190 articles tagged with russia were found.
Despite the repressions against civil society in Russia, the independent environmental movement has managed to adapt and survive. The environmental agenda in Russia remains important for the people, for local politicians, and for authorities. These factors lay the groundwork for a potential mobilization, politicization, and demand for system change. To enact this transformation, however, the author argues that professional environmentalists need to combine forces with grassroots protestors and embrace a broader socio-economic and intersectional agenda.
Essay by
Vitaly Servetnik
May 29, 2026
This essay examines the methodological, ethical, and safety challenges of researching civil society and activism in Russia after 2022. Drawing on recent fieldwork experience, we discuss the growing importance of ethnographic engagement, heightened risks for researchers and interlocutors, challenges of trust-building, anonymization, and blurred boundaries between analysis and advocacy. We argue that these conditions reshape both fieldwork practices and knowledge production, raising broader questions about the future of qualitative research in authoritarian contexts.
Essay by
Elisa Marin and Oliver Skye
May 29, 2026
Baltic Worlds’ Special issue “Civic Activism in Russia” offers a unique glimpse into the Russian civil society shortly before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the authors of the issue observe, the impact of the war has made civil society extremely complex and transnational.
To my knowledge, it is one of the first attempts to examine Russian civil society from within.
Essay by
Nadezda Petrusenko
May 29, 2026
Filming from under a history in erasure: Jessica Gorter’s documentary films about Russia’s memory and counter-memory.
By
Irina Sandomirskaja, Ramona Rat and Payam Masarrat
December 18, 2025
The international conference “Russia Through the Eyes of Its Neighbours: The Ongoing War and Regional Security” which was held in Stockholm on September 18–19, 2025, brought together leading scholars and policy experts from across Europe, providing a platform to assess how Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine continues to reshape the geopolitical and security landscape of the region.
By
Victoria Leukavets and Joakim Ekman
December 9, 2025
This article is a linguistic exploration of the lyrics and selected social media posts of nine contemporary rappers from Ukraine, Russia, and Germany, all of whom are of Ukrainian descent. The selection of these artists is based not only on their ethnic background but also on their considerable popularity and cultural influence within their respective countries. The primary objective of this study is to examine the pragmatic aspects of their lyrics and linguistic behavior, with particular attention to potential instances of language shift or code-switching, which can be socio-politically motivated. Additionally, the article explores the role these artists play in the sociopolitical landscape shaped by Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Given that rap has emerged as one of the most dynamic genres in global mainstream music, it is imperative to analyze the messages conveyed in its lyrics, as they now reach a significantly broader audience compared to the genre’s early decades (1970s–1990s). Many of these musicians have attained the status of opinion leaders, amplifying their sociopolitical influence. Within the broader context of East Slavic linguistic dynamics, the choice of language – regardless of its pragmatic function – can itself serve as a potent political statement.
By
Aleksej Tikhonov
October 23, 2025
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 has exacerbated Russian nationalism, as reflected in popular music and its reception on digital media. This article explores the role of gender and sexuality in formulating and negotiating ideas about the Russian nation since the start of the full-scale invasion, focusing on the circulation and reception of the songs and music videos by the Russian singers Shaman and Tatiana Kurtukova. Both performers occupy a significant place within a broader landscape of Russian popular music and are popular on social media platforms, where users generate content that features their songs. The analysis focuses on the ways (dis)identifications with Russianness in and through popular music are performed and highlights popular music’s symbolic capacity to naturalize normative ideas about gender and sexuality as well as the war in Ukraine.
By
Kirill Polkov
October 23, 2025
How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.
By
Anna Schwenck and Anastasia Bondarenko
October 23, 2025
The short-lived apex of journalistic freedom that took place after Perestroika in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been followed by setbacks and stagnation of press freedom, in particular since Putin’s accession to power in 2000. Despite this, qualitative text analysis of commentary articles in some of the most important current Russian news sites strongly indicates that during 2008–2018, readers of news sites were increasingly addressed as active and knowledgeable citizens. Four case studies are examined to cast light on the period, using the following methods: focusing on argumentation analysis, exploring whether arguments are valid, and the means of persuasionused. The findings imply that a number of Russian Internet outlets have strengthened their role as advocates of the Fourth Estate. The results further indicate a sharp distinction between news sites utilizing traditional Western journalistic devices, and those employing a traditional Russian/Soviet journalistic approach. Thus, the social roles of the audiences were to a certain extent reinforced during the period investigated, 2008–2018.
By
Rutger von Seth
September 23, 2025
This article argues for the relevance of new materialist theories and onto-epistemologies in understanding the workings of political status. The issue of political status is interrogated at the confluence of the university’s status, the status of the Russian state through references to its “glorious” and “rich” history, and the materialities of the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg. More specifically, I analyze how the spatio-temporal position of universities within the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg plays out as a status-enhancing or undermining mechanism. The analysis in this article traverses three sites: St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture, and European University in St. Petersburg. The universities appear to be embedded within the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg, which speaks to both the universities’ status and, more importantly, the idea of the state that lives in and through them, through the effects of beauty, glory, and rich history. However, while material durability allows the past to be actualized in the present, materialities are also subject to decay over time, leading to physical processes of deterioration and downgrading. This decay acts as a status undermining mechanism.
By
Iuliia Gataulina
April 16, 2025
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.