[LINK] "Kaliningrad: ‘Just Another Russian Region’"

[rfmcdonald]

Transitions Online featured at the beginning of April suggesting that talk the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, last remnant of German East Prussia, has an especially notable regional identity is fundamentally flawed. Kaliningrad is as Russian, I would suggest, as Alaska is American, or for that matter as East Prussia was German.

The topic of a “Kaliningrad identity” has been played up before. A recent article in New Eastern Europe magazine focuses on the “Riddle of Kaliningrad.” The author credits Kaliningraders with “a strong regional identity” which, he says, can become a framework for political mobilization, namely when the inhabitants feel that the interest of their Oblast have been disregarded. One may wonder to what extent this analysis is accurate.

There is no doubt that the Kaliningrad Oblast has always been somehow special. The German Ostpreussen was split up between Poland and the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. The renaming of its former capital, Koenigsberg, to Kaliningrad was only one of myriad toponymic purges in the Oblast, all meant to minimize the previous cultural presence. Massive resettlement from several Soviet republics worked to set up a Soviet melting pot. And what could be called a local version of the Benes decrees rid the land of the remnants of German inhabitants, ensuring there was no societal continuity between populations. During the Soviet era interest in the German past was generally discouraged, though it could not be erased completely. Buildings, cobblestone roads, orchards, and even household items remained behind as numb witnesses of the city’s “other” past. Everyday observations on whether, for example, one lived in a “German” brick house or a Soviet concrete apartment block were (and still are) commonplace.
The post-Soviet period saw a resurgence of interest in the Koenigsberg identity, owing in no small part to the influx of German tourists. Many of them came to see the ancestral land they may have left as small children. They were prepared to consume the Koenigsberg narrative in the form of souvenirs and tourist services. And immediately the specters of both German revisionism and a sort of Kaliningrad independentism arose. Political ideas of a “Baltic republic” existing separately from the Russian Federation remained utterly marginal. But the specific “Europeanness” that made Kaliningrad somehow distinct from the rest of Russia was a theme played on multiple sides. Vladimir Putin's engagement of the “Old Europe” in 2005 included a triple visit, together with Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac, to Kaliningrad. It was apparently for this occasion that the Kaliningrad State University was officially renamed after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, thus emphasizing continuity with the European heritage of Koenigsberg through the name of one of its most famous citizens.

[. . . A]pparently, importing European goods was not the same as importing European values – or the EU's stance on political issues of the day, for that matter. A poll taken in April 2014 by the Kaliningrad Monitoring group indicates that 88 percent in the Oblast supported the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol. The same poll revealed that the number of those who admit separating in any way from Russia as a possibility fell to the historical minimum of 3 percent. The fanciful idea of a joint EU-Russia jurisdiction over Kaliningrad has also been marginalized (2 percent compared with 12 percent in a similar poll taken in 2003). As the sociologist Aleksei Vysotskiy argued, the Kaliningraders finally admitted that Kaliningrad Oblast was “an ordinary administrative unit of the Russian Federation” which according to him has always been the situation anyway.