A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
The Polish art historian, critic, and curator Piotr Piotrowski passed away May 2015. He was the chair of the Modern Art History Department at Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznań, where he was also the director of the Institute of Art History from 1999 to 2008.
Read Charlotte Bydler’s In Memoriam here>>
Låt oss dö som hjältar: kvinnliga soldater i revolutionens Ryssland [Let us die as heroes: Female soldiers in the Russia of the Revolution and the Civil War] Per Enerud, Carlsson Bokförlag 2014, 275 pages.
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.
Viorela Ducu and Áron Telegdi-Csetri, Managing “Difference” in Eastern-European Transnational Families. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2016, 190 pages.
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.
Geir Hønneland, Russia and the Arctic. Environment, Identity and Security political challenges. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016, 205 pages; Tormod Heier og Anders Kjølberg (red.). Norge og Russland. Sikkerhets-politiske utfordringer i nordom-rådene. [Norway and Russia. Security Polices in the Northern Areas], Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2015, 208 pages.
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.
There are parallels in discussions about monuments in Ukraine and the USA. The reminder of the Soviet past (or in the American context, of the Confederacy) is an abject that is difficult to assimilate. On the one hand, the abject is our unwillingness to see the past and accept it; on the other hand, for those who associate themselves with this past, this is the threat of castration because through the negation of a given past a certain group is cast out from the space of representation. That is why it is questionable whether a monument can be inclusive at all. Which memory does the monument recall? Which past is castrated when a new monument is built? Which groups are fighting for recognition and representation? Which groups lose this right? These questions confront researchers and memory workers and are discussed in this essay.
The purpose of this paper is to focus attention on the Stūra Māja [Corner House] of Riga and how the building was used. I have also conducted interviews, with both the former Latvian KGB Chief Edmunds Johanson, as well as the former Latvian dissident Leo Hiršsons.
Although the primary interest of the OSA was the heritage of the Cold War and communism, it soon extended its interests to include human rights archives. The first was an archive on the Yugoslav wars, including documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Initially, interest in this archive was based on its relation to the aftermath of communism, but later it was realized that “it was a document of human rights”, and this subject was accepted as a part of the OSA’s key activity.
Analize – Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, New Series, Issue no. 7, 2016, The Romanian Society for Feminist Analyses AnA, 2016, 101 pages.