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Publications 📚
Coumel, Laurent. “A Paradoxical Triumph.” The rise and fall of Soviet academic environmentalism (1973–1991), Coming soon. link
Annotation
The last two decades of the Soviet Union were marked by the rise of an academic green movement, driven by technocratic environmentalism inspired by the thinking of geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii (Vernadsky), who died in 1945. Following the founding in 1973 by one of his disciples, Aleksandr Vinogradov, of a “Scientific Council for Problems of the Biosphere” within the USSR Academy of Sciences, the geologist Aleksandr Yanshin steered this institution and turned it into a nerve centre of ecological criticism in the 1980s. In 1986, he scored a symbolic victory with the suspension of the project to transfer water from Siberian and North Russian rivers to the Caspian and Central Asian regions (Perebroska), a decision taken by the new ruling team led by Mikhail Gorbachev. For a few years, this movement spearheaded some major ecological controversies of the Glasnost time. After 1989, however, its influence waned and it lost its ability to influence political life, as the political system was getting democratised. This relative failure can be explained by the inability of Soviet academic environmentalism to renew its repertoire of actions and adapt to the social and political changes.
Kesa, Katerina. “The Transnational Action of Baltic Independence Movements in the Ussr (1988–1991).” 1989 in the East, Coming soon. link
Annotation
This chapter explores how Baltic independence movements (mainly Popular Fronts) tried to contribute to the formation and structuring of similar movements in other Soviet republics in the late 1980s and into the beginning of the 1990s by “transferring” or disseminating ideas, practices, and/or actors. By investigating the means used to promote transnational mobilisation and its impact, we explore the extent to which the independence movements of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had both a direct influence on the advent of other Popular Fronts in the USSR and an indirect influence on creating the conditions for uncontrolled “contagion” of mobilisation in other republics. To understand Baltic transnational action, we will firstly analyse the stated intentions of the Baltic Popular Fronts, then study their repertoires of actions in what we describe as “transnational influence,” before lastly considering how Baltic action was perceived and received in other republics. Through the study of Baltic transnational action, this contribution seeks a more global understanding of the circulation of ideas and of informal networks in the USSR during this period.
Ross, Craig. Bronze Soldiers: Cultural Heritage as Weapons and Flashpoints in the Baltic States’ Hybrid Conflicts. Routledge, 30 March 2026. link
Annotation
This chapter examines the role of cultural heritage in hybrid warfare, using the Baltic States as a case study. It explores how cultural heritage, deeply tied to identity and memory, can be weaponised or serve as a tool of resistance. Drawing parallels from the Cold War, the study highlights how targeting heritage has long helped to undermine a population’s will and identity. Focusing on the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the chapter analyses events such as the Bronze Soldier incident in Estonia to illustrate how heritage can become a flashpoint in hybrid conflicts. The study uses interviews and museum observations to reveal key themes around the weaponisation of heritage, its communicative power, and its role in fostering resistance. The findings show how hybrid warfare tactics, such as disinformation and subversion, exploit heritage to sow division. Conversely, heritage can build resilience and national identity through symbols, traditions, and collective memory. This chapter calls for cultural intelligence to counter subversive actions and emphasises the need to protect tangible and intangible heritage. Linking Cold War strategies to current conflicts further highlights heritage’s significance in resisting and staving off modern threats to cultural and societal integrity.
Balčus, Zane. “Embodied Point of View: the Turn to Personal Expression in Late Soviet Baltic Documentary Cinema.” Eastern European Screen Studies, 8 Feb. 2026 link.
Abstract
A notable stylistic tendency that emerged in the post-1990s period of regained independence in the Baltic countries is a personal mode of filmmaking, in which directors construct narratives through subjective engagement and often appear on screen as characters in their own films. This phenomenon has been examined by regional scholars, yet the late Soviet period remains insufficiently explored from such perspective. In the Western context, the rise of personal and autobiographical filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s has been associated with growing identity crises and technological changes that enabled filmmakers to record themselves and question their own identities alongside broader social and political issues. In the Soviet documentary context, by contrast, the highly regulated production system and technological resources did not readily foster similar tendencies. Nevertheless, certain films reveal a more pronounced authorial presence, with filmmakers constructing narratives from a personal point of view and with their own voice, especially in the narratives of political domain. This article therefore seeks to identify early instances of participatory and performative approaches in documentary films at the late Soviet period in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that anticipated the later turn toward personal filmmaking.
Kārkla, Zita, Eva Eglāja-Kristsone. “Between Meadows and Metropolis: Emotional Geographies and Feminist Landscapes in Ivande Kaija’s Novel iedzimtais Grēks (1913).” Journal of Baltic Studies, 20 Jan. 2026 link.
Matulytė, Margarita. Kraštovaizdžio Semiozė Lietuvos Fotografijoje (landscape Semiosis in Lithuanian Photography). Išleido Lietuvos nacionalinis dailės muziejus, 2026. link
Annotation
Dr. Margarita Matulytė’s book is the first scientific work of this scope on the subject of landscape in Lithuanian photography. The study reveals the genesis of landscape semiosis—formed by the multifaceted communication between natural processes and human activity—and its visualization in photography. Photographers do not merely record the ever-changing “text” of the landscape; they create numerous interpretations that open cultural and ideological discourses. These interpretations provide a sense of geological, mythological, historical, and physical shifts in time, testing the symbolic meanings of the landscape against the scale of their own lives or the values of an era, while outlining the future perspectives of civilization. This interdisciplinary study is grounded in a broad approach across scientific fields and philosophical concepts: linguistic theory, humanistic geography, environmental protection, sociology, and art history and theory. The synthesis of knowledge from various fields provides a foundation for a complex and historical analysis of the evolution of the landscape photography genre. It reveals how the development of societal concepts regarding environmentalism and the landscape influenced the work of photographic artists, their values, and the diversity of their perspectives and voices.
Zelče, Vits. “Discourses About Dismantling the Monument to the Soviet Victory in Riga in the Public Media of Latvia.” (Non)Commemoration of the Heritage in Eastern Europe, Peter Lang, 2025. link
Martínez, Francisco. The Future of Hiding Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia’s Siberia, 2025. Open Access
Annotation
The Future of Hiding analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in Eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure’s reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area.
Annus, Epp. “Estonians’ European Imaginaries: the Soviet and Pre-soviet Legacy.” European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre, 2023. link
Broka-Lāce, Zenta. “What Did Archaeology Look Like for School Pupils in Soviet-occupied Latvia?.” Teaching the Past, Brepols. link
Annotation
Since the foundation of archaeology as a discipline, archaeologists have aimed to communicate proper information about the past to the wider public. For the most part, however, this dissemination of knowledge has been informal. The teaching of archaeology and of prehistory as part of an adopted national curriculum, meanwhile, has been largely ignored; while subjects such as the ‘Stone Age’ often feature in school curricula, the ways in which archaeology and prehistory are taught has often been disregarded.
This volume aims to fill a gap in our understanding of how archaeological knowledge is disseminated by examining the presence of archaeology and representations of the distant past in school education, particularly through the analysis of history textbooks. The contributors to this volume, drawn from different countries across Europe, here assess the teaching of archaeology and prehistory in their own countries in the light of national perspectives, and distinctive education policies. Covering topics such as the portrayal of prehistory, the use and manipulation of the past, the role of stereotype and myth, and the perceptions of archaeology as a discipline, the papers together shed a unique light on to the dissemination of the material past.
Conferences 📢
“Primitive and Noisy Music” in Late Socialist Period: Producing and Controlling Popular Music in the Soviet Union and Beyond
Dates: 2026-05-02 to 2026-05-03
CfP Deadline: 2006-03-08
Place: Riga, Latvia, Aleponija
Description: The multidisciplinary conference focuses on the functioning of popular music in the USSR during its last three decades. We are curious about what were the institutional formations and the transformation processes, as well as practices of production and consumption of popular music after the arrival of Western rock and roll, which coincided with the beginning of late socialism.
Website
Baltic Symposium: “1945 in the Baltic and Its Legacies” “Borders, History, World War II”
Dates: 2026-04-13
Place: Cambridge, UK, McCrum Lecture Theatre
Description: The end of the Second World War in the Baltic marked a complex and tragic turning point that had long term social, political, economic and cultural consequences. As Nazi Germany retreated, the Red Army (re)occupied the Baltic states, Poland, eastern Germany and parts of Finland. Locally, collaboration with the Nazis gave way to collaboration with the Soviets. In the underground, anti-Nazi resistance was superseded by anti-Soviet resistance. While ‘the Big Three’ celebrated victory, the iron curtain that they traced in their summits left the Soviet-occupied Baltic region face an abrupt and thorough sovietisation, marked by unprecedented social engineering, repressions, retributions and forced population transfers. For Finland, which managed to avoid the fate of its southern Baltic neighbours, 1945 meant fulfillment of conditions imposed by Moscow and its wartime allies, with war responsibility trials among them. After 1991, the newly reinterpreted historical memory of the events of 1945 became part and parcel of statehood and nationalism in the Baltic, shaping policies and attitudes towards each other and the other.
Website
New Journal Issues 📖
*as a journal, No. 10 (2025): “Spirit”, edited by Vaiva Grainytė.
Spirit as a Journal traverses various notions of the spirit: spirit as the opposite of physical reality, as the true self, vibe, charisma, attitude, or mood; spirit as a holy and/or outsider ghost. Feminist ecologies, devotion and queerness, the divine within the casual, and timeless archeologies are among the topics that will be explored by a constellation of contributing artists, researchers, poets, scholars, and writers. Shepherding this flock is guest editor Vaiva Grainytė – writer, playwright and poet, librettist and co-author of the Golden Lion-winning opera-performance Sun and Sea at the Venice Biennale (2019).
link
Festivals & Screenings 🎬
International Student Short Film Festival “easy to Be Young?”
Dates: 2026-03-12 to 2026-03-14
Place: Riga, Latvia, Splendid Palace
Full program
Website
Kino Pavasaris
Dates: 2026-03-09 to 2026-03-22
Place: Vilnius, Lithuania, Forum Cinemas, Pasaka, Skalvija, Apollo, Garsas, Arlekinas, Romuva and others
Website
Call for applications 📝
Baltic Sea Docs
Deadline: 2026-05-06
Apply
Residency
Baltic Shorts Residency 2026
BALTIC SHORTS RESIDENCY is an intensive script development residency for short films, dedicated to filmmakers from the Baltic countries. The program provides selected scriptwriters and directors with the opportunity to develop a new short film script in close collaboration with script consultant Anna Ciennik, in a focused working environment at the historic Trakų Vokė Manor in Vilnius.
Apply before 29th March
News 📰
On 21 February, LSM announced the winners of the annual Kilograms Kultūras awards. In the cinema category, director Dzintars Dreibergs was honored for his recent feature film Tīklā. TTT leģendas dzimšana. In the “Heritage” category, the award went to the publication Juris Podnieks. Diaries 1975–1981, edited by Agris Redovičs, as well as to the exhibition Podnieks’ Timespace at the Riga Film Museum. The full list of winners is available here.
Jānis Streičs—the Latvian film director and author of This Dangerous Balcony Door (1976), a symbol of the Soviet Stagnation era, and A Limousine the Colour of Midsummer’s Eve, a movie every Latvian has watched many times—has passed away at the age of 89.
Starting March 7, fans of Jānis Streičs worldwide can stream his film collection for free on the films.lv portal.
Estonian cinema has lost one of its most influential figures. Director and screenwriter Peeter Simm passed away on March 12 after a long illness.
According to the Lithuania Film Centre, in 2025 film productions using the Film Tax Incentive received €25.6 million in investments from Lithuanian companies. This amount was nearly 42% higher than in 2024 and almost 22% higher than in 2023, which had previously been the most successful year to date.
The 6th International Documentary Film Festival IDFF Artdocfest/Riga has concluded and announced the winners of its two competition programmes — Baltic Focus and Artdocfest OPEN.
The Baltic Focus Grand Prix, the HERZ Award, was awarded to “Lagoon” by director Šarūnas Bartas, while the main prize of the Artdocfest OPEN competition went to “Memory” by director Vladlena Sandu.
More about the awards
Quick Links 🔗
Latvian National Film Award “Lielais Kristaps — 2025” winners announced Traditional LB list of all nominees from Dita