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Category: Issue 6 2025

Issue 6 2025: Remembering yesterday, today

Re-examining the unsettled memory of communism.

December 8, 2025 - New Eastern Europe

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

Looking for heroes. Experiences in Latvia

Latvia’s understanding of heroism has been rewritten repeatedly over the past century, shaped in turn by Soviet occupation, the struggle for independence and the challenges of democratic renewal. Each era constructed its heroes – some imposed, some rediscovered, others newly recognised. Today, debates over memory, justice and national identity continue to determine which lives are honoured and which stories are told.

December 8, 2025 - Vita Zelče

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

Poland’s borderland on fire

Russian hybrid attacks are meant to increasingly disrupt our everyday reality. When positioned together, these incidents form a troubling pattern: disinformation campaigns, foreign intelligence groups, acts of sabotage, explosives discovered in cemeteries or mailed in envelopes – all contributing to a general state of anxiety and heightened alert. Strengthening preparedness to meet security challenges is one of the most reliable ways to mitigate such concerns.

December 8, 2025 - Jan Farfał

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