Last June, I
wrote briefly about the vissicitudes of identity in the region of the
East Prussia, stretching along the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea from Danzig to Klaipeda, in the several generations since the 1945 expulsion of the region's German population and its resettlement by (from south to north) Poles, Russians, and Lithuanians. The central area of East Prussia, a knot of territory surrounding the region's capital once known as Königsberg, now constitutes the Russian exclave of
Kaliningrad Oblast, home to nearly one million people separated from the Russian metropole by Lithuania and Belarus.
Justin Walley recent article in
The Baltic Times,
"The Russian soul, detached", is an interesting travelogue describing his experiences of that province. The area's remoteness from the European Union that surrounds it is what first strikes him:
Finding reliable background information about Kaliningrad in a time of mass global communication is strikingly difficult. In fact there are seemingly more English-language Web sites devoted to clam diving than there are to this tiny Russian exclave. A “Kaliningrad” word search on the Internet brings up news agency reports of smuggling, an AIDS epidemic, spying, and of an Su-27 fighter plane crashing in Lithuania en route to one of the exclave’s secretive military bases.
When I told some Latvians that I was going to Kaliningrad on holiday they reacted as if I'd just told them I wanted to spend a few days participating in a reality show where I would be incarcerated on a prison island. Most of my British friends think Kaliningrad is somewhere between Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk in the middle of deepest, darkest Siberia.
Walley's overall impression of Kaliningrad seems to be a generally positive one, though modified by a sense of the region's relative emptiness. Though it is likely unfair to characterize Kaliningrad as a "black hole" in the middle of Europe, it is safe to say that without a particularly privileged position in the Russian and European economies, and suffering from a certain amount of isolation, Kaliningrad's prospects are at best mixed.
Kaliningrad independence or radical autonomy is unlikely because of the central government's concerns for the integrity of the Russian state and the Russian identity of the people who now live there. European policies seem to balance the fine line between
trying to engage with Kaliningrad separately and
trying to prevent the territory's insertion into Europe as a source of migrants, disease, and other perceived ills from the rest of Russia.
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