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Hmm, this is a very intriguing scenario as regards Finland - Mannerheim and the cabinet were actually not at all enthusiastic about continuing the attack, so capturing Leningrad (and Finland did absolutely nothing there, except held the front, no attacks, no troop concentrations) and the...

Well, they did not have the imagination to understand how disastrous and destructive and appallingly costly in terms of human lives their policies were. They didn't see even that. So they didn't think they were cruel and sadistic while leading a great empire rigidly, determinedly towards the...

I guess I'm rather hostile to Nicholas and Alexandra, but their sheer, appalling incompetence brought so much destruction to the world. And it is a case like "if only the Germans would have come as liberators to the USSR in 1941" - as if they would have, they would not have been led by genocidal...

Brain transplant to Nicholas II?

Well, Britain spent the same years also without giving any formal guarantees to France - with the result of rather a difficult political muddle in OTL that needed the invasion of Belgium to be resolved.

Yes, it was outrageous - Keynes' ideas were by far the best, but he was sabotaged by the Soviet influenced White (I still don't know if he thought himself to be an actual agent, but he certainly was handy to them).

Indeed - he is very likely to come up with a proposal for a European wide currency system (or more properly, system of currencies), as in OTL he did globally (and his alternative would have likely been better and more flexible than the strongly US influenced solution that was adopted). And for...

Keynes is one of my favourite historical characters and he was the towering influence on economic matters on the British side IOTL - though his effictiveness was at times quite severily curtailed by the US economic might, especially in the last years of the war and at Bretton Woods. In this...

Yeah, in hindsight Russia first probably would have, at least, given a better chance of victory, but those preconditions are pretty prohibitive. Though I think there could have been a rational and strong case against the Schlieffen Plan at the time, but it simply was not taken up by anyone.

I don't know - I think he was nothing special in the early days: an enforcer for a very moderate and conventionally hawkish JFK. But those last few months and weeks, I think there was something else there, a genuine hope for better things. Maybe it's only an illusion but I think there was...

Yeah, and Kekkonen was rather displeased about the new government (and did not support it during "the night frost crisis", but even he wouldn't have given the premiership to the Communists - and it had been by then established that the SKDL would not be included in governments. (This changed in...

Yeah, they were mortal enemies at the time with SDP often allying with the Conservatives (who shared their anti-Soviet attitudes) and the Communists with the Agrarians (led by Kekkonen who had an excellent relationship with the Soviet Union). A Communist led government would not have been...

Isn't this a wee bit too theoretical a question... They wouldn't be the way they were, say, in 1943, without the German war, and with a German war, there would be no sense in having a completely different war. The only historically meaningful question would be either pre-1939 or post-1945. And...

Well, if he would have stayed true to "Politics and the English Language" and I guess he surely would have, he would have remained a scarily sharp critic of any type of dishonest cant and corrupt power politics where-ever the chips might have fallen. That was him, his point.

Anyway, if we take Estonia as the model, I think Finland would have fared even worse: better escape routes to Sweden, more rooted Nordic society (thus even more resistance), no formal surrender, so the army fighting till the bitter end and supplying the guerilla movement with plenty of arms and...

Well, the terrain certainly wasn't inviting: 80% of forest and marsh, 10% of labyrinthine lake areas with very dedicated and capable defenders even after the field army would have been defeated. In Lithuania the organized resistance continued till the 50's - I could easily see coherent guerilla...

And it's not a love marriage, and not even a marriage of convenience for the Finns but a marriage of desperation - which is why grossly unequal terms were accepted as regards the control of foreign policy etc. Once the danger passes, I don't really see a long term future here. (Well, maybe in...

I must have missed it but is it really that Charles Lindbergh has not been mentioned? Isn't he one of the most common propositions, and was mentioned even during the era?

I'm sure someone will remember more accurately but Finland was asked by Berlin about our wishes for future borders and Ryti commissioned a group of historians (Jutikkala, Renvall perhaps?) that prepared a few alternatives depending on the exact outcome of the war. The maximum line I think would...

Finland would have resisted a Stalinist occupation till the bitter end. And it would have meant awful and prolonged destruction indeed with all the forests and swamps and the scattered, rural population. We are so lucky to have escaped that fate: in the Baltic countries the "Forest Brothers"...