Trotsky says, "Nonsense, we need to focus on world revolution because only if there are sister revolutions abroad can ours survive." So while this is all going on, um, the Chinese communists really want to get out of that united front. Why? Because it puts them in close proximity to the army which is controlled by the nationalists and they're getting worried whether they're about to get killed. And the Russians say, "No, no, no, no, no. It's go- good, good, good. You stay in that united front." So they do. Chiang Kai-shek goes roaring up China. I've shown you the map. He reaches his pretty home base in Shanghai, pause, and he turns his guns on the communists and just massacres them in droves. And this is when Mao has to think of a rural strategy to power because the urban pa- strategy is no longer feasible. Well, once this happens, Stalin can use it to just trounce Trotsky in the internal power struggle 'cause its, "Look, see? Revolution in one country doesn't work abroad." And a lot of Chinese died proving Stalin's point. All right. Another example where Russia literally derails the rise of China. There's a railway system there. We're gonna talk rails. Uh, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, Japan wins it and gets from Russia, which built all these things in, uh, Chinese territory, the southern half of that railway net in lieu of an indemnity. Uh, Japan invests massively in railways, infrastructure, and apparently, in local politicians. But the ruling warlord apparently wasn't sufficiently attentive to Japanese needs, so they assassinated him in 1928. So this is his son, Zhang Xueliang, who the following year, 1929, decides he wants his railways back from Russia. What does Russia do? It's not either version of the Karakhan Manifesto. The Russians deploy over 100,000 troops, tanks, airplanes, the works, and just pound this man, and so they k- the Russians keep their railways. So, um, if you wanna delay, uh, the rise of China, that sort of thing delays the rise of China. Um, but now for the first rule of continental empire, no two-front wars. You have to, you go, move fast forward to the 1930s and Stalin thinks he may very well face a two-front war with Germans in the West and Japanese in the East. Why would he think such thoughts? This thing. The Anti-Comintern Pact. Comintern is short for Communist International, it is the Soviet outreach program, and it's signed in 1936 between the Japanese and the Germans. And Stalin goes, "Uh-oh. They're after me." And so he plays every one of his China cards and he holds lots of them 'cause then this is also part, if you want to disintegrate the neighbors in order to delay their rise, well then you fund all si- sides of their, uh, uh, civil wars and any side in between 'cause you just want them to go at it. So he plays every card he's got. And what he wants are the nationalists to stop fighting the communists, vice versa, and unite to fight the Japanese. And they're willing to do this provided Stalin provides conventional aid, which he does. But they think he's also gonna provide soldiers. They don't get it. Once they're in, Russia is outta this thing. And Stalin's plan, his script for the Chinese and Japanese works beautifully because when the nationalists unite in the second united front with the communists going back to the dark side, the Japanese are apoplectic and this is when they do the massive escalation in 1937. And they are off to overextension into parts due south of Russia. So this two-front Japanese-German war never materialized. Stalin very successful, Chinese less so because, uh, the Chinese are fighting the Japanese so the Russians don't have to and that comes at the price of millions of deaths, millions of refugees. It, that does indeed derail China's rise yet again. Next example, per the Yalta agreement, Russia finally gets in the war in Asia. About time. And at the v- in the very final weeks, in, uh, this August storm when the Russians deploy, like, 1.5 million soldiers, it's one of the largest military operations of World War II, and then they rapidly take Manchuria and they also do some... That, that would be the normal thing but here's the abnormal thing. Um, they also take away Manchuria's industrial base. That would not normally b- be what you do to someone. They take 83% of the electrical power equipment, take it home to Russia. You're not turning lights on in Manchuria. 86% of mining, 82% of cement-making, 80% of metalworking equipment. Plus, they take 640,000 Japanese POWs to be slave labor for decades if they ever get home at all. And they also take the northern islands which are still under dispute to today. But if you think about it, if you're gonna do indemnities or reparations or whatever this is, China had been fighting Japan in one form or another for 15 long years. Russia comes in at the cameo performance at the very end.So if there are indemnities to be paid for whatever Japan did, uh, in this war, surely China, not Russia, should have been the recipient for all this stuff. Uh, in addition, another example, so, uh, not only does Stalin walk away with the industrial base, but he walks away with Mongolia as well. How does that work? The Yalta Agreement also stipulates that the status quo shall be maintained in Mongolia. So then you have to look at, well, what was the status quo? It was called Russian sphere of influence in the north, uh, Chinese continuing control in the south. Um, that Mongolia, which had always been both those places, uh, had been part of the Qing Empire, never been part of the Russian Empire. And moreover, Stalin had already taken Tannu Tuva in 1944, and it looks small on this map but it's bigger than England, had lots of gold, which the Soviets had monetized long ago. So if you add up all the territory that the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence from the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and 1860 Treaty of Peking, fast-forward to detaching out of Mongolia from the Chinese sphere of influence, here's what it really is. It's greater than all US territory east of the Mississippi. This is not your normal land grab. So talk about derailing somebody, that would do it. Um, to be fair to the Russians, they did, albeit slowly, turn over all this Japanese stockpile of military equipment in Manchuria, turned it over to the communists. And they also, albeit belatedly, they trained them how to use the equipment and also how to run the Manchurian railway system. And the Chinese communists, as a rural, uh, peasant movement, how would they know how to do these things? They wouldn't. And it allows, uh, this conventional aid and logistics of being able to move people around, it transforms the communists from a lightly, uh, armed guerrilla movement to a very heavily armed conventional forces capable for the showdown phase of the Chinese Civil War. So like the Whampoa Military Academy, this is essential aid for the communist victory. So it's in... the com... neither the communists or the nationalists compa- complain about the de-industrialization of Manchuria. And the communists probably traded that industry for all the conventional aid that they got, and the nationalists are trading that and also, uh, outer Mongolian independence for a promise from Stalin not to aid the communists, which is a promise that he promptly breaks. So Mao starts to figure out that something is up here. So when he's on a roll in his offensives in the civil war, there's really bitter fighting, and the real movement in the last phase, the post-1940 phase of the Chinese Civil War is in 1948. That year, Mao just moves, and he is roaring down south and he's about to get the Yangzi River. And Stalin's like, "Hey, buddy, take a break at the Yangzi. Don't exhaust yourself," uh, and Mao ignores it. Because whereas Stalin might have wanted to keep, um, nationalist rump states south of the Yangzi River, uh, yielding a, a, a d- divided China and keeping with weakening your neighbor, uh, Mao is not remotely interested in that. And here's my tenth example, which is the Korean War. If you look at the Korean War, the first year is a war of movement. There's up and down, up and down the peninsula. It's, it's unbelievable how much movement there is. But then it stalemates for the last two years. And you think, "Well, what's going on? Why do... why don't they settle the war sooner? W- Because both sides are, are taking incredible losses." Well, here's how it goes. Once China intervenes in the Korean War, and once they halt various offensives to, um, start peace talks, the Chinese do incredible tunnel work, and probably the North Koreans as well, and build an incredible tunnel system. So it means the South Koreans and the UN forces are never gonna get anywhere near the Soviet border ever again. And from that moment on, Stalin thinks he's got a low-risk, high-reward strategy, where he's going to weaken the United States and delay the rise of China. So what's not to love about fighting to the last Chinese in Korea? Stalin thinks this is great and it's gonna retard Chinese development. Um, it's also because China is so isolated, uh, by this war, it has no international friends but Russia, it's gonna tie China to, uh, Russia ever more firmly and give Russia a breathing space to rebuild after World War II while its Western enemies are wasting time in Korea. So, um, if you put it all together, Chinese Civil War, Korean War, uh, Russia's on-and-off aid... on-and-off-again aid to the R- uh, to, uh, different sides in the civil war, his double-dealing with Bandung, and what happened with Outer Mongol- Mongolia and the Manchurian industrial base, Stalin's advice to Mao to halt at the Yangzi, and then he's fighting to the last Chinese in Korea, this is all consistent with the second rule of continental empire, no, no great power, uh, neighbors. All right,

2. 23:46 – 34:39

   Reversal of the balance of power

   1. SPSarah Paine23:46

      once Stalin dies, finest day of his life, um, he... there's never as strong a leader in Russia again. And by this time, Mao has figured out that the Russians don't want a strong China. Uh, he has to bide his time for a while, but he understands what is going on. And Mao has a growing list of gripes. It's not only he didn't like Stalin's tributary treatment, but also, uh, Mao thinks, with his resume, that he should become, uh, the leader of international communism and Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev is like, "No way." I mean, Khrushchev hasn't, uh, does not have remotely Mao's, uh, resume. Rao- uh, Mao has just put together a continent, uh, by reunifying China. That's not remotely what Khrushchev's ever been able to do. And Mao also can't stand...... either Khrushchev's domestic or foreign policy. Domestically, Khrushchev is all about de-Stalinization. Well, Mao doesn't like that. He's got a cult of personality. He doesn't wanna do things like that. And then Khrushchev is interested in peaceful coexistence with the West, or at least nominally, whereas Mao is in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, which is based on a virulently anti-Western foreign policy. And then they're forever squabbling about who's aiding Vietnam in the... North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and who's gonna get credit for it. So all of that's going on. Now, Khrushchev has his own gripes about the Chinese. He looks around at the United States. The United States has got basing all over the world. Its allies allow the United States to have bases. And China has hardly any Russian bases, these leftover concession areas, and China wants them back. And Tru- Khrushchev can't understand this. And then what he really can't understand are the two Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954 and 1958, where Mao starts lobbing ordinance on nationalist islands that are very close to mainland shores. And Khrushchev is apoplectic 'cause Mao hasn't given him any advance warning. And by the way, this sort of thing could trigger some of the security cla- clauses of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty with, uh, nuclear follow-on effects. And then when Stu- and while this is going on, when, uh, Khrushchev wants to have a combined sub fleet base, if we're gonna take all these risks we need to have subs in different places, uh, Mao says, "No way." And then Khrushchev is fed up and said, "Well, you're not gonna get the plans for the atomic bomb." Okay. And the whole thing becomes public in 1960 with, uh, anger all around. And the two, Russia and China, uh, squabbled incessantly over the Vietnam War. And the North Vietnamese were interested in getting maximum aid for both, from both, which it did. And they begged the Chinese to allow the Russians to ship things overland through China, so the Chinese felt obliged to do it. Um, but, uh, the terms of that overland trade were just, uh, uh, a food for all kinds of squabbling. It just didn't add. So, the story of the reversal in the balance of power between Russia and China arose from multiple factors. Doesn't happen all, uh, at once. It is both a story of China's rise and of Russia's decline. And step one for China is getting its own atomic weapon, which it does in 1964 so that it can get itself free of Soviet bondage. And so this is in 1964, after they've detonated that bomb, where Mao goes, "Okay, there are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account, uh, for this list of stolen territory, all the territory I've shown you. Uh, we want it back." (laughs) And the Russian's jaw drops, panic. And th- the Chinese, then, are much more aggressive about what they consider to be their territorial rights. Uh, and there is a f- a border war over territories and, in particular, this one island, Zhenbao or Damansky Island in the Amur River. All right, here's how riverine borders work, international ones. Uh, under international law, the border is the thalweg, which is the center of the main channel of whatever the river is. And Russia had followed that with its European borders. Not with China. It claimed both banks of the Amur. Well, the Chinese are fed up, uh, with that and they take Zhenbao, uh, Island. And, uh, the Russians are furious and they come to the United States and they say, "Would it be okay if we nuke these people?" (laughs) And we're like, "No." (laughs) So then the Russians scratch their head and they come back and they go, "Okay, would it be okay if we use conventional weapons to blow up their nuclear stuff?" And we go, "No, still not okay." And Mao gets it. The one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary. So there's a reshuffling of the primary adversaries so that... Formerly, the United States was a primary adversary of both China and Russia, so that would be a reason for them to cooperate. Well, now they're primary adversaries for each other, and the United States can play the swing thing with all of this. And for Russia, um, it's really devastating having China as an enemy because it's gonna have to deploy mechanized nuclear armed troops all along its really long Chinese border, Central Asia, the works. And it's already doing this with its European borders and occupying Eastern Europe, which garrison costs are significant. Imagine if this country had to put those kinds of forces on our long Canadian and Mexican borders. It'd be bankrupting and their economy was, and remains, a fraction of ours. But, um, this breaking up of the, the earlier version of the bromance, uh, uh, allows the United States to play the swing role and then we cooperate. Both Nixon and Mao think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing and overextending Russia financially by overextending it militarily with all this, these armaments and things. So, in addition, what's going as part of the China's rise are internal reforms under Deng Xiaoping, when he abandons certain communist principles of economic management and gets much more productive agricultural s- sector in industry and commerce. And so China's running double-digit growth rates for about 20 years with significant compounding effects. Okay, that's the story of China's rise. Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline. You have pictured here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev, who apparently had a really, uh, a, a stroke in 1976 that permanently impaired his thinking and which his death in 1982 finished off. And then, um, he was replaced by an... uh, Yuri And- uh, Andropov, whose own health was, uh, pretty parlous and he dies within two years. And then Konstantin Chernenko, uh, barely makes it a year before he's dead. I mean, it sorta sounds like us. But anyway, uh-... (laughs) it doesn't work well. So if you look at Soviet growth statistics, they're really good right after the end of World War II. They're busy rebuilding. But then, when you get to the mid-'70s, they're going into terminal decline. So when Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates have been either 1% to 2% less than US growth rates for the preceding decade, and the compounding effects of that are pretty horrendous. In addition, other problems, Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long years. And not only did he collect cars, that was apparently the, the, the go-to gift for him, but in addition, he was collecting a bunch of non-performing piles across the Third World because this is manifesting Russian power, but it's expensive and he doesn't have much of an economy to pay for it. And if you look at oil prices, they're very much associated with the decline of the Soviet Union, rise of Vladimir Putin. And it's because in the Soviet era, uh, government budgets, uh, relied as much as 55% on oil or energy revenues, and so, um, piggy banks are going to shrink if oi- oil prices aren't doing very well. And so Gorbachev repeatedly said, you know, "We can't live this way anymore." And so he wanted, and he did, initiate political and economic reforms to try to save communism, except he really, um, ruined the sclerotic patient doing what he did. And there are massive territorial implications for what he did, and, uh, it's the loss of empire in Eastern Europe and also the loss of the ethnically based constituent republics of the Soviet Union. So I'm gonna show you this, um, territorial, Russia's territorial odyssey in maps. So this is '38. It is before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi-Soviet pact, where they're dividing up Poland and parts of, of Eastern Europe, Nazis and Soviets, so what they want. This is before then. But by the time you get to the end of the war, Russia's got the Baltic states, it's got Kaliningrad, it's got all of Belarus, all of Ukraine, and then of course, it gets Eastern Europe. Well, with Gorbachev, after he works his magic, you're down to Kaliningrad. Okay, that's where Russians stage a lot of weapons nowadays and apparently dump a lot of toxic waste, uh, so that's what Kaliningrad's all about. Uh, so it was significant so that at the end of, uh, 1991 when Russia's lost everything, they're down to a, a much diminished rump state and then, uh, followed by years of, uh, instability in Russia.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel33:25

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3. 34:39 – 46:10

   Russian imperialism

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel34:39

      FDIC.

   2. SPSarah Paine34:39

      When Russians measure, um, well, they agree, uh, on that their country always has been, always should be, always will be a great power. But they don't measure it in wealth, um, because their wealth has always been, uh, much less than their Western neighbors, although they often confiscate the wealth of other people. So what they measure, their strength, greatness is in vast territorial extent and the ability to run roughshod over others and make them do whatever it is Russia wants, and also, when they look at their security, they also look at it this way, is that we need this vast territorial extent to be secure. Um, but they never turn it around, so they're always worried about other people invading them to think, "Well, do you suppose we pose a threat to anybody else?" They never turn it around that way, except Russia has posed existential, uh, threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they've disappeared from the pages of history courtesy of the Russians. Let's go to the medieval period where Russia starts out as the princely state of Muscovy, Moscow. Well, it wipes out the other princely states. There was Novgorod the Great, uh, was the more progressive place. They wiped that place out. Pskov, Rostov, Tver, there are a lot of other places. And then later, they're, uh, eliminating the khanates of Central Asia. These are states. It's a different way of organizing yourself, but the Khanate of Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, Kokand, Khiva, Bokhari, they get rid of all of it. And then there's been this repeated vivisecting of European neighbors, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, and Finland, of taking their territory one bite at a time, and you can see it going on today. And the Russians just don't see it, um, that if you do this to other people, um, this is why at the end of the Cold War everyone is stampeding into NATO. It's not some conspiracy. It's just what the Russians have done to them, and now I'm gonna illustrate Poland's fate to show what happens when you're surrounded by rapacious continental empires. Three partitions of Poland in the 18th century, this is when Prussia, Austria, and Russia are taking things. The Russians said, "But we didn't take Polish territory." They're taking the Polish Empire. It's a technicality. Um, and, uh...If you wonder why Poles cannot stand Russians, it would be this, and it would also be, uh, the genocide-laced occupation of Poland that went on for several generations after World War II. And oh, part of that, Yalta, again, the Russians insisted on moving Poland 200 kilometers to the west. That is not the normal thing to do to a country. So it's deep into German territory, so Russia can go eat a big part of Poland. Then Russia decides it's gonna cleanse the whole place, ethnically cleanse. So Germans are gonna live in Germany, Poles are gonna live in Poland, Ukrainian are gonna live in Ukraine, and millions of people, this is a war-devastated Europe where there's no way to take care of refugees, are being sent hither and yon, and lots of them are dying. And for the first time in their histories, um, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, they become ethnically homogeneous states. And then Poland, um, Hungary, and, uh, Czechoslovakia, uh, require Russian troops to hang onto some of their, uh, current gains. So, um, a lot of things, uh, go on here. If you compare to what the West, uh, is doing to the United States, the United States has the Marshall Plan, you've heard of it, where the United States is pouring aid into our Western allies to restore them after the war. Well, this is what Russia's doing. A, they've in- they've won the war, so their troops are there, but they never take their troops home. Then they're busy running coups. Then they're busy shooting, uh, anyone who disagrees with them or they send them to labor camps, whatever they're gonna do. And then they redistribute every form of wealth there is, either through nationalization or collectivization, right? Uh, and, uh, they're imposing this really, uh, non-functioning eco- economic model on these people. It's called communism. It doesn't work. Uh, so you wonder why Eastern Europeans aren't thrilled about a repeat of this? Well, come on. All right, moreover, story gets better. The people who made all this happen include this charmer, uh, some of the most toxic people from the Soviet Union. Andrei Vyshinsky, who goes to Romania, lucky Romanians, he was running the show trials that were killing the Bo- uh, sending the original Bolshevik leaders' summary execution. What does he do when he gets in Romania? Well, he appoints the ministers of justice, war, and the interior. If you do that, you control the courts, army, and police, and then you can start expropriating everything, and, uh, nationalizing things, and you can start eliminating other parties, and you make g- uh, Romania trade only with the Soviet Union. Okay. All right, another toxic personality, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who he's another part of the A-list, uh, tu- uh, purge team. What had he done? Signed loads of execution warrants to his military colleagues, officers, uh, during the great purges. What a great guy. He's in Hungary, lucky people. Um, he's not quite as competent as the other one because in the elections of 1945 in, in Hungary, the Smallholders' Party wins. Oops, they aren't communists. He doesn't ever make that mistake again. And then he's busily appointing communist ministers to different ministries of the land reform, taking over the civil service, getting the propaganda up and running, uh, taking over, uh, youth and women's groups to infiltrate that way, and arresting, um, all sorts of non-communists politicians before he holds the 1947 elections, which of course, the communists win. And then afterwards, there's a really big purge, which, um, 10% of the population faces tribunals. Think of that. If this room, 10% of you going to tribunals 'cause Russians are in town? Okay. Uh, Russia had a template for block building. It's- it's- it- this is, uh, I'm giving you the details 'cause you get a sense of how a continental empire runs business. So the Russians looked at how when Italy surrendered to Western part of the- Western allies, that they basically just ran the show in Italy. So the Russians are going, "Well, we're gonna, when we accept surrenders, we're gonna run the show in Eastern Europe." But the Russians wanna take advantage of the absolute turmoil that wars cause. Also, wars often lead to war economies where you've got a lot of centralized government control to run the war effort. So the Russians wanna leverage that one. And then they've got this big Red Army presence. Use all of those things, which they do. And here's their template. They're controlling the power ministries. What are they? Defense and interior. If you do that, you're gonna monopolize coercion and eliminate your opposition. If you control the justice and information ministries, you can arrest or kill at will, and then you control all the stories that are never told about this. And then if you control agriculture, particularly in those days, you're gonna buy a lot of allegiance by redistr- redistributing other people's land, and that's gonna wipe out class enemies, collaborators, all sorts of people you don't like, and the or- uh, original elite that have been running rural areas. And they also had, uh, uh, a story that they told about this. It's the big lie. Remember communism, it, what- what is the- the- the really bad people in the communist, uh, story of how we all live? It's the imperialists, right? Imperialism's really bad. Well, I've just shown you that Russians were the greatest practitioners of imperialism of the 20th century, and they're doing this right as Western imperialists are giving up their colonies. And yet this big lie, the big fiction that the Russians are somehow nice guys. They're using democratic forms, like they don't eliminate Poland as a state, as the tsars had done. Still called Poland, but it's a fiction that it's independent. It's not. And there's a fiction that they, they hold elections, but they're not democratic. We already know the outcome. And, uh, it's a dictatorship in reality, and they're just purging the place. And I mean, they're killing lots of Eastern Europeans. So if you think East- Eastern Europeans don't remember this, they most certainly do. And then-There is a, a more regional template for how you do this. I've already talked about ethnic cleansing. They did that, and then they tried moving countries, right? Poland to the west. Mongolia, I haven't talked about, it was to the east into Chinese territory. And then they wanna take some stepping stones for later expansion, so that's what Kaliningrad is all about. Another one is Moldova. That is territory between Romania and Russia on very important river systems, and Moldova's got problems with a place called Transnistria, which the Russians have poached, so that story's still ongoing. And also, places like Azerbaijan, it's split between Iran and, uh, well, now it's independent Azerbaijan, but it was split with the Soviet Union. And then there are the, the divided states of Germany, Korea, Mongolia, and China. You want all your neighbors quarreling over their, uh, borders so that Russia can then set the terms and that it can nibble them away a bite at a time, or if it can take a whole thing, good for them. So Russian, uh, national identity is not only about empire, territorial extent. It's also has some big ideas attached to it, uh, an ideology that somehow this territorial expansion is either progressive, uh, beneficial, or positive, and it's a- a- a- a myth. So under the tsars, the ideology was this Third Rome of the Russian Orthodox Church. Third Rome was in Moscow. I know, this is news to you. I'll explain how it works. So there's the Rome we all know about, (laughs) the Rome Rome. That was (laughs) Rome number one, the o- the one where the pope is. Uh, Rome number two, according to the Russians, has to do with the Byzantine Empire, and that was Constantinople or Istanbul. So when that falls, the Russians go, "Ta-da! It's Moscow." Not really, but, um, they used this Russian orthodoxy and spread, uh, the Russian Orthodox Church back in the day, uh, deep into Eastern Europe. So when the communists get in, they're not spreading Russian orthodoxy. They're spreading communism. The problem for Putin is today neither communism nor Russian orthodoxy are marketable ideologies, so he's just stuck with being a really big place. That's where, uh, his little focus is. And Russia has a nightmare scenario. They don't always win these wars. They lose, uh, quite often, and the Mongol yoke or the Yellow Peril, their terminology, not mine, uh, is the 13th century when the Mongols just swept in and the Russian elites became tax collectors for the Mongols, an extractive role that has endured. You think about Russians, they extract resources, their own, other peoples', but they're not known for producing wealth. It's just resource extraction, and this is some of the legacy of all of that one. And, um, the Russians have also suffered devastating defeats to Napoleon in World War I and World War II that just devastated Western Russia, so they've had bad times. And in our own time, Putin is dumping all of his ordinance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to China's ambitions. So if he keeps, uh, keeps the game up, he may well wind up with a Chinese yoke and his nightmare will be there for him.

4. 46:10 – 1:05:42

   China’s and Russia's existential problems

   1. SPSarah Paine46:10

      The Chinese also have their own big ideas, not religious ideas, uh, or empire, but about civilization itself. The idea, uh, hist- uh, traditionally that the Chinese believe there's only one civilization, that would be theirs. It's based on Confucianism. Uh, that would be a world order unto itself, and that worked for them for a couple thousand years. And there are certain pillars of, uh, legitimacy that have endured, uh, probably originating this but an enduring one, and one, uh, is ethical rule. Well, that's gone for the Communist Party. Let's try the next one. Economic prosperity, whoops, going fast. That leaves the communists today with territorial expansion. Well, that's ongoing with territory, incursions into India, South China Sea island-building, and then all these gathering threats to Taiwan. And in part what's going on is the Communist Party wants everyone to, he wants to play the nationalism card the same way Putin is. If you haven't gotten anything else for you, play jingoistic nationalism 'cause we human beings can be particularly, um, attentive to that one. And so that if you focus on that, maybe the Chinese people won't look at the ethical lapses of the Communist Party or the fact that their paychecks aren't going anywhere anymore. So good old Xi, he doesn't have a marketable ideology anymore, and what's really scary is Confucianism had just been this enduring feature of China. Dynasties came and went, but Confucianism stayed until, um, China was unable to fend off Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War that I told you about and the Europeans in the Opium Wars when all of a sudden Confucianism just seems totally inadequate. And so when enough Chinese cease believing in Confucianism, that's when you get the 1911 Revolution, and it just vanishes as a organizing principle for running your government, and this is the total, uh, nightmare. One of the, uh, uh, frightening things for the Communist Party is, um, when people cease believing in communism. So when China's nightmare scenario is, uh, these horrible peer- periods of chaos, they're afraid of if the, uh, communists go that China's gonna vo- devolve into these civil wars, these periods of wan. And their second one is that maybe Russia, the ef- uh, or the Soviet Union when it shattered, that may well be their fate, that maybe these communist regimes can't last forever. So Russia's nightmare scenario is other people invading Russia. China's ne- uh, nightmare sis- uh, scenario is the collapse of China. It's, uh, two different ways, two different things to worry about. And the Chinese face a conundrum.If you no longer believe the economic theories on which communism is based, well, how do you justify one-party rule? And the Communist Party has tried to soldier on without solving that problem. And, um, the Chinese have, I think, learned a great deal from watching Russians as they play around with big ideas. And, um, I think they learn a great deal from, uh, Mikhail Gorbachev when he tries to, uh, fix communism but he winds up killing the patient. And, uh, the Chinese, I think, uh, their takeaways from what Gorbachev did is, don't hesitate to deploy the tanks. If you've got unrest in the streets, you just send tanks. Tanks against civilians, it, it's a really quick fix. And make ... Uh, you wanna focus on economic reforms to the extent you can, certainly not political reforms, and you really want to sinify your minorities. Why? Uh, in the Soviet Union, the Russians had had this fiction that all these occupied minority people, uh, wanted to be there and had equal rights. And so they would sponsor all the nice folk dances and the language classes, and they'd have a bunch of token minorities in traditional dress in v- various political institutions, but basically they had no power. But it meant when the Soviet Union shattered, there were plausible divisions already set there, uh, set up on an eth- uh, an ethnic basis, and that is how you get places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, et cetera. China's like, "No way." So this helps explain the genocide of the, the Uighurs that's ongoing now. I think this is their rationale for doing it. And then what you wanna do, you can see Xi Jinping doing it, is you wanna pro- uh, prioritize maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party over economic efficiency when those two things run at cross-purposes. And that, I think, helps explain some of Xi Jinping's, uh, growth-depressing choices that he's making. What the Gorbachev discovered when he tried to reform communism is that democracy and communism just don't mix. If you give people elections, they're gonna support multiple parties. Also when the communist track record, uh, becomes known of their incompetent economic management, uh, summary executions, famines, just all the things that they've been up to, uh, it gets very hard for them to remain in power. Also, as Gorbachev discovered, democracy and empire don't mix. When you give different minorities a cho- a choice of whether or occupy places, a choice to leave or stay, uh, they bolt. And there's a consensus among the Han, the preponderant ethnic group in China, that they wanna maintain the empire, so they don't care how many Tibetans immolate themselves, right? That's no longer going on now 'cause, uh, the mortar has descended into Tibet. And they don't care how many Mongols complain about lost lands. The Han want to keep it. Also, for the generation that survived the Cultural Revolution, which would be Xi Jinping, he's precisely that age group, they do not ever want to go back to the chaos, the lan of the Cultural Revolution. It was horrendous. So expect them to prioritize stability over liberty. And this brings a third problem. If democracy and communism don't mix, and democracy and empire don't mix, okay, in a internet, cellphone age when people are much more interconnected, how does a government maintain legitimacy to rule? Because elections are an incredibly powerful way to give authority to a government. And this is where nationalism comes in. And the Chinese Communist Party, and the Russians likewise, are trying to use jingoistic nationalism to stoke up popular loyalties and also to deflect people from domestic problems to go, "Oh, look at the hated outsiders," right? And, uh, they aren't the only country to do, uh, this sort of thing, is you blame outsiders. It's all the immigrants' fault or whatever. And, uh, the problem with all of this, um, when the Chinese did it is in 1980, right after the Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese Communist Party decided to rewrite all the textbooks so they're no longer gonna focus on class enemies, but they're gonna be focused, to use jingoistic nationalism, they're gonna focus on evil Japanese, evil Americans, and focus things that way. Well, the problem with nationalism is, uh, it's a very, uh, heady drink. If you imbibe too much, it clouds the judgment. Moreover, it repels minority people within China's empire who are not interested in Han nationalism. It frightens neighbors to think, to equ- coordinate with each other and think, find big powers to counterbalance this mess, and it also impedes the deescalation of unforeseen, um, international dustups or crises. So with Putin's latest adventures, one would assume that the Chinese have some real thoughts about what's going on now. And in Putin's case, he has thrown away the Soviet addendum to the rules for continental empire. What was that one? No hot wars. You think about Soviet rulers, they were all, uh, veterans of World War II through Leonid Brezhnev, and they understood that war is easy to get into, hard to get out of, very unpredictable. So it's, for them it was proxy wars, and they loved it when the United States got into hot wars. What is not to like about the Korean War and the Vietnam War with the United States just tied down and A- Americans tearing each other's eyes out about these things? Great, great, great. Russians stayed out of it until after Brezhnev's stroke, which that's when they make the big booboo in Afghanistan, and they, they go into Afghanistan and then all of a sudden we have loads of fun giving Stinger missiles to the other sides, inflicting costs on the Russians. And the person who wanted to get into Afghanistan is Yuri Andropov, who was not a veteran. The uniformed military ...... of Russia, so don't go into Afghanistan. While Andropov and friends ignored it, did their thing. If you look at Putin, he has risen to power on a diet of hot wars. He comes to power in the early phase of the Second Chechen War, where he levels the Chechen capital of Grozny and leaves, uh, most of the rest of Chechnya an environmental waste zone, uh, but he sorts that one out. And then he gets quite popular for his war with Georgia in 2008, where he detaches South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. Now he wants to build a naval base in Abkhazia 'cause he's, he's having trouble with his base on Crimea. And then, uh, when he eliminates term limits for himself in 2012, which isn't very popular in Russia, he solves that by going into Ukraine in 2014 and walks off with about 7% of Ukrainian territory at very little cost. And Russians think that's great. So if you look at these little stepping stones, this is the way continentalists look at it, you got all these little places lined up, uh, you wanna color it in. And that's where Ukraine comes in, in, in 2022. So Putin wants to reverse all these territorial losses, and w- he wants the, the green things and the purple things. And I don't know if he wants to do, uh, the Napoleonic Wars, I suppose go all the way to Paris. Who knows? And here's how he looks at NATO, or doesn't look at it, uh, NATO, you can look at when people join, there are two great big periods of accession to NATO. One is in the early Cold War when all the smaller countries of Europe, which is everybody, right? We're all smaller than Russia, but the Europeans joined to protect themselves from Soviet imperialism, and then at the end of the Cold War when these Soviet satellites can finally slip the leash, I've given you all the reasons why, they, um, stampede into NATO. It is not NATO tricking them to join, they're stampeding in for excellent reasons. They'd been proven right. And then, uh, with Putin when he does, works his magic the second time around Ukraine in 2022, this is when the Fins and the Swedes decide neutrality's not gonna cut it, we gotta join NATO. But when Putin looks at this, he goes, "Oh, they're coming at us in arcs." Well, this is, uh, lud- ludicrous. Russia has posed an existential threat to these places forever. No one today wants to invade Russia. Who'd want it? It's full of Russians. We want them to stay home, right? There's no one there who wants Russia. So the Russians like to gaslight everybody else like, "You're the problem." It's been very effective. Lots of Americans will talk about NATO expansion and say, "Oh, this is why Putin went into Ukraine is he did NATO expansion." He's gaslighting everybody. Uh, Russians are the problem, and also it is their totally dysfunctional domestic system that offers everybody else nothing but problems. Instead of focusing on that and fixing it so they can be a productive member, uh, of, uh, the rest of the world, they're not doing that. They're just invading other people. So back to the real problem, what are the prospects of a bromance with these two? Barring World War III, which would be the great powers go at it, if the great powers go at it, you might well superglue these two. And then if that happens, whatever side is losing might well use a nuclear weapon, and then we're gonna have toxic plumes everywhere. So we had better get our dem- our diplomacy right, because there are really serious consequences for getting it wrong in this particular era. We're at the beginning of a second Cold War with a leadership that has not been chastened by surviving World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, which are the grownups who did a very effective job dealing with the early first Cold War. We haven't got those people anymore. So if you look at, um, primary adversaries' primary theaters, you don't want them to align for your enemies, because if they do it'll be, it'll coordinate. Current- currently, Vlad the Bad has a Ukraine fixation, Xi Jinping has got a Taiwan fixation opposite ends of Eurasia. Xi Jinping is also causing India problems and doing south s- China Sea island b- uh, building, but they're, they're on opposite ends of their two empires. So fa- so far, nothing aligns with these two, and even in a world war, its the- their primary theaters probably would not align the same way that the Axis primary theaters did not align, and they might well disperse their resources in different directions. But the problem was we have a lot of people with nuclear weapons now. You really don't wanna do the hot war. So if, um, the West and others manage things, things correctly, I've given you a huge historical legacy of fraught relations, uh, play your cards, uh, appropriately and these two will take care of each other. And, um, the rest of us can, if we do it right, don't launch trade wars on each other, but rather try to maximize our prosperity so that we get stronger and stronger while they're busy in these wealth-destroying wars, and Putin is just blowing through all of his assets in Ukraine to no purpose, uh, that, eh, that's how we w- uh, fought and won the, the last Cold War. Putin, he's trying to do empire in the age of nationalism. Well, it's a nonstarter, and he's dumping all of his ordinance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open, and Xi Jinping has moved right in even before the Ukraine war. That's the Belt Road Initiative is peeling away the former Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia, and Putin is doing this hot war gambit when Russia's, uh, weak and China is strong, making it particularly damaging. And you can go, "Well, why would it matter?" Well, (sighs) Uh, Russia has precisely ... Siberia has precisely the resources that China now needs and covets and wants to have them contiguous so other people can't mess with them. And in particular, they want water because they've blown through their water table in North China. Lake Baikal has over 20% of the world's surface freshwater. So if you want a quick fix, it's the best one. And China is known for big water projects. They've been damming the Mekong and the Yangze. They've done massive water projects. So, um, that may be in Russia's future, who knows? Um, and Xi Jinping now holds all of the cards. Uh, China has nine times the population, nine times the GMP of Russia, and their per capita GMPs are, uh, converging. Not good news for Putin. So I think the question isn't whether this, uh, bromance is gonna last forever but rather when it's gonna end. When is Xi Jinping gonna decide he's got the right amount of leverage to get whatever it is he wants? And, um, I think what's going on now ill- illustrates the, the perils of getting your primary adversary wrong. Nicholas II fought a recreational war against Japan, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, 1905. He is pouring resources into really an irrelevant theater in those days. Instead of taking those resources and putting it into a railway system that European Russia desperately needed to face off Germany, which it does within the decade and loses, uh, he is overthrown in part because of bread riots in Saint Petersburg 'cause no foreign aid can get in 'cause he has inadequate railway system. They'll be built later and they'll be good for Lend-Lease. So he and his family wind up shot in a Siberian basement. It takes a decade to play out. So, uh, I don't know how it's gonna go for Vladimir Putin, uh, on all of this. Uh, if we play our cards right, uh, maybe he'll go away and is lonesome. We have to wait a long time. On the other hand, if we get into a hot war, nuclear war, or, and in the meantime if the United States kills off its alliance system, which is its great- one of its greatest strengths by doing a gratuitous trade war on our allies, and then we di- have a dust-up with China, well, let's think about this. Japan tried this, uh, go-it-alone, my-way-or-the-highway strategy with China back in World War II, right? When China was a failed state and it wrecked Japan. China now has a population that's a multiple of ours, an industrial base that's a multiple of ours. Why on earth would you ever wanna take on them alone? So I'm gonna quote Pe- Pericles who was, uh, the leader of Athens at its height, uh, when it was, uh, building all these ancient ruins that weren't ruins when they were being built, right? They're gone. And he was ... Uh, he ... This warning came on, uh, on the eve of his succession of Athenian bl- blunders and, uh, ancient Athens never recovered. "I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy's devices." Our leaders truly need to ponder this before they wreck a- a- all of us, themselves included. So thank you for your attention. That's what I have to say about Sino-Soviet things. (air whooshing)

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:22

      Public benchmarks can be useful, but they don't always measure what you think they do. Take AMIE or HMMT, which both contain extremely challenging competition-level math problems. Now, LabelBox researchers found that some of the larger models were brute forcing their answers through repeated trial and error and they were sidestepping the very kind of mathematical reasoning that these benchmarks were designed to test in the first place. And on top of this, some of the questions had actually leaked into the models' training data. So when LabelBox researchers swapped in fresh, equally challenging problems, the scores plummeted, and in many cases, by more than 40%. So when a LabelBox customer wanted to improve their model's math capabilities, LabelBox brought in a team of previous Math Olympiad winners to develop brand new AMIE and HMMT style problems that the models couldn't have possibly memorized, along with clever variations that made brute force approaches computationally infeasible for the model. LabelBox also mapped out the model's strengths and weaknesses. For example, was it better at domains like combinatorics or algebra? And then weighted the final fine-tuned data towards the areas that needed the most work. There's no shortcut here. LabelBox just scrutinized benchmarks at the single data row level to ensure that their customers' models were learning and improving as effectively as possible. You can learn more at labelbox.com/twarkash. (air whooshing)

5. 1:05:42 – 1:23:29

   Q&A: Sino-Soviet split

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:42

      Okay. First question, I want to understand the role of ideology in the Sino-Soviet split. So these are the two major communist countries in the world. They have this big ideological world-changing mission, "We're gonna spread communism around the world," and that isn't enough to prevent some war over, in 19- the case of 1969, literally just islands in the middle of a river, right? There's, like, nothing super consequential at stake here. So why didn't the fact that they were both these communist countries do more to cement the relationship?

   2. SPSarah Paine1:06:11

      Well, I gave you all these bad things that Russia had done to China w- which are ... They're not small things. And then isn't the problem with communism is that the economics of it don't actually work? And, uh, that fundamentally these two countries are continental powers. They're continental empires and sure they, uh, change out u- uh, uh, ideologies. Uh, the ideology of the J- czar changes out to communism and China is changing out Confucianism for communism. But the principle that each one should be king of the roost, that hasn't changed, and that would be a mutually exclusive proposition of who's gonna run...... uh, Asia and then, uh, Eur-Asia, right? 'Cause they, they have a, a, a shared address, right? This long border.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:07:04

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SPSarah Paine1:07:04

      And also communism, you're supposed to have a whole... It's supposed to take over the whole world, right? And we're supposed to have a classless society, right? And that's why we don't even worry about governments and things, 'cause they're eventually gonna melt away. Well, that's all nonsense. And, uh, as things go on further and further, you have dictators more and more entrenched and they're, and they're using communism, which is another piece where it's just amazing about the big lie. I don't know whether Stalin said something, "If the lie is big enough people will believe you," that it's just so out there, it's so preposterous they go with it, which is this notion that the Soviet Union is... uh, that it's the West who are these imperial powers, right? And we buy this, that they're not the ones. But if you look at it, I've given you the data. Um, and then this other one in our own time, this lie about, "Oh, it's the West. It's NATO expansion. This explains Putin." I've given you the data. It's nonsense. It's... Now, why the Russians feel obliged to take other people's territory, part of it is this feeling good while other people squirm. There's that aspect. And they're not the only people who can do those sorts of things. Um, but it's also from this, uh, being on the plains of Eurasia over history, people have invaded you, and so you have an established paradigm of how you deal with other people that is deep-seated over thousands of years. 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.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:40

      Hmm. So I want to understand, uh, say Stalin's decisions in particular in, um, in the case of telling the communists during the Chinese Civil War that you can go below the Yangtze River so that he can split up the Chinese and, uh, so the communists and the nationalists in China, and leave China weak. So, we know from all the actions f- in Stalin's life that he was a devoted communist, right? He-

   6. SPSarah Paine1:09:04

      No.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:04

      ... he does collectivization and almost destroys his regime because he's a d- devoted communist. At the same time... And so communism says that there has to be this worldwide revolution at some point. If there is a worldwide revolution, um, there will be other powerful communist countries. So that's implied in the nature of what a worldwide communist revolution is. But at the same time, he's... you know, he doesn't seem communist enough to want China to become fully communist. He, like, cares more about real geopolitic. Um, so I... yeah, tell me about how-

   8. SPSarah Paine1:09:30

      Well, i- i- i-

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:30

      ... the two-

   10. SPSarah Paine1:09:31

       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 operationalized it, so we should run it forever." So, of course, it's gonna be Russia is gonna be the big communist country, so then a bunch of Chinese upstarts from their point of view are claiming, "Uh, no, no, no. It's, uh... We're gonna run the show." Uh-uh.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:53

       But did Stalin... So, a- a- as a communist he thought, "Okay, there's gonna be at some point... The whole world is gonna be communist."

   12. SPSarah Paine1:10:00

       Ultimately.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:00

       And he thought that he personally would be managing the whole world?

   14. SPSarah Paine1:10:03

       Uh, unclear, 'cause in his lifetime, right? 'Cause it's a long hor- horizon. Uh, in his lifetime he's about, uh, initially communism in one country, right? And then communism on your borders, which is what he's working on. Uh, as for the, the rest of the world, it takes Brezhnev to start going all, uh, deep into Africa. In fact, Stalin wasn't interested in, say, India, because he thought they're a bunch of lackeys of the British, right? "How did they let themselves be colonized by the British? There's something wrong with them." So, I th- uh, 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 gonna turn out. And things... His, um, 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, that's-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:00

       Yeah.

   16. SPSarah Paine1:11:00

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

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:05

       If Stalin hadn't died, do you think a Sino-Soviet split was still inevitable? Because, yes, there wouldn't have been Khrushchev's secret speech. Obviously, Stalin wouldn't have condemned the cult of personality, but the, the, uh, the grievances you mentioned would still exist.

   18. SPSarah Paine1:11:21

       I think the grievances would still exist. I think Stalin's death, uh, dictators deaths profoundly weaken their systems 'cause they've got no good succession, so it means you're guaranteed a, a catfight, 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 catfight royale for what happens to him. So, I don't know. Uh, Stalin was a pretty o- old enough guy when he died, and Russians have a... had in those days had a pretty lousy diet, and, and I can't remember if he smoked. His generation mostly did. So, um, I don't know the, uh, how, how the future would've run with, uh, good old Uncle Joe there for longer. I can't im-... The Korean War would have still gone on longer. It's really his death why that war ends.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:09

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SPSarah Paine1:12:09

       Um, so and then if the Korean War goes on and on and on, I don't know what the implications are for us or for Mao.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:17

       Hmm. This, I think, is a really interesting thing to consider, um, from this lecture, that, um, you know, 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. Um, at the time, you know, it just... you, you wouldn't think of this as a ma-... Especially World War II has just happened, you wouldn't think of this as... 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. And I wonder if we should apply the same logic today where there's other countries with huge populations-

   22. SPSarah Paine1:12:55

       Oh.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:55

       ... where we don't think a lot about what's happening there. India or Nigeria. I mean, I, 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.

   24. SPSarah Paine1:13:02

       Let's not try 'cause I don't know anything about it either.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:13:04

       (laughs)

   26. SPSarah Paine1:13:04

       (laughs) Yeah. But, um, on the China, the, uh, Chinese Civil War, there was an understanding that it was a really big deal.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:13:14

       Mm-hmm.

   28. SPSarah Paine1:13:14

       And that's why Roosevelt and the British are just thinking he's laughable. He keeps trying to treat China like a, a great power and the British are going, "They're not a great power, Franklin. Uh, not remotely." But he wants to bring them into the, uh, the Cairo Conference or where- the one he brings 'em in. And he also wants to include them as the big, uh... He wants them to be a veto, uh, member, wielding member of the United Nations which, by China's military status, there's just no way that... Uh, but Roosevelt is looking, there's no Japan out there, uh, we wanna have something in Asia to counterbalance. But then when you get to the Chinese Civil War, Americans who've, are, have fought s- some big wars, they're looking at it going, "It is not feasible for us to alter this outcome." And, uh, therefore, um, the thinking was, I think it was the Eisenhower archives, anyway, that, um, uh, that i- if you, uh, they lived together long enough, they would go at each other eventually.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:17

       Hmm. Okay. I wanna zoom in on one particular episode during this period that I think is fascinating. So in 1936, the communists in China kidnap Chiang Kai-shek, who's the leader of the nationalists.

   30. SPSarah Paine1:14:28

       Mm.
6. 1:23:29 – 1:27:05

   Stalin's lessons from WW2

   1. SPSarah Paine1:23:29

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:29

      Mm-hmm. In 1931, when Japan attacks Manchuria, Japan commandeers, uh, the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 said that it was supposed to be under Russia's purview. Um, and s- people in the Politburo are telling Stalin, "Look, we gotta, we gotta be aggressive against this." And Stalin says, "Look, I don't want, I don't wanna raise tensions against another great power. Let's just let this slide, let's keep tensions low." And this is actually quite similar to what happens with splitting of Poland in 1939 and then Barbarossa, where in both theaters, he makes this calculation that, "I'm going to let certain things slide so that I don't have to face off against this great powers on my border. I don't wanna go to war with them."

   3. SPSarah Paine1:24:12

      Right.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:12

      In the case of Japan, it works, 'cause Japan decides to attack China and not Russia. In the case of, obviously, Germany, it doesn't work.

   5. SPSarah Paine1:24:18

      Oh, yeah, yeah. And Germany, he's trying to run the same script on.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:21

      Right.

   7. SPSarah Paine1:24:22

      Um, and he thinks th- that this is gonna work for him, and that's what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of, uh, is about. And, uh, uh, not remotely, he needed to read, uh, Mein Kampf (laughs) to understand-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:37

      Right.

   9. SPSarah Paine1:24:37

      ... it's, no, you're a menu item for Hitler. He is eventually gonna come around. And also, I think it's in our own day where we don't really wanna absorb the bad news. Like, I could be wrong, but I believe that, uh, Putin wants, uh, not only all of Ukraine, which he says he wants, but also he wants the Baltic states and he wants to keep on going.And so this is profoundly bad news, because if that's the case then it means for Europeans at least, they're gonna have to be diverting all kinds of resources to this problem, which is something they don't wanna do, right? 'Cause like us, uh, they're indebted too and there are other things they would prefer to spend their money on. And we don't like the bad news that actually, uh, this is where we're at, and so you gotta make nasty trade-offs. So Stalin tries to work the same magic. Uh, uh, e- and Stalin, uh, thinks it's gonna work for him and, uh, he doesn't get it. He becomes the menu item for Hitler-

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:39

       Yeah.

   11. SPSarah Paine1:25:40

       ... and it, it just about wrecks him. But it works beautifully against, uh-

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:44

       Yeah.

   13. SPSarah Paine1:25:44

       ... China.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:44

       So it, it's interesting to see, oh, i- it kinda makes sense why he thought it would work because otherwise Operation, uh, his failure to anticipate Operation Barbarossa. So, you know, he, when he's getting information that the Germans are lining up millions of men along this huge border, he's like, "This is British disinformation." And the, he uses the exact same logic when, um, Japan is invading Manchuria, that, like, the idea that we gotta fight Japan is British information, disinformation, sorry. Um, so e- even though obviously it was a mistake, it helps us, like, understand why he thought this way.

   15. SPSarah Paine1:26:11

       Well, I think there's another concept that's useful is cooperative adversary. It, and I've introduced this before. It doesn't mean the adversary wants to cooperate with you, but they just don't play their cards particularly well. So we're talking about China that has had all of those rebellions I told you about and civil wars and regional wars. Uh, it, it doesn't have these strong government institutions, so it is much easier to script right a place like that, to have them do things that are antithetical to their, uh, interests. So you've got a cooperative adversary. Chinese aren't trying to cooperate, but from a Russian point of view they might be a cooperative adversary versus Hitler, where Germany has all kinds of institutions and all kinds of well-educated people. And so that, uh, hoodwinking Hitler is gonna be much more difficult than whoever he's dealing with in China in this period.

Episode duration: 1:31:23