CULTURE: Kaliningrad Revisited
East of Prussia
Ten years ago, I was, I believe, the first Englishman to live in Kaliningrad … but perhaps I had better pause here to remind the reader what, and where, Kaliningrad is. You have perhaps heard of the city of Koenigsberg, seat of the old Prussian monarchy? Look for it on a modern map and you won’t find it. The town was taken after a gruelling siege by the Russians at the tail end of the European section of World War II, and renamed after the stooge Head of State of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, Mikhail Kalinin. The province of East Prussia, of which it was the capital, became, after a period of dithering, administered directly by Russia (rather than being annexed to what was then the Soviet Republic of Lithuania within the Soviet Union). The consequence, on the break-up of the Soviet Union, was that the Kaliningrad region remains an exclave of Russia, wedged between the littorals of Poland and Lithuania.
Everything of real interest of the region is concentrated on its Baltic coastline – the town of Kaliningrad itself on a peninsula between two great lagoons guarded from the Baltic Sea itself by lengthy sand spits. The southern lagoon is split by the Polish border, so that the Russian section of the spit, which is connected to land only at the south, has no road or direct access to the rest of Kaliningrad. The northern lagoon is sheltered by the magnificent nature reserve of the Courland Spit (Kurshskaya Kosa) and is transected by the Lithuanian border – so you can take a bus across the border to the end of the spit (if you have a European passport or a visa) and then hop on a ferry to take you a few hundred yards to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda (formerly Memel). Kaliningrad town is at the north-east corner of the southern lagoon – moving clockwise round the peninsula which begins there, you come to the port of Baltysk – now the home to Russia’s Baltic fleet, formerly the German submarine base of Pillau - then the strange landscape of Yantarny, source of perhaps 80% or more of the world’s amber, and then on the northern coast of the peninsula the two old German Baltic resorts of Rauschen (now Svetlogorsk), and, at the foot of the Kurshskaya Kosa, Kranz (now Zelenogradsk). A few other places known vaguely from history books are in the province disguised under new names – for example, Tilsit, where Napoleon and the Russian Emperor signed their treaty on a raft on the River Neman, is now Sovietsk. There you have a brief outline of what is, for me, the strangest corner of Europe.
And it is very literally a corner. With the accession of Lithuania and Poland to the European Union, Kaliningrad becomes the first and only part of Russia to be within, if not part of, the New Europe. About a million Russians, with no travel rights (unless they have a visa) within the EU will be completely surrounded by it, and cut off by it from the rest of the Russian Federation. The implications of this, for both Russia and Europe, are serious, and as yet these implications have not been thought through on either side.
I mentioned the million Russians of Kaliningrad region (about half of whom live in the city itself). Of Germans there is no trace – every single one left living was expelled. The greatest act of ethnic cleansing in Europe after the end of official hostilities in WWII – the clearing of Germans from Central Europe – took place with particular intensity and violence in East Prussia. Indeed the whole story of the period of 1944-1946 in this region is replete with horrors, touched on by Anthony Beevor in his recent book on the fall of Berlin, but still awaiting a historian. From Koenigsberg city, many civilians in the winter of 1945/6 were driven out onto the ice covering the lagoon – no-one knows how many died from exposure or drowning.
All over Russia the call went out for settlers to create a new Soviet province of prosperous collective farms (with the unwritten understanding that no Asians, Caucasians or Jews need apply), and hence the new settlers were a grand mix of all the ‘white’ peoples of the Soviet Union. This is held by the locals to be the explanation for the high proportion of good looking women in the region; but alas the farming never recovered from the depredations of war, although East Prussia had been historically one of the most agriculturally productive regions of Europe. The absence of recovery is partly attributable to the neglect during the Soviet period of any maintenance of the sophisticated irrigation infrastructure developed by the Germans, but largely due to general Soviet incompetence, and today, despite efforts of numerous Western aid programmes, local farming still seems anaemic and inefficient. Still, the Kaliningradtsy are able to console themselves with the local saying that as you travel westward from the province through Poland, the cows get more beautiful but the women get uglier.
When I came to Kaliningrad in 1993, the town was in a very sorry state. The centre, had been more or less bombed flat by the RAF. By the time the Russians got round to rebuilding in the late 1950s, they had nothing better to do than to crowd it with the shabby housing units of the time known as khrushchyoba, or with anonymous office blocks. A few of the old German buildings in the centre were restored for the administration, and the old Opera House was converted to a museum – the rest, including the remains of the castle and the cathedral, was left to rot. In the 1960s, the last vestiges of the castle were blown up and the site razed. Conspiracy theorists claim that this is because the remains of the famous ‘Amber Room’, looted by the Nazis from the Catherine Palace outside Leningrad and taken to Koenigsberg, and never recovered after the war, are still crated in what were the castle cellars; but as it was more valuable for the Soviets to have a grudge against the Germans than to restore the Room, this drastic step was taken to prevent the Room resurfacing. (For what it is worth, I believe this story to be true, and, furthermore, that by now the amber will have crumbled into dust in any case). In the centre of the windswept plaza resulting from this demolition was erected the Dom Sovietov (House of Soviets), incontestably the ugliest building in Europe, never completed or used, and now in its turn crumbling and fragmenting – it is said that the Town Council does not have the money to demolish it. Apart from the obligatory statues (Lenin, Mother Russia, Kalinin) and tomb of Kant against the north wall of the roofless Cathedral, there was little else to see; though to be fair I must make it clear that the people, as I have found everywhere in Russia, were in general friendly, charming and supportive; otherwise my two years there would of course have been unsupportable.
In a remote corner of the old castle precinct was a plaque inscribed with a quotation – in Russian and German – from Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’: ‘There are two things which, the more I think of them, the more they inspire awe; the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me’. Every so often, someone left a couple of fresh flowers on the lintel of this plaque – about the only sign of human warmth visible on the town’s surface. Not far away from this was a mainstay of the town’s economy, the used car market. Hardy folk would get out to Germany, steal a Mercedes, drive like stink through Poland (where there were plenty of similar folk ready to relieve them of their prize if they could), and head for the market where a queue of Russian citizens, from as far away as Siberia, were queuing for there opportunity to be the first in their little town with a prestige innomark (foreign brand).
Indeed smuggling in general was a way of life in Kaliningrad, one which has now been sadly damaged by the tightening of borders in advance of the expansion of the EU. Anyone taking the regular overnight bus to Warsaw would have been seriously impressed by the amount of vodka and cigarettes which Russian matrons were able to secrete about their persons. Most spectacular was the industry of amber smuggling. Every single piece of decent quality amber, retrieved by the crude mining process of dynamiting an area of the mine, sluicing it with water and sieving out the nuggets, was promptly smuggled across the border, largely by the army whose job it was supposedly to prevent this happening. Probably the region lost $25-30m. a year this way; while I was there the mine was ‘privatised’ and the situation got if anything worse.
Outside the centre, the town displayed a surprising treasure – a more or less intact wealthy German suburb of the 1920s, complete with villas, trams, and gardens. Of course the villas were subdivided to house seven or eight families, the gardens overgrown and the trams decrepit; but it was as near to a time trip as I am ever likely to get. Baltysk, to visit which one still needed an official propusk (pass), presented a strange sight, with submarines and the Russian pirated versions of hovercraft gently rusting on its quays amongst the rather more solid warships, but a walk to the bar at the end of the pier meant you could get drunk at Russia’s most westerly location. The fleet could still get it together however when it wanted to; one of my treasured memories is flying in the Vice-Admiral’s helicopter (with the inebriated V-A himself at the controls, and a dozen assorted diplomats and bankers, and the Mayor of Kaliningrad pouring out shampanskoye, as my fellow passengers) to the Admiral’s dacha on the otherwise inaccessible stump of the Polish spit, for a little soirée.
Well, that was then. Living there was always somewhat unreal, and my return felt doubly unreal. The statue of Lenin in the main square, before which I once saw ‘Mad Vlad’ Zhirinovsky gesticulating during his presidential campaign, is still standing, but now rising behind it is an almost completed Russian Orthodox Cathedral. The old German cathedral, formerly open to the sky, now has a new roof, new windows, a restored tower and a clock. The old Soviet style department store in the centre has been completely rebuilt with a glass front and escalators. There is a Benneton shop where the one Italian restaurant used to be. The amber mine has been re-nationalised and, I am assured, is adopting proper security (which if true is bad news for the jewellery industries of Lithuania and Poland). The Casino where I used to dine regularly, and where I was once involved in an episode so excruciating that, like Dr. Watson’s story of the lighthouse-keeper and the trained cormorant, the world is not yet ready to hear of it, is now a model of sleepy propriety. And, as I discovered over the next couple of days, if the old villains had departed, plenty of new ones had come in to take their places.
For the fact is that Kaliningrad’s equivocal status, anomalously embedded within the new Europe, opens up a host of fascinating opportunities for the enterprising.
Initially the accession of the new states looked bad for the region: in advance of EU passport procedures, the relaxed voucher system for visa access to Poland was withdrawn, then the train service to Warsaw and Berlin was cancelled. The SAS flights from Copenhagen ceased some years ago. Then the Lithuanians began to get tough about the train service from Kaliningrad to Moscow – 25 hours, but the only connection that most Russians could afford. (Putin’s response to this was to lay on four flights a day at a subsidised flat fare of $35). Contrary to the European Commission’s consistent line that accession would enhance relations with the former Soviet Union countries, the actuality (which included heavy grants from Brussels to Poland and Lithuania to beef up their border control with Belarus) began to look rather different.
Then — perhaps bearing in mind the need for good publicity in accession year — things began to move as swiftly in the opposite direction. The Poles started an air service from Warsaw; an independent airline has revived the link to Copenhagen. Train links to the West (yet another incarnation of the Imperial German Berlin-Koenigsberg line) will reopen by the end of the year. Lithuanian, Polish, Danish and Swedish Consulates are all now operating in town. Inspirited by these developments, there is even now an optimistic attempt to make all Kaliningrad residents eligible for Schengen visas. Whilst this will not of course be conceded, pressure for it will increase against the background of the million or so Russians living in the accession Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia who are presently denied citizenship of those countries. After 2004 these will become a semi-stateless group living within the EU and on human rights grounds, they may have a good case for getting EU-valid passports. And if they get them, why not the Kaliningradtsy? Maybe we will soon see a revival of the movement, which flourished briefly in the mid-1990s, to make Kaliningrad an independent state in its own right – if I remember rightly, the town was to be renamed Kantograd in honour of its philosopher.
So investment in Kaliningrad, for both legitimate entrepreneurs and the not-so legitimate, seems to offer excellent odds; either the province and its residents will benefit significantly from the changes about them, or they will benefit very significantly. Accordingly, money has been rolling in. Smart new blocks of flats have sprung up in the tree-lined roads behind Prospekt Mira and the German villas in Kutuzovsky have been emptied of their multiple occupants and restored to a new splendour. On the Kurshskaya Kosa itself, where building is theoretically forbidden, but which has a strong attraction to New Russians by virtue of the security provided by its control points at either end, the local administration has been persuaded, by some means or other which can only be conjectured, to provide permissions to a few lucky, and very wealthy, Moscow businessmen. And other interesting figures are paying a close interest; - the wife of Moscow’s feisty mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has acquired land in the province and rumour has it that if Mr. L. doesn’t secure permission to run a third time in Moscow, he will look West and stand for governor of Kaliningrad. Now that would put the place well and truly back on the international map.
How the New Europe will cope with this strange fragment embedded in its structure remains as unclear as ever. Kaliningrad has in theory great potential as a entrepot between Russia and Europe; it also poses very real threats in terms of its poverty, environmental problems, criminality, drugs record and HIV rate. No one, Russian or European, as yet has any comprehensive strategies for either unleashing the potential or coping with the threats, or even shows much interest in developing them. The Russian Government has announced, with great fanfares, a large-scale financial support programme for developing the province, but no one believes that the money will actually materialize. Western countries will continue with their aid projects to the polite indifference of the locals. It will take a Luzhkov, or someone like him, to get things really moving.
With a free afternoon at the end of my trip, I packed in some essential sight-seeing. My old flat on Komsomolskaya, which still contains the magnificent walnut-cased piano left behind by its occupants of 1945; a stroll on the sea-shore at Svetlogorsk and a glimpse of the Addams Family-style seaside house reputed to have been Hermann Goering’s; a farewell glimpse of the Dom Sovietov, and, in its shadow, the Kant plaque, still, I was pleased to note, with a fresh floral tribute.
Allen Buchler is ERO's music critic
Allen Buchler, January 14, 2004 09:10 AM