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.

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.

Among the strategies followed by far right groups for normalising their messages of intolerance in contemporary Europe, sites of memory play a pivotal role. Adopting an actor-centred and instrumentalist perspective of memory work and memory politics, the article considers sites of memory as products of the framing and staging of the past by the memory entrepreneurs, leading figures within the community of remembrance who, mastering the art of memorialisation, strive to establish their revisionist history within the state-endorsed memory politics. The far right memory entrepreneurs spatialise their memory work in sites of memory that downplay the history of violence of their group and present its heroic and patriotic side. The degree of success in contesting such sites shows whether the memory entrepreneurs have succeeded in normalising their messages. The article analyses the making and the contestation of a site of memory established by the far right in post-communist in Romania.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the continuities and changes that far-right movements undergothroughout historical changes. It does so by focusing on the transnational and transgenerational dynamicsthrough which the Legionary Movement fostered its existence from the settings of the Cold War exile topost-communist Romania. In order to illustrate these transnational and transgenerational dynamics, thepaper compares the activities of the legionaries in their late Cold War exile with their activities in earlypost-communist Romania.