A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Researcher at the Institution for Slavic Languages at Stockholm University. Research interests: the Russian poet Marina Tsvetajeva and Lidija Ginzburg.
A number of representatives of the opposition in Belarus participated in a seminar “The Way Forward for Belarus”. The seminar addressed such issues as the difficulties experienced by the opposition in working for democracy and human rights in Belarus and what the outside world can do to support their work.
The Finnish Parliamentary elections of, which were held on April 17, resulted in a dramatic victory for a populist party, the True Finns, which increased its representation from 4 to 39 seats, and a big defeat for the Center Party of Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi. The leader of the National Coalition Party, which despite losing six seats, Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen is expected to form the new government.
Ragnvald Blix was both a cartoonist and author. Blix declared his manifesto: “To be a good cartoonist, you have to be cold as ice in the face of all ideas and all persons. Sympathies and antipathies do not exist. First and foremost, you must have no respect for authority, tradition, or anything else in Heaven or on Earth, or even for anything in Hell.” Blix continued ridiculing fascism, Nazism, and communism in his satirical cartoons.
Balkan experts attending the symposium “Memory and Manipulation: Religion as Politics in the Balkans", agree that the war was directed from the top, and that “top-down” is the key to understanding how the war began in the region.
Elske Rosenfeld was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. She realized that this was the end of the critical discourse that the citizens’ movements had brought to life in the GDR. When the 1990 election results were announced in the media, she cried. Today the topic of 1989 is her professional project as an artist.
Kurapaty and Khatyn: two places along the same road, the number three highway from Minsk to Vitebsk. Two places that are about history. But also about how history is used.
Russian financial markets have been a completely new element in the Russian post-Soviet economy. The level of development and the character of the financial market institutions in this country can tell us much about whether Russia will succeed or fail in evolving towards a well-functioning market economy. Professor Alexandr Abramov from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow is one of Russia’s leading experts on Russian financial markets. Ilja Viktorov from CBEES met him in Moscow to pose some questions concerning developments in the field.
Professor of mathematics, Ulf Persson, visits the legandary Steklov Institute, the flagship of pure mathematics in the Soviet Union. Russian mathematicians have long inspired awe among their Western colleagues. A second-rate Soviet mathematician was usually considered first-rate by Western standards.
Peter Weiss' descriptions of the agony and torture associated with the genocide against the Jews, of the survivors’ experiences of violence, death and war, contribute substantially to breaching the taboo of the Shoah, and hence to coming to terms with the past. By invoking the dead through memory, making them speak and thus overcome death in his works, the author confronts his guilt complex and mortal fear.
The author suggests that Platonov’s Chevengur is an attempt to describe the relationships between utopia and ideology, as seen through the eyes of a participant observer.