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What did commemoration of the dead look like in Medieval Livonia and how did memoria shape group identities in the region? Dr. Gustavs Strenga shares insights into his research and parallels with modern-day memory wars. Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.Read more:Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia Transcript Indra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies.I'm your host Indra Ekmanis, and today we're speaking with Gustavs Strenga, senior researcher at the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Latvian Academy of Culture and recently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of In Germany. Today, he speaks with us about his recent book, Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia, and what parallels that might have for us today in the modern Baltic states. Stay tuned.Dr. Gustavs Strenga, thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Perhaps we can start, you can tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into this field of study.Gustavs Strenga: First of all, thank you for inviting me. Well, my background is I'm Latvian. I was born in Riga and I began my studies in Riga, in Latvia, and I studied history at the University of Latvia. And since high school, I had an interest in the history of the Catholic Church, partially because I went to a Catholic school. And during my studies, when I began studying at the end of the last century, beginning of this century, I understood that I'm interested into medieval history. I wrote my bachelor thesis and also later my MA about Dominicans. It's a mendicant order founded in the 13th century and they also had their priories in the Baltics, like in Riga and Tallinn. I spent, during my studies, a year in Lublin at the Catholic University of Lublin. I had a wonderful Erasmus semester in Kiel, in Germany. And I really understood that I want to do medieval history. In Riga, I had really two good professors who were teaching medieval history, but I understood that it's not enough, so I went to Budapest, the Central European University now located in Vienna, and I studied medieval studies there.And later, I had a chance to study at the University of Queen Mary in London, and I was supervised by Mary Rubin. And there, my interest in medieval commemoration began.And during my studies in London — it was a wonderful time — but I had a problem. I didn't have funding. So I moved to Germany to the University of Freiburg where I was writing — continuing writing my doctoral thesis on medieval commemoration and memory in Livonia. And after that, I had a chance to work at the National Library of Latvia, and also very exciting and interesting postdoctoral projects at the universities of Tallinn and Greifswald.IE: Wonderful. So that's interesting that your early experience in a Catholic school has brought you all the way into studying commemoration in medieval Livonia. Thanks. Thank you for sharing that.So, as I mentioned, you are the author of Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia, which came out in November of 2023 and was also awarded the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies book publication subvention.It's also one of two recent monographs by Latvian historians to really be published internationally. And our colleague Una Bergmane, who also recently spoke on this podcast, published, published the other. The book examines the practices of remembering, and how those practices have influenced or had their impact on medieval Livonia, now modern day Latvia and Estonia. But I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about that book. I gather it comes from your doctoral research — tell us a little bit more about the research that informs that work.GS: Yes, so this book, as you said, is a transformed version of my doctoral dissertation, which had a bit different title, and which I defended in 2013. And, after I finished writing the thesis, I understood, yes, I want to transform it into a book, but maybe with a bit different structure, so it took me quite a lot of time to restructure it.Though medieval commemoration of the dead had, of course, religious aims — for example, to lessen the suffering of the deceased in purgatory — I wanted to pursue the idea that the medieval commemoration of the dead was both a form of collective memory and also a social practice. As a form of collective memory, it created group self awareness of the past and thus shaped their identities.As a social practice, it created bonds between individuals and groups, and also between living and dead. I can demonstrate that by saying, for example, if someone in the Middle Ages wanted to be commemorated, the person had to have resources.IE: Yeah.GS: And resources could have been donated to a particular institution, and this institution — for example, a friary, a monastery, or a nunnery, or even a parish Church — this institution would, for example, say to some priests, you have to pray or celebrate the service, and you have to pray for a certain person. So it's a, basically it's a kind of an economy of gift exchange.IE: Yeah.GS: You're giving resources to someone to commemorate you. In my book I was looking more on groups. I was interested not so much into commemoration of individuals, because lots of research has been done in the field. For example, if some of the listeners are interested, you can look up the books on medieval memorial culture. I — rather, I was interested in that, how through the commemoration of the dead, groups were remembering their past. And this is, this is something maybe a bit different, just, looking at medieval memorial culture.Thus, in my book, I'm featuring several such groups. For example, the Church of Riga, which means the Cathedral chapter and the bishops, later archbishops. The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, different urban guilds and brotherhoods in Livonian cities like Riga and Tallinn. And I also was interested in — how did the collective memory shape relationships between these groups, particularly I was interested in the conflicts.IE: Mm hmm.GS: And in the case of my research, it's definitely influenced by the surviving sources. For example, in the book, you cannot read anything about how peasants were remembering the past in the Middle Ages through the commemoration of the dead, because yes, you have, you have archaeological material, but you don't have other kinds of sources, which would give some kind of a background information.Also, medieval artisan groups are not much represented. So it's a bit of — I would say it's a collection of case studies. My colleague, Marek Tamm, also partially criticized me of that, but I was interested really in the cases of the research, less perhaps painting this large landscape picture of the medieval commemoration in medieval Livonia, because I thought that's difficult to do because not many sources survive.As we know Livonia later, after the Middle Ages was a battleground between several large regional powers and many archives had burned down. And also lots of the churches have been destroyed. Also during the Reformation, altars, murals, other things involved in the commemoration of the dead have been destroyed.So, yes, it's, let's say, it's a collection of case studies looking at certain groups and how they were remembering their past in the long term.IE: Yeah, I'd like to ask you to, to talk about, a case study or two, but I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more, especially for the non-historians or people who are not really looking always at material from, from the middle ages — how do you go about finding your source material? What does that look like?GS: Particularly this research in this study, I was using all kinds of sources. Written sources. For example, you have testaments, last wills. Then you have chronicles. I was also using some books of different brotherhoods and guilds where, like, they were keeping their records and also recording how they are commemorating their dead.You have documents written down. You have necrologies. These are like calendars where you're putting the names of the dead and you know when they should be commemorated. Liturgical manuscripts, for example, missals. And you also have other kinds of sources. You have material culture. You have chalices. You have altar pieces. You have objects, tokens given to the poor in order that they know that they, that they receive alms, that they should commemorate someone.So, I was trying to use all kinds of sources. Also, last but not least, for example, the grave slabs, which are, some of them are surviving in the churches of former Livonia. So you have all kinds of sources, and I think this is what makes the study of commemoration interesting, that you can combine them. You're not just using written material, but you're trying to look on memory as something that was kept not only in one kind of media, but in numerous kinds of media.IE: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. In the book, I think you go into a variety of different kind of contexts, looking at elites, non elites, as you mentioned, urban and rural sort of practices, liturgical, non liturgical. We'd love to hear your thoughts on one or two of those case studies.GS: Yes, I think this book has several interesting case studies. I would just introduce a few of them. In most cases, the groups in the Middle Ages were, in fact, interested a lot in remembering their beginnings. Into remembering their origins.As most of the listeners would know, medieval Livonia was Christianized quite late. The Christianization process began only in the late 12th, early 13th century, when the missionaries and crusaders from northern Germany and Scandinavia arrived in the eastern Baltic, which we now know today as Latvia and Estonia. And it is the time when the history of two, let's say, most important institutions in the region begin, and this is the history of the Riga Church, particularly the Cathedral chapter, and the history of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, and these groups in the late Middle Ages were looking back at their beginnings, and these events which took place in the late 12th and early 13th century were important for them. And also not just events, but also the dead of that age.We can say the collective memory of the Riga Cathedral chapter and Riga bishops, was not just carried by the famous and very well known text the Livonian and Chronicle of Henry, which was written around 1227, but also by Riga Cathedral itself. Riga, as a city, was founded in 1201, and then in 1211,the founder of the city, Bishop Albert, began constructing the cathedral.What do I mean, the Cathedral and its choir was memory itself — the space was the commemorative space? Before the city of Riga was founded, Livonia already had two dead bishops. The first bishop, the first missionary, Meinhard, and the second bishop, Bertolt, who was killed in a battle in 1198, just three years before the foundation of Riga.For every community in the Middle Ages, the founders were very important for their memory. So around 1229 when Bishop Albert died, or 1230, the bodies of Meinhard and Bertol were transferred from Ikšķile or Üxküll where they were buried, to the new cathedral and buried in the choir. And so we could say that in the Middle Ages, they were not just reading a chronicle, this one, for example, the Chronicle of Henry, or commemorating bishops liturgically, but also they were in contact with the graves, with the places where the bishops were buried. So it was both. A phenomenon of memory that was recorded in the texts and performed during the liturgy. And also, we can say it was a physical experience, because still, though historians are arguing about that — whether in the Middle Ages, the three founding bishops of Rīga's Church were considered to be saints — we can say that they were seen as a holy man. Maybe, yes, we can still argue about their sainthood because they were never canonized in the Middle Ages, but they were seen also as important founding figures.In the case of the Teutonic Order, it is a bit different. Spaces — maybe if we are talking about this memory of the origins or memory of the beginning — spaces are maybe not so important. More, we have textual sources showing how the Teutonic Order's Livonian branch were commemorating their death. For example, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle — text composed around 1290 — the text has numerous references to the brethren of the Teutonic Order who had been killed during the battles against the Baltic pagans during the 13th century. Later, it's very interesting, in 14th and 15th century, we can trace numerous necrologies of the Teutonic Order, not in Livonia, but nowadays Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, where we can see the Teutonic Order were — that they were Commemorating those men, their own brethren, killed in distant Livonia.Sometimes they were misspelling the name of Livonia. Most likely those people who were recording these records in the necrologies or commemorating these dead brethren, they didn't know where Livonia is, but still, this experience of crusading was part of the Teutonic Order's collective memory.It's also interesting that in the later times, as I was saying about the commemorative culture of the Riga Cathedral, we have some evidence of the commemoration. For example, the Missal of Riga — the sole complete manuscript from the Middle Ages that gives us a glimpse into how liturgy in medieval Riga looked like. In this missile, we can also spot several instances where we can see the curation of the Riga archbishops. Their names have been recorded. And also, this is a time when there was a conflict between the Teutonic Order and the Cathedral Chapter of Riga. Because the Teutonic Order, during the late 15th century, wanted to take control over the Cathedral of Riga, and also over the cathedral chapter, and you can see the struggle also in the commemoration, because the records are telling us that these archbishops had died, during captivity into the Teutonic Order's prison, for example.IE: Well, yeah, thank you for sharing those, those glimpses into those case studies.And, you know, when I first thought about that topic of medieval Livonia, it wasn't totally clear to me how it drew to my own interest, but I was really drawn in, even by those first few paragraphs. You know, you talk about memoria as this form of collective memory and social practice that creates groups, that shapes identities, that helps remember the past, and creates those relationships.And I was thinking about, how does that translate a little bit into today's society? You know, collective memory group identity still plays such an important role in our world, and so, I wonder — do you have any insights as to what, what your work might tell us about the Baltic nations today?GS: It is indeed difficult to link medieval history with the contemporary world.IE: Yeah.GS: But, I would say that the commemoration of the dead is a phenomenon that shows that every group, in every historical period, is remembering their dead. So we can see the commemoration of the dead as a basic form of collective memory. And, if we look to the past, we can also see conflicts that have been created by different memories. And, today we are living into the age of memory wars in, in the Baltics.IE: Yeah.GS: Let's just remember, for example, the removal of the so-called Alyosha statue in Tallinn in 2007 and the riots which began afterwards and which were also supported by Russia in numerous ways, also by cyberattacks.IE: Right.GS: And also the removal of the monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and from the German fascist invaders — now I'm just quoting the official name of that monument, which was removed in Riga in 2022. So these and also early examples show us that Baltics have experienced different practices of erasing memory.IE: Yeah.GS: Also, of trying to replace the memories. If we remember that during Soviet times in Latvia and also in Estonia, numerous monuments erected during the interwar period, for example, commemorating the independence wars against, against different forces, including Soviet Russia, those monuments were destroyed in the 1940s, 1950s in Latvia and Estonia. And afterwards, many of these monuments were restored by the movements.IE: Yeah.GS: So there we can see some kinds of parallels and this is quite similar to that, what I'm trying to show in my book, long term developments of commemoration and remembering.IE: Yeah. The long tail and how, how it is, perpetually moving that collective identity. Um, maybe we can talk a little bit about your current project on Saints and Heroes: From Christianization to Nationalism. Can you tell us a little bit about that work, as well?GS: Yes. In 2021, I had a chance, together with my colleague Cordelia Heß from the University of Greifswald to revisit the question of remembering in quite different settings. So, together with Cordelia Heß and also our partners from the State University of St. Petersburg in Russia, we created a project. It was a Russian-German co-project [financed by Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft]. We were working on the medieval saints and medieval heroes in the Baltic Sea region and how they have been used and later abused after the medieval times.Yes, and I have to say that when Russia's full scale invasion in Ukraine began, our cooperation was discontinued, though we continue working on our part, let's say, on our German part of the project.IE: Yeah.GS: The idea behind was really to look at these long term developments in remembering medieval figures. I can assume that many listeners know medieval heroes, for example, Joan Arc, or Emperor Barbarossa, or Charlemagne, or Scottish and Welsh rebels, William Wallace and Owen Glyndwyr, or Russian Prince and Saint Alexander Nevsky, who nowadays is abused by Putin's regime. And in the case of these all figures, you can see different ways how people have been remembering them and also using them, for example, much later in the 19th and 20th century for nation building or for creation of smaller groups. We have lots of examples — for example, in Scandinavia, that medieval saints in late 19th and early 20th century, played very important role in creating identity of Catholic groups in these countries, because let's remember that Scandinavia became Protestant after the Reformation, and then when there was this Catholic revival, many Swedish intellectuals were choosing St. Bridget as their patron and also revisiting the materials of the canonization process of St. Bridget and also living this medieval religious life during the late 19th and early 20th century.Within the project, I was working on Baltic medieval heroes. That's, for example, the master of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, Walter von Plettenberg, who was a Baltic German hero in the 19th century and also in the early 20th century. I was also working on Latvian medieval kings as heroes — for example, Viesturs and Namējs. As listeners would know, those were not real kings. During the 1920s and '30s in Latvia, they were called kings, but they were just leaders of the local ethnic groups. In the case of the Viesturs and Namējs, those were Semigallians. And I wrote an article, which has been recently published, on Liv warrior Imanta, who has been mentioned in medieval sources just once, in the Livonian Chronicle of Henry, in the scene where Imanta killed Bishop Bertold, who was mentioned in this podcast earlier.And, it is, in fact, fascinating to see that in the Baltic case, not so much history writing has been important for the revival of these medieval heroes, but literature, poetry, and also drama. Those have been the main tools — in the case of Imanta, also one of the main tools has been music, a song, which has been composed at the beginning of the 20th century, using lyrics of Latvian poet Andres Pumpurs. And the result that can be read in the case of the project is a book called Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), that has been recently published by De Gruyter. And there we have 10 contributions about different medieval saints and heroes from Scandinavia, from Northern Germany, and also Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.IE: That is really interesting to see how arts, literature, music, theater come into play in rememberings, as well. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and to share this glimpse into medieval history, medieval Livonia. The book grabbed me from the very beginning. So thank you so much, for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us.GS: Thank you. It was a pleasure.IE: Thank you for tuning in to Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters@aabs-balticstudies.org and FPRI.org/baltic-initiative for more from the world of Baltic Studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

Dr. Janet Laidla shares her work on charting the roles and contributions of women at the University of Tartu from the early days of the Estonian Republic, and what it means today. Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.Read more: * Estonia's first female doctorates were educators and physicians | News | ERR * Eesti esimestest naisdoktoritest said eeskätt arstid ja õpetajad | Ajalugu | ERR* Laidla, Janet; Anepaio, Lembi (2024). Esimesed doktorikraadiga naised tänapäeva Eesti aladelt [The First Female PhDs from the Present-day Estonian Area]. Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi aastaraamat / Annales Litterarum Societatis Esthonicae, 28−67. https://oes.ut.ee/publikatsioonid/TranscriptIndra Ekmanis: Welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host, Dr. Indra Ekmanis. Today, we listen to a conversation with Dr. Janet Laidla, lecturer in Estonian history at the University of Tartu. Dr. Laidla's recent research has focused on the history of women at the university and the essential roles they have played in both academic and non academic work. Stay tuned.Thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Perhaps you can start with a bit about your background and how you came to be involved in Baltic studies.Janet Laidla: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a bit of a long story. So bear with me, because I have a bit of an unconventional academic career path. It started out conventional enough. So I did my BA and MA in history at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and then right after went straight to PhD also in history, also at the University of Tartu.But in my fourth year of PhD, in early modern chronicles, I got a bit stuck. So instead of graduating, I went out to look for a job. And eventually I was hired by the University of Tartu Museum. And there I worked in different positions and for several years I was the head of the Old Observatory. I enjoyed that a lot.But instead of history I was promoting astronomy for 10 years, and my research was more concentrated on the history of science [rather] than the history of 17th century chronicles. I still had a small position at the Institute of History and Archaeology as lecturer, and although I always planned to defend my PhD eventually, I got around to it when the university changed the rules and said you now have to have a PhD to be a lecturer.But as I said, my focus had already changed, so after graduating I was moving slowly at first towards the 20th century. And, because I had been working on the early modern period, I now also had to seek out new networks. And I had been aware, through a lot of my colleagues, of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. But, well, a few years ago, I decided now it's time because I was working in similar topics that my colleagues who were members were now working on.IE: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that transition from studying early modern historiography, and then you went into history of astronomy and sciences, and now your focus is on studying women in academia. Perhaps you can trace that path for us a little bit.JL: Well, the University Museum is not only about history of science, it was also about the history of university, and I had been interested in the history of university, especially women students for a while, specifically the period of the 1920s and the '30s, the interwar period.And for the university centenary in 2019, where we celebrated the hundred years of Estonian-language university, we were preparing an exhibition at the National Archives on academic women. And we were so surprised that there was so little research on that subject. So basically, this is how I ended up with the topic that I'm really passionate about. However, my first research paper I did in my first year of university was actually on the position of women in Greek society. So in a way I was going back to the roots.IE: A full circle sort of a journey then. Well, can you tell us a little bit about your current work, looking at women, studying and working at the University of Tartu? You mentioned that you started looking at the interwar period. Maybe you can tell us a bit about the role of the university during those first years of the Estonian Republic and how it developed and how it came to admit women also into different fields of study.JL: The University of Tartu has a long and illustrious history going back, well, almost 400 years. So it already played a role in the national awakening in the 19th century of Estonian and also Latvian and many other nations of the Russian Empire. And of course it was important for the young republic. Its official name was the University of Tartu of the Republic of Estonia. So the state was literally in the name. Also, there was the political decision, to change the language of instruction to Estonian that we celebrated. So Estonian at the time was not a language of scholarly use. The secondary education had mostly been in German or Russian.And so the university was tasked, alongside other organizations, to create the vocabulary needed for research. And the university also concentrated on Estonian culture, Estonian history, literature, but also Estonian geography and nature, natural resources, instead of the whole Russian Empire, or the world.It was not as provincial as it sounds, of course, there were still world renowned scholars like Ernst and Armin Öpik, Ludvig Puusepp, Johann Villip, Walter Andersson, and others. But when we talk about women — women had been admitted as auditors since 1905 and full students since 1915, which is much later than in the US or the UK, for example.But in the Russian empire, and also, in fact, Germany, the struggle for female higher education had been going on over the 19th century. Many women also from Estonia went to Switzerland and there were the higher courses in Tartu, but also in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and some of them are kind of like women's colleges. But this is like a topic that I plan to have a closer look at in the future.So the university in 1919 did not reverse the decision to admit women — it was already admitting women, it had been admitting women for, for some years already. And I think it would have been an unpopular decision if they had decided to no longer admit women, but I mean, not everybody was in favor as well. It was like not 100 percent that all the male academics were like, “Yes, let all those women come in.”IE: Maybe you can share a little bit about how the career paths of women in these academic positions at University of Tartu evolved over time — some of the trends that you saw.JL: So, even before you had some women working as assistants in the university clinics, or assistant assistants at the astronomical observatory, Maria Orlova, for example. But, in 1919, they started with a temporary lecturer of English. She was called Jenny Leidig, and she had been appointed already in 1905 [edit: 1906]. But then the state said, the government said, “No, no women in academia, in the staff positions, I mean, we don't even have them as students, so what were you thinking?”So in 1919, you had Jenny Leidig. You had some assistants in the clinics, and there was this young woman, Lidia Poska-Teiss, who also applied to become an assistant in — first she was working at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, but then sort of moved into medicine. And, over the period of the 1920s and the '30s, you could say that the number of and the percentage of female staff grew steadily.By 1938, it was around 16 percent of the whole staff. That includes all of the clerical, the secretary positions and the libraries and so on. But we can say that perhaps around 13 percent of the staff were doing at least some research and teaching. And over time, some women rose from junior to senior assistants.The first woman to be invited to become a professor was in 1939. She was, however, not appointed, again by the state. For different reasons, gender had probably less to do with it. So Alma Tomingas basically became the first auxiliary professor in 1940. And she was a pharmacologist.IE: In your work, you also speak a little bit about the challenges facing women in their career progression. And those challenges — one being dealing with gender and patriarchal society, but also other social and economic and political factors. Can you tell us a little bit about those and their impact on women at the University of Tartu?JL: Basically, it was as complicated as it is now, in a sense. A fair part of the society still saw women's place at home. Single women, and also men in Estonia, in the marriageable age were frowned upon.IE: In terms of coming into the university?JL: Well, sort of basically coming to university because either you were there to find a husband or you were there to sit in a cafe and, you know, waste your life.And also the fear that if you had a higher education, you would not marry because that myth stayed around for quite a bit of time. However, there were still many working mothers — also at the university. So economically, it made sense in many cases that both of the parents worked, except right after the Great Depression, where, especially in civil service, only one of the spouses was supposed to work.It could be the woman, but of course more often it was the man. So, and also the university — all this apparent progress aside, the steady rise of women and staff numbers — there is no question of the fact that the university and the state saw research as mainly as a male profession, because the graduate research scholarships that are listed in the staff lists were given almost exclusively to men.Vera Poska-Grünthal, she was a specialist in social law, is a notable exception. This of course, led women to search for alternative opportunities, for example, through the International Council [edit: Federation] of University Women. Hilda Taba, who worked in the US, is a very good example. But this also needs a little bit of a deeper investigation.A lot of women were working in temporary, low paying positions at the university. If you see that there's a job opportunity in, say, high school, or you can become a barrister, or open your own practice in medicine, work for a hospital, you figure that this will perhaps give me a higher salary. But definitely it might give you more financial security. The Baltic German women went to have careers in Germany. So there were a lot of issues at play here. So it was quite complicated. And of course there were stay at home moms and wives, it's just that I'm interested in professional women.IE: Of course. Can you speak a little bit more about these sorts of non-academic roles that women held and how they played into the overall culture at the university?JL: Yeah, interestingly, women had worked for the university long before they were admitted as students. From the first part of the 19th century, you had the midwives working for the university. From the second part, you had the housekeepers at clinics, you had the first secretaries. And the beginning of the 20th century, as I mentioned, the assistants at the Astronomical Observatory and the clinics. In the 1920s and '30s, there were also a lot of women working as secretaries in the offices, also at different libraries and with collections.And some of these women working especially in the collections might have also pursued research and they also could have done some teaching. I think the archaeologist Marta Schmiedehelm is a good example of this. So in my opinion, the line between academic and non-academic is blurred. And this is why I don't want to dismiss the non-academic positions from my research as many other scholars have done.IE: Yeah, absolutely. The work and the history of women at the university extending far beyond what we think of as formal academic roles. That's an important point to make. I wonder if you can tell us about the overall situation, and some of the key takeaways that you're finding in your research or areas perhaps that you want to continue to explore.JL: Well, some of the things that I have found from study of the University of Tartu during the interwar period, when I sort of engage them with the previous research on the subjects done in the US, the UK and Germany — then, in some places, the women were engaged in the so called feminine fields, such as home economics, for example. But in Tartu there were no clearly defined feminine fields because they did not have the home economics department for starts. But there are definitely non-female fields. So the faculties of theology, agriculture, and law were dominantly, if not exclusively, male fields. So women were more numerous in the faculties of medicine, veterinary medicine, mathematics and natural sciences.But it's sort of interesting because I think that the factor here is also the hierarchy, like how many levels of positions you have. For example, in humanities, you have lecturers, docents and professors. So in humanities, women only have the lower positions, at least until 1939. But in these other areas where you have the temporary assistants and junior assistants, senior assistant, docent, if you have more layers, then you actually can see women sort of starting from the bottom and going up.Of course, men also start from the bottom and go up and sometimes they linger in the lower positions and sometimes they are similarly demoted or leave the university. So I think that I need to do some more data analysis to really understand how the sort of the restructuring or the structure or the hierarchy of the position works for women at the time and perhaps how it works for women now.Also, the preliminary survey of the social status also suggests a more varied social background for the academic women in Estonia, in comparison to some other Western European countries. several are indeed from lower and upper middle class, but there are also a fair number of working class women and farmer's daughters.Now, farmer's daughters, there is a range, so they could be quite wealthy in Estonia, or relatively poor. So there's other factors as well. And, in many places, marriage ended the academic career. So academic women were single, but there's a significant number of married couples working at the university, such as Elfriede and Vilhelm Ridala, Elisa Käer-Kingisepp and Georg Kingisepp, Gerhard and Natalia Rägö, Salme and Ilmar Vooremaa, and so on. Many others were also married, just not to fellow academics, including Lidia Poska-Teiss, that I mentioned earlier. And of course there are fathers and daughters. So we get to mothers and daughters only in the 1940s.That said, there are several women students who remember being told that if they are serious about their research, they should not marry. One by Professor Gustav Suits, whose wife Aino worked at the university as a lecturer for over 15 years.IE: Oh, a bit ironic then!JL: Yeah, sort of, I know that this discussion took place before Aino took up the position of lecturer, so maybe he changed his mind when he, because Aino was also a mother, she was a working mother, they had children and so she had to somehow cope with everything. IE: It's interesting that you talk about this kind of range of economic backgrounds with the women who entered into these roles. Do you have any inclination as to why there is that type of access, that range?Janet Laidla: So I think it has something to do with Estonia, being the young republic, that sort of, sort of declared itself classless or where class wasn't as prominent. Also for many of these women, the secondary education, and also the university education was a way of social mobility. And they were out there to get a job, because the university education was costly, and they thought that it would be an easier way to work for the university while studying at the university. So they sometimes weren't motivated so much by the sort of idea of an academic career, they didn't see it as entering academia, as perhaps we sometimes do now that you have this career path ahead of you. It was just a job as any other. But this was a preliminary study and I would need to go further in order to make any kind of more profound arguments based on this. But it was interesting to see. But it was also expected, thinking about Estonian history, and what the Estonian state declared in the beginning it was about to do. I think that was one of the things that perhaps makes the Estonian state and probably some other similar case studies stand out on the background of the Western European situation.IE: I wonder what you think of all this work that you're doing — the study of the interwar period — how do you think it translates into today? How can it impact the way that we are thinking about women in academia now? I'm thinking a little bit about a study that I recently read about the United States, where there are fears of a “demographic crisis” regarding too many women in comparatively, in academia. The argument was that there's not necessarily a balance anymore. And I wonder what it's like in Estonia. And at the same time, keeping in the back of our mind that there are plenty of areas where we are not seeing parity or equity. So, curious about your thoughts on that.JL: Well, it's also a complex issue. Yes, I actually heard that argument recently. When we had the women in science days, one of the discussants was saying that soon we will be talking about the lack of men in university, so they will become a minority. Not yet in Estonia.Of course, things have changed where in 1940, we had one professor. And now we have around 30 percent of professors at the University of Tartu are women. So we're getting closer to balance. Thinking about recent research, Michelle Ryan wrote a paper in Nature in 2022 saying that one of the misconceptions we have is that we overestimate the progress.So perhaps, perhaps it was based on statistics, perhaps it was another overestimation of the representation of women. And I'm thinking perhaps partly we underestimate the number of women working at the university in the past. So we overestimate now because we think that there has been this huge progress.And then you might say, and that, yes, that's the numbers, but their positions and their contributions in comparison today were insignificant. But nowadays we understand research much more as teamwork, as a collaborative effort. So perhaps, the women of the past their contributions were not as insignificant. I mean, the records did not file themselves, the notes and manuscripts did not type themselves at the time. And we also know these later controversies concerning, for example, Rosalind Franklin or Jocelyn Bell Burnell. And I'm not saying that we'll find something like that here in Tartu as well, but still.Coming back to the overestimation or the fact that women are becoming dominant, that there's a fear that women might start to dominate academia some — well, it then tells you something about academia. Because the IT sector used to be a female area in the beginning, because the computers and it all started from the universities. It started from Harvard University where the computations and also the glass plates the astrographs were making were analyzed by a group of women, called the Pickering Harem. And also Tartu had its own sets of women computers and they were called computers.It's the whole “Hidden Figures” story at NASA and so on. So in the beginning, these sort of computer programs and computing, well, not in the beginning, but at some point this was women's work. And then it started to pay something. It started to be prominent. It started to be, you know, the salaries got higher. And then for some reason it became a dominantly male field. And now we're looking to include women in STEM, but also IT. So maybe we should do some soul searching and see if the working positions in academia are then not highly paid or prestigious enough that men are no longer interested.So it's not about women taking over. What I see when I look at professional women is that they are often stuck into low prestige, low paying jobs. So if, you know, if they're overflowing the academia, it says something about academia in the future. But well, at least in Tartu, we're a fair bit away from that.And it's also sort of about numbers. It's another thing that Michelle Ryan said that it's not the percentage of staff, you have to look at the positions. And I mean, are the sort of the heads of, you know, these Ivy League universities and colleges, the top positions, are they being taken over massively by women? Or is it just that you have women in administrative positions, the low paying the teaching positions. Is the overall percentage more than 50 or are you having women in the higher positions?IE: Yeah, absolutely. And you speak really well to that idea of those hierarchies and also the unrecognized labor that really does support broader academic achievement. Filing. Typing. Being a sounding board. It is important and significant to recognize that labor as well.Perhaps you can tell, tell us a little bit more about the future of your work.JL: The Tartu example is very interesting and also there is a lot of material because the University of Tartu collected masses of information on its staff and students — so, much more than many other institutions around the world, so you can do different things with the material. But I would also like to do some comparative history. For example, Zane Rosīte is doing similar studies, for her Ph.D. at the University of Latvia. I am looking to compare the Tartu case with Latvia because they are so close. But I'm also looking to compare my Tartu case with the universities in Finland, New Zealand, and Australia. And now you might be wondering why these countries.Well, the obvious factor, of course, is the early vote for women. But also the size of population, the number of universities, the empire factor is also there, and in a way, all four countries trying somehow to redefine themselves before the Second World War. Two of them becoming independent, and two of them sort of becoming definitely more autonomous within the empire. So I think it would be interesting to compare these. I don't think many people would agree Estonia and Finland as being a frontier in the 20th century, but somehow sort of these frontier, co-educational institutions in these four countries to see what else comes out from this comparison.IE: We will certainly look forward to seeing the results of that future work from you as well. You know, this has been such a fascinating discussion. And I think it's such an interesting and significant topic. It's really necessary to understand our histories, the histories of our institutions, the role of women throughout the course of those institutions, which has so often been undervalued or understudied at the very least. And this is making a significant contribution to that work. So I appreciate the discussion very much — especially in this time where we're seeing slow and incremental, but still important progress. I often think of the Baltics as one of those key regions that advances the visibility of women in leadership positions — thinking very much about those strong women Kaja Kallas, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Dalia Gribauskaite — so it's interesting to have this perspective as well.Janet: Yes, because sort of we assume that the position of women, especially in the 20th century, has been linear, sort of progressive, but it hasn't actually. Also in academia, it hasn't. And there is a PhD thesis on the University of Washington in the US, for example, where she starts out in the 19th century and ends in, I think, 1970s. And she so shows how it has been up and down. It hasn't been this linear progress that I'm showing and, and here the fact that it's linear is really interesting.But of course in Estonia, there's a different kind of break in the 1940s. And this apparent understanding that in the Soviet Union, the gender question had been solved. And, I don't know if I'll really go into the Soviet period as well, but, well. It isn't as easy as that, definitely. So even if we are making progress at the moment, I think, especially in the US, you're feeling that when women's rights in general are in question. And then it's definitely sort of if you have reached some level, it's not, “Yes, we can also only go forward from here.” No, you can actually go back.I think it's something that needs to be kept in minds — every victory we have won is not certain.IE: It is certainly not a guarantee for that progress to be guaranteed. That's such an important point. Well, again, I am so thankful for the opportunity to be in discussion with you. Thank you so much, Dr. Laidla for joining us on the podcast. We certainly look forward to your future workJL: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. IE:Thank you for tuning in to Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters at AABS dash Baltic studies dot org and FPRI dot org slash baltic dash initiative for more from the world of Baltic studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time.  This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

Baron Roman Von Ungern-Sternberg is one of the most insane men to ever live. *clarification: Estonians aren't slavic people. However, Russian and Baltic German nobility saw them as slavs due to their peasant status. No, this makes no sense. SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

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In this episode we cover the National Awakening. The National Awakening is a period of time after serfdom, in which Estonians were allowed to better themselves through education and hard work. With this a realization of pride for Estonian culture arose. Many began to question the dominance  of the Baltic German overlords and pressed their own fundamental rights as Estonians as equals to the German upper class.

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One night in the Russian imperial province of Courland, an eleven-year-old boy more than a little drunk on his parents’ champagne slips away from his aristocratic manor and heads for the village that houses his family’s Latvian farmhands. It is Christmas 1905, two months after Emperor Nicholas II of Russia’s October Manifesto has turned his autocracy into the semblance of a constitutional monarchy, and the subject peoples of his empire are restive. In Courland, a province governed by Baltic barons who descend from the thirteenth-century chivalric orders of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, that hope for change centers on the populace’s desire for independence from its German overlords–even more than from the Russian Empire itself. Thus begins the story of Wiktor Rooks, a Baltic German boy who soon sees his family’s estate burned, its ancestral property lost, and his own future compromised. Wiktor yearns for the academic life, but family tradition requires him, as a second son, to become a soldier. He joins the Russian imperial army, which assigns him to spy on a unit full of Latvian soldiers fighting to rid themselves of men like him. Slowly he wins their trust, and the friendships he forms there–and the wartime atrocities he witnesses–send him into the ranks of the Latvian Red Riflemen. By 1918, he is guarding the new Soviet government. When Latvia achieves its independence in 1921, Wiktor’s fortunes change again, and he returns to the land of his birth. There he strives, once and for all, to overcome his past as the second son of a Baltic baron. But soon the forces of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia are massing, and tiny Latvia stands smack in their way. Follow  William Burton McCormick as he leads us along a less well-trodden but nonetheless fascinating historical path in his discussion of Lenin’s Harem. (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One night in the Russian imperial province of Courland, an eleven-year-old boy more than a little drunk on his parents’ champagne slips away from his aristocratic manor and heads for the village that houses his family’s Latvian farmhands. It is Christmas 1905, two months after Emperor Nicholas II of Russia’s October Manifesto has turned his autocracy into the semblance of a constitutional monarchy, and the subject peoples of his empire are restive. In Courland, a province governed by Baltic barons who descend from the thirteenth-century chivalric orders of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, that hope for change centers on the populace’s desire for independence from its German overlords–even more than from the Russian Empire itself. Thus begins the story of Wiktor Rooks, a Baltic German boy who soon sees his family’s estate burned, its ancestral property lost, and his own future compromised. Wiktor yearns for the academic life, but family tradition requires him, as a second son, to become a soldier. He joins the Russian imperial army, which assigns him to spy on a unit full of Latvian soldiers fighting to rid themselves of men like him. Slowly he wins their trust, and the friendships he forms there–and the wartime atrocities he witnesses–send him into the ranks of the Latvian Red Riflemen. By 1918, he is guarding the new Soviet government. When Latvia achieves its independence in 1921, Wiktor’s fortunes change again, and he returns to the land of his birth. There he strives, once and for all, to overcome his past as the second son of a Baltic baron. But soon the forces of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia are massing, and tiny Latvia stands smack in their way. Follow  William Burton McCormick as he leads us along a less well-trodden but nonetheless fascinating historical path in his discussion of Lenin’s Harem. (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices