I'm John Batcher with the historian Nick Bunker.

The new book is in the shadow of fear of America and the world in 1950.

Joseph Stalin is the absolute authority of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet empire can be thought of as imperialism.

Joseph Stalin has ambitions in Asia. One of those ambitions is the People's Republic

of China. Mao has very little, no air force, no money, no dollars, no cash. He needs Stalin's

sponsorship. And what that means is he needs to go to Moscow. Nick, at this point, it becomes extremely mysterious

to figure out Stalin one more time. If it was confounding in the Second War, it was tragic during

the 1930s. Stalin and Mao, you present us several scenes of them dealing with each other in Moscow

after Mao finally gets the invitation and travels thereby train. What can we understand now

about what Stalin wanted from Mao? Did he see him as a temporary tool? Did he see him as somebody

who was obedient like, say, the Eastern European leaders? How did

he regard him? Well, fortunately, we know quite a lot about this now because the Soviet archives

were opened during the 1990s. Now, under Mr. Putin recently, they appeared have been largely closed again,

but there was a period when the Soviet archives were available to historians. So a great work has been done on this subject. Now, what Mao watched, as you said, was obviously support for his economy. He did his support to build an air force. He was thinking at this stage, for example, of possibly invading Taiwan, and he would have required Russian help to do that. There are all kinds of things that Mao wanted. And above all, he wanted to be recognized as almost an equal to Stalin. He wants to be

recognized as the kind of joint leader of the communist world. Now, Stalin's situation was rather

different. Stalin was a very wary, cautious, suspicious character. He had known about Mao for a long

time because Stalin had taken a very close interest in

Chinese affairs right back into the 1920s. Stalin had been involved intimately in the affairs

of the Chinese Communist Party and in Madison, China, right back to circa 1925, 1926.

So he knew a great deal about Mao, but he wasn't quite sure what he should do, what kind

of relationship she should have with Mao. And the impression, about Mao, but he wasn't quite sure what he should do, what kind of relationship

...