A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is Professor of Eastern and Central European Studies; director for the Centre for European Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She specializes in cultural studies and contemporary history, focusing on studies of identities, collective memory, and nationalism.
Magdalena Góra is Assistant professor at the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow. PhD in political science. Her focus is on the EU role in international relations, Polish foreign policy and processes of collective identity formation in the context of the EU enlargement.
When it comes to art museums in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, ownership is an especially loaded issue that continues to bring out new skeletons from its closeted past. Ludwig’s gigantic art collection, consisting of some 50,000 artworks, came into being because of his goal of inscribing himself into the future of art history.
By analyzing the usage of the word “market” (rynok) in the Russian press since 1990, the author shows how the keyword takes on new meanings, reflecting and relates to the different social and political roles of the press outlets in an evolving, modernizing environment.
The author argues that the equation of culture and natural resources has become a fundamental metaphor of the official patriotic discourse of identity in contemporary Russia. This conceptualization of the past frames nation building and state construction, the “nostalgic modernization”.
In an attempt to bring Russian articulations of Russian religiosity into a dialogue with the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah’s theory on secularization the author argues for a Russian model of civil religion.
Focusing on the role of the Soviet legacy the author conducts a detailed analysis of the restoration work, as well as the official discourse surrounding it. The aim is to uncovering the ideological ambiguities of Russia’s most recent top-down modernization, a modernization based on values claimed to be “conservative”.
Like many other modern states, both the Soviet Union, with its authoritian socialism, and Sweden, with its social democracy, strived to shape their citizens' lives for the better. Both states considered it their duty actively to plan, organize and control housing.
The Russian media system today is a hybrid composed of the main public sphere — that is, state-owned mainstream media — and a parallel public sphere or counter-sphere, consisting of mainstream media relatively disloyal to the Kremlin, and social media. The present study is based on an analysis of one hundred journalist’s blogs maintained on the LiveJournal platform in during the 2012 presidential election in Russia.
The nationally organized camp Seliger All-Russia Youth Forum gathers tens of thousands of young Russians every year. Here a report from the inside of the camp, observations in contemporary nation-building.
The author argues that the history of the Holocaust is the history of Europe; "as Europeans, we all continue to live it". "It is not wise to appropriate to ourselves the story of suffering, because even in the short term such a course will lead to isolation and a rise in anti-Semitism."
The Russian researcher Olga Kryshtanovskaya discusses Russian political elites and their role in the political process in Russia. According to Kryshtanovskaya, a new class of rich people is emerging, a hereditary aristocracy which has yet to be legitimized in the Russian collective consciousness.