Dear readers,
This year has been difficult for all of us. The Covid-19 pandemic forced state borders to close, many academic conferences were cancelled, and faculty were forced to spend time and resources on adapting their courses for distant learning.
But even dark clouds have silver lining. The academic community has mastered new forms of communication, news ways of discussing research findings, and new channels of sharing scholarly knowledge. Moreover, online formats simplified access to new knowledge for the broad public whose members increasingly use Internet to attend academic conferences, workshops, and roundtables. New forms of the public communication of research findings emerged such as popular topical lectures and workshops for lay audiences. With live and on-demand streaming to any Internet-connected device, their audience grew immensely, and this is encouraging.
The adaptation of scholars to the new conditions of life and work was not a straightforward process, and the editorial boards of scholarly journals have faced challenges in soliciting and obtaining materials for new issues. We had to revise the format of the current issue by replacing the section Conference Papers with a new one, Scholarly Reports. Due to a restricted access to libraries and archives we have also been compelled to temporarily stop the publication of our bibliographic survey of the periodicals of the Republic Karelia published in the 2000s in Finnish, Karelian, and Vepsian languages.
Overall, the current issue turned out to be largely ‘Karelian,’ as most of our materials examine the history and culture of the Karelians, something that we find reasonable for the year when the Republic of Karelia celebrates the one-hundred-year anniversary of its political autonomy. The issue also addresses two other anniversaries of 2020: the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Peace Treaty of Tartu and the eighty-year-anniversary of the conclusion of the Soviet-Finnish (Winter) War of 1939–40.
The current issue has an interesting and diverse section Academic Life. In addition to more traditional news of anniversaries, scholarly projects, workshops, and new books, we have published analytical materials on the mission and work of the Finnish foundation Cultura as well as an overview of the current state of the studies of Finnish history.
We are wishing you good health and hope that you will find something interesting and useful in this issue of the Nordic and Baltic Studies Review.
Irina Takala
Alexander Tolstikov
Alexander Krivonozhenko
Petrozavodsk, December 18, 2020
