A quarterly scholarly journal and news magazine. From the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm
Looking for back issues of Baltic Worlds? Download as PDF here.János Kornai certainly has been taking risks, and he definitely got his chance to develop in a most unusual way. He started out as a very young journalist in communist Hungary, and he eventually became a professor at Harvard.
Elske Rosenfeld was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. She realized that this was the end of the critical discourse that the citizens’ movements had brought to life in the GDR. When the 1990 election results were announced in the media, she cried. Today the topic of 1989 is her professional project as an artist.
Russian financial markets have been a completely new element in the Russian post-Soviet economy. The level of development and the character of the financial market institutions in this country can tell us much about whether Russia will succeed or fail in evolving towards a well-functioning market economy. Professor Alexandr Abramov from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow is one of Russia’s leading experts on Russian financial markets. Ilja Viktorov from CBEES met him in Moscow to pose some questions concerning developments in the field.
Professor Adam Przeworski often asks the questions most of us are a little embarrassed to ask. We see democracy as the natural state of affairs. To Adam Przeworski, who came from New York to Uppsala in late September 2010 to receive this year’s Johan Skytte Prize in political science, no such truths are taken for granted.
Lithuanian politician and ex-President Algirdas Brazauskas was a Communist leader, who became a reformer of considerable prominence, a Western-style social democrat, and finally a statesman, European-style. Here is an interview with this pragmatic leader, only shortly before he died in cancer in June 2010.
In this interview professor Birgitta Almgren discusses her study on Nazi-German infiltration in Sweden and the offshoots, in Cold War Sweden, of the GDR’s policies. She is now requesting that the Swedish law courts make it possible for her to continue her research by granting her access to the so-called Rosenholz files. In a comment professor Åmark argues for a release of the Stasi-material.
To be tolerated is to be disliked. Minorities are oppressed and persecuted to a degree that is difficult to absorb, says David Gaunt. Within the affected group, it takes several generations to dare to talk about genocide.
Joachim Gauck was 50 years old when he first voted in a free, democratic election in the GDR. A conversation about power and powerlessness, culpability, and reconciliation. The opposite of Communism is individualism, he states.
Budapest, fall 2009. István Rév opens the door to the Open Society Archives for a discussion about bloodshed as a poor gauge of a revolution, about honesty and decency as rare commodities, and about populism and utopianism.
Conor O'Dwyer, professor of political science, talks about a backlash at the political level also. Sexual minorities in Poland and Latvia have had their rights restricted following EU accession.