The first Soviet census of 1926 counted 1,708 Sami living in Northern Russia, 99.4 per cent of whom worked at that time with reindeer breeding, and the vast area of the Kola tundra was used by Sami reindeer (Kisilev & Kisileva 1987). The total population on the Kola Peninsula at that time was 22,858 persons. The Sami people consisted of 7.5 per cent of the total population and was a significant minority of the Barents region, exceeded in numbers only by the Russian majority.

In the Russian empire, the Sami had no native-language schools and administrative autonomy. After the 1917 October revolution, the politics of self-determination the so called korenizatsiya became a dominant trope for Bolsheviks expressing national aspirations for “oppressed” indigenous peoples of the tsarist regime. The Soviet government looked on the indigenous people in a good way regarding them as a socialistic collective social group (Leete 2004: 28–30).

The Soviet regime in the Barents Sea region was established only in 1920 after three years of civil war. The remote Northern area was terra incognita for Soviet leadership, whose personal experience was urban and linked to the industrial milieu. Therefore, with the help of a favourable national policy, the Bolsheviks wanted to attract indigenous peoples to take their side (Toulouze 2005: 140–141). The official nomenclature of indigenous peoples was changed, and Soviet officials began to use politically correct names. Thus, instead of Lapps (Russian lopari) the Sami (saamy) appeared in the Soviet legislation acts and mass media. In 1917, a delegation of the Kola Sami was met in the Kremlin by Joseph Stalin— Minister for Nationalities (Souvarine 1939: 200). In 1920, the national assembly of the Kola Sami appealed to the Soviet government of Murmansk with a requirement of cultural autonomy (Dashchinskiy 1999: 21).

The interwar Soviet Union was unlike many other states in Europe. This difference concerns not only the abolition of private property and the dictatorship of the Communist Party, but also a nationalities policy based on internationalism. The Soviet Union was practically the first great power in the world that systematically promoted the national consciousness of indigenous peoples and established for them institutional forms characteristic of a modern nation. While indigenous peoples faced discrimination, the Soviet Union proclaimed in 1923 a policy of self-determination, cultural and linguistic rights for all minorities (Martin 2001). The main aim of the Soviet nationalities policy in the North was “to liberate indigenous peoples from the vestiges of the past” (Slezkine 1994: 220–221). The Bolshevik party decided to overcome “backwardness of indigenous peoples” and make them “modern,” which meant to develop them in the short term at a higher level of more advanced minorities (Sundström 2007: 130–135). The fascinating experiment of early Soviet minority politics included the establishment of Sami administrative autonomy with a center in Lovozero, the training and promotion of ethnic cadres, the invention and codification of Sami literary language in the Latin script and the introduction of a native system of education.

New educational policy started with a nurture of native pedagogical cadres and preparation of native textbooks. In 1929 the first Sami school was opened and by 1937 there were 18 Sami primary schools on the Kola Peninsula. The future Sami teachers and educators have nurtured at the Sami Department of Murmansk Pedagogical College (33 Students in 1934) and in Leningrad, at the Institute for the Peoples of the North (8 students in 1933) and

Lenin’s nationalities policy changed dramatically when in 1937, the Soviet secret police NKVD fabricated the so-called “Sami Complot.” 68 Sami were accused of being spies for Finland and members of the fictitious underground organization the alleged aim of which was to rebel against the USSR in order to establish an independent Sami republic. Terry Martin drew attention to the connection between the Great Terror and the liquidation of the native system of education of non-Slavic minorities and the expanding educational sphere of the Russian language (Martin 2001: 422-429). In the course of Stalin’s Great Terror the Sami schools on the Kola Peninsula were closed, Sami-language textbooks confiscated, and replaced by Russian-language textbooks. Many of native teachers were arrested by the NKVD and executed or sent to prison. The promotion of Sami culture in Russia was fully stopped simultaneously until the perestroika.

On September 25, 1942, the government of Sweden ordered a census of Roma and Travellers in the country. The mapping of these groups was to serve as a first step towards solving the perceived "Gypsy problem." The census did not proceed smoothly, mainly because of conflicts within the scholarly community. On the basis of studies undertaken in fully sovereign Sweden during the World War II period, the author of this article clarifies the role "experts" played in the "scientific" legitimization of the registration process.

The article examines contemporary memory politics in Belarus as exhibited by new monuments to Holocaust victims, the genocide of the Roma people, and the mass killings of representatives of the Polish minority during World War II. It analyses various instances of the exploitation of the mythology of World War II for daily political purposes. Dr Kotljarchuk draws parallels with memory politics in Ukraine, and its conciliation with Poland and Russia with which Belarus shares similar problems, namely the very limited commemoration of the genocide of the Roma and the swift rate of memorialisation of the Holocaust.

The Great Terror in the Soviet Union 1937–38 was to a high degree accomplished on ethnic grounds. Citizens of German, Finnish and Polish and other descent became victims for the ‘national operations’ of the NKVD. In 1926 approximately 2,500 Swedes were residing in the Soviet Union. In April 1937 an NKVD-directive declared ‘to detect and remove from the USSR all foreign nationals, who in one way or another were suspected of espionage.’ Paradoxically the authorities tried to purge the country from ‘dangerous elements,’ but in the totalitarian communist system, returning home was still nearly impossible. The Embassy of Sweden in Moscow initiated a rescue operation, never before professionally studied. Hundreds of Swedish citizens in various regions of the country contacted the embassy in order to escape the threats from the NKVD. Many of them were from Karelia. Many were rescued, but in many cases the efforts failed. This unknown event gives a new perspective of Swedish diplomatic operations before World War II. But it also contributes to the wider issue of Western rescue operations in the USSR. Our paper is focused on the rescue operations of Sweden. How were they carried out? How did the Soviet concept of nationality affect the identification and misidentification of Swedes and Finns by the NKVD? Did the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow try to define ‘Swedish connection’ as broadly as possible? How important were the emotional reaction for the diplomats? The empirical results of this study open up for theoretical discussion on the relevance of moral and humanistic contents, as well as the principle of legal state in international conflicts and zones of insecurity. The source material is based on the collection of the Foreign Office discovered by the authors in the National Archives of Sweden, which contains various materials regarding the Swedish rescue operation.

Despite making headlines in the global media in August 2020, Belarus still remains one of the least-known countries in the west. Belarus had not existed as an independent political entity prior to 1991 and had hardly any sovereignty historically; this however does not mean that the Belarusians lack a tradition of statehood and their own political history. The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief analysis of different and sometimes confronting concepts of Belarusian statehood, as well as the political symbols, from a long-term historical perspective, to understand the country's unilinear path towards sovereignty and independence. The results obtained in the present study could provide a better understanding of the ongoing political crisis, especially since the 2020 presidential election, and the challenges Belarus continues to face today.

This anthology presents studies of Stalinism in the ethnic and religious borderlands of the Soviet Union. The authors not only cover hitherto less researched geographical areas, but have also addressed new questions and added new source material. Most of the contributors to this anthology use a micro-historical approach. With this approach, it is not the entire area of the country, with millions of separate individuals that are in focus but rather particular and cohesive ethnic and religious communities.

Micro-history does not mean ignoring a macro-historical perspective. What happened on the local level had an all-Union context, and communism was a European-wide phenomenon. This means that the history of minorities in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule cannot be grasped outside the national and international context; aspects which are also considered in this volume. The chapters of the book are case studies on various minority groups, both ethnic and religious. In this way, the book gives a more complex picture of the causes and effects of the state-run mass violence during Stalinism.

The publication is the outcome of a multidisciplinary international research network lead by Andrej Kotljarchuk (Södertörn University, Sweden) and Olle Sundström (Umeå University, Sweden) and consisting of specialists from Estonia, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and the United States. These scholars represent various disciplines: Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History and the History of Religions.

Since the mid-1930s, theNazi regime concerned itself with the systematic registration and identificationof Roma. At the 1935 Copenhagen Interpol Conference participating states backedthe initiative proposed by the German police regarding the creation of aninternational registry of Roma. It had been easier to classify Jews for recordsheld by religious communities were readily available to the state. Many Roma inEurope were nomadic and ID-less. The study focuses on measures ofidentification and registration of Roma undertaken in sovereign Sweden and therole of experts and census takers in transnational context. On 25 September1942, the government of Sweden ordered inventory of Roma and Travellers. Thepurpose of the registration was to solve “a problem” by mapping both thesegroups. In Sweden the census did not proceed smoothly, because of the conflictswithin the experts’ community. The paper focuses on the transnational studiesof registration of Roma undertaken in the fully-sovereign Sweden and the roleof experts in ‘scientific’ legitimation of this process.

This anthology explores the memory work performed by Baltic, Central and East European far-right actors in the online space. Situated at the crossroads between memory studies, far-right studies and media studies, the volume’s seven chapters show how a wide range of far-right actors, from small movements to major parties, have exploited digital communication technologies in order to establish their plays with the past in the mainstream discourses of their respective national contexts. With focus on the online memory work of the far right in Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Lithuania, Romania, Sweden, and Ukraine, the anthology eviscerates the nexus between politics, media and memory in order to show how the spaces of flow of digital communication proper of the network society have empowered the memory work of marginal but dangerous societal actors. As the anthology’s chapters show, the online space has raised the visibility and success of organised intolerant groups and, consequently, it has magnified the societal impact of their memory work. Thanks to digital media, the memory work of the far right can compete on an equal level with state-endorsed memory politics. By meddling with the past and how it is perceived by civil societies on websites, blogs, and social media, the far right has succeeded in overcoming its marginality and in normalising its messages of intolerance on a continental scale.

This article investigates the formation and use of the notion of the ancient origins of Swedish democracy before the Second World War. A commonplace of the early rhetoric on the ancient origins of Swedish democracy was its reference to an anti-aristocratic tradition, despite the variety of political positions that the rhetoric served. It was the leitmotif of the first sporadic notions of a democratic past in the 18th century, it was the main topic of the romantic idealisation of a coalition between the monarch and the peasants, and it served as an argument in struggles over suffrage reforms and parliamentary government. When parliamentary democracy was institutionally established, the 'aristocracy' lost its central place in the rhetoric of a Swedish democratic tradition. At the same time, the notion of a coalition between the people and the monarch was revised to a more non-specific notion of the common interest between the people and the government. In the context of the rise of totalitarianism, a 'Swedish' and 'Nordic' democratic tradition was employed as a rhetorical means of defending existing political institutions in the country.

This round table discusses a collection that explores the circulation of ideas across and beyond the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century, a space normally consigned to the margins of historiographical concerns and studied in discrete geographical areas. The commentators agree that the diasporic approach centred on biography taken by the collection demonstrates the existence of a plurality of liberal strands and political projects, highlights the importance of exchanges between European peripheries like Russia, the Adriatic and Greece, and challenges the notion of the derivative nature of eastern and oriental political culture. At the same time, the round table suggests new paths for future research, pointing to the desirability of producing a transnational conceptual history of liberalism that connects and compares East and West, and of applying the same transnational methodological approach to other seas.

As North-South conflict appeared to overshadow Cold War tensions in the early 1970s, minor powers as well as non-aligned states across the world faced new challenges. The oil crisis, the rise of environmentalism, and the calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) propelled a wide-ranging debate within the Nordic countries regarding their complex position vis-a-vis international development and global environment. In Sweden, these debates reflect the emergence of (inter)national knowledge production about economic inequalities, ecological imbalances, and sustainable development. While these debates can be followed in both media and public debate, they also resulted in a specific body of governmental reports, research projects, and future long-term planning for the 1980s. By analysing a series of such studies from Sweden, this article problematizes the fusing of ecology and economy, the grand strategy of small states, and the local intellectual history of global solidarity during a key moment in the global Cold War. It is argued that the NIEO agenda/ideology played a significant but understudied role in shaping the debate on the balance between development and environment as well as the idea of Sweden's 'double loyalties' as a solidaristic small state and as a competitive advanced economy.

This chapter analyzes how competing notions of conditionality – primarily tensions between efficiency and solidarity – have played out in debates and discourses on development aid since the 1960s in one Scandinavian country and a small, yet highly profiled donor – Sweden. Repeated and shifting demands for accountability and transparency serve as a probe into the complex, competing, and often fluctuating aims, goals, and motives of international development aid. The chapter argues that current debates on “the end of aid” are informed by a historical and unresolved tension between “unconditional solidarity” on the one hand and “conditional efficiency” on the other: Demands for openness elucidate competing aims of aid, indicating a paradox in the transparency paradigm in contemporary development aid discourse, whereby efficient aid – as manifested in economic growth – eventually leads to the end of aid while its alleged inefficiency – as evidenced in social inequality – ensures its continued legitimacy.

The concept of soft power, as introduced by Joseph S. Nye in the early 1990s has become popular in academia and media since the end of the Cold War. It addresses the influence of attraction through culture, policies, and values—as in “getting others to want what you want” and as distinct from hard power through coercion by means of economic strength and/or military force. As such, the concept reflects the growing significance of immaterial factors for exercising power under conditions of globalization, financialization, and mediatization, when physical control of territory, trade, and transport is increasingly supplanted by the significance of controlling digital infrastructures, ideational languages, and norm systems, allowing nonstate actors more influence, diffusing the power of the state and affecting coupled human–environment systems in diverse ways. While soft power has sometimes been reduced to imply an idealist outlook on global affairs, its main contribution lies in nuancing the concept of power in international relations, illustrating the significance of the whole spectrum of power, ranging from coercive hard power to attractive soft power. As such, it’s usage in human geography and other social sciences also requires attention to the complexity of the concept as introduced by Nye to avoid the risk of reproducing the binary separation between nature and humanity, material and immaterial factors implied by the dichotomy between hard and soft forms of power.

Här undersöks Sverigebilden i USA mot bakgrund av den senaste tidens debatt om hur Sverige beskrivs utomlands. Den svenskamerikanska relationen är viktig för Sverige – kulturellt, ekonomiskt och politiskt. Den är högaktuell givet den säkerhetspolitiska oron och Sveriges NATO-ansökan. USA är också en viktig hållplats för den globala spridningen av föreställningar om Sverige världen över, vilket blivit tydligt i dagens alltmer polariserade medielandskap. Rapporten syftar inte till att återge en fullständig bild av ”hela” den amerikanska Sverigebilden utan fokuserar på sådana händelser och tillfällen där uppmärksamheten kring Sverige och svenska förhållanden dels förstärkts kvantitativt och dels förändrats kvalitativt.

Globalization, stagflation and economic uncertainty challenged the Swedish welfare model during the 1980s, driving renegotiations of state-market relations domestically as well as re-conceptualizations of Sweden’s place in the world internationally. This article addresses how a key media event – the 1638–1988 New Sweden 350th Anniversary of the New Sweden Colony in North America (New Sweden ’88) – reflects these shifts. Drawing upon materials from the National Committee for New Sweden ’88 and various public-private Swedish-American foundations and initiatives as well as Swedish and US media reception, this article argues that the performance of this media event signaled a shift in state-market relations in Swedish public diplomacy as well as a renegotiation of Swedish self-identity in the late 1980s. The New Sweden ’88 project reflected the more polarized self-perceptions beginning to proliferate in Sweden at the end of the 1980s – self-perceptions which would set the transformations of the early 1990s into a sense of inevitability, which in its turn matched calls for far-ranging reforms of the Swedish welfare model which followed during the globalized 1990s.

This report examines the historical image of Sweden in the United States against the backdrop of recent debates on how Sweden is portrayed abroad. The Swedish–American relationship is important for Sweden – culturally, economically, and politically. This is highly relevant given current security concerns and Sweden’s recent NATO application.

The USA is also a key arena for the global dissemination of perceptions about Sweden, which is critical in today’s increasingly polarized media landscape. The report does not aim to present a comprehensive overview of the entirety of American image of Sweden but focuses on events and occasions where attention to Sweden and Swedish affairs has both quantitatively intensified and qualitatively changed. 

This article revisits the debates on Sweden’s possible contribution to the international developmental debates as an exemplary neutral, a developmental model, and an aid donor. While these debates exemplify diplomatic elements and activities, understood metaphorically as the art of negotiating conflicting interests, they also fed into, and informed Swedish positions vis-à-vis the emerging Global South, diplomatic outreach, and foreign policy initiatives on the part of successive Swedish Governments from the 1950s to the 1970s. As such, these positions have only rarely directly impacted upon actual Swedish policy behaviour. But they have over time aggregated into a widely shared and oft-cited understanding of Sweden as “the darling of the Third World”. This article seeks to trace the origins, motives, and main themes of this moral diplomacy – directed inwards as well as outwards.

This article analyzes Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Rudolf Kjellén’s advocacy in favour of a Swedish «Baltic program» directed at the Baltic Sea region and Russia in the decades preceding the First World War. These Baltic ambitions as well as their legacy in the interwar period are studied as a series of exercises in «paradiplomacy» on three different levels: 1) as a geopolitical reconstruction of a Baltic-Nordic «space of expectation;» 2) as a kind of Baltic-Nordic regionalism based upon early notions of «soft power;» and 3) as an inspiration to the geopolitical outlook of the Swedish military elite, business circles and trade policy-makers in the time period from the First World War up to the Second World War. This «region-work in the margins» contributed to modernizing Swedish conservative elites’ geopolitical outlook into an ostensibly less aggressive vision of Swedish international influence through cultural, economic, and technological prowess.

In intellectual histories of geography as well as in international relations, geopolitics is usually the business of great powers, understood as the expansion of hard power through territorial control. However, the existence of a ‘Geopolitik of the weak’ has also been theorised, premised on the ability of smaller states – such as the Nordic countries – to secure their survival through a wider range of policy instruments. In this chapter, we analyse key themes in the work of two Nordic geographical thinkers deeply concerned with the place and status of their home countries in the era of high modernity – Rudolf Kjellén and Gudmund Hatt. Relying upon their scholarly works as well as relevant public debates circa 1905–1945, we trace the ‘small-state geopoliticking’ of Hatt and Kjellén, identifying three key characteristics of their style of small-state geopolitics: (1) determinism is qualified by voluntarism; (2) space is complemented by future; and (3) external expansion is sublimated into internal progress. In its reconceptualisation of living space as primarily concerned with existential survival as premised upon future progress, rather than outward-oriented territorial expansion, small-state geopolitics emerges as a highly situated, somewhat quaint but nonetheless significant element in Nordic theorising of geography.

Swedish financier, philanthropist, and progressive Olof Aschberg played a dynamic, but "forgotten"role in the contacts between international labor, Western finance, and Soviet power across the world wars. We first suggest Aschberg can be studied as a converter of different forms of capital as well as a trader in trust in between the practices of diplomacy and entrepreneurship. We then outline Aschberg's wide-ranging activities drawing upon existing secondary literature in lieu of a more systematic study of his life. Third, we concentrate on his interwar solidarity work and anti-fascism based in Paris. We analyze, fourth, his cultural diplomacy and publishing activities out of New York in between the Second World War and the early Cold War. Finally, we argue that Aschberg's multi-positional and variegated vita illustrates the merit of employing entrepreneurship, in its most broad sense, as an analytical category for investigating the art and practice of citizen diplomacy.

This chapter analyses how Sweden, as a small neutral state with a high-profile agenda vis-à-vis the decolonising Global South, responded to the deeply entangled economic, environmental and political crisis of the 1970s and the rise of the non-aligned “Third World”. It provides a pilot study of how Swedish perceptions of Global North–South relations were reflected in two different spheres: public diplomacy and knowledge production. In addressing Sweden’s envisioned role in the North–South dialogue, these debates evolved around two partially separate rhetorics of “cultural affinity” and “small-state solidarity”. We argue that these rhetorics go some way to complement our understanding of the logic of Swedish (social democratic) commitment to North–South relations, beyond the explanatory categories of either altruism or realism.