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What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think—it also responded to and was shaped by individuals’ needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.

A war frontier in Lithuania was engendered by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March of 2014 and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. This essay explores how the new war frontier emerged in Lithuania, becoming an integral part of the public sphere and civic life. I argue that the war frontier is a social institution of sovereign uncertainty, which engenders divisive politics of historical justice, protection of the majority’s rights, and dangers to liberalism. The geopolitical insecurity and sovereign uncertainty that define this Baltic frontier are essential to understand how Lithuania can be a strong ally of NATO and the EU, a proponent of democratic politics and liberalism, a claimant to regional security expertise to lead western countries, and at the same time undermine liberal ideals of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism.

With a focus on Gintaras Beresnevičius's book The Making of an Empire (2003) and the marketing and consumption of \"Soviet\" sausages, this article explores the rise of national ideologies that promote an \"eastern\" and \"Soviet\" identity in Lithuania. Both during the nationalist movement against the Soviet Union and later in the 1990s and 2000s, the west and Europe were seen as sites of prestige, power, and goodness. Recently the reinvented \"east\" and \"Soviet\" have become important competing symbols of national history and community. In this article Neringa Klumbytė argues that nationalism has become embedded in the power politics of Europeanization. National ideologies are shaped by differing ideas about ways of being modern and European rather than by simple resistance to European Union expansion. The resulting geopolitics of provinciality, a nationalist politics of space, thus becomes an integral part of the story of European modernity and domination within a global history.

The 2022 war in Ukraine has produced the biggest virtual humor archive in the history of wars. We argue that Ukrainian war humor is a form of civic activism in the name of Ukraine’s sovereignty. This civic activism is defined by resistance, solidarity, vigilance, and dedication to victory. The war humor circulates locally as well as on a global stage. It expresses the government’s positions and the people’s voices and empowers those affected by this war. Ukrainian war humor documents experiences of war realities; provides moral commentaries and emotional and aesthetic interpretations; and articulates visions for the future of Ukraine as a sovereign European state.

During Lithuania's 2008 parliamentary elections, National Resurrection Party members dressed up as vampires, insane people, criminals, and prostitutes to gain people's votes. They mocked the state and laughed at political elites and electoral politics. I argue that the 2008 electoral carnivalesque was a politics of becoming, a fluid and open-ended process that engaged communities of despair and promoted moral citizenship through laughter. It was a form of political opposition, grounded in future-oriented moral and affective reassemblages of social and political fields. This politics of becoming attracted new people to politics, reframed political debates, and challenged state policies, practices, and ideologies.

The annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, followed soon after by Brexit, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the 2016 presidential elections in the United States have all had enormous impact on Eastern Europe. They have fractured east European states’ commitment to the continuity of western (neo)liberal projects, leading many to rethink their own national histories. This Forum contributes to discussions of post-2014 political transformations in eastern Europe by focusing on the militarization of the region, the threats to liberalism, and the emergence of new polarized civil societies. We argue that the emergence of the new war frontiers, where war is actual or eventual, after 2014 is likely to mark the end of postsocialism and the beginning of a new historical and political era in the region.