Kaliningrad’s present, anomalous situation is the result of the simultaneous collapse of both the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself. Having been assigned after the Second World War to the Russian SFSR,* the Kaliningrad oblast served as the linchpin of Soviet strategic defences in the Baltic region. But in 1990–91, when adjoining parts of Poland and Lithuania left the Soviet bloc, it suddenly found itself cut off from the rest of Russia, and the demise of the USSR rendered the concept of a Soviet military zone redundant. Surrounded by foreign countries, the stranded Russian enclave, with a total population close to 1 million, became a sad anachronism.
The full history of Kaliningrad’s unenviable fate in the 1990s has still to be written, but there can be no doubt that it was characterized by a large measure of neglect and an almost total lack of financial investment. Submarines of the ex-Soviet fleet rusted at their moorings; ex-Soviet soldiers and their dependants lost all means of providing for themselves; environmental pollution mushroomed. The ensuing vacuum was filled by social, economic and political pathologies of all sorts. Crime syndicates flourished. A scheme was afoot to declare independence from Moscow. In 1998, to retake control, Moscow declared a state of emergency.3
At the very end of the century, concerted efforts were made to rescue the failed city by the rehabilitation both of its physical infrastructure and its social fabric. Modern buildings were constructed, eyesores were cleared, roads mended and trees planted. Drug gangs were rounded up, protection rings closed down, and foreign smuggling stifled. The aim was to turn Kaliningrad into the hub of a Special Economic Zone, a ‘Baltic Hong Kong’ attracting new enterprises, casinos and tourist hotels. The European Union, eager to contain the danger on its borders, offered far-reaching advice and co-operation.4
In the course of Vladimir Putin’s two presidential terms, from 2000 to 2008, Russia, though patently only pseudo-democratic, made considerable progress towards greater stability and prosperity, and Kaliningrad’s downward slide was halted. New industry arrived, notably in the form of a television assembly plant that now supplies one in three television sets throughout Russia, and a BMW car factory, whose products go mainly to Germany. Hotels, a casino and tourist agencies have been established, and an Agreement of Special Association signed with the European Union. City-twinning partnerships have been created, not only with fellow Baltic ports like Kiel, Gdynia or Klaipeda, but also with Norfolk (Virginia) and Mexico City. High-powered delegations visited, including European Commissioner Chris Patten and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Conferences were held, an EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee was formed, and in December 2006 a casino law aimed to confine gambling to a special zone within the Special Zone. Most importantly, travel and transport arrangements were eased so that people and goods could move freely to the rest of Russia. It did no harm that the president’s wife, Russia’s first lady, Lyudmila Putina, had been born and raised in Kaliningrad. And though formally only prime minister after 2008, Putin clearly remains master of the Kremlin.
VIP visitors are customarily taken to inspect drilling rigs, new business enterprises and the Kaliningrad duma or ‘parliament’. A Working Group of the EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee in October 2006, for example, was shown round the LUKOIL D6 offshore rig, the Georgenburg Studfarm, the Taranova Brewery, and the Lesobalt wood-processing factory.5 Overall, the European visitors were impressed both by recent economic recovery and by the colossal gulf still to be bridged. Economic growth in 2001–5 was reported at 25 per cent, 6 per cent per annum, but 25 per cent of zero is still zero. All thoughtful visitors are dumbfounded by the crime figures, and by living standards that one scholar has put at sixty-five times lower than the EU average.6
All but the most partial observers would agree that the potential of the ‘Baltic Hong Kong’ has yet to be realized. Over-enthusiastic proponents of ‘Transition’ assumed that free markets and Western-style democracies would develop of their own accord. In fact, the Soviet legacy is proving stubborn. One reason lies in the very low starting point: once a city has gained the reputation of ‘cesspit of cesspits’, the tarnished image does not improve overnight.7 Negative statistics, which may or may not be out of date, continue to circulate. Kaliningrad has (or had) a murder rate 20–30 per cent higher than the Russian average. Kaliningrad is (or was) the scene of Europe’s highest rates of HIV infection, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Kaliningrad is still reputed to support Europe’s most persistent network of white slave trafficking. And though the Kaliningrad oblast regenerates, the adjacent districts in Poland and Lithuania, now inside the European Union, regenerate much faster.8
Two factors inhibit Kaliningrad’s would-be renaissance. One derives from the nature of the Putin regime itself. If crime, corruption and a hidden local hierarchy lie at the heart of the problem, the centralized authoritarian system is unlikely to cure it; the Special Economic Zone may well prove to be more of a money-spinning outpost of Kremlin Corp than a motor of local well-being. One of the most successful, government-backed enterprises, the Baltic Tobacco Factory (BTF), turns out to be specially designed for smuggling cigarettes into Germany. It mass-produces the ex-Chinese Jin Ling brand in packets that are suspiciously similar to those of Camel cigarettes, except that a goat has replaced the camel.9
Further inhibitions stem from the pathological proportions of the Russian military presence. Since the Soviet army’s withdrawal from East Germany, the Kaliningrad oblast harbours the largest concentration of military equipment, personnel and installations in the whole of Europe, and the cash-strapped ex-Soviet military is widely suspected of playing godfather to the notorious crime syndicates. What is more, militarization may actually increase. In the summer of 2007, when Russia’s foreign minister first hinted at relocating nuclear missiles to Kaliningrad in response to US proposals for a Central European ‘Missile Shield’, none but the generals rejoiced. Headlines about ‘a return to the strategic frontline’ do not encourage investors and developers.*
President Putin’s governor in Kaliningrad, Georgiy Boos, was appointed in September 2005 to preside over celebrations of the city’s 750th anniversary. A pretext was found in the slender thread of continuity since 1255, and the festivities were attended by presidents Putin and Chirac of France, and Germany’s Chancellor Schröder. Governor Boos stressed the necessity for dialogue on all fronts, especially with Germany and the EU, and acted as the genial host to numerous delegations.11
Visitors to the enclave, therefore, have many interesting things to look out for. They usually arrive either at Khrabrovo Airport, which serves international destinations such as Copenhagen, Warsaw and Prague, or at the Bagrationovsk border crossing with Poland. Europeans accustomed to border-free journeys can relive their past experiences of visa controls, police questions and customs examinations. Rumours of an unavoidable thirty-six-hour wait are exaggerated.
Landmarks of the Soviet era are much in evidence. The Dom Sovietov, or ‘House of Soviets’, a high-rise pile from the 1960s, occupies the site of the former Royal Castle. The Rossiya cinema is an architectural exhibit of some distinction. The Ploshad Pobiedy or ‘Victory Square’ is named after Stalin’s triumph in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, and a triumphal arch reminds visitors to the Baltic Stadium of the same event. The City Hall or ‘White House’ vies in its oversized proportions with the gleaming new Russian Orthodox cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Deliberately or accidentally, the statue of Lenin – a brutal proponent of atheism, but still apparently revered – stands right in front of the cathedral.12
Shopping is not Kaliningrad’s forte. A Benetton shop has opened in place of an abandoned Italian restaurant. Another store, clearly a champion of endurance, sports a sign ‘Founded in 1932’. But generally speaking, there is nothing to make the experience of consumption here anything but the most mundane.
Among the restored historical monuments, pride of place must go to the medieval cathedral. Built over fifty years in the fourteenth century, it was destroyed in 1
944 in as many minutes by RAF bombs. One can view three of the city’s fortified gates, now adapted for motor traffic, the former opera house, now a museum, the city zoo, and, allegedly, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi Gestapo.13 Visitors with a sense of the past, however, may have difficulty in locating the remnants of pre-Soviet times:
Occasionally, signs of another, older order poked through the wreckage of the new. In one place, a concrete pavement came to an abrupt end revealing a well-laid cobblestone road lying just beneath its surface; somewhere else, an old building leaned sideways in an empty lot, surrounded by nothing. It was possible, almost, to see how the streets of the old town – once narrow and twisted and lined with the tall houses of the merchants – had disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety… had vanished behind spectacular monotony…
Yet the city seemed unconscious of its history. After an hour of searching, map in hand, I found the only monument to the Soviet destruction of [the city]: a tiny underground museum hidden away in a war bunker. Most of its displays contained battle dioramas, and a series of diagrams plotted the Red Army’s advance… The final room contained before-and-after photographs. Brick homes and churches before: identical concrete blocks after. Mediaeval churches before: empty lots after.
Outside, I tried to walk through the old heart of the city, but the street plan made no sense. The centre of the town seemed jagged, unfinished: it was as if someone had thrown down the mismatched boulevards and drab buildings on top of the older landmarks by accident, and then gave up the whole project for lost when he saw the hideous result.14
Only two of the city’s famous inhabitants have left a discernible spoor. One, Leonhard Euler (1707–83) was a celebrated mathematician who went off to St Petersburg. Before leaving he set his fellow citizens the impossible task of finding a route round the city’s islands in such a way that returned them to their starting point after crossing each of its then seven bridges not more than once.15 The puzzle cannot be tackled in its original form, since only five bridges have survived. Even so, ‘Euler’s Path’ is a pleasant tourist trail which takes one round the Old City’s islands.
Unlike his colleague and critic, J. G. Hamann (1730–88), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) never set foot outside his home town. His lectures are reputed to have been attended by Russian officers during the Seven Years War. His tomb is still marked in the restored cathedral, and a moving souvenir lurks in an easily missed corner of the former castle precinct, where a small inscribed bilingual plaque bears a quotation from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. ‘There are two things’, it reads, ‘which the more I think of them, the more they inspire awe: the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within.’ A small posy of flowers is usually left on the lintel of this plaque.16
Many visitors drop into the former Kaliningrad State Pedagogical Institute, which since 2005 has been upgraded to full university status as the Russian State University ‘Immanuel Kant’, or ‘ISKUR’. The institution claims to be successor to the sixteenth-century Albertina College, and is unusually keen to establish international connections. As of March 2008, it was claiming forty-four partner universities, including four in Lithuania, ten in Poland, fourteen in Germany, and Europe’s oldest university at Bologna.17
Yet the intellectual horizons of Kaliningrad’s educated citizens can be very limited, especially in regard to history. A brilliant American historian of the region, then a young journalist, was looking in the early 1990s for assistance from the editor of a newspaper previously called Komsomolskaya Pravda; she found out how little her Russian colleague could tell her:
She had been born in Siberia, and spent her childhood at an army base in the Kurile Islands. Her parents had escaped the cold and poverty of Asiatic Russia by joining the army [and] moving west…
The editor had lived in Kaliningrad for most of her life, but in school she had not learned that Kaliningrad had ever been a German city. History began with the Russian Revolution, and the next important event was the Great Patriotic War. After the war, her teachers told her, Stalin liberated Kaliningrad from Nazi occupation, but no-one ever said anything about the city prior to this event. Now she knew more. She had seen photographs of the cathedral, and she was very proud of Kant: she thought that Kaliningrad should be renamed Kantgrad. Already, she said, her generation considered itself ‘different’ from Russian Russians. They were Baltic Russians, a new nationality…
Yet her knowledge of the city’s past was shallow. She spoke of Kant with the same veneration that Russians reserve for their canon of cultural heroes – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – yet she had not read any of Kant’s books: ‘I don’t think they are published in Russian’… Her interest in Germany was an interest in German tourism, German commerce, not an interest in the German past. Her plans for ‘her city’ were plans that would bring in German money.18
A worthwhile diversion is to explore the Kutuzovsky suburb, the only pre-war district to have survived intact and where ancient pre-war trams were still running in the 1990s. It is free of the otherwise ubiquitous khrushchyoba, the Khrushchev-era housing blocks, and is filled instead with once elegant villas, each now divided into seven or eight apartments. Nowadays, the Kutuzovsky is also punctuated with the vulgar, fenced-off residences of the super-rich. Outside Kaliningrad, visitors can enjoy a curious mixture of verdant countryside (where brooding lakes and forests alternate with agricultural settlements) and small towns caught in a time warp. With few exceptions, these tattered places have preserved their grandiloquent Soviet names: Sovyetsk Gvardejsk (‘Red Guard-town’), Slavsk (‘Gloryville’), Krasno-Znamensk (‘Red Banner’), Pravdinsk (after pravda, ‘the truth’) and Pionerskii (after the Communist Youth Organization). No one tells you that Sovyetsk was formerly Tilsit, where Tsar Alexander I met Napoleon on a raft on the Nieman in 1807. Tourists can visit the naval base at Baltiysk if armed with a propusk or ‘pass’. The giant sand-dunes of the Curonian Spit are a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. The more adventurous can plunge into the forests to discover the romantic ruins of Teutonic castles at Balga, Polessk (Labiau) and Saalau (Kamenskoe).19 The Kaliningradtsy console themselves with the none-too-gallant saying, as one moves away from Poland, that ‘the cows get prettier – unlike the women’.
On the coast, beyond Baltiysk, lie a couple of half-empty seaside resorts: Svetlogorsk and Zelenogradsky. The strangely dilapidated town of Yantarny is said to be the source of 80 per cent of the world’s amber, and hence of the smuggling trade. Hardy souls who venture out of Kaliningrad to savour these places, however, must be prepared for a lesson in Communist-era planning:
I made my way up the filthy staircase and down the dark hall. Opening the door, I beheld a remarkable sight. It was not just that the hotel room was badly designed. It was as if someone had purposefully set out to create a room where… nothing worked at all.
Every item in the bathroom was poorly constructed, as if stray bits of old junk had been reassembled there… The sink had no drainpipe, so water leaked straight onto the floor. The toilet flushed not with a handle, but with a bit of twisted wire. The shower head was so low that any normal adult would have to kneel to wet his head. An inoperable ventilator, unconnected to any source of electricity, hung from the wall.
In the bedroom, the walls were covered in unmatching tiles. Half of the room was muddy blue, and the other half hospital green. No-one had made the tiles reach the ceiling, so several inches of unadorned cement lined the top of the walls. The beds lacked sheets and pillows. A small but vigorous cockroach was crawling across the floor.
Someone had ordered the construction of this hotel. Someone else had built it. Someone had placed the mismatching tiles on the walls, someone had installed the ill-fitting sink… someone had failed to make the beds. Many decisions had been made, but no-one had been responsible for the hotel room… It was just a place, created to fill the plan of a distant bureaucrat who would never see it and would never care.20
The region’s
best asset is its climate. Apart from faraway Murmansk, this is Russia’s only section of northern coastline that is ice-free throughout the year. Twenty years ago, the USSR had six Baltic naval bases. Today’s Russia has only two: Kronstadt near St Petersburg and Baltiysk.
So far, Kaliningrad and its beleaguered enclave have failed to change their name. The city of Kalinin, in central Russia, has reverted to the ancient name of Tver, and the broad Kalininskaya Boulevard in central Moscow is the ‘Tverskaya’ again. The citizens of Leningrad voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to recover the city’s original identity of St Petersburg. So there is no shortage of precedents, but no consensus has emerged in the enclave about a new name. The front-runners in the 1990s were ‘Kantograd’ and ‘Korolovsk’. At present, the Russian slang-name of ‘Kyonig’ is said to have the edge. But cultural sensibilities are still heavily Sovietized, and rallies are still held to mark the Bolshevik Revolution.
As the second post-Soviet decade reached its end, the city held its breath to see if the stand-off over nuclear missiles could be defused. In 2008 hopes were sinking. The government of Poland had agreed in principle to admit the American ‘Shield’; and Russia’s new president, Dmitri Medvedyev, threatened to install short-range Iskander missiles in the enclave. Then in 2009 tensions relaxed. The incoming Obama administration in the United States curtailed the chances of the ‘Shield’ being built,21 and the Iskanders were sent back. The signing of a new Russo-American START Treaty on 26 January 2011 promised a period of calm.
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