AABS Awards Vilis Vītols Prize to Best JBS Articles for 2024 and 2025

Karl Stuklis

Stuklis, K. (2024). Revisionist national narratives in the memoirs of Estonian and Latvian Waffen-SS Legionnaires. Journal of Baltic Studies, 55(1), 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2023.2173262

Aiming to shed light on the underrepresented Baltic experience of World War II, this article examines how memoirs written by Estonian and Latvian Waffen‑SS Legionnaires after the collapse of the Soviet Union construct revisionist national narratives that justify military collaboration with Nazi Germany. Attribution theory and the concept of nodal points of discourse are used to analyze how these veterans explain their wartime choices, portray key actors, and position their nations within broader European memory debates.

Through close reading of six memoirs, Estonian and Latvian authors are shown to consistently frame their service as a patriotic, defensive struggle against Soviet aggression, often invoking the “separate war” thesis to distance themselves from Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. The memoirists attribute positive, active motivations—such as patriotism, martial values, and anti‑communism—to themselves, while depicting the Soviet Union as driven by expansionism and a desire for destruction. At the same time, they downplay or omit local collaboration in genocide, appropriating the suffering of other victimized groups and presenting their nations as inherently European and unjustly torn from their natural independence by the Soviet Union.

The article concludes that these memoirs collectively advance a revisionist interpretation of World War II that aligns with dominant post‑Soviet national narratives in Estonia and Latvia. By emphasizing Soviet crimes, minimizing Nazi atrocities, and portraying the legionnaires as victims rather than perpetrators, the texts contribute to a broader regional trend that seeks to equate fascism and communism within European memory politics. This narrative strategy supports the argument that the collective memory of the contemporary Baltic states is based upon a revision of established Western narratives of World War II and the Holocaust, with significant implications for how Europe understands the legacies of occupation, collaboration, and genocide.

Karl Stuklis is a final-year PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in Central and Eastern European Studies at the University of Glasgow. His thesis explores the role of vicarious identification in British, German, and Latvian foreign policy responses to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Karl is an editorial assistant at the Journal of Baltic Studies and committee member of the BASEES Study Group on the Baltic States. His latest article is “How the War in Ukraine Strengthened Latvia’s European Credentials and International Standing” (E-International Relations, 2025).

Erfan Fatehi, Juha Herkman, Joonas Koivukoski, and Liisi Laineste

Fatehi, E., Herkman, J., Koivukoski, J., & Laineste, L. (2025). National identity through the prism of satire: humor scandals in Estonia 1991–2022. Journal of Baltic Studies, 56(4), 705–726. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2025.2460503

Erfan Fatehi is a Doctoral Researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki. His dissertation examines the civilizing and de-civilizing processes of humor as they intersect with migration, far-right politics, and globalization. With a background in semiotics, Fatehi pursues an interdisciplinary approach and has published on the implications of semiotic destruction of the meaningful for minorities, psychoanalytic theory, and neoliberal academia.

Juha Herkman is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Over the past decades, he has conducted extensive research on political communication and the interplay between populism and media. He also has a solid academic background in British cultural studies, with a particular focus on media culture with a side path of humour studies. In addition to publishing a substantial number of articles in prestigious academic journals such as Cultural Studies, Acta Sociologica, Media, Culture & Society, and Journalism Studies, Herkman is the author of A Cultural Approach to Populism (2022, Routledge). He also co-edited Populism, Twitter, and the European Public Sphere (2024, Palgrave) alongside Emilia Palonen.

Joonas Koivukoski, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Koivukoski specializes in emerging forms of journalism and political communication. His dissertation (2022) examined political humor in the hybrid media environment, with a focus on humorous online advocacy and the intersections of satire and journalism. Koivukoski’s current research examines war journalism, while forthcoming collaborative projects investigate political podcast audiences and the social stratification of comedy taste and humor. Koivukoski has held fellowships at Temple University (Fulbright) and KU Leuven. His work has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Journalism Studies, and Alternatives.

Liisi Laineste is a Researcher Professor at the Department of Folkloristics of the Estonian Literary Museum, where she leads the working group of humour research. Her main research object is folk humor and its online manifestations. She has published articles and edited books and journal issues on ethnic humour, internet folklore and online communication, many of which represent an interdisciplinary angle and combine folkloristics with linguistics, psychology, sociology or communication studies. She has a standing interest in digital humanities.

Ingrid Ruudi

Ruudi, I. (2025). Tallinn’s Freedom Square as a heterogeneous public space. Journal of Baltic Studies, 56(2), 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2024.2385827

The paper looks at the mental and physical transformations of the Freedom (Vabaduse) square, the main square of Tallinn, over the transition period from Late to Post-Soviet Estonia, analysing the developments as at times antagonistic and conflictual, at times mutually supportive dialogue of architectural and artistic projects and everyday practices. After the square was successfully renamed and thus symbolically ’regained’ in 1989, nothing much visually discernible happened there for the next ten years. Nevertheless the space worked as an arena of constructing and negotiating different public and counterpublic spheres through various projects and interventions from art, architecture and everyday practices.

Architecturally, the decade saw two urban planning competitions (1993 and 1998) with a wide range of propositions; an addition of two office buildings to the square’s farther ends by émigré architects introducing sought-after international know-how and controversial commercial taste; and the renovation of 1934 Art Hall building as a conceptual project of Swiss artist George Steinmann with connotations ranging from return to the golden pre-war age to neocolonialism through European structural aid funds. At the same time, the artistic interventions ranged from an ironic display of Soviet luxury car above the pedestrians’ heads (Toivo Raidmets, 1993) to explorations of urban and psychic subconsciousness in subterranean tunnels (Jaan Toomik, 1993) to a poetic cathedral of the homeless (Raoul Kurvitz, 1999). Artist Tõnis Vint continued his pursuit of urban acupuncture by proposing a 58-metre tower as a Tree of the World and a replacement of the St James Church with a spiritual hall; yet the only amendment the city government was able to accomplish was the painting of colourful flowers on the asphalt (Hannes Starkopf, 1998).

Looking at these projects in dialogue, as they form dense layers of meaning to a precise locus, demonstrate the potential of an urban public space in the construction of the public sphere, as a place for formation and negotiation of different publics and counterpublics. It also enables to grasp the heterogeneity of the era, at the same time highlighting the potency of unexecuted projects and temporary interventions in constructing diverging and competing public spheres. The analysis testifies of the developmental dynamics over the period, with the beginning of the 1990s manifesting more openness, more social antagonisms but also more pragmatic and commercial attitudes, and the end of the decade showing a shift towards concerns of representational and symbolic issues. 

Ingrid Ruudi is a senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. In 2020 she defended her PhD at the Estonian Academy of Arts with a dissertation Spaces of the Interregnum. Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art, 1986 – 1994 (cum laude) and spent the autumn semester of 2022 as a Juris Padegs postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University. Her research interests encompass Late and Post-Soviet spatial practices, intersections of architecture and art, architecture as a social and political agent, and gender studies in architecture; currently she is leading in a research grant focused on Late and Post-Soviet Estonian spatial environment from the perspective of ethics of care.