This article examines how culture functions as a strategic instrument of recolonial power in the post-Soviet space, where imperial legacies, Soviet infrastructures, and contemporary authoritarian practices converge. Integrating postcolonial, decolonial, and recolonial frameworks, the study analyzes three emblematic cases – Gergiev’s 2008 Tskhinvali concert, the 2014 opera Crimea, and Sandro Sulaberidze’s 2023 protest in Tbilisi – to show how artistic production legitimizes territorial conquest, naturalizes hierarchical authority, and disciplines cultural autonomy.1 The article argues that recolonization today operates not only through military force but through performative, affective, and institutional mechanisms that render domination intelligible, emotionally resonant, and politically durable.
By
Nana Sharikadze
December 18, 2025
The events in Ukraine prompted the countries of East-Central Europe to review their approach to the monuments and collective memory signs that have remained from the Soviet era. Although the region regards the dismantling of Soviet monuments in relation to de-Sovietization that started around 1990, the removal of the remaining Soviet artefacts from public spaces was also related to the international situation in 2013–2014 and 2022, almost thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the dominant research of de-Sovietization focus on the elimination of Soviet monuments, i.e. by nature, a negative aspect of de-Sovietization based on the removal and dismantling of monuments, the article presents the concept of positive de-Sovietization based on the case analysis of Lithuanian monuments. The de-Sovietization process is considered dual: the removal of Soviet monuments is accompanied by the construction of the new ones establishing a new historical narrative and state’s identity. It can be defined as a positive aspect of de-Sovietization that makes its implementation complete.
By
Viktorija Rimaitė-Beržiūnienė
September 23, 2025
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.
By
Madina Tlostanova
December 10, 2024
I would like to offer this remnant of a futuristic halo of the Soviet space program as a possible way to comprehend why April 12 never managed to become a full-fledged fantasy world of what Boym terms “restorative nostalgia” like May 9th, and to see which alternative ways to understand nostalgia it may open up.
Essay by
Roman Privalov
June 22, 2022
In this article the author, a multidisciplinary artist, reflects on the process of making the video project Red, 2015,
(21:45 min.) and a sound installation The White Wall, 2015 (9:30 min.) about post-Soviet times and transgenerational silence about experiences with the Soviet Union.
By
Kati Roover
February 15, 2021
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.
By
Irina Sandomirskaja
January 18, 2021
Although there have been some attempts to “add men” into gender analysis, so far these attempts have primarily been made in order to balance the gender perspective and demonstrate that gender is not only about women. Critical analysis and deconstruction of men’s privileges has not yet taken place. Pro-feminist men and masculinities studies in Ukraine is emerging under rather problematic anti-feminist ideological conditions.
By
Tetyana Bureychak
May 13, 2015
The stereotype of the Soviet man was destroyed in the early 1990s. New forms of culture, such as comic books, tried to invent new male models. In 1991, a group of authors started to publish the comic magazine Veles, in which patterns of male identity were constructed. The comics expressed a form of sublimation of post war and post Soviet trauma.
By
Daria Dmitrieva
May 13, 2015
The images of the leaders in the widely distributed press played an important part in shaping the ideological platform in the Soviet Union, including the regulation, control and support of a certain gender order.
By
Ekaterina Vikulina
May 13, 2015
The article considers the centrifugal trajectories of the postsocialist world in the direction of the secondary Europe and the global South as seen through the prism of gender relations and at the intersection of the postsocialist and the postcolonial. The author focuses on the importance and specificity of geopolitical positioning in postsocialist gendered discourses using Central Asia and the Caucasus as graphic examples.
Essay by
Madina Tlostanova
May 12, 2015
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.