I know that Stalin was extremely paranoid and he had a ton of people shot for really tenuous reasons, but it seems to me that a lot of times it was completely random. People like Bukharin and Tuchachevesky never were a threat to Stalins power, but they were killed anyway. Same with Rykov.

Specifically, he states that it was caused by the failure of newly conquered lands in Russia, Ukraine, and the western steppes to generate wheat in sufficient quantities to meet Germany's needs. "Faced with chronic problems in Russia, this casual attitude now hardened into something more formal and more ruthless as it dawned on Nazi planners that the fact that Jews had been gathered in camps meant that mass murder could be accomplished with little difficulty.” (this after previously having intended to simply deport them all to a new homeland somewhere)

While obviously not absolving the Nazis in any way, this is a very different spin on the Holocaust than I'm accustomed to hearing - motivated by callousness and a lack of resources rather than pure malevolence - so I'm curious to know whether it's something with widespread support.

Was it thrown out and started over? Was it acknowledged at all or simply just "crossed out"?

I read Michael David Fox's book Showcasing the Great Experiment about western travellers visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and it got me wondering about how travel worked between eastern bloc countries (once the Eastern Bloc existed- 1950s-1980s). Does anyone know if there were tour operators? Was free (unimpeded) travel and circulation within other Communist nations permitted? Did Poles/Romanians etc. travel into the USSR? And were travel posters and campaigns encouraging tourism possible in Communist countries? Someone needs to write the history of communist tourism, if such a book does not yet exist. If it does, I will read the heck out of it.

We know that many American authors and artists around the turn of the 20th century could have used cannabis, and some did, but was it remotely the same in English culture? For example, if Virginia Woolf wanted to blaze dank kush could she have?

tried to be clever with the dashes on either side of the letter to show that it could be only in front of the word, behind the word, or sometimes in between, hope you understood that!

The last few decades of politics have driven home that a lot of people in the United States feel like New Yorkers aren't real Americans. References are made to this earlier in things like Annie Hall. But I was surprised to see some mention of this in Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton as well, which got me thinking - how long has this sentiment been around in a meaningful way, how has it been exploited, and what are some notable examples?

As a possible follow-up: Have other American cities (other than San Francisco and Los Angeles) been subjected to the same widespread "not one of us" denigration?

In reading up on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, I came across an article in the Los Angeles Times from August 1986 which reports that flawed reactor design was a major factor in the catastrophe (a claim which is now known to be true). Relevant excerpt here:

These analysts say that Soviet authorities appear to recognize that operator errors at the Chernobyl plant on the night of April 25-26 were not the sole cause of the accident, and that technical flaws in the reactor's design contributed to the worst accident in the 44-year history of nuclear energy.

In particular, they said, a distinctive feature of the Chernobyl design, which sets it apart from conventional nuclear power plants in most of the world, is its tendency to generate a sudden and uncontrollable burst of power if large steam bubbles, or "voids," are allowed to form in the reactor core, as they did before the accident.

My question is: did the Soviet engineers or the Soviet government know the of the flaws inherent to Chernobyl's reactor design when construction began in 1972? If so, how serious did the engineers or government consider these flaws to be?

I was looking at the upside Florida map posted earlier in /r/mildlyinteresting and realized that the way our maps are oriented (North on top, South on bottom) must have been chosen at some point in history. I mean we could have maps with Antarctica on the top if this was how early topographers decided to orient their maps. Is there any explanation as to how this was determined? I tried looking this up but only got articles for Kim Kardashian and how she chose North as her baby's name.

Wouldn't they have been worried about facing damnation for attacking a monastery?

I am looking at Woodard's American Nations and Garreau's The Nine Nations of Noth America. I'm limited on funds, and I don't have the time to fact check what I read, so I was wondering if someone here can recommend one as more historically credible. Or any third option if you have one. Thanks

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Today we hear about the super rich buying expensive yachts, mansions, cars, house around the world and more and more outrageous things. But how would the richest people of the 19th century have spent their money?

I am especially curious about Karl Ross, the infamous "I didn't want to get involved" guy. I haven't been able to find anything about anyone though, such as thoughts, beliefs, etc. about what happened. I don't know if there just hasn't been any effort, or if I'm just not searching correctly.

I'm writing my undergrad thesis on the Chinese Civil War from 1927-37, and I'm specifically looking at why Mao and Chiang teamed up against the Japanese. One of the theories that I'm working with hypothesizes that actors with weaker military forces are more likely to enter into coalitions than those who have stronger military forces. In order to show a correlation, I have to find data on number of enlisted soldiers and number of military hardware (tanks, guns, planes, etc.) that the National Revolutionary Army, the Red Army, and the Imperial Japanese Army had. I can't find this data anywhere, and I was wondering if you guys could help!