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I hear the statement that Soviet communism was fiercely against the peasantry, but I am not sure how much I believe it. Appeals to the peasantry were a regular part of Soviet propaganda and agricultural modernization and the eradication of illiteracy (which was undoubtedly the most successful...

-Oh, I don't think there's any guarantee that a Moscow-line Stalinist would have any less potential for damage but... when you look at what was put in place by Mao, the double whammy of the Great Leap Forward directly followed by the Cultural Revolution which killed untold millions of people and...

Killing Mao only increases the likelihood that the Communist takeover of China is accomplished by one of the numerous Soviet-trained Chinese communists that Moscow consistently tried to use to outmaneuver Mao and take over the Party. Which, considering the enormous series of setbacks and...

The Long March was a failure. I can't remember the statistics off of the top of my head, but I think something like only 10% of the original group of people that set out on the Long March survived all the way to make it to the Jiangxi Soviet. Sure Mao and a cadre of the most important Party...

I think Cook put it best when he said that the stupid are rarely fortunate. The Japanese had the success they did in Southeast Asia and the early Pacific Campaign in general precisely because they were well-prepared, knew what they were going after, and were up against a series of...

The Vietnamese have every reason to prevent the development of a crazy state on their border, if only to stabilize Cambodia and to prevent a massive, ongoing refugee crisis constantly spewing impoverished, half-dead refugees into Vietnam. I make the argument that, unfortunately, OTL was about...

I believe that little bit deserves to be singled out. It would be truly great thing if the fall of Burma were to be averted, if for no other reason than to keep the food supplies going to Bengal. We have this idea that OTL was a very positive thing where the best possible outcomes came about...

This was actually from an extremely interesting British Empire class I took a couple years ago, so it's a fascination of mine. Jellicoe proposed the grand fleet right after WWI, where the Anglo-Japanese alliance had indeed just seen action against Germany, but where it was otherwise pretty much...

I kind of have to agree with this, unless Britain commits to a solid defense of the Malay Peninsula and generally shifts its defense priorities to include the possibility of a land-based attack, any further commitment of British soldiers would merely worsen an inevitable disaster. Solid changes...

I don't know if that is necessarily how it works, it is not as if Muslims are some sort of hive mind that collectively decide "okay, starting as of this day, terrorist organizations will use suicide attacks". It is, again, a fairly widespread tactic that was employed by a wide range of groups...

Actually yes it did, if the Kamikazes (and associated use of other lesser-known suicide attacks like the pole-miners by the IJA) are anything to go by. This is really not that new or novel of a concept: an attack where the attacker has absolutely no intention of surviving is both a bold...

The Khmer Rouge were pretty much Khmer ultranationalists with communist aspirations from day one, so as others have said, changing Pol Pot's behavior really requires a different Pol Pot. In keeping with the eerie similarities between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis: the Khmer Rouge leadership were...

Taiwan and North Korea are at least defensible against their potential enemies. St. Petersburg is directly connected to the rest of Russia, has no real precedent or reason to succeed, and is never anything a Russia-centric state, Bolshevik or otherwise, could meaningfully let go of. If all...

IMHO, as slim as Beria's chances are, using the NKVD, one of the single most-refined organizations of state terror in human history, as a Praetorian Guard to engineer his own rise to power isn't an entirely impossible idea. Of course, there is no guarantee that the NKVD itself will not turn on...

The thing that was so unusual about Stalin in the context of Soviet politics was that he was very good at consolidating authority exclusively around himself, constantly reinforcing this through party purges and state terror, and effectively creating a system where his word was ultimately the...

While there is no doubt that there were Soviet war crimes committed against the German people, I am not entirely sure I would go as far as to suggest it was deliberate policy (in the sense of how Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union were directly derived from Nazi ideology and deliberate orders...

Yeah but for various reasons, Beria is unlikely to be the one who takes leadership. Enjoying some political power behind-the-scenes, maybe, but he was too unpopular to be a front man. The rest of the Soviet leadership had a lot of bones to pick with him. It is telling that IOTL, Beria was one of...

And that is pretty much the issue, I was attempting to get at that with my post, and I should have elaborated further, but Nazi ideology and the relentless drive to the East mentality was ultimately going to hamstring any possibility of a practical solution to the war with the Soviet Union.

In some cases the Western Allies advocated even more extreme plans for Germany than the Soviets were willing to accept, Morgenthau chief among them. Kind of adds some nuance to the whole idea of vengeful Soviets and lenient Allies.

Germany arguably lost its chance for anything else on June 22, 1941. In strict combat terms, the Soviet Union was the most indispensable participant in the European war and the defeat of the Axis as a whole.