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Well, all the sensible things were forced down Nicholas' (and his equally idiotic wife's) throat and he tried to reverse them immediately when he was able. The amazing weakness of the Duma was directly the concequence of the court that did everything to sabotage it. I wouldn't put those two to...

Well, he was not always war mongering and he was actually pretty irrelevant much of the time, but I have seen many bags of potatos more intelligent and with more strength of character... Though Nicholas II makes Willie seem like Einstein and Frederick the Great combined.

For Finland not to seek armistice with the Soviet Union in August 1944. (An additional alternative which is maybe be less universally supported, but Finland not joining Barbarossa - I believe we would have nevertheless become participants but in very chaotic and damaging circumstances not under...

I've always thought that the military restrictions were rather central to the treaty: in the pre-war era conscription, plans for mobilization and available heavy arms, capital ships etc. etc. were central to the balance of power in Europe. In that light effectively disarming Germany was rather a...

But I believe that there was a window of opportunity to fashion a European Community more along British lines for several years after the war - France was still too suspicious of Germany and the situation in Western Europe was quite fluid with many countries looking towards London for...

Maybe taking the lead in Europe and replacing France as the de facto leading power of the EC could preserve more of Britain's status, but with a POD in 1945 it surely couldn't have done much on it's own. White-Keynes duel in Bretton Woods pretty much settled the US economic supermacy in the...

It might well be that many would have thought "that if we would have to choose to be occupied by either power that Russians would then be the better alternative". But such a thing would have been only a thought game and the near universal attitude was that of course we don't want to be occupied...

Well, I think I know pretty well the Estonian case and to say that they would have been, of all the words in the world, "relieved" about the brutal Stalinist occupation is purely abhorrent. They were as much relieved as the hanged man is relieved by the rope. I'm sorry but that's how it is and I...

Actually, Charles pretty much started that trend of it not being advisable - Napoleon and Hitler followed suit. I think he might well have gotten a good peace treaty after Narva, had he persisted with the attack - or even better if Peter had been killed in the battle. But in the longer term it's...

Plato lost me when he argued that art and literature lead people astray from the essential - art and literature are the essential, certainly not some moldy philosophy...

Touché! But that's the fate of the poor Greeks: unwieldy empires this way and that. Anyway, about Sparta I don't have much to say, a nasty little statelet, a ferret, a rat of a state...

I freely confess that I have always been rather supremely uncaring of the great empire of Persia and almost as supremely uninformed... - I'm sure there were many good and excellent things there but I rather doubt that even further enlightenment could tore me away from that brief flash of human...

Well, I guess there might be countless immortal works of literature just rotted away for ever, but surely at least sculpture and architecture remain to some degree. Anyway, it just so happens that classical Greece was the pivotal ancient culture for the Western civilization and although it was...

Nope, I'll remain an oldfashioned pro-Athenian - the Persian autocracy and central bureacracy led to a rather static state and society with none of the breathtaking burst of all-around brilliance of the classical Greece (as rather "barbarian" and cruel as it all seems now to us universalist...

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines - it surely would have been a very unstable republic, if surving the 20's likely succumbing to either extreme during the Depression. Rather sad to think that it took such a high price to instill strong moderate influences to our politics.

That would be a really fascinating Finland - all the alternative scenarios basically are about the Reds winning or about a further twist to the Whites' victory (i.e. the monarchists prevailing or Mannerheim taking the Petrograd gamble etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a scenario about...

As a part of a Soviet Union that is pretty much like in OTL - well, not very promising prospects: you would probably find a deeply divided society devastated by Stalinism and forced collectivization and influx of maybe 2-3 million immigrants from the other parts of the USSR (mainly Russia). In a...

Well, in all fairness, I think Athens has been overwhelmingly favoured since the beginning of the humanist revival: the amazingly high level of the arts, the great Athenian philosophers and then increasingly also the early forms of democracy have been much admired and Sparta has been seen as a...

Obviously there would be a genre without him too but Tolkien really was such a unique writer - for decades his obsessive world and language building was just a very odd private hobby (by an exceptionally gifted professional philologist) and added to that is then his whole theoretical apparatus...

Well, I think that's definitely a clear possibility - Germany would hold strong cards to pressure us after capturing Leningrad, and some people would probably be rather enthusiastic about us continuing the 1941 attack. Hmm, I would be interested to see other Finns' comments here, this scenario...