How effective is Russian state television in framing the conflict in Ukraine that began with the Euromaidan protests and what is its impact on Russian Internet users? We carried out a content analysis of Dmitrii Kiselev's “News of the Week” show, which allowed us to identify the two key frames he used to explain the conflict – World War II-era fascism and anti-Americanism. Since Kiselev often reduces these frames to buzzwords, we were able to track the impact of these words on Internet users by examining search query histories on Yandex and Google and by developing quantitative data to complement our qualitative analysis. Our findings show that much of what state media produces is not effective, but that the “fascist” and anti-American frames have had lasting impacts on Russian Internet users. We argue that it does not make sense to speak of competition between a “television party” and an “Internet party” in Russia since state television has a strong impact in setting the agenda for the Internet and society as a whole. Ultimately, the relationship between television and the Internet in Russia is a continual loop, with each affecting the other.

Methodology can be defined as “the principles of organized investigation.” It deals primarily with the question how to arrive at substantive knowledge about the subject under investigation. It is an indispensable tool for scientific work without which the quality of the acquired knowledge would be at the best haphazardous and at worst erroneous.

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).

The Archive of the Town Curator of Monuments in the Polish city Poznań contains material about streets, monuments, Old Town Square, the cathedral, and other valuable constructions there. A folder labeled Nowy Ratusz (New Town Hall) attracted my attention, because I knew nothing about such a building. The folder contained photographs of a large neo-Gothic building. It looked like a typical Prussian public building, similar to hundreds of other postal, school, and government offices throughout the Prussian/German state. But what of this building? Had it been another casualty of the Second World War? The postwar images showed, that although seriously damaged, the building still stood in the ruins of the Old Town Square.

The article discusses the much-debated issue of collective identity among the Estonian Russian-speaking population from a different prism – based on representations of the past in the local Russian-language press in 2009. Assuming that representations of the past offer references for present-day identity construction, the study is aimed at revealing which identity patterns were supported and which were rejected by journalists and other speakers in the press. The analysis suggests that the “memory divide” is not only connected with WWII, as is widely believed in Estonia, but runs further down at the imaginary time-scale. Although the analysis revealed a strong prevalence of local-scale events, the mode of representations could not help to develop “own” local identities, either in a civic or emancipatory form. By the evaluation of events, actors and the stylistic means, the Russian-language press rather constructed the identity of the imperial diaspora. The existing State Integration Program aims at strengthening civic identity and activity, but it does not have a say in history politics. However, the latter is needed in order to give more space for private memories, critical reflection and the search for ways to (re)define the group in relation to space, time and other groups.

Research into some 30 families has revealed blank spaces in the history of many of these families, most of which date from the Stalin period. My thesis is that the internal policy of the Soviet state, with its repression and stigmatization of victims and their families, contributed to making certain pages of Soviet history disappear from family memories, or be reinterpreted within these memories. The policies of physical and symbolic stratification of the new “communist” society and stigmatization of broad social groups tended to create a gap between the social outcasts and their families. Families were impelled to “purge” their past and to eliminate the elements that could make them discreditable: to change names, surnames, and fathers’ names, to destroy the documents and photographs containing information about repressed people and to forget relatives lost from sight in the political turmoil. With the disappearance of eyewitnesses, firsthand memories that had not been transmitted to subsequent generations fell out of family history. These memory omissions result in these pages of family history being entirely wiped out, or lead to fragmented and impersonal memories.