The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  Newspaper and radio reporting and, above all, TV coverage have shown the war in Bosnia in extraordinary detail, but in the absence of a will to intervene by those few people in the world who make political and military decisions, the war becomes another remote disaster; the people suffering and being murdered there become disaster “victims.” Suffering is visibly present, and can be seen in close-up; and no doubt many people feel sympathy for the victims. What cannot be recorded is an absence—the absence of any political will to end the suffering: more exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily Europe’s responsibility, which has its origins in the traditional pro-Serb slant of the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office. It is being implemented by the UN occupation of Sarajevo, which is largely a French operation.

  I do not believe the standard argument made by critics of television that watching terrible events on the small screen distances them as much as it makes them real. It is the continuing coverage of the war in the absence of action to stop it that makes us mere spectators. Not television but our politicians have made history come to seem like re-runs. We get tired of watching the same show. If it seems unreal, it is because it’s both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.

  Even people in Sarajevo sometimes say it seems to them unreal. They are in a state of shock, which does not diminish, which takes the form of a rhetorical incredulity (“How could this happen? I still can’t believe this is happening.”). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb atrocities, and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the lives they are now obliged to lead. “We’re living in the Middle Ages,” someone said to me. “This is science fiction,” another friend said.

  People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since I’ve started going to Sarajevo—this winter I plan to return to direct The Cherry Orchard with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.

  Waiting for Godot opened, with twelve candles on the stage, on August 17. There were two performances that day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 4:00 PM. In Sarajevo there are only matinees; hardly anybody goes out after dark. Many people were turned away. For the first few performances I was tense with anxiety. But there was a moment, I think it was the third performance, when I began to relax. For the first time I was seeing the play as a spectator. It was time to stop worrying that Ines would let the rope linking her and Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mâché chicken; that Sejo, the third Vladimir, would forget to keep shifting from foot to foot just before he suddenly rushes off to pee. The play now belonged to the actors, and I knew it was in good hands. And I think it was at the end of that performance—on Wednesday, August 18 at 2:00 PM—during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, that my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theater: a UN APC thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire.

  —October 21, 1993

  15

  The Nowhere City

  Amos Elon

  The violence of empires can destroy more than peoples and buildings; memories, histories, can be demolished too.

  German-speaking peoples had lived in East Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia, Ruthenia, for many centuries. They were part of the European mosaic ripped apart in the 20th century by Hitler and Stalin, with some complicity of the Western nations too.

  In 1945, German parts of Poland simply vanished, not just the people, and much of what they had built over the ages, but their histories. Memories were erased, new histories invented. Königsberg, the capital of Prussia, became Kaliningrad, part of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Kaliningrad became an orphan of history, a concrete mess with almost nothing left to remind people what came before.

  —I.B.

  1.

  IN DAYTIME, THE main avenues of Kaliningrad—wide enough to allow ten tanks abreast to pass a reviewing stand—are half deserted. Traffic is sparse. Before the Russians took it over in 1945, this ice-free Baltic seaport was the ancient German city of Königsberg, the historic capital of East Prussia and one of the more attractive towns of the German empire. Recently there has even been talk of Germany taking the city back. But now the barren monotony and inhuman scale of Communist urban planning make Kaliningrad—the phantom of a city without any visible center—possibly one of the ugliest places in the world. Four hundred thousand inhabitants—70 percent transient sailors, fishermen, and members of the Russian armed forces and their dependents—live here in monotonous apartment blocks, crumbling mountain ranges of tar and cement and peeling plaster, gray on gray.

  The public squares, as in most cities built by the Soviets after the war, are vast, each large enough to accommodate almost the entire population. Loudspeakers left over from the old Communist public-address system still dangle from their poles. There are no mass rallies nowadays and the loudspeakers are rarely if ever used. But the statue of M.I. Kalinin, a former president of the Soviet Union (he is said to have sent his own wife to the Gulag), is still standing in a vast square outside the railroad station. The city was named for him in 1945 after its capture by the Red Army in fierce street fighting with the Wehrmacht and its annexation by the Soviet Union. A giant statue of Lenin is also still standing on Ploshchad Pobedy (Victory Square)—the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

  Founded in 1255 by knights of the Teutonic Order on rising ground above the river Pregel (now called Pregolya), Königsberg was the seat of a famous Lutheran university. In the countryside nearby were some of the largest and finest estates of the Prussian military aristocracy. In this quintessentially Germanic region the proverbial Prussian virtues of duty and discipline and austere living were cultivated in huts and manor houses, while in the city itself the dukes and the kings of Prussia were crowned. Immanuel Kant was born here in 1724, and he hardly ever left. At the university he taught not only philosophy, but geography and math as well. Johann Gottfried Herder, a Lutheran minister’s son who also taught here, almost single-handedly invented pan-German nationalism as the expression of the “spirit” of language and folksong and poetry.

  Königsberg was an important garrison town, where generations of Prussian officers were trained in blind, ungrudging obedience to the word of command. Yet among young graduates of its military academy were also some of the spirited, if ineffective, aristocratic officers who conspired to launch the coup against Hitler’s tyranny on July 20, 1944.

  Driving through today’s city, you would never guess how pretty Königsberg was. Old photographs show a scenic place, with a busy harbor, several fine churches, picturesque wharfs, and stately embankments and promenades along the river. On the hilltop stood the Prussian royal palace with its imposing crenelated towers. In the middle of the river was a densely built-up island whose narrow lanes, lined with medieval frame houses, led to the great brick Gothic cathedral in which the Prussian kings were crowned. Its grotesque ruin survives today in the middle of the completely empty island, with Kant’s relatively well-preserved tombstone on the wall of the southwestern corner.

  Nearly everything else has disappeared. When the Red Army stormed it in 1945, roughly a third of the old town was still standing and there were 120,000 remaining Germans. By 1947, the last of these had been deported to Germany or Kazakhstan, along with neighboring East Prussian farmers, many of whom died. Stalin ordered the old center of Prussian militarism bulldozed, leveled, and completely rebuilt as a model socialist city, to be resettled by Russians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Ukrainians, and other New Soviet Men and Women. Not all came voluntarily. Some were inmates of gulags ordered to settle in Kaliningrad after years of forced labor in the nearby swamps. The population today is still some twenty percent below its prewar level of 480,000.

  The future of the Kaliningrad Province, or Oblast, on
e of Russia’s thirty-nine increasingly autonomous provinces, is currently a matter of intense debate. The sudden collapse of the Soviet empire made Kaliningrad the last bit of territory (a mere 4,200 square miles) left over from Stalin’s vast territorial gains in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. But Kaliningrad is now cut off from “mainland” Russia, to which it formally belongs, by hundreds of miles of newly independent Lithuanian, Latvian, and Belarus territory.

  Only a few of the people I saw believe Kaliningrad should go on being governed directly by Moscow. They talk of Kaliningrad becoming an “independent” Baltic state, of “full autonomy” as a new “Republic of Prussia” within the Russian federation, of a joint German-Russian condominium, or of outright Anschluss with Germany. Like the officials of several other Russian regional governments, the local administrators here have become more independent of Moscow in recent months, and some are now actively courting virtually every prominent German businessman, journalist, or missionary who visits the city.

  “Kaliningrad must become Königsberg again,” I was told by Arsenij Gulyga, a prominent Russian philosopher who is now the leading Russian authority on Kant. Gulyga recalls with some irony that as a young Soviet officer in 1945, he had been one of the “liberators” of the city. Now, he says, “it would be the most natural thing in the world” if the city would revert to Germany again. Geographically, it is nearer to Berlin (400 miles) than to St. Petersburg (512 miles) or Moscow (more than 600 miles). Historically, it remains a German city, he says. Gulyga would also like to see the tsarist monarchy restored.

  There is a persistent rumor in Kaliningrad, as well as in the Baltic countries, that an East Prussian “government in exile” has already been formed by right-wing German politicians. At the same time nationalists in both Warsaw and Vilnius are laying claim to parts of the Kaliningrad Autonomous Province, which they consider “historically” Polish or Lithuanian. In Warsaw last summer I saw leaflets calling for the return of Kaliningrad (Krolewiec) to Mother Poland; a few weeks later, in Vilnius, people were referring to the eastern parts of the Kaliningrad region as “Little Lithuania.” The Lithuanian ambassador to Washington provoked a minor storm last year when he announced that Little Lithuania was an empty space and could be taken over by his country immediately.

  Several people I talked to speculated that Russia might sell the former Königsberg to the Germans for money—a temptation which the Moscow English-language weekly New Times described last year as possibly “too strong to resist.” According to one view of German politics, past and present—which by now may be a misleading stereotype—“Prussia” and “Königsberg” are central or permanent features of the German national psyche. “Can Kohl really refuse a Russian offer to restore Königsberg?” a Polish diplomat in Warsaw asked me. He may be overestimating Germany’s wealth after reunification or the true extent of its economic or strategic designs in the East. President Yeltsin is thought to be sufficiently unconventional, and hard-pressed for Western currency, to entertain the idea of a sale for which there is a wellknown precedent—the Russian sale of Alaska to the United States in 1872.

  On the other hand, if Germany should reacquire East Prussia and Königsberg this might undermine the entire postwar border pattern in Eastern Europe and revive fears of German expansionism. “Poland will strongly oppose it,” a Polish diplomat says. According to a joke circulating last summer, pessimists in Kaliningrad are taking lessons in Polish and optimists lessons in German, while realists are learning how to shoot Kalashnikov submachine guns. (In fact, nearly 75 percent of the students at the state university have signed up for German courses.)

  The city’s economy is in a state of collapse. The average monthly pay went down from sixteen dollars a month last summer to an estimated nine dollars a month now, and a Russian army major makes only slightly more than twice that amount. On the Lenin Prospect I saw soldiers in uniform selling gasoline from an army petrol tank to civilian motorists. There is a thriving black market in military equipment. Western diplomats claim that in Kaliningrad you can buy yourself a missile (“there are more missiles here than trees”) or a tank, if you so wish, and perhaps even nuclear fuel or a nuclear device. A Western diplomat told me that dozens of nuclear devices formerly located in the Kaliningrad area remain unaccounted for.

  The port’s nuclear submarines have been transferred to the Arctic Sea or decommissioned, but there are many rumors—most of them ugly ones—about the condition and safety of these decommissioned nuclear submarines, and of the shorebased reactors that used to produce their fuel. The total amount of radioactive materials in them is said to be many times greater than that in the crippled unit at Chernobyl. In the Russian press there have been warnings of the danger of “dozens of Chernobyls” erupting in Russian naval bases in the Arctic and Baltic seas. One morning I visited Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, the officer commanding the Russian Baltic fleet, in his office on the outskirts of Kaliningrad. I asked if there was substance in these warnings. Or was the press perhaps exaggerating? “The situation is even more serious than as reported in the press,” the admiral replied.

  Early each morning, thousands line up outside the state-owned food shops where the shelves are often bare. There are long lines for the bus, which sometimes never arrives and often has no room for more passengers when it does. Lines of a different sort form every morning at some of the main intersections: hundreds of elderly woman and men, mostly state pensioners, stand about for hours with a little something in their hands they are hoping to sell: a bottle of Coke, a jar of preserved cucumbers, a handful of berries, a wilted cauliflower wrapped in a piece of torn newspaper.

  Almost every night graves are dug up and robbed by thieves who come to the cemeteries with metal detectors, looking for rings and other valuables and for gold teeth which they pry off with hammers and pliers. The police seem to do nothing to prevent this. I visited the Kaliningrad police chief, Colonel Viktor Shoshnikov, in his office. A tough-looking man, with a habit of quoting Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, he was sitting behind a large oak desk—before 1945 it may have served a German police chief—on which were many telephones. Keys dangled from his broad belt.

  Shoshnikov began by lamenting that the crime rate in Kaliningrad had risen sharply since the beginning of glasnost and perestroika. Perestroika and the “Americanization of journalism” were inspiring permissiveness, pornography, prostitution, and capital crimes. The entire Kaliningrad region, he said, was infested by “a plague of Smerdyakovs,” referring to the feebleminded, sinister half brother of the Karamazovs. People had never been afraid to go out at night, Shoshnikov said. Now they are.

  At night, the streets are dim. Nearly all electric power is imported from neighboring Lithuania, which is threatening to charge hard currency for it soon. In the bluish uncertain light cast by neon and quartz street lamps, many of them damaged, the few souls still about throw weird shadows on the ground, and the atmosphere, grim and gloomy at best in daytime, is now even gloomier. On Prospekt Mira, outside the rickety old Hotel Moskwa where I was staying, drunks were hollering in the dark long after midnight. I watched them stagger over the potholes in the road, throwing bottles against the walls and shouting obscenities at one another. Drug addicts passed the night on the scraggly lawn nearby. According to a recent report in the liberal local newsweekly Mirror, a former samizdat publication, Kaliningrad is the “No. 1 drug city” in the former Soviet Union. When I asked Colonel Shoshnikov about that he said that Kaliningrad is number one on the list only because it is the only major city reporting true statistics; all the others were cheating.

  One cannot escape an uncanny feeling of the existence of the old Königsberg, like the negative of a damaged photograph, lying ten to twenty feet underneath the city’s surface, covered with rubble from the war and from Stalin’s bulldozers. If the huge mass of debris were cleared away the old topography, now flattened out, would come into view, with its natural hills and dips, its landscaped river basins and embankments. Buried u
nder the Lumumba and Friedrich Engels Sport Centers, under the Gamal Abdul Nasser Park and Oktober Revolution Housing Estates Nos. 1–9, the old town has survived only in the city’s historical museum, where models of the 1945 street battles accompanied by sound effects convey an idea of the burning city’s center, drowned in gunfire, at the moment of its capture by the Red Army.

  Until the spring of 1991, Kaliningrad was a Soviet “security zone,” known as the “Silent Swamp,” since it was very difficult to visit and few people knew what was going on in the many military installations there. The region was closed to foreigners, except possibly spies, and even to most Russians except by special permit. Much of the rich farmland—before the war East Prussia was Germany’s corn granary—lay fallow. Some three hundred abandoned German villages that had engaged in farming before the war were never resettled. During the early Sixties, oil was found east of the city but it was hardly developed. Nor was Kaliningrad’s economic potential exploited, with its opportune geographic location at the westernmost point of the Soviet Union and its great port, as a link between Russia and Central Europe. Instead, the place was turned into one of the Soviet Union’s main military and naval bases.

  According to a report published last spring in Moscow News, if war with the West had broken out, the main task of the Soviet Baltic fleet would have been to capture the Danish Straits and seal off the Baltic Sea. Between 1945 and 1991, no Western cargo ship was allowed into either Kaliningrad waters or those of nearby Baltijsk (the former Prussian Pillau). The city is still a military fiefdom, headquarters of the 11th Army of the Guards, and seat of the admiral commanding the Russian Baltic fleet. The Baltic fleet, according to Admiral Yegorov, is expected nowadays to cover part of its maintenance costs by transporting civilian and foreign cargo and renting out ships to Western entrepreneurs and organizers of entertainments such as company anniversaries or wedding parties.