contributors

Articles by Alexandra Biktimirova and Victoria Kravtsova

1. The zone of memory

   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.

2. Remembering Vilcha A twice abandoned village

   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.

3. “This is how I dreamed of the fourth reactor” Maria Prymachenko and (not) naive images of Chornobyl

   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.

4. Writing the disaster from Hiroshima to Chornobyl ATOMIC AND NUCLEAR TESTIMONIES AND THE AFTERLIFE OF DISASTERS

   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.

5. Peaceful atom, haunted legacy. ECHOES OF WAR(S) IN CHORNOBYL DOCUMENTARIES

   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.

6. Chornobyl Children A generation between two realities

   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.

7. The Chernobyl Children. A generation growing up with radiological contaminations

   Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of a Nuclear Disaster Melanie Arndt, transl. Alastair Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 368 pages.

8. Latvian folklore ensembles and their initiatives against Russia’s war in Ukraine

   This article delves into the folk music community of Latvia and its reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Rooted in the 20th-century folklore revival movement, during which Latvians revitalized their cultural heritage as a form of opposition to Soviet ideology, the community of Latvian folklore ensembles, musicians and enthusiasts has joined the broader civic initiative of giving aid to Ukraine and expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Since February 2022, at least 80 initiatives linked to folklore (concerts, dance events, protests etc.) have been carried out that are directly connected to gathering support for or expressing solidarity with Ukraine. The analysis of these events reveals how the folklore community engages with political issues, using folklore as a medium to express its views in the contemporary political context.

9. Resilience of school infrastructure Children’s right to education in wartime Ukraine

   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.

10. UKRAINE UPDATE; THE ATTITUDE CLIMATE IN 2026

    In 2018 and 2021, I wrote two articles for Baltic Worlds on Ukraine and the Ukrainian attitude climate in the context of the ongoing Russian attack on Ukraine, launched in 2014. The empirical data used in the articles was largely taken from the website of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), whose press releases and reports are accessible in Ukrainian, Russian, and English. The KIIS surveys covered the territory governed by the Government of Ukraine before February 2022. One of the key purposes of the articles was to give the Ukrainian population a more international voice, taking into account the pro-Russian bias of the international research community as pointed out e.g. in the Kuzio-Sakwa debate.(See Taras Kuzio, Crisis in Russian studies? Nationalism (Imperialism), Racism and War (Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, 2020); Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: B. Tauris, 2015). Now, it may be interesting to take a new look at the attitude climate in Ukraine and how it has changed; the war has continued since 2014 and escalated in 2022, and while the international community keeps speaking about peace and security guarantees, there is no real perspective of the war ending.

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