The book lovers, collectors, and dealers of the siege were moving antiquarian books on strollers and sleds, as they had done with dead bodies several months earlier, thus reorganizing the devastated spaces of the changed city. From the “vacant” apartments of missing people, books that materially represented material and symbolic values of the past were running through — and up against — a new reality, a contact or collision that engendered new forms of inquiry and of collaboration between past and present
Essay by
Polina Barskova
November 21, 2019
This article will introduce the term “pribaltification”, designating the tendencies in the Soviet Union and Russia to imagine and represent the Soviet Baltic republics – and later the independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – as a largely uniform political and cultural entity, and to significantly blur the cultural and linguistic distinctions between the natives of these republics/countries. Analyzing the narrative and semiotic systems that underpin design and production strategies in an audio-visual text of a Russian television serial Gastrolery [Guest Performers], I will demonstrate that representations/metageographies of Lithuania and Lithuanians articulated in the film closely align with the principle of “pribaltification”. Thus, an image of Lithuania and Lithuanians appears to be employed synecdochically, whereby one specific state embodies onscreen all three Baltic countries as a whole. I will also suggest that “pribaltification” in Gastrolery may not be driven exclusively by popular Russian metageographies of the Baltic States. Thus, analysis of the serial may make it possible to observe traces of the Russian state’s geopolitical discourse on the Baltic States.
By
Dzmitry Pravatorau
November 21, 2019
Negotiating Imperial Rule. Colonists and Marriage in the Nine-teenth-Century Black Sea Steppe Julia Malitska, Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations 135, Stockholm 2017, 392 pages.
By
Susanna Rabow-Edling
June 19, 2019
Gulag Memories. The re-discovery and com-memoration of Russia’s repressive past, Zuzanna Bogumil New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books 2018. 302 pages.
By
Tomas Sniegon
June 19, 2019
This paper analyzes Soviet and Russian spy films with respect to maintaining and transmitting memories of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) in popular culture. The new Russian post-Soviet cinema (after the 2000s) about the “war spies” is considered not only with regard to its entertainment and ideological functions, but also with regard to its function as a “post-memory” of the traumatic experiences of the war and the Nazi occupation. The new Russian cinema about espionage and spies reinterprets the issues of dependent people, Stalinist repressions, and traumatic memories that were absent in Soviet cinema.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
June 17, 2019
“Postsocialist Revolutions of Intimacy: Sexuality, Rights and Backlash”, Workshop October 1–2, 2018. The workshop was organized by CBEES, Centre for […]
By
Yulia Gradskova
March 7, 2019
What the symposium emphasized was the processes that led to the emergence of the cultural techniques and institutions as well as the conceptual apparatus to deal in practice with the suddenly highly desired Russian cultural heritage. Another focus was on the reception of the Western tradition by the Russian educated society, which took place in parallel with, and sometimes conceptually intertwined with, the re-opening of the Russian tradition.
By
Anna Kharkina
March 7, 2019
After announcing her presidential campaign in October 2017, Sobchak, perhaps unsurprisingly, was represented in mainstream Russian media as an “unruly woman”19 who was transgressing the existing patriarchal norms and rules, and she was explicitly reminded by male journalists and TV anchors of the “real” and “traditional” role a woman is supposed to play.
Essay by
Liudmila Voronova and Emil Edenborg
March 7, 2019
Professor Olga Kryshtanovskaya comments on the current situation around the future presidential successor in Russia and the potential political upheavals connected to this issue. Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a professor at the State University of Management in Moscow and a leading Russian sociologist with a specialization in elite research
By
Ilja Viktorov
March 7, 2019
Gleb Yarovoy is a professor of political science and is currently based at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. His dealings over the years with his former main employer, Petrozavodsk State University, says something about the situation for Russian academics of today.
By
Påhl Ruin
March 5, 2019
Special Issue 2023, 3 Youth and authoritarian
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.