Search results for "World war i"
showing 10 items of 132 documents
Archive Photography That Forms a Personal and Collective Memory
2021
Personal and family albums created by Latvians in the period from 1939 until the 1950s are placed in a wider social and historical perspective by analyzing its content, as well as the individual intent to create it. This work explores photography album as a tool to organize memories and how historical, personal photography albums serve and interact as evidence of private as well as a public past. The research tries to prove the historical authenticity in two personal albums created by Latvians during the Second World War and the following years – a visual diary illustrating the imprisonment in the Soviet working camp in Siberia and a family album memorializing the way and life of the Latvia…
Forbidden and sublime forest landscapes: narrated experiences of Latvian national partisan women after World War II
2015
At the beginning of the Cold War, tens of thousands of Baltic people headed for the forests. It was the largest and longest such experience of human and forest interaction in the history of the three Baltic countries. The forest was turned into a political concept and had abruptly become a doubly sensitive zone: to the authorities it was a space of revolt subject to their control; to the locals, the forests were transformed into sites of both resistance and shelter when life was endangered. Based on recorded life story interviews, this article examines how women experienced the changes in their native landscapes after World War II in the occupied Baltic states, and what it meant for them to…
The Adaptation of an Ethnic Minority in Finland in the 1940s and 1950s: Orthodox displaced persons and the Lutheran indigenous population
2013
This article examines the imposed adaptation of Orthodox Finns, who were evacuated from territories ceded to the Soviet Union during the Second World War in the areas where they were settled. It elucidates both the settlement measures taken by the Finnish authorities and the unofficial forms of control, such as labelling and other discriminatory practices, exercised by the local populations. By controlling the behaviour of the displaced persons, the original inhabitants were able to make the newcomers conform to the values, norms and habits of the Lutheran community at both local and national levels.
Mortal threat: Latvian Jews at the dawn of Nazi occupation
2018
In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia's Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual ag…
Marriage Guidance, Women and the Problem(s) of Returning Soldiers in Finland, 1944-1946
2017
When former military chaplains began to give marital guidance to troubled couples after the end of hostilities with the Soviet Union (1941–1944) in Finland, new information about the causes and experiences of marital problems and divorces emerged during guidance sessions. Even lengthy marriages were seen to be burdened due to the stress of reunion and men’s wartime infidelity, increased inclination to drinking and aggressive behaviour. The article discusses the meaning and construction of marital expectations with respect to the development of post-war marital dissolution, and argues that wives in particular tried to adjust their marital expectations in accordance with the general developme…
The fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy at the moment when Prussianism fell
2019
The Finnish case is in many ways illustrative of the complexities of democratisation after World War I. Finland found itself at the nexus of a Swedish constitutional tradition, legalism and ideological controversies adopted from Imperial Germany, the radicalised Russian Revolution, and Western parliamentary democracy. After having been a model for reformers demanding women’s suffrage, for instance, the country found itself in autumn 1918 going in the opposite direction to almost all other European countries. This article analyses the fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy then, contrasting it with longer-term trends supportive of democratisation. ‘Democracy’ had been the goal for mos…
Civil Society, Corruption and Ethnic Relations
2015
In 2007 the Estonian government began to relocate a highly contentious Soviet era war memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a nearby military cemetery. The ‘Bronze Soldier’ was erected in 1947 to honour the memory of the fallen Soviet soldiers who had fought in the battles that liberated Tallinn from German forces during the Second World War. At that time it was known as the ‘Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn’. An eternal flame was added in 1964. Following independence, Estonian authorities rededicated it to all soldiers who had died during the war and dismantled the eternal flame in an attempt to depoliticise the memorial. For ethnic Estonians, however, it remained an acrimonious symb…
Vēsture: Latvijas Universitātes Žurnāls, 3
2017
https://doi.org/10.22364/luzv.3.2017
Zanim został ministrem: o kontaktach Ryszarda Zakrzewskiego z wywiadem PRL
2017
After the Second World War Ryszard Zakrzewski (1913–1994) was a well-known exile political and social activist in Great Britain. In the late 1940s he became one of the leaders of the Polish Socialist Party in emigration. He was also active in the Polish Ex-Combatants’ Association and the Federation of Poles in Great Britain. In 1956, the intelligence of the Polish People’s Republic got interested in his person. Over the next few years Zakrzewski maintained contacts with intelligence officers, employed as diplomats at the Polish Embassy in London. Despite the fact that he was not formally recruited, he provided information about activities of certain political groups on emigration, especiall…
The European Union in a Changing World Order: What Is at Stake?
2019
This introductory chapter aims to shed light on how tightly the EU and the liberal international order are entwined and discuss the likely impact on the EU of a changing and, most likely, less liberal world order. The chapter discusses the concept of order in international politics and analyses how the liberal order that emerged after WWII has effected the development of the EU. The chapter introduces the book’s interdisciplinary, holistic approach, and discusses how a changing world order is affecting the EU and how the EU, in turn, is trying to shape the emerging new order by recalibrating its policies and actions in various domains, ranging from its relations with the rest of the world, …