Eastern front whatif.

[Foo Fighter]

What if, the German military had treated the western USSR countries better and given them the opportunity to overthrow the communist regime. How much more military clout could German have at their disposal and could the shift be devisive4 enough to carry the war beyond the ability of the communist's to prosecute it militarily?

In this scenario they also do NOT alter the Russian rolling stock and network to the european norm gauge which then improves supply considerably.

 

[Dilandu]

What if, the German military had treated the western USSR countries better and given them the opportunity to overthrow the communist regime.

It would not be German military. All the German atrocities weren't just because of Nazi coming to power; they were the result of long-standing nationalistic and social-Darwinist patterns in German culture since XIX century.

 

[Kat Tsun]

They wouldn't. They would have liquidated them all the same as any other Untermenschen. As Dilandu says, the apotheosis of the Prussian "army with a country" mentality is Naziism. If it hadn't tried to eat Russia and Poland, then Prussia would have eaten itself and maybe Poland would be a lot bigger today.

It's a bit of a brain twister (I guess?) because the Wehrmacht/Landwehr and the Nazi rise to power were part and parcel of the same thing.

There's no getting around this when the most powerful stated resistance is "if the SS want to kill people make them do it in 49th Division's area instead of my own 16th Division's" or whatever, and Wehrmacht troops actively assisted in the mass liquidation of perceived ethnic inferiors. Even if not by directly providing manpower, Wehrmacht unit commanders were ordered then by their chiefs to provide logistical support to Einsatzgruppen commanders like Dirlewanger. They were all complicit and abetting, until the last vestiges in April 1945 when some newly minted Wehrmacht officers of ersatz companies or platoons began shooting at SS troops at least. However, that was literally days before the end of the war and well after the Soviets had entered the Reich proper.

OTOH I think the Whites being secretly decamped in Germany al a Lenin was a genuine fear of the Bolsheviks until like 1930 or so, not that it was real or anything. You would have a better starting point if you asking what if Germany simply didn't exist and "what if Britain and France invaded the USSR," which might genuinely support a monarchy. On that front I'd say that a hypothetical Second Entente would be split even between a Kerensky-esque republic and a restoration of the Tsars unless the USA stepped in.

But Germany would never deign itself to collaborate with its future slaves unless it wasn't Germany. If it's not Germany/Prussia then it's probably Switzerland or Bavaria, who are basically harmless, and probably would prefer invading illegal distilleries than neighboring countries. In which case there wouldn't be much talking about the question because neither Bavaria nor Switzerland are particularly aggressive.

I guess there's a split between Mountain Germans like Bavarians and Swiss and Plains Germans like Brandenburgers that makes the latter more warlike and the former more inclined to run taverns or banks. Maybe it's that the geography is hard to move big armies around and because it's easier to ambush columns in mountains that makes conquest more difficult as a means of economic expansion? Prussian Germany had to resort to diplomatic trickery and vote rigging just to get the Austrians to agree to its plebiscite I suppose, but then again no one knows what the true level of support for Austrian Anschluss was I guess.

 

[Justo Miranda]

In my opinion both USSR and China are too big for a conventional army to conquer the entire territory that is the reason why the Japanese and the Germans failed during World War II, There was always another place where local armies could retreat, reorganize and counterattack again. But those huge tracts of land and those huge crowds are also very difficult to control by local governments that invariably tend to turn into dictatorships.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Big flat countries are extremely easy to conquer by virtue of their big flatness. They are much less rugged and much less likely to harbor anti-government partisans than mountainous countries like Spain or Afghanistan lol.

There are quite a few of geographically and demographically tiny, historic dictatorships, like Portugal and Chile, which might as well be the opposite of China or Russia (sparse, rough, mountainous country) in all manner. That's more a cultural or social facet of a population than anything relating to something tangible. Also plenty of conventional armies have conquered both Russia and China. The Mongolians conquered both, the Manchus conquered China, and the Muscovites conquered Russia.

If geography were a true determinant then it would mean that healthy democracies like Switzerland would never exist I guess, but it isn't.

 

[kaiserd]

It takes a very specific narrow idealogical bent (obsession?) to see any remotely plausible “nicer Nazi” approach leading to more success for/ victory against the USSR by Nazi Germany.
The extreme and evil nature of their campaign was baked into Nazi Germany; it’s the attempt to retrospectively make the war against the USSR more palatable (by those that seek to minimise the essential evil of nazism for their own various idealogical reasons) and/ or winnable (by the generals and their fellow travellers looking to shift the blame for their own failures and essential failure to recognize their own prejudices and that they likely couldn’t have won in any remotely realistic scenario).
I would disagree somewhat that the Nazi conduct of their war against the USSR was just a continuation of Prussian military tradition etc. That tradition clearly had a considerable influence on the WW2 Wehrmacht but going beyond that is a bit like trying to blame a 14th century Shoganate for Japan’s conduct in WW2.
And trying to link such conduct to “national character” or equivalent “regional characters” is as misguided and absurd as the evil pseudo race “science” that Nazi Germany was pursuing.

 

[Avimimus]

Honestly, the Nazis were a regime which was much more genocidal than any other totalitarian state, and a lot of that was based on fairly widespread beliefs.

The only plausible scenario would be if they could've painted their invasion of Poland as 'liberating it' from the USSR in 1939... that would have delayed Allied intervention and even could have helped keep the Americans neutral for longer (by utilising American anti-communism).

The other plausible scenarios are the Allies messing up by supplying troops to Finland and hitting the Baku oilfields using strategic bombers in 1939... prior to the Invasion of Poland.

 

[Avimimus]

I would disagree somewhat that the Nazi conduct of their war against the USSR was just a continuation of Prussian military tradition etc. That tradition clearly had a considerable influence on the WW2 Wehrmacht but going beyond that is a bit like trying to blame a 14th century Shoganate for Japan’s conduct in WW2.

Yes. It is worth noting the widespread anti-semitism in the Kaiser's 19th century Prussia and early 20th century Germany... the rot was already deep.

The thing about racists - there is nothing you can change to appease them - no way to join with them, except as a member of an underclass, a slave or a corpse - if you are deemed to be of the wrong race. What you are born as will determine how they treat you. So, once the racism was widespread enough the scenario proposed becomes impossible - outside of a few temporary emergency axillaries anyway.

 

[TR1]

It takes a very specific narrow idealogical bent (obsession?) to see any remotely plausible “nicer Nazi” approach leading to more success for/ victory against the USSR by Nazi Germany.

90% of these ww2 "what =iffs" tend to steer in that direction.

It is very very strange and disturbing.

 

[kaiserd]

Unfortunately the strain of anti-semitism ran a lot wider and deeper than pre-WW1 Germany. Indeed Germany of this period was arguably significantly less anti-Semitic than France or Russia of the same period.
And while Stalin’s purges did at times have anti-Semitic undercurrents and targets and Vichy France eagerly collaborated with Nazi Germany’s blood lust for its Jewish inhabitants nothing of direct equivalence to the Holocaust originated in these countries (at least re: targeting their Jewish inhabitants).
Hence there is nothing in any countries “national character” or history that unavoidably leads to such horrendous events or automatically makes them impossible - this is why we all must be ever watchful. Given a combination of factors and events such things can happen anywhere and by anyone.

 

[Foo Fighter]

Early on there was a pact with the USSR, they did this to put the Poles to the sword and distract the USSR from their greater plan. What is to stop them from making a pact with those in the region who had no love for communism to claim a greater prize and then stick the knife in their backs as the did to the USSR.

 

[Kat Tsun]

The British and French wouldn't have agreed to a Ribbentrop Pact that wasn't status quo ante. And Hitler wasn't giving up Poland.

Churchill and Daladier for all their faults weren't the kind to just surrender immediately.

 

[pathology_doc]

What if, the German military had treated the western USSR countries better and given them the opportunity to overthrow the communist regime.

It would not be German military. All the German atrocities weren't just because of Nazi coming to power; they were the result of long-standing nationalistic and social-Darwinist patterns in German culture since XIX century.

What he's really asking - and it's a fair question - is, "What if Hitler had behaved more like Napoleon?" And it's a fascinating question to ask, because without all the anti-semitic and racial garbage (and all the horrors it resulted in), history might have remembered him better (although unlike Napoleon, Hitler did not actually manage to enter Moscow; Stalin wasn't willing to allow that the way Alexander did for Napoleon).

But the Hitler we got in real life rose to power on the back of his screwed-up ideology, and the Wehrmacht he took into Russia (and the attitude it went in with) was a product of that. So long as this was the case, I think we were always going to get what we actually did.

 

[Kat Tsun]

He behaved exactly like Napoleon, though. Before Hitler and the Great Patriotic War, the Russian antichrist byword was Napoleon.

They're no different in absolute terms: they were both imperialist despots forcibly invading, subjugating, and colonizing their neighboring polities. They both collapsed after a major European war that brought together very different countries in a grand coalition. They both took charge after major upsets and big wars left their countries in shambles.

The aesthetic differences are probably more pronounced since the modern world is descended from Napoleon's influences in the American Revolution, and the United States is the current center of world culture (and before that, in the 1960's and earlier, it was the United Kingdom) and general baseline of "Western" aesthetic preference. OTOH if America had turned out more like the CSA than the USA, you can probably bet that Hitler would probably have a far rosier view than he does IRL.

There's no Hitler without Hitlerism, because Hitler was just deeply keyed in to the most popular political beliefs of his time.

 

[muttly]

Hitler was telling people what they wanted to hear. The party capitalized on the thoughts
and fears of the German people. They thought they could control Hitler and bring themselves
to power but in the end it was he that did the controlling. The monster they created became
their master and the face of nazism .

 

[pathology_doc]

They're no different in absolute terms: they were both imperialist despots forcibly invading, subjugating, and colonizing their neighboring polities. They both collapsed after a major European war that brought together very different countries in a grand coalition. They both took charge after major upsets and big wars left their countries in shambles.

I don't see any death camps or policies leading to them in Napoleon's time. Invading armies might have treated the local civilians like shit with more impunity than they do now (rape and pillage was still a regular thing in that era), and the Spanish Guerrillas and French troops in Spain are both known to have done unspeakable things to each other, but it wasn't focused and systematized the way the Holocaust was.

 

[Archibald]

Unfortunately the strain of anti-semitism ran a lot wider and deeper than pre-WW1 Germany. Indeed Germany of this period was arguably significantly less anti-Semitic than France or Russia of the same period.
And while Stalin’s purges did at times have anti-Semitic undercurrents and targets and Vichy France eagerly collaborated with Nazi Germany’s blood lust for its Jewish inhabitants nothing of direct equivalence to the Holocaust originated in these countries (at least re: targeting their Jewish inhabitants).
Hence there is nothing in any countries “national character” or history that unavoidably leads to such horrendous events or automatically makes them impossible - this is why we all must be ever watchful. Given a combination of factors and events such things can happen anywhere and by anyone.

You certainly heard of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne: france 19th century writters and literature colossus: one for romatism, the other for sci-fi.

There were a bunch of other respectable and legendary writers: Zola, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire... a crapton of them.

Alas, there was one big bastard and son of a bitch who got similar popular success... being antisemit in a way that would make Hitler blush - or die of jealousy.

That colossal excrement of human waste (and I'm really unfair here - with the poo and shit, poor things) was called Edouard Drumont.

Édouard Drumont - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(sounds of myself vomiting loudly - you've been warned)

With Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, Drumond is one of the key influences that led to Vichy and 80 000 jews being "graciously" delivered to the nazis by French police, with such a zeal, even nazis were baffled. I mean, really.

I kid you not: when in July 1942 14 000 jews were arrestd in Paris, very baffled nazis told Laval

"Wow. Hell of efficiency, we didn't asked that many jews. Plus you little ugly bastard, most of them are natural born French citizens, don't you care about that detail a little ? Sending your own population into the jaws of death ?
Laval answer
"Screw you, take those jews, burn them, and stop complaining. And now, tell Hitler to send back the coal and the food, occupied French people are starving and freezing..."

Later in 1945 before eating a well deserved load of bullets, Pierre Laval self-defense was akin to

- I'm not even antisemit, you know
(and this has been proven true: he was no more antisemit than the average French politician of 1938, or the Barrès-Maurras-Drumont arse-lickers. Which doesn't makes Laval more sympathetic, btw: actually even more sickening, plain opportunism and indifference is no better).

- I deported foreign jews to save the french ones (Eric fucking Zemmour presently embrace that theory... may he roast in hell, that pond scum fungus of excrement)

- I deported the jews to help the case of occupied France in the eye of Hitler: because I was gifted to bargain food and coal with him, trading that for jews

Well... he was mercifully shot down, that horse manure.

(and yes there is a lot of swearing in that post, but when discussing far-right, there is no point in being polite).

 

[muttly]

Thank you Archibald for the history lesson. I was unaware of this Drumont.

 

[Archibald]

Thank you Archibald for the history lesson. I was unaware of this Drumont.

Sorry to have made you discovering that pond scum. Don't you lose too much time reading about that whacko. He isn't worth it. Yet in different times, he was immensely popular, as were Barrès, Mauras, and a bunch of others.
For people who complain about 2021 France, I use to think - go try the 1939 one, happily slidding into the abyss of 1940. To think my grandparents lived through these times - even in the remote countryside, they paid the price to that ugliness.

 

[iverson]

<snip>

What he's really asking - and it's a fair question - is, "What if Hitler had behaved more like Napoleon?"

All of these discussions seem to assume the times compared--1799 to 1815 and 1941-45--are alike. They aren't.

Napoleon led the first, big, modern, national army based on mass conscription, patriotism, and revolutionary internationalism. Opposing armies had a hereditary, aristocratic officer corps commanding mercenary troops in defense of unpopular minority regimes. He freed France from foreign invaders and rapidly carried the liberal revolution into Italy, the Low Countries, and Germany. But as he moved east, Romantic, conservative, nationalistic sentiment in Germany and Russia blunted the revolutionary appeal of the French armies, which were themselves seen increasingly as "French". Revolution led to the birth of nationalism, something that had not existed in Europe in prior centuries. As a result, Napoleon's creation lasted at most 15 years, depending on how you measure it.

But nationalism and racism, its child, cannot explain much in themselves. National identity was a human creation, not a natural predisposition or characteristic. National identity was a useful fiction when autocrats faced an international revolution spreading from Britain's obscure American colonies , to French Haiti, and then to France itself on the basis of universal equality and the Rights of Man. But it was (and is) a fiction. Racism had to be invented when egalitarian liberal democracies had to justify wealth built on slavery and colonialism.

So nothing is innate or inevitable in history. But prior actions do limit future choices. The Hitler that gave Germans the wealth of their Jewish neighbors and promised Lebensraum in the East was not going to adopt kinder, gentler policies when force would better serve his ends. Looting and stealing had become state policy. So, when Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941 while at war with Britain and contemplating war with US, he entrained more or less the sequence of events that the history books record. He knew he lacked the resources required for conquest, but gambled that he could quickly and violently capture what he needed as he went, while enslaving subject peoples to do the work of making more. Russia was indeed flat, as others have remarked. But it was also trackless, muddy or frozen, very big, and poorer than Germany. Looting and slavery failed to provide enough food, fuel, transport, and clothing fast enough to compensate for Germany's smaller economy and consequent lack of reserves.

Hitler did, in fact, promise "to liberate" Eastern Europe from the USSR and did so in the eyes of many Ukrainians, Belorussians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Finns: Hitlers puppet regimes satisfied nationalistic impulses even if they did little else. Hitler also promised to liberate India and the Arab countries from their British colonial masters. That he did not do so mattered little to those he swayed. Much of the Arab world still admired Nazism long after Hitler's demise. But for Hitler, as for others, nationalism could be no more than a tool serving the Reich's interests. Hitler was not going to create A Nazi version of NATO in the East.

 

[Foo Fighter]

Has anyone suggested he did? There are many instances of people from different nationalities actually cooperating with the Nazi's Ukranian guards in concentration camps to name just one. The question raised was that IF the Nazi's accorded greater opportunities for those with a mind to do so, how would it have affected war in the east? Local rolling stock use and local militia's etc and there may have been a great reduction of insurgency operations too.

Putting all these resources into the use of regular units may have swung the balance early on and prevent efficient movement of factories to the east. This then effects war production and reduces the imbalance, no idea how much.

 

[paralay]

Hitler convinced himself that the USSR was so weakened by internal repression that it was easier to conquer it than Britain.
This creature tried to defeat Russia at least three times, and each time the result was the same

 

[pathology_doc]

So nothing is innate or inevitable in history. But prior actions do limit future choices.

For sure, and I admitted as much in a separate post. My what-if requires him to make some serious diversions from actual history at a fairly early stage, and I think you could argue with success that he wasn't capable of it.

Hitler convinced himself that the USSR was so weakened by internal repression that it was easier to conquer it than Britain.

Based on what Germany had done to Tsarist Russia in the First World War (i.e. knocked it clean out of the war), he had some basis for his belief - but he badly misjudged the differences between Tsarist and Stalinist Russia.

 

[paralay]

Nicholas II is not a tsar, but a rag. He gathered flatterers around him, not professionals, lost the war to Japan and Germany, destroyed the Empire and ruined his family
He deserved his fate

 

[Kat Tsun]

Nicky II was a nice guy in person (though I suppose everyone is nice in person) but a rubbish leader.

Weak leaders are expunged from history, as Nicky and the Tsars were by a bunch of upstart lads who got their start robbing banks. Lenin, and by extension Stalin, were powerful leaders, like FDR or Churchill, who rallied entire nations around themselves to heights not seen before (or perhaps since). To some extent so was Hitler, but Hitler's nation was much weaker than Stalin's, so Hitler was predestined to lose by economic factors, even if his own incompetence and delusions didn't do him in before that.

The only issue at the time was how off everyone was in their estimates of how big Germany was. It took a few years of post-mortem study to tease out the true size of the German economy, helped mostly in part by Germany's lack of information control/destruction of records, which I suppose was a symptom of their own internal delusions perhaps. It's much harder to do the same for something like the USSR, or perhaps the post-mortem of the Western world, where so much records are stored on ephemeral methods (voltage differences in capacitors or magnetic polarities) or where definitions used for data collection are so wildly different as to be utterly alien.

There was no basis to say that Stalinist Russia is like Tsarist Russia except that you're saying you have no knowledge of the former to compare to. Analogies are never really accurate since they never capture nuance, and they should probably be discarded wholesale if you rely on them for most problems. You would think that Germany would have reasonably trained officers in foreign economic intelligence to understand this, but...

Perhaps Germany truly had no good intelligence services whatsoever and was completely incapable of comprehending the magnitude of difference between the two, or perhaps the German leadership apparatus had deluded itself that they were equivalent by huffing its own fumes, but the end result would be the same.

Either the German intelligence officers' reports about "big Soviet tank factories" were ignored because they didn't toe the party line or the officers had been replaced by men who said what the party diehards wanted to hear rather than what was true.

 

[Dilandu]

Nicky II was a nice guy in person (though I suppose everyone is nice in person)

Not exactly. He was quite spiteful, envious to those who were more talented or capable than him, and vengeful.

 

[Fluff]

Perhaps Germany truly had no good intelligence services whatsoever and was completely incapable of comprehending the magnitude of difference between the two, or perhaps the German leadership apparatus had deluded itself that they were equivalent by huffing its own fumes, but the end result would be the same.

Either the German intelligence officers' reports about "big Soviet tank factories" were ignored because they didn't toe the party line or the officers had been replaced by men who said what the party diehards wanted to hear rather than what was true.

isnt that one of the biggest problems in a dictatorship, you come along with news that the soviets have a bigger and better tank factory, at best your going to get shot as its clearly a planted story, what are you trying to do undermine our illustrious party/leader/plan?

Or keep getting the best uniforms/booze/women and hope the boss man is right.....

 

[Archibald]

Nicky II was a nice guy in person (though I suppose everyone is nice in person)

Not exactly. He was quite spiteful, envious to those who were more talented or capable than him, and vengeful.

Plus Rasputin of course "lover of the russian queen" (just kidding)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgleBqOvQGI


"Tell commander Lewis disco sucks !"

 

[Dilandu]

isnt that one of the biggest problems in a dictatorship

Depend on dictator. Stalin always demanded that only truth must be reported to him, and, being quite non-trusting and paranoid, have a habit of cross-checking reports. Everybody knew that its much safer to report unpleasant truth to Stalin, than trying to hide it (the second was essentially death warrant).

 

[Orionblamblam]

It takes a very specific narrow idealogical bent (obsession?) to see any remotely plausible “nicer Nazi” approach leading to more success for/ victory against the USSR by Nazi Germany.

90% of these ww2 "what =iffs" tend to steer in that direction.

It is very very strange and disturbing.

Not really. The whole point of most "what-if" scenarios is "what if things went the other way?" What if the Nazis won WWII. What if the Commies won the Cold War. What if the CSA won the Civil War. What if Rome didn't fall. What if the USSR beat the USA to the moon. What is Oswald missed. What if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into the Cuban Nuclear War. And so on.

"What if Apollo landed on the moon a month earlier," or "what if Kyoto got nuked instead of Nagasaki," or "what if Pattons tanks were half a mile per hour faster," or "what if Republic was selected as prime contractor on the X-15" are interesting, but they are comparatively minor alterations and thus less dramatic.


And then you get "what if Aliens invade in 1942."

 

[Fluff]

It takes a very specific narrow idealogical bent (obsession?) to see any remotely plausible “nicer Nazi” approach leading to more success for/ victory against the USSR by Nazi Germany.

90% of these ww2 "what =iffs" tend to steer in that direction.

It is very very strange and disturbing.

Not really. The whole point of most "what-if" scenarios is "what if things went the other way?" What if the Nazis won WWII. What if the Commies won the Cold War. What if the CSA won the Civil War. What if Rome didn't fall. What if the USSR beat the USA to the moon. What is Oswald missed. What if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into the Cuban Nuclear War. And so on.

"What if Apollo landed on the moon a month earlier," or "what if Kyoto got nuked instead of Nagasaki," or "what if Pattons tanks were half a mile per hour faster," or "what if Republic was selected as prime contractor on the X-15" are interesting, but they are comparatively minor alterations and thus less dramatic.


And then you get "what if Aliens invade in 1942."

What do you mean ‘if’

 

[Kat Tsun]

Perhaps Germany truly had no good intelligence services whatsoever and was completely incapable of comprehending the magnitude of difference between the two, or perhaps the German leadership apparatus had deluded itself that they were equivalent by huffing its own fumes, but the end result would be the same.

Either the German intelligence officers' reports about "big Soviet tank factories" were ignored because they didn't toe the party line or the officers had been replaced by men who said what the party diehards wanted to hear rather than what was true.

isnt that one of the biggest problems in a dictatorship, you come along with news that the soviets have a bigger and better tank factory, at best your going to get shot as its clearly a planted story, what are you trying to do undermine our illustrious party/leader/plan?

Or keep getting the best uniforms/booze/women and hope the boss man is right.....

No, because that sort of thinking permeates democracies as well. They are not immune to groupthink or ideological thought traps. The British Empire RAF had trouble believing the Japanese could produce an advanced, modern fighter aircraft and the United States was rather bad at anticipating Soviet intentions and industrial capacity for rocketry: at least one of these was even self-serving rather than simple prejudicial thinking. Just look at the missile gap and its various intelligence organ estimates of Soviet rocket production versus the reality.

As I said, it requires a substantial post-mortem to sus out the reality from the perception in most cases. The missile gap was mostly invented by the US Air Force and Army to justify their huge strategic buildups. Meanwhile the Navy, having the supercarriers and the Polaris missiles, had no real reason to lie to anyone about rocketry/industrial output because they had nothing to gain, they'd already gotten everything they'd wanted without it thanks to ADM Burke.

Democracies can be just as error prone as dictatorships, but they change their collective minds so often about these things it's mostly inconsequential, although had Herbert Hoover been in charge during WW2 the USA may have done different things. Luckily he had been kicked out and were not made President for life. The problem with democracies is when the groupthink permeates the political system so thoroughly that leadership exchanges become formalities rather than genuine shifts is when you need to be concerned.

Legend of Galactic Heroes is actually an excellent anime on the subject.

 

[igor-mich]

So nothing is innate or inevitable in history. But prior actions do limit future choices.

For sure, and I admitted as much in a separate post. My what-if requires him to make some serious diversions from actual history at a fairly early stage, and I think you could argue with success that he wasn't capable of it.

Hitler convinced himself that the USSR was so weakened by internal repression that it was easier to conquer it than Britain.

Based on what Germany had done to Tsarist Russia in the First World War (i.e. knocked it clean out of the war), he had some basis for his belief - but he badly misjudged the differences between Tsarist and Stalinist Russia.

That's just not worth lying. There was a revolution in Russia, so I could not continue the war any further. And your Germany has nothing to do with it, it only takes advantage of this situation.

 

[pathology_doc]

Didn't they deliberately send Lenin to Russia to foment the particular direction that revolution took?

Perhaps Kerensky would have kept on fighting. The Bolsheviks clearly did not.

 

[igor-mich]

About Lenin, this is complete nonsense, there is not a single proof, only speculation. This is your favorite highly likely.