In January 1945, the German Army in Poland braced itself for an inevitable massive attack. Enjoying overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, and with logistics and communications greatly improved by the Lend Lease program, the Red Army had learned how to outperform the Wehrmacht. The Soviets struck across Poland in mid-January. Two weeks later, they were deep inside Germany; East Prussia was cut off from the rest of the country. The top Soviet generals planned to take Berlin by mid-February, but Stalin postponed their march to the Reich’s capital, rerouting their efforts to what he perceived as a flank threat from northern Germany. The elimination of this treat delayed the offensive towards Berlin until mid-April. The Germans exploited this pause to strengthen their fortifications. When the march to the ‘beast’s lair’ finally resumed, bitter fights at the Seelow Heights and then in Berlin’s streets resulted in grave casualties. During the entire war on the Eastern Front, the Red Army lost at least four times as many soldiers as the Wehrmacht. As for Soviet civilians, crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes made comparable contributions to their death toll.

This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

At his coronation the monarch swore to preserve the peace of the kingdom, maintain the laws and customs of the realm and diligently do justice to his subjects. Upholding these tenets underpinned the successful exercise of kingship. Indeed, the quality of the king’s rule was frequently judged contemporaneously and historically by his record on justice. Yet, while the king did have personal input and was ultimately responsible for issuing legislative decrees and upholding law and order, operationally this was not something he could do on his own. The enormous task of day-to-day judicial administration was delegated to a mixture of trained judges, lawyers and royal officials, who worked alongside less specialised men of law, shire bureaucrats and a pool of borough merchants and county gentry. These assisted the crown by acting on a variety of local commissions and as constituency representatives in parliament.

Collective memory of a historical event does not depend on its contemporary and historiographical significance alone. Germany’s selective memory of the Eastern Front is a case in point. It has been influenced by four developments. The problem of the prisoners of war that had remained in the Soviet Union, the ‘returnees’, and the veterans underlined the importance of the Eastern Front among the West German public. The Stalingrad myth, in particular, had a decisive influence on an image of war (in the East), according to which the Germans considered themselves first and foremost victims of that war. The critical discussion of the war and its nexus with the Holocaust after 1970 led to a turning point wherein the victims of the Germans became the focus of remembrance in West Germany. In the socialist satellite state of East Germany, the heroization of the Red Army was a characteristic feature of public war memories. Commemorations of the Eastern Front changed again in unified Germany after the Cold War – from the early years of Russia’s rapprochement to the dramatic deterioration of the German-Russian relationship.

In every human relationship there is a tension, or perhaps better say a dynamic, between what is and what is desired by the parties involved, and in this the relations between medieval kings and the upper nobility were no different. When these factors coincided, the relationship tended to work well; when they did not, it could break down. To understand how this relationship played out between medieval English kings and their nobilities, we first need to understand how the structure of that relationship evolved. We can then examine how it manifested itself in areas such as the king’s role in maintaining the nobility, in service and cooperation between kings and his nobles, the interplay of ideas of wealth and power, favouritism, political instability and in some cases the removal of monarchs.

This chapter describes German and Soviet strategies for the year 1942 and covers operations from May 1942 to March 1943. These includes the Soviet offensive towards Kharkiv, German preliminary operations such as the conquering of Sevastopol and the Kerch peninsula, but also operations on other sections of the Eastern Front like Soviet offensives against Rzhev and the German operation ‘Whirlwind’. However, the focus is on the German summer offensive and the Battle of Stalingrad. By linking these events to the operations along the eastern front as well as decisions and events outside the eastern theatre, the chapter argues that Germany’s failure in 1942 was a consequence of Allied superiority in men and material, but also of a German leadership that underestimated Soviet warfare capabilities. The German command wanted to achieve too many objectives with too few resources in too short a period of time. This failure was part of a larger turn of the tide in the war, that finally led to the Axis defeat.

History is a product of the time in which it is written. This should not surprise us since each generation has its own interpretation of the past, which is easily impacted by the events of the present. Writing the history of the Nazi-Soviet War in the 2020s against the backdrop of resurgent warfare in Eastern Europe – war that draws so directly from interpretations (many of which are disputed) of the period 1941–1945 – makes our task unusually complex but all the more important. The temptation to use and abuse history is nothing new, but amid an active information war the value of first-rate scholarship and established expertise cannot be overestimated. To that end, I am deeply appreciative for the time and support of so many leading scholars.

Late medieval kings varied in their level of personal interest in the visual arts and architecture. Henry III sent his workmen detailed and impatient personal directives for the commissioning of vestments, liturgical furnishings and the decoration of palaces and chapels. In 1447–8, Henry VI ordered his new college of Eton to be built in the fashionable Perpendicular architectural style. Yet for all late medieval kings, images, buildings and material objects played an important role in projecting, representing and inviting wider reflection on their power and authority.

Twenty-first-century readers perhaps associate the word ‘citizen’ with nations and states. The inhabitants of England in the later Middle Ages, however, were subjects of the king, not citizens of a nation. The word ‘citizen’ did exist in late medieval England, but it referred to cities and towns rather than nations, realms or states. A citizen was someone who swore an oath to be a member of an urban political community: a person who paid taxes to the local urban government, took up municipal office when called upon and contributed towards the defence of the city. In return, the citizen received the right to practise a trade within the city and to be tried by the city’s own law courts.

The German home front was a vital part of the war Nazi-Germany waged. Skilfully deploying the country’s workers, its women, and its youth organizations, the regime would come to subject most of its economy to the war effort. The Wehrmacht’s campaign into the Soviet Union would permanently alter the way Germany structured its economy. The home front benefitted tremendously from the Nazi conquest of the East, and before long hundreds of thousands of slave labourers were forcibly drafted into its factories and its agriculture. As the war went on, the regime also increasingly deployed concentration camp inmates in the war effort and also used the threat of violence or imprisonment to coerce it own population. Determined to prevent a repeat of the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, the home front was treated with increasing suspicion, while Allied bombing raids and the introduction of ever stricter rations put further strain on Germany’s citizens. Notwithstanding, resistance was rare, and the home front remained largely intact until the very end of the war: the vast majority of Germans only laid down their tools once Allied forces arrived.

Of the eleven kings under discussion in this volume, only two were married at their accession. Four of the others were still children, but those who had reached adulthood were expected to marry as soon as possible. There were practical reasons for this – the need for an heir to guarantee stability and the opportunity to create a diplomatic alliance that would strengthen a new regime. There were also ideological reasons. Medieval literature, chronicles and reports of gossip all demonstrate that a queen was an integral part of the medieval ideal of stable, mature kingship. This sense of a need for a feminine element in sovereignty was similarly apparent in the elevated position of the Virgin Mary who had been celebrated as queen of heaven from at least the sixth century. Just as medieval kings were Christ’s representatives, so the ideology of late medieval queenship drew inspiration from His idealised mother.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.