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Abstract
The history of communist crimes in the USSR has been well elucidated. Nonetheless, a still under-investigated group of archival materials are files of the Soviet counterintelligence. One of its tasks was the surveillance of the foreign diplomats and consular representatives operating on the territory of the USRR. Even after the fall of the USSR and the opening of the archives, access to the materials of the communist special services was and is very difficult. The situation changed not very long ago. Open access to materials of the former GPU/NKVD/KGB was possible in Ukraine. In the Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv is a file continuing materials from the surveillance by the Soviet counterintelligence of the Polish diplomat Jan Karszo-Siedlewski, who was among others the head of the Polish consulates general in Kharkiv and Kyiv in 1932–1937. In this way, material that had been entirely inaccessible for researchers will be discussed in the present article.
Abstract
This essay examines the life and career of famed Russian geologist, geographer, and academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences V. A. Obruchev. By emphasizing Obruchev’s commitment to popular enlightenment within and beyond his scientific disciplines, a clearer portrait of Obruchev’s lasting influence in Soviet science and literature emerges. Over the course of his career, Obruchev devised an original model of public science, one that renegotiated the traditional boundaries between science fiction, popular science, and academic discourse. As a result, Obruchev’s scientific research granted form and function to his popular fiction and his fiction, in turn, provided a space to explore the possibilities of scientific hypotheses and promote the active research of the scientific phenomena Obruchev considered significant. By the time of Obruchev’s death in 1956, other natural scientists, especially geoscientists, and science fiction authors had coopted Obruchev’s approach to popular enlightenment, cementing his legacy.
Abstract
While the narratives of democratization and Europeanization had significant mobilizing potential in the Western Balkans during the 1990s and early 2000s, their relevance has been largely undermined by recent political developments in the region and growing crises of solidarity within the EU. This article offers a novel perspective for understanding the prospects of an EU future for the Western Balkans, through a discussion of the ideas and practices of political solidarity. It introduces the need to differentiate between reactive and institutional solidarity, and argues that institutional solidarity has a unique potential to mobilize the attention and commitment of citizens by offering a projection of a durable and sustainable political community organized around the principles of social justice and equality. Operationalizing this has become a necessary precondition not only for the “European future” of the Western Balkans but also for the future of the European project itself.
Abstract
Since 2015, the mobilization of refugee and migrant populations towards the European Union has at times monopolised public debate, and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has put fundamental European values, such as solidarity, to the test. In this article, the authors focus on Greece with the aim of examining the extent to which manifestations of discriminatory discourses crop up in the discussion of the ‘refugee crisis’ in two mainstream news portals (i.e., Próto Théma and Efimerída ton Syntaktón) with different ideological orientations (i.e., center-right vs. center-left, respectively). In doing so, the authors specifically focus on the framing of the EU and its institutions as main actors in the management of the situation, showcasing how the discursive emergence of discriminatory attitudes in the context of the mainstream media discussing EU policy forms a solid argumentative basis on which European solidarity is continuously challenged.
Abstract
This article explores representations of European solidarity in the aftermath of crisis-like events between 2007 and 2017 in the Croatian and Serbian broadsheet press, as well as their resonance with the discursive construction of Europe and Europeanisation. In order to achieve this goal, corpus-based discourse analysis is performed over a large collection of ca. 20,000 articles, originating in four newspapers. The results demonstrate that discourses on European solidarity rose to particular prominence in 2008–2009, 2011–2013, and 2015. This constitutes a dialectical relation with discourses on crises: the global financial crisis, European debt crisis, and migration crisis – especially the latter – redefined the notion of European solidarity, reflected in Croatian and Serbian discourses as a value promoted by the EU core and related mostly to the EU members. In Serbia, the solidarity discourses were of particular local importance during the first phase of the global financial crisis, coinciding with the country’s application for the EU candidacy, and later losing significance. In Croatia, the notion of European solidarity seems to become more relevant for domestic actors after the 2013 EU accession.
Abstract
This article investigates how the idea of European solidarity and the vision of Europe changed over time amongst Italian groups and individuals engaged in solidarity actions in support of Internally Displaced Persons (idp s) and refugees in the Western Balkans in the 1990s and 2020s. By means of document analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews, the article shows that individuals partaking in solidarity initiatives framed their action as European grassroots solidarity, enacted to replace the institutional solidarity that the EU failed to offer. While solidarity groups in the 1990s saw the EU-in-the-making as alternative to the power politics of member states worsening the conflicts in the region, those mobilising in the 2020s expressed a more critical and disenchanted vision characterised by rage, disillusionment, and disappointment towards an EU perceived as having betrayed its ideal foundations while dealing with migration along the Balkan route.