Peer-reviewed articles

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.

Nord Stream, mediation, and the Council of Baltic Sea States

Recent discussions on expanding Nord Stream highlight the fact that this unilateral effort by Russia and Germany has stirred further unrest among the other littoral states. Here it is argued that the EU, which has been repeatedly proposed as a mediator of the conflict, is unsuitable for this. Instead it is suggested that the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS), are more likely to be accepted as mediators, and more likely to be successful in that role.

By Levke Aduda and Stefan Ewert March 8, 2018

The butterfly effect in history-making Conservative subjectivities of women in the anti-communist discourse in Slovakia

The oral history archive of the non-profit organization Nenápadní hrdinovia (The Inconspicous Heroes) is considered as an example of a wider trend in Slovakia to exploit women’s memories for the purposes of conservative or nationalist interpretations of history, placing women in the traditional roles and discourses of victims, auxiliaries, and self-sacrifice. Using the concrete oral history project as a vehicle and a case study for the argument, the article contributes to the understanding of the current discursive landscape of memory of state socialism and of gender in Slovakia.

By Zuzana Maďarová March 8, 2018

Female terrorists: political or just mad? Conservative narratives in the historiography of early 20th century female terrorism in Russia

This article discusses the main narratives employed by conservatives at the beginning of the 20th century to explain the political violence committed by women, and it shows how these narratives have been employed in the scholarly analysis of the topic. The article provides an answer to the question why progovernmental conservative views on the female terrorists and terrorism in prerevolutionary Russia have never been influential in the historiography.

By Nadezda Petrusenko March 8, 2018

Between gender blindness and nationalist herstory The history of Polish women in WWII as the site of an anti-modernist revolution

This paper discusses the current “herstorical turn” in professional and popular historiography and memory of WWII in Poland: a growing interest in women and the distinctiveness of their wartime experiences. Focusing on one dominant strand of this “herstorical turn” – nationalist herstory – the article reflects on the ways in which women’s history has become one of the platforms a broader illiberal political shift that is currently ongoing in Central Europe.

By Weronika Grzebalska March 8, 2018

Roots of illiberal memory politics. Remembering women in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

In 2016, commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution brought new conflicts in memory politics. This article analyzes the reasons for women’s absence from the historiography of the 1956 Revolution and discusses how the polypore state is using the populist turn to introduce hegemonic narratives and to include women in the narrative of “national feminism”.

By Andrea Petö March 8, 2018

War and other worries of the people views on Ukraine from Ukraine

The article describes Ukrainian views on the war in the eastern region of the country and other worries of the people as well as Ukrainian-Russian relations and the views on the EU. The empirical material is from opinion polls carried out by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology in 2014–2017. The conflict in the east is the main concern of the population.

By Simo Mannila and Natalia Kharchenko March 8, 2018

The inverted myth Viktor Pelevin’s Buddha’s little finger

In his contribution to the volume Russian Literature since 1991 entitled “The Postmodernist Novel”, Mark Lipovetsky makes the now rather widespread claim that the Russian postmodernist post-Soviet novel represents a break with the totalizing tendencies of the socialist realist novel and opens for new ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world. In this paper this claim is critically examined on the basis of a reading of Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (transl. as Buddha’s Little Finger or Clay Machine Gun against the backdrop of contemporary debates about realism and simulacra. Here it is argued that the Soviet myth of Chapaev lends itself to the totality of the private myth.

By Tora Lane November 10, 2017

Mickey Mouse – the perfect tenant of an early Soviet city

The article provides a closer reading of Walter Benjamin’s essays Experience and Poverty and Moscow, by juxtaposing the records of his visit to Russia in 1926–1927 with the author’s reflections on the nature of the transformations in the urban space of an early Soviet city. By using the dystopian image of Mickey Mouse as the desired inhabitant of modernity introduced by Benjamin in Experience and Poverty, Seits gives the allegorical and comparative interpretation to the substantial changes in the living space of Moscow that were witnessed by Walter Benjamin.

By Irina Seits November 10, 2017

Revolutionary Synchrony: A Day of the World

A Day of the World (Den’ mira) was a documentary volume, published in 1937, that was intended to provide a snapshot of the entire globe on a single day, September 27, 1935. The tensions within and around A Day of the World capture some of the basic contradictions in socialist realism, the official aesthetic method of Soviet art: between publicity and intimacy and between the dream of synchronous, global revolution and the aberrant temporalities of individual experience.

By Robert Bird November 10, 2017

Becoming tools for artistic consciousness of the people

In the present article, the main principles of the reforms in Revolutionary Russia in the sphere of art are analyzed through the example of the reorganization of the Higher Artistic School of the Imperial Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg into the Free Art Studios (Svomas). The studios were to become a tool for the transformation of the surrounding reality and for the development of the artistic consciousness of the people. The intended result of those transformations was the complete spiritual and material harmonization of society, while the perfection of artistic interpretation was to be replaced with the perfection of social living. The research presented here is based on the archival materials and is one of the very first publications on the problems associated with the reform of artistic education in the first post-revolutionary years.

By Mikhail Evsevyev November 10, 2017