Maxim, displaying all the staple attributes of Russian (actually foreign) “cool”—Ray-Ban sunglasses, Polo jeans, and a blue quilted Barbour jacket—told us that his father, a Kaliningrad-born naval officer, had made a fortune on deals with the armed forces during the Putin years. Although unable to advance his own career, Maxim was certainly benefiting from his father’s success: he owned a nice car and traveled abroad frequently. The young man both criticized and supported the Kremlin, thereby evincing an attitude we would encounter elsewhere in Russia—people neither demonized nor deified Putin but viewed him and his administration in light of their achievements and failings.
“Putin is a smart man,” Maxim said admiringly, as his Audi carried us through the austere Baltic landscape—here, mostly coniferous forest. The air was redolent of the calming scents of pine cones and the nearby sea.
He spoke at length about the Kaliningrad Oblast’s status as Russia’s paramount “strategic zone.”
“Do you believe that the Germans are really planning on invading?” we asked.
He did not, but he understood why the Russian government needed to send such a message—to instill in the oblast’s population a mind-set for potential confrontation, so that no one would be taken by surprise if the West did attack. This might seem like a far-fetched notion, but the dramatic deterioration of relations between the West and Russia following the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, and the buildup of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in the Baltic region, made it a justifiable concern for the Russian government.
Yet Maxim was disillusioned. Since the 2014 annexation, life had become so much more expensive in Kaliningrad that shopping for food in Poland was cheaper. The ports, once bustling with trade, were now less busy. If at times they were employed, it was for the purpose of impressing on German cruise ship passengers the purportedly formidable might of the Russian navy.
“Once the cruise ships dock,” Maxim told us, “a submarine, already retired from the fleet, surfaces within their view. The tourists don’t know it’s been retired. It’s just used to show off, to tell them, ‘See what Russia can do against your NATO!’ And the Germans are frightened,” he added with a chuckle, “and start taking pictures.”
Although Maxim only half believed in the threat supposedly emanating from NATO, an older taxi driver we later struck up a conversation with unquestionably did. “In Russia, with all the history we have had, why should we be afraid of NATO? Of the Germans?” he asked sarcastically. Such is the sentiment prevailing throughout Russia, as we would discover during our travels across the country’s eleven time zones. Fears dormant for two decades have been reemerging with the renewed volatility in relations with NATO countries. In a country thrice invaded from the West in recent centuries—the last time in 1941, within living memory of so many Russians—the scars of war are real, the fear of it is hard to appreciate for those living with a more peaceful past.
The Kaliningrad Oblast, home to almost a million people, is now about 80 percent ethnically Russian, yet its Russian identity seems more fragile than elsewhere in the country. Perhaps this derives from a profound sense of cultural dislocation: through a program of coercion and promises, after the war the Soviet Union encouraged its peasants from central Russia to relocate as urban dwellers to the newly obtained exclave by way of tax credits and internal passports. Peasants didn’t have such passports at the time, but urban dwellers did. They were also lured with a promise of comfortable homes and better supplies of food. Roughly 400,000 peasants moved to Kaliningrad between 1947 and 1950, to restart their lives and rebuild the city in the Soviet image.
Kaliningrad residents have since been taught to celebrate and, moreover, take credit for the legacy of a history that is not their own—for example, the fourteenth-century Königsberg Cathedral; the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant; the famed Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, author of a fairy tale that the world-famous story “The Nutcracker” is based on, made even more famous by the ballet set to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s music. Marvelous, these—but not all Russian.
The currently Russian Kaliningrad region, with so little of its own Russian history, strikingly manifests the split personality disorder afflicting the country as a whole. Nothing symbolizes this division more than the bicephalous eagle. The eagle is a vestige of the Russian Empire, which claimed to be the successor to the Byzantine Empire from which Russia adopted its Christian beliefs. The Soviet Union abandoned the bird after 1917, but it was revived again when the new Russia was searching its past for a new identity.
Following the fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century, Russia, fortified with its new double-headed eagle emblem, began seeing itself as the Guardian of the True Faith, in opposition to “heretical” Rome-based Catholicism. The eastern and western churches had excommunicated each other in the Schism of 1054, an event that would have momentous consequences for Russia and its relations with the West. Russians dubbed their own capital, Moscow, the “Third Rome” (the first Rome having been Rome, the second Constantinople). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church reemerged from the shadows. During the Soviet era, after initial persecution, the church was tolerated; in post-1991 Russia, it has been celebrated and recognized in the country’s otherwise secular constitution for the special role it had played in Russian history. As it had in bygone Byzantium, the double-headed eagle signifies Russian domination over a territory encompassing parts of both Europe and Asia. Russia’s borders, after all, extend from Kaliningrad in Europe to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Asia (on the Pacific Ocean) and Chukotka, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
In the Putin years, the eagle’s significance has come to rival that of the communist-era red star. The not-so-subtle idea behind the Byzantine connection is that Russia can (and should) exist only as a counterweight to the West; the West had troubled, often competitive relations with Byzantium just as it does now with Byzantium’s spiritual heir, Russia. Nowadays, more than ever before, the double eagle embodies the country’s split personality, the deep-rooted anxiety of a former superpower torn between the old and the new, between the past and present. We are Western, European, people told us in Kaliningrad, yet their behavior, both haughty and insecure, could not have been more Russian. They argue that Russia, a continent of its own, doesn’t need approval from abroad to prosper. Yet, simultaneously, they crave that approval.
In Kaliningrad a Western lifestyle has emerged, at least as residents understand it. They pass long hours in cafés and go on frequent shopping sprees to Poland. The “Westernness” of Russian towns and cities may be evaluated, to an extent, by the ease with which they have accepted the café culture of Europe—the sharing of leisurely moments over a cup of coffee, something less substantial than a meal or a drink. This, we would see, varies greatly from place to place. When, for example, people have disposable income in Tyumen (the capital of Siberian oil), they mostly spend it on furs, jewelry, and appliances; there, cafés are hard to come by. But in Kaliningrad—so close to the West and bearing a history that makes it Western—café culture exists, yet only in a superficial, inchoate form. Naturally, it has not cured the paranoid attitude of the authorities.
When asked how they feel about being Russian in this once so Prussian a city, the locals responded, “Well, Krym nash [Crimea is ours]!” In other words, “What we’ve taken we keep and make ours, by virtue of our strength, our military power; we took back Crimea, and we will not give it up!”
Many Russians indeed believe in their inherent ownership—97 percent of Crimeans voted for the annexation in March 2014; 88 percent of all Russians supported the move at the time, and in March 2018 the number is almost unchanged—86 percent.5 The takeover has not only pitted Ukraine and the West against Russia, it has also divided many families. Even Khrushchev’s son Sergei, Nina’s uncle, once said that for the Russians, the public referendum that supported Crimea’s takeover was as legitimate as throwing out Yanukovych was for the
Ukrainians.
“Krym nash,” the typical Russian response to any militant or oppressive move by the Kremlin, we saw as a display of feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once. Again, think of the double-headed eagle, the split-personality syndrome.
This newly revived fear of foreign associations—somewhat odd in an exclave so proud of its Western heritage—may well have been shared by one of our potential contacts, Andrei Klemeshev, the rector of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Despite our repeated attempts to arrange an interview for this book, he avoided meeting us. We did not expect this: after all, his university was once the open-minded Albertina (as the University of Königsberg was formerly known), where Kant himself served as rector and taught logic and metaphysics; it was also the alma mater of Hoffmann and the birthplace of German Romanticism. Cordial on the phone at first, Klemeshev soon stopped answering our calls and ignored our texts. In a militarized city on the border, he might have decided that meeting with us would create problems for him with the authorities. This was a reasonable, if a slightly paranoid, supposition: after all, we—one of us an American, the other a Russian critic of Putin living in New York—might have served to incriminate him by mere association. His response reflected the increasing animosity between Russia and the West and was reminiscent of suspicions that made Russians wary of entertaining Westerners during the Cold War era. Others in Kaliningrad, too—including the head of the German Relations Center—refused to see us, citing busy schedules or forthcoming trips.
Our difficulties in arranging meetings put us in mind of a scene from Russian literature. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita—which for so many Russians was, during the atheist decades of communism, a Soviet gospel of sorts—a theater administrator, Varenukha, dodged phone calls from those hoping to secure tickets to a scandalous show featuring Satan (the character Woland, in Bulgakov’s telling). Spoofing Goethe’s Faust and Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, Bulgakov, writing in the Stalin era, depicted Woland as surveilling Muscovites en masse. Perhaps Klemeshev, too, thought he was being watched, and that we had come to town to ask him probing, even judgmental, questions.
One person, though, did agree to meet with us—Igor Rudnikov, a deputy of the Kaliningrad City Council and the editor of the popular opposition newspaper Novye Kolesa (New Wheels). (He would pay dearly for his political views; in November 2017 he was arrested on trumped-up charges of extortion.)
On an afternoon of rain and whipping wind we found him in his office in a nondescript suburb, which, like so much of Kaliningrad, resembled a construction site. A balding, trim bespectacled man in his early fifties, Rudnikov seemed excited. He had just returned from a court case that pitted him and his clients against a “criminal businessman” who wanted to build a fourteen-story hotel without the requisite permits. There had been two murders in Kaliningrad recently, he explained, but “The police are on the side of killers, of course.”
Rudnikov was eager to talk to an American. In him, as in others we would encounter on our travels, Westerners—especially Americans—still inspire reverence and often receive preferential treatment, despite the xenophobic attitude of the authorities. The Soviet Union was largely closed to foreigners, and curiosity is still evident in now rather common encounters. Moreover, Russia has felt inferior and envious toward the West throughout its history, hence its often-militant display of grandstanding and superiority in human relations translates as fascination and desire for contact.
Receiving the American’s attention, for an hour and a half, Rudnikov lectured us on Russian politics: “For a century, our country has been in the grip of total lies.” As had the border guards at the airport, he treated Nina as Jeff’s helper–a reflection of sexist bias still so common in Russia. Sure, women write books in Russia all the time, but a male foreigner is in any case worthier of serious attention than a Russian female. (We did not advertise Nina’s Khrushchev connection.)
Rudnikov was particularly concerned about the vulnerability of an American writer traveling around Russia, believing that such an American would inevitably provoke suspicion. “Yesterday you Americans were our friends. Today, you aren’t, and no one will want to talk to you. The way it is nowadays,” he added, channeling the state’s message, “if you explain you’re writing a book, you’ll be immediately considered a spy, a provocateur. You have to come up with a better cover.”
Cover? The odd, very Cold War choice of words made us doubt what he was saying. The expressions on our faces surely reflected this, possibly prompting him to clarify: “But here in Kaliningrad it’s different, of course. Europe is a stone’s throw away. Here we see Russian patriots only at soccer matches.”
This was not quite our impression. Rudnikov was a member of the opposition, after all, but as it turned out, he had it wrong. In places we were to visit farther east, which we expected to be more nationalist and patriotic, people were, in fact, much less suspicious than in Kaliningrad.
We told him of our travails in attempting to interview people in town. He offered an explanation that contradicted what he had just said. In his view, what made some in Kaliningrad so closed-minded, was the oblast’s proximity to the West and, therefore, at least as the authorities saw it, the distinct possibility that Kaliningrad might succumb to Western influence.
Rudnikov told us that in the early 2000s Kaliningrad was proud that Putin’s then-wife Lyudmila hailed from here.
“Putin was no stranger to this town,” he said. “What’s more, for the first two terms of his presidency, Kaliningrad was supposed to become Russia’s European enclave, a qualitative test for Russo-European relationships that would then be replicated in the rest of the country.” In fact, he explained, in 2005 Königsberg/Kaliningrad celebrated its 750th anniversary as a joint German-Russian city. This reflected a dramatic change in the authorities’ attitude toward Kaliningrad’s history, which they had previously depicted as beginning, basically, only in 1945. Germany welcomed the inclusive continuity of the “new” view of the city’s past; German tourists whose families were originally from the area could now visit without feeling burdened by the Nazis’ crimes in the Soviet Union. The government then proclaimed Kaliningrad a Free Economic Zone (appropriately nicknamed Yantar, or Amber) and dubbed it Russia’s Hong Kong, with tax tariffs lower than elsewhere in the country. Rudnikov detailed for us the inevitable distortions to which such status led: clever entrepreneurs imported goods—from foodstuffs to automobiles—from Germany and other European countries only to repackage and relabel them “Made in Kaliningrad,” so that they might sell them as authentically Russian.
Kaliningrad’s pro-Western orientation, however, began to change in 2002, when President George W. Bush announced that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (a cornerstone arms control agreement of the Cold War) it had signed with the Soviet Union. He further decided to deploy missile defense systems (supposedly against threats emanating from Iran) in Poland and other Eastern European countries. Relations soured further after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent imposition of Western economic sanctions on the Russian economy. Kaliningrad set about converting itself into a fortress of sorts, in preparation for conflict with the NATO alliance. Russia accomplished this easily; after all, it had never fully dismantled the oblast’s military infrastructure and continued sheltering its Baltic fleet there. In addition to basing Iskander missiles in the oblast, which became official in 2018, it has recently set about building long-range anti-missile radar installations.
During the Prussian centuries, the city was a fortress, too, then facing the Russian frontier. In the Soviet decades, the old German forts—seven in total, grim, all built of grimy red brick—were converted into Great Patriotic War museums and operate as such today. The tanks and submarines strategically placed by these forts serve as a reminder to visitors of the threat from the West.
Rudnikov insisted that actual warfare was not looming; inste
ad, a virtual combat involving a “hybrid” war of perceptions and information was on, because neither side—for obvious reasons—actually wants to fight. Nevertheless, “This threat,” he said, “helps bolster the state’s propaganda. After the Soviet collapse there was talk that Kaliningrad might split from Russia, just as parts of Yugoslavia broke away, and became independent.” He termed the “threat of Germanization” a convenient political tool, nothing more.
During the war the Soviets decimated large parts of the city in retaliation for the Nazi destruction of so much of western Russia. The city had been laid to waste: infrastructure was in ruins, there was no running water or electricity, and a shortage of food and medical supplies persisted. Stalin, however, saw an opportunity amid the destruction. He would have Königsberg completely rebuilt to represent the New Soviet City. This transformation—from a “fascist” city embedded in almost a millennium of German culture into a Socialist dream town devoid of German influence—necessitated a complete erasure of its past.
Nevertheless, the Soviet government followed political considerations in determining what it destroyed and what it left standing. Miraculously surviving both the Nazi and the Soviet assaults, Königsberg Cathedral is still the focal point of the city. It stands on the stone embankment of the lightly wooded Kant Island (once Kneiphof Island) in the Pregel River, amid Kaliningrad’s Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks. Kant is interred beside its north wall, in a triple-plinthed grave supporting an elongated pyramidal slab. The Bolsheviks considered Kant a precursor to Karl Marx, and Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason was seen as an argument against the existence of God. Hence, the Soviet government decided to leave the cathedral intact.
During the Soviet decades the house of worship fell into disrepair, but under Putin, the maintenance of Kaliningrad’s cultural heritage became a priority. The Gothic cathedral was renovated and restored to much of its glory.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 3