A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 1-2: Download.
47 articles tagged with communism were found.
The increasing investment in and emphasis on ideological and political education at Chinese universities, and statements, including by Xi Jinping himself, and other policies related to youth and higher education, reveals a growing concern about youth. This article provides a brief overview of developments and policies affecting Chinese youth, including the emergence of new values among them.
Bakom och bortom järnridån. De sovjetiska åren och frigörelsen i Baltikum och Ukraina [Behind the Iron Curtain and Beyond. The Soviet Years and the Emancipation in the Baltics and Ukraine]. Li Bennich Björkman. Stockholm: Appell förlag. 465 pages
This text gives a glimpse of a hitherto unknown design discourse during the Cold War – from both sides of the Iron Curtain – by exploring the 1975 Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), held in Moscow. Sweden sent a big delegation to Russia. More than forty of the small country’s top designers and influencers participated, which was more than twice as many as usual to these international design congresses. Thanks to reactions published about the events in journals on design in Sweden and in the Soviet Union, archival material, and the author’s own interviews with the delegates from Sweden who participated in Moscow, as well as one-off exclusive backstage witnesses from the local staff of the host organization during the ongoing congress, Moscow 1975 is experienced through the eyes of contemporary witnesses. The essay gives new insights into the world congress in design and illustrates the international atmosphere during the Cold War.
The article summarizes the main findings of a socio-historical study devoted to the question of the political and social handling of “paranormal,” “parapsychological” or “occult” knowledge, experiences, and practices in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The “scientific worldview” derived from Marxism-Leninism and propagated in the GDR was essentially a scientistic conception of reality. Against this background, all occult or paranormal topics were rigorously rejected in the public discourse of the GDR.
The roundtable “Inheriting the Pandora Box: Environmental Impacts of the Soviet Industrial Legacy”, explored the relevance of the Soviet environmental legacy for the way we as a society understand our relationship to the environment today.
The narrative in this article is based on a reconstruction of my personal curatorial experience while working on the exhibition “A Difficult Age: Vilnius, 1939–1949”. The exhibition’s chronological framework – 1939 to 1949 – was established with a focus on historical realities and aimed to frame the narrative of the guest exhibition. The public knowledge of the history of multi-national Vilnius is full of conscious and unconscious omissions, in large part caused by oblivion, but no less by the unwillingness to remember, ignorance, and the refusal to know or even fear of finding out. The narrative based on the history of visual art and artists’ lives is a way to bring up controversial topics and open new perspectives.
The Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, arranges a series of multidisciplinary roundtables during 2021 with a focus on the 30 years period since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Tomas Venclova in a conversation with Stefan Ingvarsson on literature, Lithuania, and being a historical optimist in Europe today.
Tourist in Utopia. Travels in Ideology and the Albanian landscape [Turist i Utopia, reiser i ideologi og albansk landskap], Rune Ottosen (1950-). 336 pages.
In his contribution to the volume Russian Literature since 1991 entitled “The Postmodernist Novel”, Mark Lipovetsky makes the now rather widespread claim that the Russian postmodernist post-Soviet novel represents a break with the totalizing tendencies of the socialist realist novel and opens for new ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world. In this paper this claim is critically examined on the basis of a reading of Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (transl. as Buddha’s Little Finger or Clay Machine Gun against the backdrop of contemporary debates about realism and simulacra. Here it is argued that the Soviet myth of Chapaev lends itself to the totality of the private myth.
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.