Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
In general, social disasters always result in the disproportionate excess of things: while humans perish en masse, artifacts survive in the form of market commodities and museum exhibit; as human life extinguishes in catastrophes, the life of objects gets more and more active in market exchanges, expropriations, and lootings. The history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century has witnessed many such episodes.
Essay by
Irina Sandomirskaja
December 30, 2019
The history of revolutionary Petrograd covers the period between the two times when the city changed its name, in 1914 and 1924. During this period, it came to witness a world war (not accidentally called the Great War) and two revolutions, as well as cold, famine, and destruction. Even though difficult to assess, the consequences for museums and collections, both private and public, were enormous, as they were for a variety of art institutions and, even more so, for private persons such as collectors, artists, art critics, and so on.
Essay by
Iulia Demidenko
November 21, 2019
The book lovers, collectors, and dealers of the siege were moving antiquarian books on strollers and sleds, as they had done with dead bodies several months earlier, thus reorganizing the devastated spaces of the changed city. From the “vacant” apartments of missing people, books that materially represented material and symbolic values of the past were running through — and up against — a new reality, a contact or collision that engendered new forms of inquiry and of collaboration between past and present
Essay by
Polina Barskova
November 21, 2019
With the recent screening of a feature film and a documentary depicting corruption and sexual abuse by priests in Poland, issues that were previously taboo are now being aired in public. What effect, if any, will they have on the powerful position of the Church in Poland? This article looks first at how scandals have challenged the massive authority of the Church in another conservative and Catholic country, Ireland. It asks whether there are sufficient points of similarity between the two countries and their political predicaments for the Irish experience to act as a guide for the Polish situation.
Essay by
Brendan Humphreys
November 21, 2019
A cursory reading of the literature describing yesterdays’ societies in the Stockholm Archipelago tells us that people in the archipelago heavily relied on fishing and small-scale farming for their living. With the arrival of modern industrialized society during the latter half of the 19th century, things changed, and other opportunities to earn a living appeared. However, there were and are certain circumstances in the Stockholm Archipelago that make it somewhat inert, preventing it from taking a place in the modern labor market.
Essay by
Christian Widholm
June 18, 2019
In the period between the two world wars, Swedish interest in the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was in general extremely limited, whereas from the other side Sweden was seen as a geopolitically inactive power and consequently as a possible source of support and an ally against the Baltic states’ two greater neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany.
Essay by
Thomas Lundén
June 18, 2019
The skitgrop system was, to use popular words by today’s politicians, a “world-class re-cycling system” and a commercial practice that helped Stockholm handle its problems with garbage and feces. But more important is that the skitgrop system demonstrates the archipelago population’s trust in future farming. When buying feces and garbage for fertilizer, large economic and physical resources were invested
Essay by
Johan Hegardt
June 17, 2019
This paper analyzes Soviet and Russian spy films with respect to maintaining and transmitting memories of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) in popular culture. The new Russian post-Soviet cinema (after the 2000s) about the “war spies” is considered not only with regard to its entertainment and ideological functions, but also with regard to its function as a “post-memory” of the traumatic experiences of the war and the Nazi occupation. The new Russian cinema about espionage and spies reinterprets the issues of dependent people, Stalinist repressions, and traumatic memories that were absent in Soviet cinema.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
June 17, 2019
There is a significant discrepancy between the political potential of the EU and its actual position and role in the future development of Europe. In practice, the member states have maintained their power monopoly in the most essential policy areas.
Essay by
Bjarne Lindström
March 7, 2019
After announcing her presidential campaign in October 2017, Sobchak, perhaps unsurprisingly, was represented in mainstream Russian media as an “unruly woman”19 who was transgressing the existing patriarchal norms and rules, and she was explicitly reminded by male journalists and TV anchors of the “real” and “traditional” role a woman is supposed to play.
Essay by
Liudmila Voronova and Emil Edenborg
March 7, 2019
Special Issue 2023, 3 Youth and authoritarian
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.