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Well, there were really tense Cabinet discussions about for example Mussolini's offer of mediation, Churchill was under considerable pressure to open negotiations in that direction. I believe this is pretty much the historians' consensus about this matter. Of course the moment passed pretty...

A bad deal. But there were influential voices in the government not adverse to peace. A worse Dunkirk for example might have tipped the decision.

I have always wondered that maybe declaring the liberation of the serfs and redistribution of land along with a promise to respect and enrich the Orthodox Church might have worked (along with hired and tame priests delivering the message to the peasants). Though this might be a bit too modern...

I would think that in real time tactical operations this could be useful for speed. No coding and decoding necessary if you just have two bilingual speakers at each end. For other than urgent operational commucination surely way too risky.

Well, I disagree in this particular case. What we had in OTL was not too bad a plan wrought by the Americans and to a lesser degree by Keynes. It was kind of a watered down version of Keynes' full proposal which likely would have been much better. And even in that truncated form it was a stable...

One interesting aspect of the post-war world is Keynes - he is likely as influential in this timeline as he was in OTL and maybe not as overworked and exhausted, so he might die later than 1946. He really had rather brilliant economic plans for the global economy that were largely thwarted by...

Very eloquently and knowledgeably put - and of course quite correctly in that narrow sense of the term, but I would not disapprove of also the rather more loose uses of it. A clear cut large scale victory that has profound concequences for the overall war situation can surely be called decisive...

Well, I would call Bagration pretty devastating, a death blow.

Well, they would have "liberated" Finland from Nordic democracy, so no thanks to that.

Often Stalin's brutal industrialization is seen as essential for survival - but that is kind of circular reasoning: first of all he did much to encourage the rise of Nazism in Germany and much to alienate the West. A slightly more inefficient Russia with strong Western allies would have likely...

Very challenging late pod - after Peter and Catherine Russia was already quite a juggernaut and all nearby competitors in decline (and Austria-Hungary heading that way).

I guess that would be quite interesting but rather heart breaking too if well done. I fully realize that he was a very flawed person and politician but those last months just, I don't know, gave some extraordinary promise... I suppose it might have been a total grim disaster anyway, like our tl...

I totally and belatedly agree with @DrakonFin 's (that scarily knowledgeable guy's) comments that you already acted upon - it's unlikely that the great powers would ever acceed to Finland's maximum goals.

Well, that would certainly be the maximum goal of White Finland - Germany might not want to give it all to Finland though, maybe Murmansk as a German base? But a very interesting question of what they would agree to - we would appear to be a quite loyal client state with an influential German...

I definitely agree. Their economic planners did have in otl a plan to use Finland and Eastern Karelia as a source of timber with favourable trade deals, so I would actually expect a sizeable chunk of Russian Karelia to be annexed plus Murmansk eliminated as a significant Russian harbour/naval base.

Yep, it would be quite ideal - but the prequisite for all this is a full occupation and an unconditional and unambiguous surrender. The Allies had no stomach for that and after 4,5 years of horrible slaughter probably not even the capability. Though they tried to pretend in otl Versailles that...

The proof of the pudding is in eating it - it was a new kind of a war: Germany should have been occupied and reconstructed, but the Allies had neither will nor actually the capability of doing it, so a compromise treaty was needed, balanced of course in the Allied favour. In Versailles they were...

A fascinating topic - and a difficult one: the Winter War was such a central thing for our actions in the WW2 that it's really tough to assess what would have happened without it. And lots of course of depends on how it came about to be avoided. If we just suppose that Stalin for some reason...

Good points there. Obviously the army fought on its "own" ground - rather different from most battlefield terrains but still with amazing efficiency and discipline. A very vicious army and resistance if there ever was one - and one that persuaded even victorious Stalin to refrain from trying a...

Well, an argument can be made (rather easily) that it was actually the Finnish army - awfully meagre military resources effectively utilized and used with amazing presicion to guard the national interest and prevent occupation by either the Soviet Union or Germany.