[BRIEF NOTE] Kaliningrad's Future
May. 15th, 2009 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldSome days ago, Window on Eurasia featured a very interesting article on Kaliningrad's future as seen by the mayor of the city of Kaliningrad.
I've blogged about Kaliningrad in 2005 and 2006 (1, 2), both times because the post-1945 history of the historic region of East Prussia, of which Kaliningrad--once Königsberg--was the core, fascinates me.
Pravda once suggested that Kaliningrad might become a detached territory of Russia, at once included in the Federation and the European Union. That's unlikely, since the European Union is interested in developing a relationship with a Russian Kaliningrad. The ways in which Kaliningrad could develop in the future fascinate me, not least because I'm not sure what could happen there. Can my readers come in with their own suggestions?
Kaliningrad is not a trophy won by Moscow as the result of the Soviet victory in World War II but rather “a Russian city” that became part of the Russian Empire two centuries earlier, according to that city’s mayor. For that reason, he says, it is his personal view that it would not be a problem to restore Koenigsberg as its name.
Indeed, Feliks Lapin said in a wide-ranging interview on Echo Moskvy radio yesterday, Russians should be proud of the fact that Koenigsberg is a Russian city, although he admitted that many people would have problems with this or with calling the entire oblast, created in 1945, Eastern Prussia (www.echo.msk.ru/programs/town/589217-echo/).
[. . .]
[O]ne dimension on which Kaliningrad is distinguished “from other [Russian] cities in a positive way: [there] city can walk about at night without fear.” And he acknowledged that this was “certainly” the result of what his Echo Moskvy interviewer described as “the influence of the neighbors.”
Those include both the Poles and the Balts, all of whose countries are members of the two key Western institutions, the European Union and NATO. But those memberships do not prevent the Russian residents of Kaliningrad from having regular and positive interaction with members of those nations.
“You know,” Lapin said, “when people talk to one another, no one typically asks whether you are a NATO member or not a NATO member.” Instead, they focus on common issues, including on shared works of art and culture which lay the foundation for “a communion of people and a closeness of people.”
Because that is the case, the mayor continued, how one calls the city he heads matters. Calling it Kaliningrad as now focuses on the events of 1945 while restoring its earlier name of Koenigsberg would serve to underscore the way in which that city has long been part of Russia and of Europe.
Russians have every reason to be “proud that Koenigsberg is a Russian city,” although he noted that many would object and even more would have problems with calling the oblast “Prussia.” It might be better to keep its current name, Kaliningrad oblast, “or call it something else,” such as “Western Russia” (www.rian.ru/society/20090509/170568924.html).
I've blogged about Kaliningrad in 2005 and 2006 (1, 2), both times because the post-1945 history of the historic region of East Prussia, of which Kaliningrad--once Königsberg--was the core, fascinates me.
In the days of the Second Reich, Danzig, Memel, and Königsberg were the easternmost enclaves of Germandom. The German states of these cities were threatened, not only geopolitically by the Russian Empire that nearly surrounded them, but demographically and ethnolinguistically by the relatively more fecund Poles, Lithuanians, and kindred peoples. The Ostflucht, the migration of ethnic Germans from the eastern reaches of the Prussian realm to richer areas in western and central Germany, began almost as soon as Germany was unified. The recreation of independent Polish and Lithuanian nation-states impinged directly upon East Prussia, which became a sovereign German island in a Balto-Slavic sea. Unsurprisingly, the failure of Nazi Germany's gambit to unite all Germans into a single nightmarish empire left East Prussia and its adjoining cities forfeit. Memel was renamed Klaipeda and restored to a post-war Lithuania now a Soviet republic; Danzig became Gdansk as part of its annexation to a Poland that now also included the Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodship, the south of East Prussia; the core of East Prussia, around the devastated city of Königsberg, became the Russian republic's 'Калининград province (Kaliningrad in Latin script).
Pravda once suggested that Kaliningrad might become a detached territory of Russia, at once included in the Federation and the European Union. That's unlikely, since the European Union is interested in developing a relationship with a Russian Kaliningrad. The ways in which Kaliningrad could develop in the future fascinate me, not least because I'm not sure what could happen there. Can my readers come in with their own suggestions?
