As far as I know both were communist countries but China was not in the Soviet union, a weakened China that had been subjugated by Japan would have been easy pickings for the fully mobilized USSR right after the war, how come the remained independent as opposed to many countries in eastern europe?

I know this is theoretically a political question, but I don't want a political answer. However, for example, Hilary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a close margin, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire Primaries by a larger majority, but according to the New York Times, she has 362 superdelegates to his 8.

I know in the past as well, the primaries really didn't matter as much and that the delegates selected the candidates at the conversations. Was this a fail-safe on the masses?

Are there any connections between ash wednesday and the worship of Agni or Odin? When did the oddly pagan-seeming tradition of rubbing ashes on the forehead become an accepted christian practice?

Etymologically it seems acknowledged that the word Ignite comes from Agni, meaning that there was an obvious cultural intermingling of latin and sandskrit at some point, right?

Was there a way that the germanic people would recognize Wodensdag? Is there some kind of connection there? If vikings were visiting asia around 1000, or mixing culturally with vedics in europe a thousand years earlier, does any of that Ash-wearing practice pass around between them?

I am desperately struggling to find a topic for my dissertation/thesis, but i'm kind of leaning towards Poison/Poisoning/Arsenic Poisoning in the 19th Century (inspired by the Bradford Poisoning of 1858).

I don't know much about the early German diaspora, but the topic has always interested me; especially as I'm interested in social/economic stratification, cultural exchange, and historic notions of identity.

Starting from the eleventh century, about one-fourth of the inhabitants of Dalmatia were ethnic Italians, while in may cities (notably Ragusa, modern Dubrovnik) the local ruling class spoke an extinct Dalmatian Romance language similar to (if not intelligible with) northeastern dialects of Italian.

What were the uses of German language in Eastern Europe? Would a well-to-do citizen of Prague, for example, be expected to know German as a citizen of Ragusa would know Italian? When would he speak German, and what sort of accent would he have? Did this change over time?

Was there a language frontier? How far east could a German go and expect to be understood? What sorts of people would be able to understand him?

And finally, following the Russian Revolution, a number of German-Speaking inhabitants of the Baltic States attempted to crate a state run by ethnic Germans in modern Estonia and Latvia. Were there a sufficient number of ethnic Germans living in the Baltic to justify the creation of such a state?

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I've been reading the book Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination by Stefan Ihrig, and according to his book, Ataturk is a cult personality to the ranks of Nazis, especially for Hitler himself. The book even claims that Hitler had a bust of Ataturk, and Goebbels kept writing about Ataturk's health status during Turkish leader's last days. Is it correct to conclude that Nazi ideology roots back to Turkish Kemalism? I can't be sure if the book exaggerates the influence or events in Turkey between 1919-1945, because I can't find any other sources that links these two movements directly together.

As a follow-up, were they aware of global events to any extent? Were they abused by Japanese or American soldiers? Were they inadvertently the victims of battles?

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I was doing some research for my History essay and as I looked at different sources, some mentioned Spain and some mentioned Castile (and sometimes León)... Are they the same thing?

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Was it related (at least partially) to Crassus' defeat at Carrhae, or was that an afterthought?

What kind of manpower and resources did he (not Rome as a whole but he as a single politician) have at hand at the time (i.e. right after the end of the civil war)?

I recently came across a quote from Peter Vladimirov, the Comintern representative to Yan'an, in my copy of Rana Mitter's book Forgotten Ally. Vladimirov wrote in a report that "The Eight Route Army and New Fourth Army have actually folded up military operations since 1941". Was this a fair assessment of the Communist contribution in this period? If so, was Communist guerrilla activity affected?

I have also read that Lenin was only able to return to Russia from exile because of support from the German government, particularly Ludendorff, who wanted him in to sabotage the Russian government and get Russia out of WWI. How accurate is this and to what extent did they help Lenin?

Pepin the Great created the empire if Francia, centralizing almost all of western and parts of central europe. His oldest son was Karl I (Charlamagne). Why do we learn about Charlamagne and not Pepin? Wouldn't he be just as important to medieval history as he unified most if europe and provided the base that Charlamagne grew on to form what became the Holy Roman Empire?

Were the Greeks aware?

Specifically, his portrayal of the Bolsheviks in Parallel Lives (a joint biography of Hitler and Stalin) seems to show them as largely inept at most areas of government.

They surrendered significant territories to the Germans. They sabotaged the Tsar's unpopular war, but failed to safeguard Russian national territories in the peace negotiations. When the time came to administer the army, the Communists had so little trust in the military leadership that they created a hated commissar system of dual authority.

Their economic policy vacillated between a command economy and free market, causing widespread disruption. Later, Stalin treated the peasantry as a distrusted enemy class. Their industrial output was also prone to number inflation and false reporting, given the pressure to meet set quotas.

Politically, their emphasis on presenting a united parliamentary front to the public (after hashing out their differences behind closed doors) may have led to the later hyper-orthodox atmosphere of fear and intolerance of dissent. This alienated and undermined the intellectual classes, including scientists and technical experts necessary for advancing society.

This was the general gist that I got from Bullock's biography. I think it's been about a quarter of a century since it was published, and on reddit I see posts that portray the Soviet Union as a less menacing society where communism had some strengths as well as weaknesses. Which viewpoint was closer to the facts? If I go with Bullock, it's as though communism was an opportunistic power grab that did nothing positive for the Russians and satellite peoples.

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