This article is a special addition to New Eastern Europe Issue 2 (VII) / 2013: Painful Past, Fragile Future. To read Dorota and Tomasz Majkowska-Szajer's article on Yugonostalgia please download the whole issue from our mobile application. The term Yugosphere emerged relatively recently, and was first used by a British journalist, Tim Judah, in 2009 […]

On April 7th 2013,  the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, signed a decree (number 197/137) pardoning six prisoners, including the former Minister of the Interior, Yuri Lutsenko and the former Minister of Environment, Georgiy Filipchuk. The decision came after the country's Ombudsman, Valeriya Lutkovska, petitioned for their release. On Saturday (April 6th) the presidential committee for […]

Yuri Lutsenko is free again. This is the first positive signal we have had from Kyiv in recent months. And yet some of Viktor Yanukovych’s critics will not sleep calmly once they read the commentaries that have been printed in the West regarding this event. “Don’t they understand anything?” they will ask, irritated. Yanukovych’s administration […]

It had all started with a joke. “Some snow yet. Hopefully, there will be less in the summer,” said a friend of mine on March 16th, looking at a snow cloud over Kyiv on a web forecast. “Well, it happens,” I thought, knowing there had been something in the media about a snow storm in […]

It had all started with a joke. “Some snow yet. Hopefully, there will be less in the summer,” said a friend of mine on March 16th, looking at a snow cloud over Kyiv on a web forecast. “Well, it happens,” I thought, knowing there had been something in the media about a snow storm in […]

This article is a special addition to New Eastern Europe Issue 2 (VII) / 2013: Painful Past, Fragile Future. To read another article related to this topic, please download the whole issue from our mobile application. For several months, Croatia has been straddling the past and the future. On the threshold of European Union, this […]

This article is a special addition to New Eastern Europe Issue 2 (VII) / 2013: Painful Past, Fragile Future. To read another article related to this topic, please download the whole issue from our mobile application. For several months, Croatia has been straddling the past and the future. On the threshold of European Union, this […]

Easter celebrations in Catholic and orthodox countries are often extremely fascinating with respect to their cultural heritage. They remain less commercial than those at Christmas, and much more mysterious; Easter is connected to death and the resurrection, two taboo concepts even in the most secularised societies. Countries which share a strong Catholic character become the […]

Easter celebrations in Catholic and orthodox countries are often extremely fascinating with respect to their cultural heritage. They remain less commercial than those at Christmas, and much more mysterious; Easter is connected to death and the resurrection, two taboo concepts even in the most secularised societies. Countries which share a strong Catholic character become the […]

Wave 6, the latest edition of social media research by Universal McCann media agency, highlights an interesting difference in various nations’ attitudes towards privacy in social networking sites. The general tendency appears to be incompatible with common wisdom. Although there is much concern about “authoritarian” (or at least not fully democratic) governments using social media […]

Orthodox churches are scrawled into their body, as are swastikas, yet the monochrome portraits or Russian prisoners look serene. “Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the soviet union,” Stalin once said; and as the collection's title it is laced with as much irony. There is little beauty in London's Saatchi Gallery now and any […]

On February 13th 2013, Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat announced that his Liberal-Democratic Party of Moldova (LDPM) was withdrawing from the 2010 coalition agreement from which the pro-Western Alliance for European Integration (AIE) was established. This decision was a surprise for many analysts and journalists writing on Moldovan issues, as well as for Chișinău’s partners. […]