This anthology explores the memory work performed by Baltic, Central and East European far-right actors in the online space. Situated at the crossroads between memory studies, far-right studies and media studies, the volume’s seven chapters show how a wide range of far-right actors, from small movements to major parties, have exploited digital communication technologies in order to establish their plays with the past in the mainstream discourses of their respective national contexts. With focus on the online memory work of the far right in Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Lithuania, Romania, Sweden, and Ukraine, the anthology eviscerates the nexus between politics, media and memory in order to show how the spaces of flow of digital communication proper of the network society have empowered the memory work of marginal but dangerous societal actors. As the anthology’s chapters show, the online space has raised the visibility and success of organised intolerant groups and, consequently, it has magnified the societal impact of their memory work. Thanks to digital media, the memory work of the far right can compete on an equal level with state-endorsed memory politics. By meddling with the past and how it is perceived by civil societies on websites, blogs, and social media, the far right has succeeded in overcoming its marginality and in normalising its messages of intolerance on a continental scale.

The image of North-Eastern Europe appears composite and complex. While its geographical conglomeration is cut across by the Baltic Sea, it is not a coherent area at a cultural and political level. Yet, the numerous investments made by local and international actors in attempting to define this space call for a closer scrutiny of the processes of imagining and re-imagining spaces. 

This article analyses the memorialization of Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, two Romanian Legionary movement volunteers who died while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as an entangled history of Romanian and Spanish fascisms. The commemoration practices and narratives recounted in the Spanish and Romanian newspapers and archival sources from the period 1937–41 show that commemorating foreign ideological peers and appropriating symbolic elements of foreign fascisms in order to memorialize fallen comrades served as resources for legitimizing the struggle against domestic competitors. Although the totalitarian ambitions of Spanish and Romanian fascists remained unfulfilled, the Spanish-Romanian entanglement contributed to consolidating Moţa and Marin as martyrs of transnational fascism.