Peer-reviewed articles have all been through a peer-review process. We practice double-blind peer-review. All material is reviewed by two independent specialists at least at post-doc level. A prerequisite for publishing scientific articles in Baltic Worlds is that the article has not already been published in English elsewhere. If an article is simultaneously being considered by another publication, this should be indicated when submitting.
In 1949–1950, the Yugoslavian Chamber of Commerce commissioned architects Vjenceslav Richter (1917–2002) and Zvonimir Radić (1921–85) together with artists Ivan Picelj (1924–2011) and Alexandar Srnec (1924–2010) to shape several pavilions at various international trade fairs; in Stockholm twice. This text departs from a rich photographic documentation of the 1950 fair, discussing how and why Yugoslavia turned to modernism, why the artists shaped the pavilion the way they did, how it was received in Sweden. It also places the pavilion in a political context. As Yugoslavia was expelled from the Eastern Bloc in 1948, it had to find new alliances. The turn to modernism could be seen as a sign of this, but such reading also risks diminishing the role of modernism, leaving it as something that belongs to the liberal democracies in the West. The text argues against such narrow reading. It also discusses the role art history has played in forming a quite stereotype image of modernism and finally, it uses Roland Barthes “myth” as a way of looking at modernism from a multiple perspective.
By
Håkan Nilsson
October 8, 2020
How can the loss of connection with history be experienced and expressed? The relationship with the past is difficult to capture and describe, although at some historic moments the emotional connection with the past becomes pivotal. This article introduces the debates on loss and cultivating the sense of losing the past in modernizing Russia in the late 19th – early 20th century. It contributes to the history of emotions, analyzing the discourse on the disappearance of Russian cultural history cultivated by intellectual and artistic circles around the journals Mir Iskusstva, Starye Gody and Iskusstvo in the late Russian Empire, and tracing distinct voices that problematized the relation to earlier times in Russia and promoted the preservation of Russian cultural and historical monuments. The article concludes that the discourse of losing the connection with Russia’s own past played an important role in forming the discourse and practices of Russian heritage preservation.
By
Anna Kharkina
October 8, 2020
This study offers the first analysis of anti-Roma propaganda in the District of Galicia (Distrikt Galizien, the DG), a part of the General Government (Das Generalgouvernement, the GG), by studying the dailies and several periodicals published in the District. It constitutes the first step in studying anti-Roma propaganda in the GG. While the wartime anti-Roma propaganda employed the pre-war images of Roma, those were manipulated, distorted and radicalized in accordance to the needs of the Nazi regime in the DG. The radicalization in the press paralleled introduction of regulations with anti-Roma edge and scaling up of Roma persecution in the GG. By 1943, the propaganda pieces alluded to solving “the Gypsy question” in the way that “the Jewish question” had been solved.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
October 7, 2020
Unlike British or American vegetarian movements which arose during the 19th century, organized vegetarianism did not emerge in the Russian empire until the turn of the century. By the 1910s, a network of vegetarian circles flourished across the empire. Odessa presents a fascinating case study for examining dietary reform and vegetarianism. Using diverse sources, the article explores the evolution and implementation of grassroot vegetarian activism in the city of Odessa by focusing on its institutionalization and infrastructure, as well as on ideas, practices and activists. It scrutinizes the motives that guided actions, unfolds alliances and challenges that arose, and how these played out in practice, and identifies popularization strategies for vegetarian ideas, and forms of vegetarian consumption. The study sheds light on an unknown page of the history of Odessa and the Black Sea Region, as well as enriching existing knowledge of the histories of imperial and European borderlands.
By
Julia Malitska
October 5, 2020
This article explores recent developments in Turkey in the light of the newly emerging literature on anti-gender movements in Europe, with the ultimate aim of assessing the prospects of the emergence of a feminist politics strong enough to challenge the threat. Today, Turkey is one of the leading countries where an authoritarian regime combined with a blatantly anti-gender equality agenda has recently been on the ascendant. The Turkish case displays many characteristics shared by right-wing populisms and strongly illiberal regimes, yet it also represents a particular instance where we don’t see “anti-gender movements” as such.
By
Alev Özkazanç
May 25, 2020
The author argues that stigmatization of “gender” as ideology has become a central element of political discourse in Hungary since 2010 — resulting in the ban of the MA in Gender Studies in the Official Gazette on October 12, 2018. For a critical reading, the author situates the strategic attack in relation to three junctures of meaning-making of “feminism” and “gender” since the system change in 1989 that have eventually crystalized into the commonsense discourses of “gender ideology” and “gender-craze” of right-wing populism.
By
Erzsébet Barát
May 24, 2020
This paper examines the politics of monument building and the “de-communization” of public space in Ukraine. It first introduces the conceptual categorization of societal-political interaction over memory in order to showcase permutations between between the two types of memory. It then proceeds to evaluate recent memory developments in the case study of the provincial town of Shyshaky in central Ukraine. I argue that official governmental memory politics is secondary to a broader social memory dynamics in re-structuring the local memory landscape in how it represents Ukraine’s WWII experience and its Soviet past. Approaching the local memory developments as a case of permutations between social and political memories yields greater and more accurate insight.
By
Andrii Nekoliak
February 25, 2020
For more than a decade the government of Georgia, following consultations with international and transnational actors involved in financial politics and development work, is attempting to stimulate economic development in the countryside by encouraging tourism. The mountainous regions play a specific role in this process. Mountains provide a seemingly good starting point for the development of tourism as they can be defined as being very rich in both cultural heritage and natural landscapes. The main question addressed here is whether the current spatial plans and heritagization strategies of the government for Tusheti are subtle steering mechanisms primarily concerned with encouraging a free market economy. Towards this end, the local population are expected to become entrepreneurs in tourism services. In order to theoretically embed and explain what is happening in Georgia, the concepts of governmentality and heritage regimes will be used. The focus of this paper is on governmentality as it is perceived from the perspective of critical heritage studies and the anthropology of development.
By
Edita Štulcaitė
February 25, 2020
This article will introduce the term “pribaltification”, designating the tendencies in the Soviet Union and Russia to imagine and represent the Soviet Baltic republics – and later the independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – as a largely uniform political and cultural entity, and to significantly blur the cultural and linguistic distinctions between the natives of these republics/countries. Analyzing the narrative and semiotic systems that underpin design and production strategies in an audio-visual text of a Russian television serial Gastrolery [Guest Performers], I will demonstrate that representations/metageographies of Lithuania and Lithuanians articulated in the film closely align with the principle of “pribaltification”. Thus, an image of Lithuania and Lithuanians appears to be employed synecdochically, whereby one specific state embodies onscreen all three Baltic countries as a whole. I will also suggest that “pribaltification” in Gastrolery may not be driven exclusively by popular Russian metageographies of the Baltic States. Thus, analysis of the serial may make it possible to observe traces of the Russian state’s geopolitical discourse on the Baltic States.
By
Dzmitry Pravatorau
November 21, 2019
Spatial polarization has become one of the EU’s most pressing issues. While the EU Member States have shown convergence in economic development, interregional inequalities within states have increased considerably. Polarization means that urban agglomerations and capital city-regions demonstrate population growth and increasing prosperity, while a growing number of rural, remote, and old industrial regions suffer from economic and demographic stagnation or decline. The growing divides between rich and poor regions are caused not only by economic laws.
By
Nadir Kinossian
June 18, 2019
Special Issue 2023, 3 Youth and authoritarian
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