Bestselling Historian: The Revolution That Shouldn't Have Happened - Douglas Brunt

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1:22Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. 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.

2:00Because 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.

2:31Joining us today, best-selling New York Times author, host of dedicated, Douglas Brunt. But what a great book. The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanov'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 so we want to talk a little bit about your writing style at some point too uh but let's go i want to go if you don't mind i want to go to rudolph diesel uh who's another towering figure under underappreciated industrial figure uh 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 into the book, The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel.

3:23That's a great way to get into it because I only know about Emanuel Nobel through Rudolf 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.

4:01Petersburg that was building boilers and steam engines, diesel engines and munitions for the Tsars, 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, well, we'll 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.

4:43Well, 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. 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 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.

5:25You'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. Yeah. So he was Alfred's nephew. And in fact, when Emmanuel's father Ludwig died, there were huge names there around the world. Ludwig Nobel died in 1888. And he was a large enough figure that it was global headlines. So over in France, there's Alfred Nobel, who picks up his French morning newspaper to read his own obituary. The newspaper had messed up. They confused Ludwig for Alfred. So Alfred reads his own obituary, though he's alive and well, calls him a merchant of death for his dynamite and responsible for more deaths around the world than anyone else.

6:13he then decides, well, this is not the way I want to be remembered, so establishes the prizes. But over in Russia, Emmanuel Nobel had essentially founded the largest oil concern in the world. And under the czars of Russia, was probably the most important figure leading into the Great War. He controlled more oil than anyone else when the war started, and that was our first mechanized war. So suddenly, by 1914, oil is more important than food for an army. What happened to Emanuel Nobel in the wake of World War I and then the subsequent Russian Revolution was the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984.

6:53You know, the lines in that book where they talk about they tore down the statues, they changed the street names, they rewrote the history. That's exactly what happened to Emanuel Nobel. So within Baku, there are little vestiges of it still remaining even today, but they turned him into a political unperson. And Stalin, very effective at doing this. I mean, he did this even to his Bolshevik allies. You go back and look at these pictures of Lenin that had Trotsky next to him. Suddenly Trotsky's not in a photo anymore. Lenin has rewritten, oh, it was like early Photoshop, you know, and so he did that to - Stalin invented the Snapchat filter, Doug.

7:27Like, you know, I mean, he was the first guy to invent it. But, you know, I mean, I was dying to ask you this question. And so I'm going to ask it to you. I feel like the Russian story went off on a negative timeline because the culture there is amazing. They had a capitalist footprint going into the 20th century and had the czar. And again, this is perhaps apropos to our time, because when poor people get upset and richer people are taking too much of the economic rent for themselves, you get people upset and they come at you with torches and pitchforks and things end brutally. I was just wondering if it would have been a different timeline that people like him had taken, I guess, a different approach to the economic situation.

8:18Am I wrong about that, Doug? No, you're right. I mean, Russia was slowly moving along more toward a constitutional monarchy. They were implementing, you know, liberalizing reforms around free speech, freedom of assembly. They were coming along toward more of a Western form of government. And Lenin, you know, really largely because of the Great War, World War I, and a very feckless leader in Nicholas II, who was undermined by Rasputin and all these crazy, you know, fun stories, but crazy stories, 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.

8:59The 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. 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 fix. So he, because of the war and these external events, even though he is barely hanging on to control even domestically, he certainly doesn't have any kind of military power to take on a foreign power.

9:34He 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, because you have a lot of young viewers and listeners, thank God, is how sensitized history is to different timelines.

10:15You know, 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, you know, a bomb, God forbid, has dropped on Washington, D.C., and Hitler and Tojo are controlling the United States. You know, they've got the thing split, and you say, well, that could never happen. You know, 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.

10:54Tell us a little bit about that and tell us what we learned from them, actually, through the process of extracting oil, et cetera. 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.

11:32And 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, you know, sophisticated drilling rigs. He's built in pipelines. Refining technology is really advanced.

12:09So 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.

12:41There 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 refiners and said, let's go in on this together.

13:20It's 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 really gets 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.

13:50And 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 Brunt, 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 have 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?

14:36I'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. We kind of know that. So then it's just sort of a curiosity of like, all right, well, I'm going to go into some archives. I made it into some archives in Stockholm, Sweden, that has treasures of Nobel history that's been pulled out of Azerbaijan.

15:12And it's funny that you say like sort of a treasure hunting thing when for me, like the geeky version of Indiana Jones, you know, you i'm sort of digging into the story and i'll find a document that for most people like oh this doesn't really mean a lot but for me in the context of this story it's gold i'm i you know i'll call my wife like you won't believe and she's like all right you know and then call me i'll give you my cell phone you call me because this is this is stuff that you're right i am totally fascinated by it and the reason i started this podcast doug was because i find authors. I mean, I'm a little bit of a book geek, but I find authors to be fascinating.

15:47How many years did you work on this book? Well, so the next one you're also going to love, it's going to end up being a trilogy. I've started the third one. The full trilogy will be about 10 years. Diesel was five years, 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 the 1850s through the war. So this was more like three years because I had so much foundational, like atmospheric research was done. So it'd be sort of five, three, and three by the time the trilogy is done.

16:21Okay. So, so, so, so think 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 why 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, 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 how you think about these things how you frame the story are you are you writing screenplays for hollywood part time i i love what are you doing i love the narrative history the non-fiction narrative history like the diesel and the Nobel book.

17:34I would love for this to make it to the screen and someone better at writing screenplays, I hope we'll 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. It's much more interesting to know how did it change a person's life like from one day to the next all right we had this 1905 bloody sunday inst 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 or political, industrial, military forces all at play in the midst of this life.

18:30You 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. You know, you sort of want to move through things chronologically. You've got to advance a number of different storylines at once. so you can't make a 20 year run on one thing and then come back from 1910 all the way back to 1890 that's just too whiplashy for a reader like it really should feel natural and sort of easy to follow and making it feel that way is organizationally a challenge so there's a lot of organization that goes into the book it's like a massive jigsaw puzzle but that can be fun too listen you can feel it in your writing it's just so well prepared something that struck me about both these books but specifically this one is the wipeout and just hear me out for a second so bolshevik nationalization literally wipes out one of the largest fortunes in history overnight and you know i obviously uh run a fund and i often think about the political risks that we chronically underprice so you know we're living in a society you and i thankfully, 80 years out from the war, where there's been predictable rules, there's been a rules-based society, predictable legal system around property in the US and most parts of the West.

19:56But talk about that wipeout and talk about the consequences of that wipeout, not just for that family, but for that nation. Because when you get wiped out like that, it stultifies venture capital, it stultifies risk, and it causes a real backslide in innovation, doesn't it? Totally. I bet there's a great book called The Mystery of Capital by this Peruvian economist saying the great leap forward is when an asset could hold a parallel value. And there's a legal framework around it to say, okay, I have a house, which is worth the amount of money, so I can take out a loan and start a business based on the asset of my house having a parallel life and ability to get a loan.

20:34Yeah. And so overnight, they nationalized more than 9 ,000 and businesses, most of the heavy industry, the oil. Stalin was very early in Lenin's ear to say, go do this. And then Lenin was a little more nervous saying, well, how are we going to operate it? There's no one in our communist government who knows how to run an oil rig in a refinery. The production could dwindle to nothing and then we're really in trouble. So he was soliciting help from the oil industrialists to come along and participate post-nationalization and make production didn't dwindle down to nothing. But you're exactly right.

21:08So Emmanuel Nobel is sort of in this refugee town, buffered by the White Army, while the Red Army is heading toward Baku as a Rajan to take over the oil. And he's still trying to financially engineer an outcome for himself. No one expects the Bolsheviks to last. But he's really without a state sponsor at this point. Emmanuel Nobel went from being offered Russian citizenship by the czar and having a very cozy relationship with government ministers to having only opposition politically within Russia. So he thinks, well, who better than Standard Oil, who's always enjoyed a very cozy relationship with the State Department?

21:50If I can align with them, suddenly I have the Americans behind me. They would never let their crown jewel of a company, Standard Oil, be taken for a ride by the communists. 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?

22:38Even though I think the house is on fire, Doug, but everything's okay, right? You know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about? 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, you know, we don't see that today. That's just totally hard to imagine that now. But there's so many things that you, you know, 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.

23:15You know, 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 military. 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 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. I mean, if you go back to prior to the Great War, the czar was not only an autocrat, he was like a demigod.

24:04He was God's man on earth. And so he actually was closer sort of like an Eastern, you know, Japanese where the, the God is a form of deity. So it's, it's like a hundred years ago, the Russians thought their, their leader was a deity. Listen, I mean, you know, you just have to read Dov Sayesky, right? You know, the whole concepts of choosing bread over freedom has always been embedded in the system. Could be weather related. It could be culture related, the combination of everything. But, you know, just to me, it's a, it's a story that could have ended differently. I think you pointed out beautifully how much success and how much economic progress they were heading for before they took this political U-turn into this wilderness that they're in.

24:46So, all right. So, we picked out five words from your book. And so, I'm going to read the word and I need you to give me like a one or two sentences on the word. Perhaps there's one I want more than that. I'll get to that one. But if I say the word oil, Doug, you think what? Power. Okay. What if I say the word empire?

25:12Here in the title, it's an industrial empire meant to be sort of a play on the czar's empire. Work. It's interesting because I hear constant vulnerability. You hear work because you're saying work because you got to work to keep it. right but empires are always under stress right you don't have to read gibbon to understand that you can just look at a framework of history and see the rise and fall of these things and how the cycle works politically and how it works generationally okay so third word i say revolution you say what you know i maybe in the context of the book it's a damage you know what But when Russia, they were slowly advancing and there were liberalizing forces happening.

26:04Russia might have been the one, you know, Britain had a revolution to become a constitutional monarchy. The king was beheaded. Russia might have been the one, ironically, power, even though they're sort of trailing, they might have been the one power to sort of peacefully arrive at a constitutional monarchy. And Stalin was saying, I don't even want these concessions from the czar because they undermine my goal of a violent revolution. And so anytime the czar was sort of negotiating, he would try to undermine it and say, no, no, no, we only want blood. We don't want concessions. We want blood. And so damage.

26:41I guess the next word would be related to all this is Joseph Stalin, right? And I want a couple more than just words because this is the more fascinating figure because no one's worried about him. Lenin's not really worried about him. They see him as this rogue, his former seminarian. And then, you know, he just, he does things that you and I probably could never do. I mean, I got raised, Cav. I don't know. I probably couldn't do any of the things that Joe Stalin was willing to do. So what are your thoughts on Stalin? And I would say ruthless and underestimated. And as you say, so he was born impoverished on these hardscrabble streets of Georgia near Tiflis, basically a kid in a street gang, sort of a gangster upbringing, but then studies to be a priest of all things, just the craziest thing.

27:31And then while he's studying to be a priest, he's essentially in occupied Georgia. It's controlled by the Russian empire. And they start passing laws that in school, you have to speak Russian. So he resents this. He wants to speak his native Georgian, but he's forced to speak Russian. So he feels like these teachers, these Russian occupiers. And really ironic given what he becomes as the leader of Russia, who later invades Georgia 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.