Research by Michael Behrent for
KÖNIGSBEGR IS DEAD by Max & Gilbert
www.koenigsberg-is-dead.de
III. OBLAST
I.
The Birth of Kaliningrad as Military Zone and Closed City
Kaliningrad was founded with the Soviet victory over
the German forces in Königsberg towards the end of the Second World War.
Following the attempted assassination on Hitler on July 20, 1944, because of
the involvement of numerous East Prussian officers, high-ranking members of the
Wehrmacht came under suspicion,
leading Hitler to increase the oversight power of the Nazi party in Königsberg.
The British Royal Air Force bombed the city regularly from August to September,
1944. The night of August 30 was remembered as particularly devastating:
approximately 2,400 people were killed, some 150,000 were left homeless, and
much of the Dom was destroyed.[1]
Around the same time, the Soviet push westward had
brought its troops within the vicinity. According to official Soviet history,
the Red Army's aim in East Prussia
was to cut off the central German army group from the remainder of Hitler's
forces and to corner them next to the Baltic before dividing and destroying
them.[2]
Moreover, the Soviets were also aware of the historic significance of the region
for Germany.
The official history emphasizes this by describing how German social and
military priorities were closely intertwined in the region: "Officers and
N.C.O.'s of the retreating German army came to East Prussia to establish themselves. They
were distributed lands with favorable conditions, but they were under the
obligation to build farms in accordance with the plans of the German command.
Such measures would permit setting up continuous secondary lines of defense,
the piercing through of which would require gigantic efforts."[3]
The Soviet operation was conducted by the 2nd
and 3rd Bielorussian Fronts, with the assistance of the Baltic
Fleet. The total number of forces the Soviets placed into battle included:
1,600,000 troops, 21,500 artillery pieces and mortars, 3,800 tanks and mobile
cannons, and 3,000 fighter planes. The
initial assault, launched from January 13 - 30, left German forces divided in
three, between Samland, an area near the sea southwest of Königsberg, and
Königsberg itself. A next assault, in mid-March, dispersed the German forces
along the sea. Finally, at the beginning of April, the final assault against
Königsberg itself was launched (involving the 11th, 43rd
and 50th Guard Armies and the 39th Army). During the
final push, Soviet aviation played a particularly important role, flying over
6,000 sorties on April 8 alone.
On April 9, the German command in Königsberg
surrendered. The Soviet records estimate that the Germans lost 134,000 troops
there: 42,000 dead and 92,000 made prisoner.
In the words of the Soviet history, "The fall of
East Prussia
further weakened the military potential of Nazi Germany. The Red Army defeated
a very important enemy bridgehead, the cradle of Prussian militarism. The
Soviet Union and popular Poland
have forever foreclosed the threat of a German attack from this region."[4]
Several months later, the victorious Allied powers
met in Potsdam to map out postwar Europe. For strategic reasons, Stalin insisted on
annexing part of East Prussia,
including Königsberg. This demand was recognized by the other allies in a
protocol signed during the Berlin Conference, held between mid July and early
August 1945 to prepare the Potsdam
meeting. The protocol, in a section entitled "City of Königsberg and the Adjacent Area",
stated:
"The conference examined a proposal by the
Soviet Government to the effect that, pending the final determination of
territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western
frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the
Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig
to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers
of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.
"The conference has agreed in principle to the
proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the
Soviet Union of the City of Königsberg
and the area adjacent to it as described above, subject to expert examination
of the actual frontier.
"The President of the United States and the British Prime
Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the conference at
the forthcoming peace settlement."[5]
In October of the same year (1945), the Soviet Union
formally annexed the part of East Prussia
granted to it by the Potsdam Conference as a region of the Russian Federal
Socialist Republic
under the name "Kenigsbergskaja
oblast." Not until July of the next year were the region and city
renamed Kaliningrad
- in memory of the Chairmen of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin, who had
only died in June. The decision to change the city's name was presumably taken
quickly.
Not long after the remaining German population was
being evacuated in 1946 - 1947, Kaliningrad,
with the onset of the Cold War, underwent heavily militarization. At the same
time, the city was closed off to foreigners and unauthorized Soviet citizens.
It would appear that during the height of the Cold
War, the town's significance to the Soviets was almost exclusively military and
strategic. Some plans to began reconstruction were considered in the 1950s, but
with little result. Photographs from as late as the 1960s show a city in which
the dust seemed only just to be clearing from the British bombardments of 1944.
Even its status in the Soviet Union seemed
provisional, as perhaps nothing more than a potential bargaining chip in a
superpower game. In 1957, General Secretary Nikita Krushchev had to confirm
publicly that Kaliningrad
had a "permanent" status in the union, in order to quell fears to the
contrary.
Although specifics on the militarization of
Königsberg are, by the nature of the game, hard to come by, it seems to have
served at least 4 major strategic goals:
1. It was the main port of the Baltic
Fleet, which, according to western intelligence reports from 1992,
consisted of 85,000 men, 20 submarines, 3 cruisers, 5 destroyers, 29 frigates and
other craft and amphibious units.
2. It stationed the 11th Guards
Army (symbolically, the same unit that had "liberated"
Königsberg), which consisted of a major
assemblage of armored vehicle, motorized rifle and naval strike aviation and
artillery divisions; missile and
self-propelled artillery and tank regiments; naval infantry brigades,
engineer-sapper battalions, as well as "more esoteric units"; in short,
some 620 tanks, 940 armored vehicles, 695 artillery guns, 155 combat planes and
95 helicopters.
3. It was an important command and control
station for naval, air, ground forces in Eastern
Europe, designed to play a key coordinating role in the event of the
outbreak of hostilities between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.
4. It hosted an element of the Soviet
nuclear deterrent, notably tactical nuclear missiles with range of 400
kilometer, as well as torpedo-launched warheads. [6]
II.
The Soviet
Building and Rebuilding of Kaliningrad
The story of the Soviet conquest of Königsberg from
the Germans and its subsequent transformation into a militarized western
outpost had profound consequences in shaping the options for the rebuilding of
the city in the post-war era. The fact that the former city had been, according
to Soviet propaganda, the seat of Prussian militarism and a fascist nest
delegitimized its pre-1945 past. The
architectural remnants of old Königsberg, or what remained of them, were
consequently problematic for the new Soviet authorities. The Soviet fantasy was
that Kaliningrad
should be a tabula rasa - a clean slate, in which all traces of the
recent German past were erased, making possible the transposition onto it of an
altogether new Soviet identity and experience.
The rebuilding of Kaliningrad was clearly a problem for the
Soviet authorities. Though Moscow architects had
already made plans for the reconstruction of cities liberated from German
occupiers, Kaliningrad,
as a former German city proved more intractable. Rebuilding the city first
required an official interpretation of the meaning of Königsberg in German history. Shortly after the city's
surrender to the Red Army, Pravda, on
April 13, 1945, wrote: "Königsberg - this is the history of Germany's
crime.. Through the many centuries of its history the city lived with struggles
and invasions; another life was not granted to it. Here, palaces are silent and
gloomy. In its quiet cabinets, war archives and libraries, behind the thick
walls of the war school and Auditorien,
the way for war and assaults was paved decade after decade. Around the city
arose the massive structures of the fortification walls. In the center of the
capital stood a citadel rising to a stony point and of enormous dimensions,
into which corridors, barracks and galleries were embedded, chiseled and
struck. They extended deep under the earth."[7]
Bert Hoppe argues that this delegitimation of the German past by the Soviets
and the myth of Königsberg as an "evil city" parallels the spawning
of the equally idealized, though positive myth of Königsberg developed by the
East Prussian exiles in the years 1948 - 1949: "The German history of
Königsberg solidified into an image which required little connection to the
real past of the city."[8]
The urban planning of postwar Kaliningrad was thoroughly underwritten by an
historical interpretation. According to the Soviet view, Kaliningrad was an originally Slavic land, that had illegitimately
been occupied by the Teutonic Order in the 13th century. The Soviet
conquest of the region in April 1945 was, literally, a liberation. In November
1947, Kaliningrad's regional party chief, Vladimir Ščerbakov, in a brochure entitled "The
Stalin Program for the Economic and Cultural
Building of the Kaliningrad region", wrote: "The
Soviet Army has forever annihilated and extinguished the homestead of war and
reaction and given the Slavs back their very own soil."[9]
Consequently, the strategy used by Soviet architects and urban planners to
delegitimate the German remains of old Königsberg was to cast it as having been
nothing more than a temporary, soulless, instrumentalized military outpost. In
many ways, the Soviet vision of German Königsberg dovetails with the German
vision of Soviet Kaliningrad: each sees the other's town as not even properly a
city, but nothing more than a barren, temporary fortress town. Dmitri Tjan, the
official then in charge of reconstruction, wrote that it was "impossible
[...] in determining the course of the streets, to find geometrical principles.
Architectonically, it is difficult, in the cities of the region, to find
completed ensembles, squares or groups of buildings, with the exception of a
few neighborhoods which arose at the end of the 19th century or in
the 20s and 30s. The architecture of the buildings is of low quality. The
predominant styles are Gothic, modernized Gothic [Neugotik] and constructivist Gothic [Expressionismus]. The most characteristic feature of all the cities
is that they are not architectonically planned, but are created according to
technical principles. Organic, architectonic flaws are covered up through the
order and technical quality of the buildings' structure and
characteristics."[10]
In an article for the Kaliningraskaja
Pravda in 1947, Tjan concluded: "The predominant style [of Königsberg]
was a simplified Gothic, or, more rightly, a Gothic disguise. The abundant
green of the summer months hides the ugliness of these buildings."
Dimitri Navalichin, who was Kaliningrad's chief architect from 1948 to
1955 (and who was later, until 1957, the head of the regional architectural
administration), brought in a Marxist element to the critique. He believed that
the military character of the city was
particularly evident in the workers neighborhoods of former Königsberg.
Workers' homes looked like "hopeless, cheerless barracks"; indeed,
all civilian buildings in such a city had no more than a "subordinate
meaning."[11]
This conception of Königsberg also found its way into
contemporary Soviet cinema. In the movie Altenberg,
Königsberg was denied the right to its name: the Soviet image of a destroyed
German city was created by mixing scenes from the former East Prussian capital
and Riga. The
greatest symbolic violence was achieved in the 1959 film, Human Destiny (Sudba
čeloveka): the neogothic gates of old Königsberg's fortifications
appeared, amongst others, as representations of the Auschwitz
extermination camp.[12]
The task of the rebuilding would thus be to oppose to
the small, windy streets of German "medieval" architecture the
massive, rectilinear conception of modern socialist man. Leading architects and
planners were afraid that the presence of German remains could have a negative
effect on Soviet citizens, placing them in contact with foreign and capitalist
influences. The process of eradicating these influences was, however, a slow
one: in 1952, the regional party committee called attention to the fact that
not only German inscriptions and signs, but even anti-Soviet graffiti dating
from the war, still covered the city.
The main work of the rebuilding of Kaliningrad was not fully undertaken until
the early 1960s. A grandiose, rectilinear urban grid was built around the new
North-South axis, Lenin Prospekt. Many
constructions were entirely new, such as those of the Kaliningrad State
University, which opened
in 1967. In other cases, buildings of old Königsberg were integrated into the
new socialist city: the former Stadthaus,
on what had been Hansaplatz, was reopened as a seat of local government in the
late 1960s, while the old Bourse on
the island became an a cultural center for the town's seamen. Others were
destroyed: the old Schloss, which for
centuries had symbolized the Prussian town, was dynamited around 1968 - meaning
that it did in fact remain, albeit in the ruined condition in which the British
wartime raids had left it, as part of Soviet Kaliningrad for nearly half its
history. Where it had stood, a massive "Central Square" was laid out.
III.
Kaliningrad
Remembers Königsberg
The founding myth of Soviet Kaliningrad was that the
Red Army had liberated the city from "fascists", who themselves were
integrally linked to "Prussian militarism" (a connection that has
some truth, but which it is risky to exaggerate). Reconstruction would both
symbolize and promote the advent of the new Soviet human being in a former
citadel of social backwardness.
Yet the history of Kaliningrad is not simply about the hubris of
erecting a new, functional city on the clean slate left by the war, but rather
one of the dialectic between the suppression and the reemergence of the past.
Despite the efforts of Soviet authorities to extricate Kaliningrad
from Königsberg and to incorporate the new
city into the socialist world, many of the new
inhabitants turned to and cultivated the Prussian past in an effort to forge
their own identity.
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period, dubbed
since Gorbachev's time the "era of stagnation", which saw the birth
of a parallel oppositional culture, most notably marked by the samizdat movement. In Kaliningrad, one form which this culture took
was the renewed interest in local history. As some recent research has shown,
Kaliningraders could subtly affirm themselves by investigating the repressed
past of the city, thus undermining the foundational myth that the former inhabitants
were only fascists and militarists, while at the same time asserting that the
city was unique and different. In a command-economy like that of the Soviet
Union, affirming local needs (notably through hoarding) was in and of itself
subversive; similarly, discovering local history, in the context of
"building socialism", presented a political challenge. This tendency
seems to have been present in the Kaliningrad
writers' association that brought together such local intellectuals as Valentin
Erasov, (1927 - ?), Yuri Ivanov, (1928 - ), Sergei Snegov, (1910 - ?) and Petr
Vorob'ev (1900 - 1975). It also appears that Soviet authorities attempted to
coopt this spirit: in 1972, the Dom, one
of the last remnants of medieval Königsberg, was recognized by the Soviet
Ministry of Culture as an official landmark.
One of the main vectors for the cultivation of
Kaliningraders' memory of Königsberg was the unofficial civic cult of Immanuel
Kant. The cult received recognition from Soviet authorities in 1974, on the
occasion of a series of events commemorating the 250th anniversary
of the philosopher's birth. For Leonard Kalinnikov, a local Kant specialist
(and, presumably, a participant in the "dissident" local history
milieus), 1974 was a turning point in his town's history "[s]imply because
until this significant year - Kant's 250th birthday - Königsberg
with its culture had not existed for Kaliningraders, at least officially."[13]
Recognizing Kant as a local heritage was not only a way of finding an aspect of
the local past that the Soviet Union could tolerate, but it also helped replace
the image of the former residents as "fascists" with that of the "Aufklärer.”[14]
The interest in Kant made it possible reject - or at
least qualify - the "tabula rasa" view of Kaliningrad's history, in a
way not unlike Kant's own philosophical effort to reject epistemology based on
viewing the mind as a clean slate: just as, in Kant's view, experience would be
empty without the organizing functions of a
priori space and time, so identity is similarly vapid without the
historical a priori of a shared past.
But it is nonetheless the experience of the present that shapes how the past is
seen; Kaliningraders appropriated Kant not as a Prussian, but as a link between
Germany and Russia.
Kalinnikow writes that "Kant is the most Russian of German thinkers",
and that his significance lies in the fact that "he became the symbol of
the opened historical depths, the symbol of a new spiritual atmosphere, a
comfortable bridge over the abyss between the past and the present."[15]
Conclusion
One could argue that it is with the building of Kaliningrad that
Königsberg's history really becomes interesting. The city's parallel each other
in interesting and ironic ways: Königsberg was Prussia
and Germany's eastern outpost,
Kaliningrad the Soviet
Union's eastern outpost. Soviet authorities denigrated the German
city as a soulless military encampment, a critique of Kaliningrad which exiled Königsbergers later
echoed. "Both" cities were entangled in political projects that
sought to deny the city's complex history and identity by the - dogmatic -
assertion of its timeless belonging to a national space.
Yet Kaliningrad
never fully transcended Königsberg. Its rebuilding was a deliberate rejection
of the earlier architecture and past, even though some buildings were left
over, either to be renamed or to stand as ruins. At the same time, many
residents were obsessed with the suppressed recent past of the old town. Far
from homogenizing the city into Soviet uniformity, the Kaliningrad episode played an important role
in sowing the seeds of the hybrid identity that would burst forth in the
post-91 era.
Michael Behrent