The Birch, Fall 2005

Kaliningrad: Russia's New Window on the West?
Straddling the East and West

David Plotz

A careful study of the map of post-communist Europe reveals an odd feature in the eastern half of the continent. Wedged between Poland and Lithuania, both sovereign states and members of the European Union, there is a tiny patch of land about the size of Connecticut. A closer look will reveal that this oft-ignored corner of Europe is actually Russian territory, although it does not border Russia proper. Those familiar with much older maps of Europe may recognize it as German territory, although it does not border Germany at all.

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the founding of Kaliningrad, at once one of Russia's oldest and youngest cities. It has been threequarters of a millennium since Teutonic knights first established the city of Königsberg on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and sixty years since the Red Army "liberated East Prussia from German fascism.” According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then the commander of a Red Army battalion, this liberation took the form of gang rape, pillage, and the near-total devastation of the city's medieval architectural heritage. Controversial historian Alfred Maurice de Zayas has described the Soviet occupation of East Prussia as an ethnic cleansing. Whether or not Zayas's description is fully justified, few westerners are even aware of the events he describes.

Königsberg and the northern part of East Prussia were Stalin's promised reward for bearing the brunt of the Nazi wehrmacht during World War II. At Potsdam in 1945, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill officially agreed to let Stalin annex this territory from Germany, thus guaranteeing the Soviets a warm-water port on the Baltic. Within three years, the overwhelming majority of the prewar German population had fled west or been deported after enduring violence and starvation, and Moscow had subsidized the resettlement of several hundred thousand Russians in East Prussia. Königsberg, the city where the kings of Prussia were crowned, where Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason, where Euler developed the basis of topology, had become Kaliningrad.

The Kaliningrad Oblast (region) spent the Cold War as a major naval base, but it has gained newfound geopolitical prominence since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the independence of Lithuania, Kaliningrad was physically severed from Russia, and the map of Europe came to reflect the awkward (not to say horrific) circumstances in which Russia first occupied the city. In Europe, media reports of the last fifteen years have given Kaliningrad a reputation as a center of AIDS, organized crime, drugs, arms dealing, poverty, and despair. At the same time, a boom in tourism by the former German inhabitants and their descendents has reawakened interest in, and controversy about, the city's transformation. Yurii Kostyashov, a professor of history at Kaliningrad State University, has compiled a col- lection of interviews with Russians who arrived in the first wave of settlement in the late 1940s. For his publishing of candid descriptions of the squalid conditions created by the occupying forces, Kostyashov has been described by local communists as "an enemy of Russia" and "a typical intellectual prostitute, who has sold out his motherland for thirty deutschmarks".

It would have been more accurate to say thirty euros. Kaliningrad's special status has become even more complex since last year, when Lithuania and Poland were two of ten new states to join the European Union. President Vladimir Putin has been adamant that the new EU members bordering Kaliningrad should relax their visa laws and transit restrictions to make it easier for Kaliningraders to travel, both within Europe and to the Russian mainland via Lithuania. However, the issue is a thorny one. EU officials are concerned about the potential spread of crime from the region, and the Polish and Lithuanian governments tend to be on particularly bad terms with Moscow in general. At the 750th anniversary celebrations this past July, Putin invited French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but deliberately snubbed Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski and Lithuanian President Valdus Adamkus.

Moreover, some hawks in the Russian cabinet have longstanding fears that Russia's hold over Kaliningrad could be threatened by increased contact with the west, and particularly with Germany. Europe's largest economic power is home to the descendents of nearly two million expelled East Prussians, and there have been periodic demands for the reacquisition of lost lands for decades. These have often been associated with neo-nazism and revisionism, but to an extent they reflect the bitterness of a large civilian population that found itself uniquely scapegoated for World War II. It was widely maintained by the Allied leadership that Hitler's drang nach östen, his drive to the east, was the legacy of centuries of Prussian imperialism and militarism -- nevermind that nazism emerged out of Bavaria, and Hitler himself was a product of Austria. Nevertheless, this association was used as a justification for wiping any trace of Prussia off the map of Europe, and for expelling the Prussians from their ancestral home.

During the détente of the 1970s, West Germany attempted to garner good will with the USSR by offering to fund the reconstruction of historical sites in Kaliningrad. These offers were rebuffed by Moscow, which had labored since the 1940s to rebuild the city as a typical concrete and steel Soviet jungle. According to Olga Sezneva, a scholar at the University of Chicago and a native of Kaliningrad, the Soviet intention was to eradicate almost every archtectural trace of the city's German heritage. Now, however, Kaliningrad is the center of a number of restoration projects, most of them lavishly funded by Moscow. Putin, himself something of a germanophile (he spent years working for the KGB in East Berlin, speaks fluent German, and famously prefers beer to vodka), authorized government funding for this summer's anniversary festivities, which acknowledged the entire scope of the city's history. Among the reconstruction projects slated for completion this year are a medieval cathedral and the famed King's Gate, whose titular monarchs have been headless since 1945.

Although all of these projects have been running behind schedule, and many are still surrounded by controversy, they represent a newfound confidence on the part of Kaliningraders. For decades, the inhabitants of Russia's westernmost territory have been denied a history of their own. Most of the relevant archives were closed during the Soviet period, and Kaliningraders found themselves living in the ruins of a German city whose history remained mostly invisible and inaccessible. Regardless of the future of Kaliningrad's political and economic status, the region cannot avoid increased contact with the west. The German population may be gone, but geography ensures that the Russians of Kaliningrad will always exist somewhere between Russia and Europe, not entirely bound to either. Putin may yet decide, in the words of Pushkin, "to hack through a window to Europe" in the one Russian city that was unambiguously European for seven centuries.