Many critics today rightly call for “decolonizing” utopia given its undeniable deployment in imperialist as well as liberatory projects. It is more historically accurate to view Thomas More’s Utopia, however, as a site of struggle, especially given the contradiction of considering a society without any conception of private property to be “colonialist” at all. At the very least, we should acknowledge Utopia’s negative form, and the problems that its so-called colonialism is attempting to address before too hastily denouncing utopia as inherently colonialist. Utopia, I argue, is always a site of struggle, a reminder of the difficulty of imagining liberation in a “wrong” world. Early receptions of Utopia in England reveal that it was not embraced by advocates of colonial and propertarian projects; not only was it viewed as an impediment to the unfolding of such agendas while the primitive accumulation of capital was underway, but, revealingly, the values and lifeways of More’s Utopians were often associated with the very peoples being colonized and enslaved, not their colonizers. Failing to understand utopia dialectically, then, not only gives rise to presentist misunderstandings of the past, but problematically limits how it can best be understood to work today.

Iosif Stalin, along with Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, constituted the Big Three dictators of the twentieth century who decisively swayed the course of world history. As is the case with all tyrants, hubris was the underlining feature of Stalin’s rule. As a Marxist, he firmly believed in the inevitability of the demise of capitalism and the ultimate triumph of socialism. As a Bolshevik, he emphatically advanced his mission of spreading war and revolution abroad and defeating world imperialism once and for all. By means of disinformation, subversion, and camouflage, Stalin covertly and openly challenged the liberal world order dominated by Britain, France, and the United States. His defiance found common political ground with his nemesis Adolf Hitler, as seen in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression) in August 1939. Ultimately, however, Stalin’s hubris blinded him to Hitler’s cunning, resulting in the humiliating and devastating betrayal of June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). It was also Stalin’s hubris, however, that drove the country to victory over Nazi German, at unimaginable human and material costs.

After a year of advance following the failed summer 1943 German offensive at Kursk, the Soviet High Command decided on a renewed assault against Germany’s Army Group Centre in Belarus. After successful deception operations, in June 1944 the massive Soviet operation Bagration overwhelmed the outmanned and outgunned troops of Army Group Centre by combining masses of men and material with partisan activity to prevent German evacuation or reinforcement. Within weeks, the German position had collapsed and Soviet forces raced west into Poland. Combined with the Western allies’ landings in Normandy, Bagration convinced many in the German High Command that the war was lost, and Hitler’s assassination was the only hope to salvage acceptable peace terms. The headlong Soviet advance reached the Vistula River, triggering an attempt by the Polish Home Army resistance to seize power in Warsaw ahead of Soviet occupation. The Soviet advance ground to a halt on the east bank of the Vistula, and Hitler’s forces systematically crushed Polish resistance.

The Statute of York in 1322 recognised that ‘in time past … troubles and wars have happened in the realm’, blaming this on the various attempts to restrict royal power in the thirteenth century. Reform, sometimes led by the crown and sometimes imposed upon it, was a key theme in the reigns of Henry III (1216–72) and Edward I (1272–1307). Two other themes, focused on the king’s interests beyond the borders of England, had significant effects on relations between the king and his English subjects, as the king sought to access their manpower, money and material. These interests were the king’s claims to sovereignty over all Britain and protecting his remaining lands in France.

This chapter argues that by any measure – mass conscription, full economic mobilization, blurring of civilians and combatants, blockades, sieges, scorched earth, murderous occupation, unfree labour, and state control – the Soviet Union was involved in ‘Total War’. The Soviet state set a new benchmark in its exhaustive mobilization of resources, including human labour. The government, reaching the height of its power, achieved a mobilization of resources for the front so complete that the home front population was close to collapse by the war’s end. Covering the period from the invasion in 1941 to the end of the war, the chapter examines the mass evacuation of people, industry, and herds in the face of invasion; the rationing system and supplementary food policies; compulsory labour mobilization of free citizens and prisoners; labour laws and repression; propaganda and popular support; and the liberation of the occupied territories. It examines the deep sacrifices made by ordinary people in terms of consumption, living and working conditions, and daily life in order to provision the front.

To the established causes of conflict (the limits of royal authority, the crown’s financial demands and factionalism) a more destabilising dimension was added after 1399: the legitimacy of the ruling branch of the Plantagenet dynasty itself. From 1455 the houses of Lancaster and York, two lines descended from Edward III, contested the throne in a series of civil wars. As Edward Hall put it in 1548, ‘All other disorders, divisions and factions flourish to this present day but the old divided controversy between the families of Lancaster and York (were) suspended and appalled in the person of … Henry VIII and by him clearly buried’.

The fourteenth century saw the arrival of what is often described as the late medieval crisis. A period of famine, war, plague and death on an unparalleled scale – it is hardly surprising that many believed the apocalypse was upon them. Given these vicissitudes it is equally unsurprising that the challenges of kingship became especially acute in this period. The fourteenth century saw the first deposition of an English king by his own people, but it was not the last. Edward II’s fate would be shared by his great-grandson, Richard II, who was well aware that a dangerous precedent had been set. Indeed, Richard’s cognisance of the events of 1327 and his attempts to prevent them from being repeated proved utterly counterproductive.

The ‘Blockade’ of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to January 1944. It was one of the most tragic events of the war, especially with the mass starvation of the early months of 1942. Leningrad had been exposed to attack from the west, due to the Red Army’s rapid collapse in the recently annexed Baltic states, and it was potentially threatened by a Finnish attack from the north. The ability of the Russian forces to hold the city was based on other geographical and political factors, including the enemy’s inability to block Lake Ladoga to the east and the unwillingness of the Finnish government to take part. Starvation was the main weapon; the Germans bombarded Leningrad with artillery and aircraft with only limited effect, and little fighting took place inside the city itself. However, once the Germans had achieved their position near Leningrad from the south, it was difficult for the Red Army to mount successful counterattacks from the ‘mainland’, or from within the encircled city. Fortunately, after winter 1941–1942 the Germans were committed to other parts of the Russian front and there was little likelihood Leningrad would fall, but fighting in the surrounding countryside would be deadly for many months. The final end of the blockade came in January 1944, remarkably late in the war.

This chapter examines the planning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It sketches Hitler’s long-term economic and ideological motives for seeking to conquer the country, before examining the strategic considerations that determined the invasion’s particular timing in June 1941. Wehrmacht planners’ confidence was boosted by intelligence assessments that overlooked the less-than-overwhelming superiority of the German armed forces and underestimated Soviet military and economic potential. It was also boosted by their identification with the invasion’s ideological goals. Thus were the Panzer divisions and their air support, on which success depended more than anything else, committed to too many targets simultaneously, and the risk grew of a lengthy war in which superior Soviet resources would be increasingly likely to prevail. The chapter also sketches the peripheral roles played by Germany’s Axis allies in the invasion and the under-strength forces that the planners of Barbarossa would commit to rear area security. This underpowered occupation force would be compelled to cooperate closely with the SS and police in its efforts to control the occupied territories. This relationship, together with the Wehrmacht’s own ideological proclivities and harsh perception of military necessity, would help precipitate its deep involvement in Nazi crimes in the East.