Politics of Uncertainty: Una Bergmane on Cold War superpowers, Soviet disintegration and a relentless Baltic push for independence

RevDem Podcast

Introduction (Alexandra Medzibrodszky): Welcome all to this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast. I’m Alexandra Medzibrodszky, and it is a great pleasure to have with us today Una Bergmane to discuss her book "Politics of Uncertainty: the United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union". So, first of all, thank you, Una, for accepting our invitation and being here with us. Before we start discussing your book, let me introduce our guest today.

Una Bergmane’s main research interests are the history of the Soviet collapse, the Baltic states, diasporas, transnational networks, collective memory, and the post-Cold War transitions in the Baltic Sea region. She is currently an Academy of Finland research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki. Before joining the Institute, she held various fellowships across the world; she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in the US, a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland-funded BALTRANS project. She obtained her Ph.D. from Sciences Po in Paris.

The focus of our podcast today is Una’s first book, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. As already mentioned, the title of the book is "Politics of Uncertainty: the United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union". In a nutshell, the book tells the story of how Cold War superpowers tried to deal with the Baltic question at the end of the 1980s, but also how marginal actors can find strategies to gain recognition and visibility on the international stage during periods of deep historical change. Let’s have a closer look at the ideas and arguments of your book.