A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 4: Download.
Helmut Müller-Enbergs is adj. professor, University of Southern Denmark; Guestprofessor,
University of Gotland; Senior Researcher The agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi records (BStU).
Thomas Wegener Friis is associate professor and network coordinator at the Centre for Cold War at the Department for History and Civilization, University of Southern Denmark
The section is an invitation to think further on the possibilities of implementing decolonial theory in the memory field of the countries that were dominated by the Soviet Union.
The process of decolonization in Ukrainian cities is significant because of the remaining socialist heritage. This includes architecture, urban planning structures, toponyms, and symbolic spaces. While this heritage is deeply implemented in the contemporary cityscape, it has also become the subject of criticism, particularly after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014. Socialist cities such as Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rig played a prominent role in shaping the urban landscape and were conceptualized by Soviet urbanists in the 1920s and 1930s. These cities were designed to gain complete control over the social and professional aspects of residents’ lives, reflecting the ideological ambitions of the communist party. This article explores the importance of socialist cities in the context of colonial heritage, examining the origins of the idea and its ideological significance.
The essay analyzes the role of Western art institutions in supporting and promoting imperialist views on both the cultural and political history of what once was the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and then the so-called “post-Soviet” space while they universalized and homogenized the multiple, complex, heterogenic, interconnected voices that temporally and spatially fell within the boundaries of the Russian Empire in its various forms. It looks into the case of the market-driven umbrella terms of “Russian art” and “Russian avant-garde,” as presented in several exhibitions in major Western museums between 2016 and 2019, dedicated to the centennial of the October Revolution, often called the Russian Revolution. The research focuses on the artists connected to Ukraine. It attempts to do them epistemic justice by restoring the complexity of the interconnections, contexts, and traditions they grew out of and were inspired by, as well as the ones they reworked, deconstructed, and revolutionized. By referring to decolonial thinkers, it combines and compares how imperial thinking, frames of reference, and coloniality work in symbolic and knowledge production.
The article reflects if it is possible to decolonize memory in the former Soviet republics that have been gradually moving centrifugally towards different political allegiances. It is needed to go beyond the postcolonial/post-Soviet national optic and consider inter-imperial (Doyle) and non-nation-state post-imperial (Burbank and Cooper) models and other unrealized alternatives. The article focuses on coloniality of memory critically engaging with various concepts including “dismembering” (Thiong’o), “mankurtism” (Aitmatov), “Myalism” (Brodber), “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg), “double critique” (Khatibi), “species memory” (Kaiser and Thiele), and the “third way” (Wynter). It sets the goal of tracing possible paths for rethinking of what it means to remember in a human way and what it takes to engender a global mnemonic transversal network of solidarity for refuturing.
This article exposes the extent of Russian cultural aggression: the looting of museums and appropriation of items of the Ukrainian museum foundation, the damage to and demolition of archaeological sites of Ukraine, the explosion of the Kakhovka dam and the consequences of this disaster for Ukrainian cultural heritage, and the cultural erasure of Crimean Tatars.
In this article the authors seek to analyze the difficult situation in which Orthodoxy finds itself in Ukraine. It shows that as a result of the Russian Federation’s military attack on sovereign Ukraine, inter-Orthodox relations, already complicated, have been further challenged. The authors investigate the factors that aggravate inter-Orthodox relations, their influence on world Orthodoxy, the reaction of Ukrainian citizens to confrontation in the religious sphere, and possible ways of overcoming inter- Orthodox confrontation.
Over the past decade, social networking platforms have become an important communication channel for protesters in autocratic countries. In August 2020 and January 2021, the messaging application Telegram and social media platform Tik-Tok became platforms for protest mobilization and coordination in Belarus and Russia respectively. This article applies previous research within social movements and democratization studies about the use of Facebook and Twitter to instigate and galvanize protests in autocratic countries in order to explore how protest mobilization on newly politicized platforms such as Telegram and TikTok is manifested. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,128 protest-related publications (posts) on Telegram’s channel NextaLive and 100 videos on TikTok. The conclusion provides an extended framework for analyzing political mobilization online and argues that social networking platforms can themselves be considered spaces that are commensurate with those of offline protest and not merely tools to stimulate democratic participation.
International Conference “Exploring the relation between antigender politics and democracy: the Baltic Sea region and beyond” held at Södertörn University on September 26–27, 2024. The conference brought together scholars, activists, and politicians to address the challenges of antigender politics in the Baltic sea region. Funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, it was a part of a Horizon Europe project: Co-Creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces Across Europe CCINDLE.
This year, 300 years have elapsed since the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, in what was then East Prussia.
Review article of Kassandra Larysa Luciuk, Making Ukrainian Canadians: Identity, Politics, and Power in Cold War Canada, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2021) xv+338 pages.