There are spots in the former Soviet Union that seem scarcely changed from the old days. The main railroad terminal in Kaliningrad is one of them. With its classical lines, sleek marble
concourse and overly ornate chandeliers, Kaliningrad South station has a nicely retro feel. The trains still rumble off to Minsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
But no longer can Kaliningraders just hop on departing trains without formality. For, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia’s Baltic exclave at Kaliningrad finds itself curiously isolated: a fragment of Russia hemmed in by the European Union. True, Kaliningrad has access to Baltic waters, but its land frontiers are with Poland and Lithuania, both territories that today are hardly overflowing with affection for Mother Russia.
This year, Kaliningrad is back in the news. After months of tit-for-tat diplomacy redolent of the Cold War years, Moscow and Washington are at last talking, and the Russian threat to site warheads in the Kaliningrad Oblast recedes. It may be the Obama dividend, but the million inhabitants of this detached portion of Russia are still pawns. “Back in the eighties, my friends and I often went to Vilnius just for the weekend,” said Jana, a tousle-haired woman in her late forties who has views on everything from the price of potatoes to global geopolitics. In those days, the then Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was just a short hop away for Kaliningraders. “Now I cannot go to Vilnius without a visa, and that’s pricey – far more than I could ever afford,” Jana complained.
Like most citizens of the Kaliningrad region, Jana is torn as to whether Moscow or Brussels is to blame for Kaliningrad’s isolation. “The travel situation has become very difficult over the last 10 years. Lithuania and Poland have really clamped down on cross-border movement into their territories from Kaliningrad. No visa, no entry. It’s very tough.”
Former European Union commissioner Chris Patten once famously dubbed Kaliningrad “Russia’s hell-hole exclave,” a phrase seized upon by the western media who were quick to depict Kaliningrad as a small, encircled outpost of urban depravity. The truth is very different. The Kaliningrad region is larger than the U.S. state of Connecticut. The city itself is bustling, neat and in parts has an old style elegance that seems more Central European than Russian. The surrounding countryside is deliciously beautiful, with cobbled village lanes and rural highways lined with avenues of chestnuts and lime trees that look for all the world like the hinterland of Berlin – and there really is a strong German connection, for parts of the Kaliningrad Oblast are akin to Prussia frozen in amber.
track six at kaliningrad south is the most interesting in the entire train station. It comes alive just after two every afternoon – the moment when the train from Berlin arrives. Be not deceived! This is no luxury international express that strings out across the Baltic countryside, but rather one of those slo-mo trains that dawdles past country villages and slips round the back of long abandoned factories. A single, blue-and-white sleeping car suffices to accommodate passengers bound for Kaliningrad from Berlin. It is a 16-hour journey on a route reinstated only five years ago after a gap of more than half a century. This solitary railroad car captures the conundrum of modern Kaliningrad.
Prior to the Second World War, Kaliningrad was Königsberg, the principal city of Germany’s province of East Prussia. Soviet-era rhetoric glossed over Königsberg’s history, but Kaliningrad and its hinterland are full of visual references to a Prussian past. There are red brick city walls embellished with statues of Teutonic knights and Prussian kings. Out beyond the city fringe, there is a further ring of city defenses built by Prussian military engineers. Wander through some Kaliningrad suburbs, and, were it not for the telltale street signs in Cyrillic script, one might easily be seduced into believing that you were in Lübeck or Leipzig. Throughout the region, churches that once echoed to Bach and Schubert are now flourishing Orthodox communities. Lutheran piety has been supplanted by devotional zeal of a more Russian demeanor.
The train that arrives on track six is a link with Kaliningrad’s past. Back in the late 1920s, Berlin’s mercantile and political elite could breakfast at home, board the Königsberg express at nine in the morning, and be in the Baltic port in time for tea. In those days, it took just eight hours to speed between Prussia’s two great cities.
Elenore Kallweit wishes that the journey in 2009 was as painless. An overnight sleeping berth is no place for an octogenarian with aching limbs, and it is only with some difficulty that Elenore climbs down from the railroad car onto the station platform. The provodnitsa [female conductor] – who herself is not quite young enough to gracefully wear the short skirt riding up around her thighs – helps Kallweit down the steps. A growing number of older Germans now venture nervously to the Königsberg of their youth. Most are a little fearful about what awaits them there. For most of these Heimkehrer [homecomers], their visits are fleeting – sometimes no more than a day trip from Frombork or Klaipeda. These two towns, in Poland and Lithuania respectively, are both conveniently near the Russian exclave’s border.
Elenore comes by train with misty memories of horse chestnut trees laden with white blossoms, of hedgerows full of wild sorrel and meadowsweet, and orchards heavy with the scent of ripe apples. There were picnics by the old mill stream, and fierce frosts on deep-winter days on the family farm near Kluken (today Klyukvennoye). She recalls an excursion by train: her entire school class traveling on the eve of World War II to visit Königsberg’s great cathedral on its island in the heart of the East Prussian capital. Children walking two-by-two, hands linked, through several centuries of very German history. And there were summer trips to the beach at Rauschen, where the wind whispered through the pines, and Elenore and her sister danced the wave-washed sands. Whenever a particularly big wave rolled in, the girls rushed to be the first to find little pieces of amber washed up by the receding waters.
This land that was once Prussia is now very definitely Russia. Near the train station, a bold statue of Mother Russia makes the point. She towers sternly on her plinth, gesturing down at the Kaliningrad soil as if to assert that this is Russia, and it shall ever be so. European Union policymakers in Brussels, who once speculated that Russia might be gently squeezed out of its Kaliningrad outpost, had not reckoned with the tenacity of Mother Russia. Moscow will not give up Kaliningrad lightly, nor should it. Instead, all the talk is of some sort of special arrangement for the exclave oblast. Canny Russian entrepreneurs have invested heavily in the Kaliningrad region, hoping that some liberalization of trade laws, and even a possible relaxation of the visa regime, might usher in a sort of Russia-lite – a Slavic Hong Kong of sorts.
Moscow is cautious, arguing that, compared with many parts of rural Russia, the Kaliningrad Oblast is not so bad off. After all, any economic dispensations for the exclave may prompt demands for similar privileges from a dozen other regions, from Murmansk to Magadan. But there are some chinks in Moscow’s armor. There is talk of designating the coastal town of Yantarny – famous as the world’s greatest single source of amber – as a special casino-zone. Local proponents of the scheme argue that a hotspot of gambling capitalism in the exclave oblast would pull in high rollers from across Europe (shifting the analogy from Hong Kong to Monaco, perhaps). Milan, Paris, Zürich, Vienna and Berlin are all less than three hours away by plane. The ever-perceptive Jana is skeptical: “It’s just a gimmick to pander to the New Russians,” she says. “You know, the ones who made a fast buck through all manner of dubious schemes back in the nineties. Roulette and blackjack in Yantarny will do zilch to help folk like me.”
Jana has a point. The Kaliningrad region has attracted more than its fair share of the bling-bling glitz generation. Stroll the promenade in the seaside town of Svetlogorsk on a spring morning, and chances are you’ll run across at least one novy russky enjoying a caipirinha for breakfast (see box).
Back at Kaliningrad station, Elenore Kallweit knows nothing of the New Russians nor of gambling. The octogenarian makes her way to the inevitable first stop on Germans’ homecoming pilgrimage – the restored German cathedral on an island in the River Pregolya. Here Igor Odintsov, a former Soviet military engineer who moved to Kaliningrad in 1982, presides with style over the city’s most controversial renovation project. Small groups of visiting Germans, bemused at what has become of Königsberg, listen to renderings of Bach on a huge organ aloft. Odintsov tutors the visitors on the importance of the cathedral as the spiritual focus of old Königsberg. True that may be, but the spiritual focus of modern Kaliningrad is very definitely not here on the island in the Pregolya river. A mile or two away to the north, the splendid new Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour dominates Victory Square. Students of changing pieties in Kaliningrad remark that the statue of Lenin which once dominated Victory Square was removed to make way for the new cathedral. But, this being Kaliningrad, Lenin was not condemned to monumental oblivion; instead the statue was re-erected at the southern end of Leninsky Prospekt.
Few of the Germans who return to trace their Königsberg connections ever make it up to Victory Square and the new Orthodox Cathedral. Instead, they are seduced by Odintsov’s tales of battling bureaucracy to rebuild the old German cathedral. The building was bombed by the British in the closing months of the war. In the summer of 1945, it was a burnt-out shell. Over the ensuing 40 years it fell into an ever worse state of disrepair, and kids from local housing projects played in the ruins. Jana was one of them. She is less than complimentary about the cathedral restoration.
“My brothers and I played there as children,” Jana explained. “Those red ruins, with their charred stones and dark passages, were part of my Kaliningrad childhood. We explored every corner of those walls. And we were free to imagine whatever we wanted. The ruins inspired us to create our own histories for our city. Now, with the restoration of the building, a past generation of German residents has reclaimed a part of my city as their own.”
The debate about whose history should be recreated is part of the fabric of Kaliningrad life. Jana resents the effective Germanization of one of the city’s key landmarks. Yet city officials and businesses with an eye on the tourist dollar appreciate that Kaliningrad’s pre-Soviet history appeals to potential visitors. This is the city of Immanuel Kart, a place that, as Prussian Königsberg in the 18th and 19th centuries, punched far above its weight. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he cited Königsberg as an example of a great trading city – a place connected to such far-flung ports as Lisbon and Amsterdam. In Adam Smith’s day, Königsberg exported corn to Portugal, receiving fruit and wine in return. The city’s bookshop was renowned as one of the finest in Europe, and the quaysides bustled with business people and laborers who had moved to Königsberg to take advantage of its liberal trading conditions and tolerant ways. There were Scottish and Huguenot traders, migrants from Germany, Russia and beyond, and the alleys that cut between the great lines of warehouses behind the wharves echoed to a medley of accents from across Europe.
Igor Odintsov puts Immanuel Kart at the very heart of the cathedral restoration. The building houses an excellent exhibition on Kant’s life and work. Kart is uncontroversial, a symbol of the European Enlightenment and not at all associated with German military aggression. This sharp move defuses potential criticism from Kaliningrad locals like Jana who fear that the cathedral restoration might serve as a focus for nostalgic German nationalism. The main chancel of the erstwhile cathedral is now used for occasional concerts, and religion is relegated to two small chapels near the entrance, one Lutheran and the other Russian Orthodox. Kant’s spirit must surely smile benignly at the whole affair, for Immanuel Kart held no truck with organized religion and, during his tenure as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg, Kart refused to cross the threshold of the cathedral even once.
history is always contested, and never more so than in Kaliningrad. The great Soviet experiment brought settlers to this new community during the late forties and early fifties, the German population having fled or been ousted in the dog days of the war. From Kazakhstan and the Volga region, from Siberia and the Urals, citizens moved to the new oblast, encouraged and coerced by a Moscow government that was intent on obliterating the very memory of old Königsberg. Mikhail Kalinin, then the titular head of state in the Soviet Union, inadvertently contributed to the process of eradicating Königsberg from the map. He died in 1946, just as the authorities were pondering on a new name for the former German city. So it was that Königsberg became Kaliningrad, and, over 60 years later, the city still bears the name of one of the Soviet Union’s least inspiring statesmen.
Olga Danilova, a vivacious and perceptive tourist guide, is a passionate advocate of her home city, and very alert to the entire issue of how Kaliningrad’s history could and should be rendered. “When I was a child, my Kaliningrad was a city with no history. It was as if there was literally nothing here before 1945. Slowly, slowly we are uncovering our city’s hidden history.”
Olga now escorts visitors through the city and its hinterland, taking care to point out the follies of all the city’s rulers. “This was the road that Germans started building to create a modern highway from Königsberg to Berlin,” she says. “But look, it leads nowhere. Unfinished, no signposts, but still it is here, a streak across the Kaliningrad landscape.”
Standing on the bank of the Pregoyla near the cathedral island, Olga points at the crumbling apartment block where Jana lives. “The Russian engineers had no idea they were building on marshland. Every year it sinks another inch or two into the marshy subsoil. In a few years, the people in the ground floor apartments will be living subterranean lives.”
Olga laughs at many Soviet follies, but her favorite is a building she affectionately calls “the monster.” The Dom Sovyetov (House of Soviets) occupies a key spot in the very heart of Kaliningrad. It is a hideous concrete slab constructed on the site of the old German fortress of Königsberg, controversially demolished as part of Moscow’s strategy to mask Kaliningrad’s German past. “Years ago, we never spoke openly about what was there before they started building the Dom Sovyetov. Now we can. Yes, we are beginning to look at our city’s history.” Olga pauses. “But of course Kaliningrad will always be Russian,” she adds, deftly mimicking the stance of that Mother Russia monument down at Kaliningrad station.
at one of the dozen forts in the city’s outer ring of fortifications, Stanislav Laurushonis is quietly trying to make a business from Kaliningrad region’s history. Stanislav’s name may betray Lithuanian origins, but his family moved to Kaliningrad from Russia’s Far East when he was a boy – part of that great wave of migrants who came from far and wide to create in the new oblast the ideal Soviet community. “Until a few years ago, the ring of a dozen Prussian forts around Kaliningrad was something I knew little about,” Laurushonis explained. “The structures were all buried in tangled undergrowth and access was guarded by the military.”
Some of the forts are still used by the army. Fort Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III, northwest of the city (photo, page 49), is one of the most spectacular, its lush red battlements offset by an attractive moat. One day it will surely make a fine luxury hotel, but meanwhile it is a nice irony that the Russian army is based in a military installation named for a German emperor.
Laurushonis has liberated one of the forts from the military. It is a magnificent rambling structure by the city’s eastern ring road, out beyond a housing estate named after the October Revolution. Laurushonis now calls Fort Stein home. He shares this eccentric accommodation with his wife, children and two thousand French skeletons. The latter were dug up when a new development in the middle of Kaliningrad unearthed a mass grave, apparently dating from the winter of 1812-1813, when the French army was retreating in disarray from Russia. For want of any final resting place, these remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée are lodged in Fort Stein, where Laurushonis has a couple of hundred unheated and unlit rooms to spare. Forensic anthropologists and military historians venture out to Fort Stein to view Laurushonis’ skeletons, and the fort is increasingly used for re-enactments of the last days of Königsberg in early 1945, as soldiers of the Red Army combed the corridors and passages of the fort to flush out the last elements of German resistance. “Fort Stein,” said Laurushonis, “is a sort of time machine – a place where both Kaliningraders and visitors can feel the pulse of our region’s history.”
russia, but not quite russia: the Kaliningrad region is increasingly becoming a haven for those who do not quite fit into the straitjacket of conventional Russian life. For every silk jacketed New Russian who finds exile in the Baltic oblast, there are a dozen artists and eccentrics who are trying to make a living in the city and its surrounding region. The area attracts devotees of amber as well as environmentalists keen to experience the oblast’s peculiar beauty. Out in the wilderness of the Curonian Spit, Leonid Sokolov presides over the largest bird trap in the world. And at Klyukvennoye, in the undulating countryside immediately behind the oblast’s beautiful amber coast, the Mikhailovs, migrants from Novosibirsk, have taken over an old Prussian manor house. Now called Kluken-Mikhailov Manor, this idyllic rural hideaway is just the sort of spot where Elenore Kallweit might have lived as a girl. Today, children from Russia, Germany and a dozen other countries (including the U.S.) come to Klyukvennoye for summer camp, mingling freely in a manner that would have seemed impossible a couple of decades ago.
Kaliningrad is finally coming to terms with its history. And that history is increasingly regarded as key to the city’s future. Many Kaliningraders, like Jana and Olga, hope that the day will soon come when they might more easily be able to board that daily train to Berlin without needing to secure an impossibly expensive visa. And many in the oblast administration hope that the relationship between Germany and its erstwhile Prussian outpost in the East might be recast into something that affords real partnership, rather than merely nostalgia tourism.
Stephen Dewar, who works in Kaliningrad on a range of initiatives promoting cooperation with the European Union, highlights the enthusiasm that young people in Kaliningrad have for closer contact with the rest of Europe. “Berlin, Copenhagen and Vienna are all very much closer to us here in Kaliningrad than Moscow,” Dewar said. “And a lot of Kaliningrad citizens feel that we are somehow being held back by Moscow. That breeds resentment.”
Down at Kaliningrad South station, Elenore Kallweit has finished her explorations of Kaliningrad after two days and nights in the city. She is about to board the train back to Berlin. “Yes,” she says a little wistfully, “there is still something of the old Königsberg about this city.” It is a view with which young Kaliningraders would concur. They affectionately call the place König, they drink a beer called Königsberg and, when local couples get married, there is one spot to which they invariably go to affirm their love for one another: the footbridge over the Pregoyla river, right by the old German cathedral. There, by their city’s most potent symbol of its Prussian past, they seal their union by attaching a signed padlock to the railings of the bridge. So popular is the action, that soon there will be no more space for more padlocks.
Irena and Pyotr. Together.
Elena and Oleg. Together.
Prussia and Russia. Together.
This is the conundrum of modern Kaliningrad. RL
GOOD NEIGHBORS: Distance from Kaliningrad to: Moscow – 1289 km, Berlin – 28 km, Warsaw – 275 km
ROOTS: Königsberg was founded in 1255 by the Knights of the Teutonic Order. During the Seven-Year War, from 1758-1762, the region was captured and occupied by Russian troops.
CENTER OF LEARNING: The university in Königsberg was founded in 1544. A century later, in 1644, it had over 2000 students.
WAR STORY: The battle for Königsberg razed 90% of the city during February and March of 1945.
The city finally surrendered on April 9, one month before Berlin.
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