Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
This essay examines the fate of Vilcha, a village that was forcibly abandoned twice within a single generation. Originally located in Polissia, the village was evacuated after the Chornobyl disaster. Its inhabitants were resettled to a newly built village in the Kharkiv region. This second village of Vilcha was occupied and subsequently destroyed during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Based on three waves of oral interviews conducted between 2016 and 2025, this essay explores the experiences of forced displacement, memory, and loss. Vilcha emerges as a poignant example of repeated forced migration caused by both technological disaster and war.
Essay by
Viktoria Naumenko
April 23, 2026
Art in the Soviet Union was the mirror of the official communist party policy. However, Maria Prymachenko was successfully hiding the critique of the system behind “naive” pictures. She was one of the few artists who truly depicted the consequences of the Chornobyl catastrophe: from environmental issues to commemorating the dead, from illnesses to corruption surrounding liquidator certificates.
Essay by
Oksana Semenik
April 23, 2026
This essay examines the memorialization of two pivotal nuclear catastrophes – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the Chornobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 – through the lens of testimonial writings and Maurice Blanchot’s concept of “the disaster.” Drawing on Japanese hibakusha testimonies and Chornobyl survivors’ accounts, the essay contrasts political memory, which seeks closure and national integration, with cultural memory, which preserves trauma, ambiguity, and unresolved loss. Testimonial writings, rather than commemorating a concluded past, emerge from within the disaster itself, articulating a reality that defies assimilation into redemptive historical narratives.
Essay by
Florence Fröhlig
April 23, 2026
From a cinematic perspective, the Chornobyl accident became one of the most generative episodes in Ukrainian film history. The explosion of Reactor No. 4 triggered an unprecedented surge in film production: between 1986 and 1998, around forty documentaries were produced, alongside only one feature film. This essay examines one of the earliest attempts to represent the disaster, Volodymyr Shevchenko’s Chornobyl. Chronicle of the Hard Weeks (1987), now regarded as a key Chornobyl film. Focusing on its pervasive militarized rhetoric, the essay investigates how wartime language and memory structure the film’s interpretation of what was fundamentally a civilian, technological catastrophe.
Essay by
Stanislav Menzelevskyi
April 23, 2026
After the collapse of the USSR, rural Belarus faced severe economic and social crises and psychological issues. International humanitarian Chornobyl Children respite programs enabled hundreds of thousands of children to spend time abroad in Europe and North America. Although designed to improve health after the 1986 disaster, these initiatives gave encounters with other ways of living and thinking. Personal testimonies and long-term observations suggest that the experience significantly influenced the youth’s aspirations, self-perception, and life trajectories. These projects became a transformative encounter with a bigger world.
Essay by
Olga Bubich
April 23, 2026
This essay examines innovative educational adaptations implemented in Kharkiv to ensure children’s right to education, considered as a manifestation of resilience in wartime. The research methodology employed a descriptive case study approach utilizing multiple data sources to ensure triangulation, including official reports from educational authorities; press releases; Ukrainian and foreign mass media platforms; documented observations of facilities and stakeholder testimonials; and personal notes, videos, and photos. The results indicate the interventions successfully provided safe learning environments for approximately 15,000 schoolchildren (30% of school-aged learners) by December 2025 The experience in Kharkiv offers transferable insights for educational continuity planning in conflict zones worldwide.
Essay by
Ilona Kostikova et al
April 23, 2026
Widespread anti-government and anti-austerity protests erupted in Bulgaria in December 2025, reflecting intense public opposition to the state’s fiscal policies, governance models, and lack of transparency in political and judicial processes, which eventually led to the resignation of the Zhelyazkov Government. The eighth round of parliamentary elections in just five years took place on April 19, 2026 and resulted in victory for Progressive Bulgaria, the new party of the former president Rumen Radev. The country faces ongoing political instability. The current essay sheds light on the central misrepresentations in the portrayal of the protests and underlying structural issues in Bulgarian politics based on the analysis of state documents, media coverage, corruption investigation cases, and digital observations.
By
Alexandra Brankova
April 23, 2026
Early-career academics (ECAs) generally experience insecure employment conditions, intense competition for research funding, and limited access to effective mentorship. Postdoctoral career pathways are marked by uncertainty and precarity, with short-term contracts and high expectations for research output, teaching, and administrative work. Drawing on interviews with ECAs in Sweden and Albania, this essay identifies a striking convergence in their experiences despite substantial differences in national academic systems. The findings suggest that these difficulties are not merely country-specific but reflect broader structural characteristics of contemporary European academia. The persistence of such conditions highlights a systemic disconnect between doctoral training and sustainable academic careers, pointing to the need for reforms that promote long-term career stability and healthier research environments. The essay also reveals differences between Albanian and Swedish ECAs’ career aspirations and experiences of gender equality.
Essay by
Gilda Hoxha and Joakim Ekman
April 23, 2026
Views of the past are constantly being revised, with the impact of different political and social occurrences generating new narratives and ways of interpreting history. This essay focuses on three cases of recent spatial reconfiguration in Estonia, all demonstrating how contrasting memoryscapes are perceived, especially after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, the Soviet memorials, symbols and murals in public space in Estonia have fallen under intense scrutiny as remnants and symbols of the Soviet regime. Russian aggression towards Ukraine seemed to reopen the wound of the most recent trauma. At the same time, the legacies of more remote oppressors, the Baltic Germans, has taken on a new meaning as a more neutral and even positive heritage. With three examples of spatial transformation, the essay examines the choices made on treating the layers of Estonian history and raises questions about how current decisions could shape our perception in the future.
Essay by
Triin Reidla and Anu Soojärv
December 18, 2025
This essay traces the development of Latvian nationalism from its emergence in the 19th century to the present, particularly examining how the relationship between the individual and the nation has been interpreted. By relying on the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his idealization of authentic cultures, this essay examines his influences on the invention of authentic Latvian culture (and people) in the 19th century, as well as the afterlives of Fichte’s ideas during the Ulmanis regime, the independence struggle in the 1980s, and finally, in the contemporary, liberal era. The essay argues that the unfavorable comparison to their idealized, “authentic” selves has contributed to a discourse in which people are expected to engage in a personal and inherently intimate relationship with their nation. I argue that these principles produce an anti-populist nationalism that distinguishes Latvian nationalism from its European counterparts.
Essay by
Gustav Lundberg
December 18, 2025
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.