Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
This special issue contributes to the ongoing analysis of the transformations Russian society has undergone since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Tthe contributions examine acts of resistance within professional communities, as well as specific identity-based and issue-based forms of activism, including decolonial, feminist, climate, and environmental initiatives. The issue seeks to offer a bird’s introduction eye perspective on the transformation of activist initiatives over the past four years.
Essay by
Ekaterina Kalinina
May 29, 2026
Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, education has become a central arena in Russia for the consolidation of an authoritarian state project. This article examines how history and social studies teachers navigate the intensified ideological control in everyday school practice. Drawing on ten in-depth interviews conducted in late 2024, the study analyses subtle, non-heroic forms of resistance, conceptualized through James C. Scott’s notion of the “weapons of the weak”. The guiding research question is: What forms does resistance take when open confrontation becomes too costly, and how should such practices be interpreted politically? The authors identify two principal scenarios of resistance: a collective one, which they term the “besieged fortress,” and an individual one – “a stranger among one’s own”; suggesting an ambivalent character of quiet resistance in authoritarian contexts — simultaneously protective, adaptive, and potentially erosive of the regime’s normative authority.
Essay by
A. Hope and V. Milidia
May 29, 2026
Despite the repressions against civil society in Russia, the independent environmental movement has managed to adapt and survive. The environmental agenda in Russia remains important for the people, for local politicians, and for authorities. These factors lay the groundwork for a potential mobilization, politicization, and demand for system change. To enact this transformation, however, the author argues that professional environmentalists need to combine forces with grassroots protestors and embrace a broader socio-economic and intersectional agenda.
Essay by
Vitaly Servetnik
May 29, 2026
This essay examines the methodological, ethical, and safety challenges of researching civil society and activism in Russia after 2022. Drawing on recent fieldwork experience, we discuss the growing importance of ethnographic engagement, heightened risks for researchers and interlocutors, challenges of trust-building, anonymization, and blurred boundaries between analysis and advocacy. We argue that these conditions reshape both fieldwork practices and knowledge production, raising broader questions about the future of qualitative research in authoritarian contexts.
Essay by
Elisa Marin and Oliver Skye
May 29, 2026
Baltic Worlds’ Special issue “Civic Activism in Russia” offers a unique glimpse into the Russian civil society shortly before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the authors of the issue observe, the impact of the war has made civil society extremely complex and transnational.
To my knowledge, it is one of the first attempts to examine Russian civil society from within.
Essay by
Nadezda Petrusenko
May 29, 2026
The following essays in this theme-issue aim to capture a snapshot of that 40th anniversary amidst the ongoing war. These essays were written by researchers in life sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as practitioners of the arts, many of whom have worked on Chornobyl issues in Ukraine, in Eastern and Western Europe and in North America for some time. They engage the effort to understand the impact of the ongoing violence unleashed by Russian troops on the legacy and memory of Chornobyl writ large. These impressions have been laid out in multiple, layered visions and memories of Chornobyl: Chornobyl as a symbol of technological failure, a reminder of local and national tragedy and resilience, and a place for international technoscientific and humanitarian cooperation and collective reflection about nuclear and other technogenic risks.
Essay by
Tatiana Kasperski and Oksana Semenik
April 23, 2026
The first news from Chornobyl was about gunfire near the Buriakivka radioactive waste storage facility. By noon there were images: Russian tanks near the Administrative Building No. 1 of the plant. Denys Vyshnevskyi, the Head of Department at Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve writes here about the occupation and how life changed in the Exclusion Zone. For many research groups, 2022 became the year of accepting a bitter truth – Chornobyl research was being suspended indefinitely.
Essay by
Denys Vyshnevskiy
April 23, 2026
From the moment of its establishment, the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) became a territory separated from the rest of the country: governed by different rules and a distinct internal logic. The isolation of the CEZ and the urgency of its tasks have shaped – and continue to shape – specific demands on the scientists who work there. Chornobyl science is also influenced by crises that have repeatedly redefined its priorities.
Essay by
Olena Pareniuk and Kateryna Shavanova
April 23, 2026
Forty years after the Chornobyl disaster, the essay reflects on the impact of peaceful and weaponized nuclear energy in Ukraine’s history. One of the leading nuclear energy operators in the world, Ukraine suffered the worst nuclear accident in history, which had wide-ranging geopolitical consequences. One of them was to influence Ukraine’s decision to surrender the nuclear weapons inherited from the USSR, a decision that ultimately exposed.
Ukraine to Russian predation. After its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow proceeded to create and manipulate unprecedented nuclear dangers for Ukraine’s civilian nuclear infrastructure, blurring – as it once did in Chornobyl – the distinction between atoms for peace and atoms for war.
Essay by
Mariana Budjeryn
April 23, 2026
This article explores the transformation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone into a contemporary “zone of memory” shaped by physical inaccessibility and digital mediation. Drawing on memory studies and cultural heritage research, it analyzes how virtual tourism, social media, and virtual reality (VR) technologies influence the ways in which the catastrophe is remembered and experienced. Special attention is given to the role of immersive media, particularly VR applications, in producing affective and experiential forms of memory that differ from traditional narrative remembrance. The study argues that digital environments reorganize temporal perception and enable users to encounter the past as a sensory and emotional event, generating what may be described as immersive memory.
Essay by
Magdalena Banaszkiewicz
April 23, 2026
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.