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Never again meets a new war

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced Germany into a reckoning that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago. Warnings that Moscow could attack another European country before the end of the decade have pushed Berlin into its most ambitious rearmament effort since the Cold War. However, this shift has not come without resistance.

February 23, 2026 - Isabelle de Pommereau

Latin Europe

What a future European culture will look like remains an open question. What matters here is the insistence that such a culture must exist at all. Europe should be understood as an idea and a system of symbols, not as a race or a nation. For this to be possible, Europe requires a renewed sense of continuity.

February 23, 2026 - David Hallbeck

Goodbye communism

The pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and Eastern Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the so-called Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains strongly negative.

December 8, 2025 - Kinga Gajda Michał Kuryłowicz

From revolution to souvenirs

The selling of communism across Central and Eastern Europe reveals more than the region’s ingenuity in repurposing its past – it exposes how memory itself has become a currency in the post-socialist era. This marketplace of memory is not merely a tourist trend – it is a mirror of broader cultural transformations.

December 8, 2025 - Jovana Janinovic

Sensory memory and creating a community of memory

The feeling of coarse toilet paper bought after hours in a queue, the scent of sweat on a train to a Bulgarian summer camp, the fizz of Soviet shampanskoye igristoye on New Year’s Eve – these are not just fragments of nostalgia. They are traces of a collective past, an embodied memory of life under communism that continues to shape how a generation remembers itself.

December 8, 2025 - Magdalena Banaszkiewicz

The memory of forgetting

After the end of communist rule, many societies sought recognition of their own wartime suffering as part of Europe’s shared memory. Although the Allies are often portrayed as a united front against Nazism, the newer member states of the European Union have pressed for acknowledgement of the oppression they experienced under both Nazism and Stalinism, arguing that these histories should be remembered on equal terms.

December 8, 2025 - Dymitr Romanowski

Rediscovering the People’s Poland

In Poland, after the initial rejection of the legacy of the Polish People’s Republic, a gradual re-evaluation of the communist period has begun. Certain elements of its social reality – those that gave it a distinct local colour and a sense of belonging – came to be reassessed and, in some cases, appreciated.

December 8, 2025 - Elżbieta Żak

The gradual “forgetting” of communism in Poland

Featured in communist times as a symbol of abductions, the black Volga has lost its aura now. Today few young Poles even recognize the car or recall the urban legends that once linked it to the KGB or security services. Stripped of these political connotations, it has survived mainly as a retro curiosity – an object of aesthetic nostalgia rather than historical unease.

December 8, 2025 - Aleksander Niepokój Michał Kuryłowicz

Recovering Moldovan identity through literature

Contemporary Moldovan novels offer fresh perspectives on how linguistic, social and ethnic identities are formed in the shadow of the Soviet past. Written in tones that range from tragic to ironic, they recreate the atmosphere of Soviet Moldova with striking honesty, exposing the depth of the identity crisis it produced. Taken together, these works become acts of memory and recovery, reaching far beyond the boundaries of fiction.

December 8, 2025 - Oxana Gherman

Lithuania’s memory of communism

The opening of Grūtas Park, an open-air museum with statues from the Soviet era, in 2001 provoked considerable public debate, with leading politicians expressing both strong support and firm opposition. The arguments on both sides revealed a deeper societal divide over how to evaluate – and what to do with – the heritage of communism.

December 8, 2025 - Paweł Plichta

Russia’s religion of victory

In Russia, the May 9th Victory Day celebration has become a disciplinary date. It enforces participation in the cult and delineates the boundaries of loyalty to the state. Outside, the myth of Soviet victory of fascism has become one of the central instruments of Russian foreign policy.

December 8, 2025 - Bartłomiej Brążkiewicz

Shifting ground in Russia–Azerbaijan relations

The tensions between Moscow and Baku seemed to thaw in Dushanbe this past October, as Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev met for the first time since the catastrophic downing of an Azerbaijani passenger jet last year. In a rare gesture, Putin offered a guarded apology – a move seen as an attempt to halt months of escalating hostility. Yet, beneath the optics of reconciliation, the meeting revealed the limits of the two leaders’ once pragmatic relationship.

December 8, 2025 - Murad Muradov

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