Dear readers,
The year 2022 turned out to be the most difficult one in the still short history of our Review. The events of this year shocked and demoralized many of us and destroyed longstanding connections between scholars from different countries. We found ourselves in an international isolation. Several of our foreign colleagues left the Editorial Council and Board. We understand and accept their decision to suspend our collaboration yet hope that these connections have not been cut forever.
Unfortunately, we lost one of our Editorial Board members, a historian of nineteenth-century Finland, Professor Leo Suni (1932–2022).
Solicitation of new materials and recruitment of new authors have become much more complicated in the current situation, and we are very grateful to our Russian colleagues for their support and help that were instrumental in the preparation and publication of the current issue. A special thanks goes to Moscow-based scholars of Nordic studies whose contributions made an exemplary section on medieval Scandinavian history. Scholars from St. Petersburg, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk introduce the early results of a collaborative Russian-Norwegian project on the history of Paatsjoki River hydroelectric powerplants. These materials form the basis of our sections Articles and Publications.
Two conferences hosted in Petrozavodsk in fall 2022 are covered in the section Conference Papers with texts by scholars from Petrozavodsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.
This issue introduces a new section From a Student’s Notebook. It has a separate foreword explaining why we decided to add it to the journal; here, we only want to mention that one of the goals of the Review is to train new scholars of Nordic studies, a process that should start from their early undergraduate years when they are still mastering the historian’s craft yet already have ambitions to get heard. We decided that a special section for aspiring undergraduate scholars fits the mission of our journal.
We hope that new themes presented in this issue will expand our audience and help us recruit new authors and that the year 2023 will be the year of peace, mutual understanding, and productive collaboration.
Irina Takala
Alexander Tolstikov
Alexander Krivonozhenko
Petrozavodsk, December 27, 2022
