Research by Michael Behrent for
KÖNIGSBEGR IS DEAD by Max & Gilbert
www.koenigsberg-is-dead.de
IV.
ENCLAVE / EXCLAVE
The dissolution of the
Soviet Union - which was already underway with the independence movement in the
Baltic states in 1990 - 1991, but which was made irreversible by the chain of
events following the attempted coup of August, 1991 - made the Kaliningrad oblast a paradoxical space: Lithuanian
independence left it surrounded by the sea and "foreign" powers, with
no land connection to the Russian mainland. Where it had been a German enclave
from 1919 to 1939, it is now an enclave once again, this time of the Russian Federation.
Yet at the
same time that it has been separated from the rest of Russia, it has
become opened up to the rest of the world - and more exposed to the flow of
commercial, human, cultural and even biological exchange than ever. After the
experiences of being roped into German nationalism and Soviet socialism,
Königsberg, as Kaliningrad,
once again seems to have retrieved something like the cosmopolitan stature it
had in the 18th century - with all the ambiguities and ironies that
go with it.
I.
Economic
Crossroads
The newly independent Russia that was finding its feet in early 1992
was, amongst other concerns, worried about Lithuania's
ability to block the Kaliningrad region off from
the rest of Russia.
One of the ways President Boris Yeltsin's government tried to mitigate this
threat was by strengthening Kaliningrad's
economic position as a crossroads of foreign trade. It created the
"Amber" free trading zone in the region, which entitled it to various
tax exemptions designed to make it an attractive place to do business. Foreign
investors were actively sought out, particularly among the Poles and the
Germans (who initially were responsible for nearly 40% of all investments, and
many of whom were former residents). Direct roads and train lines to the west -
notably to Berlin
- were reopened. A ferry line to St.
Petersburg was put in place.[1]
Truck routes were opened heading south through Belarus
and the Ukraine, as well as
north to St. Petersburg.
The opening of Kaliningrad created many problems for which neither the
region nor Russia
were prepared. In the first place, Russia
found itself vulnerable to Lithuania's
whims - a humiliating position for Russia to find itself in, given its
previous hegemony. In 1994, for instance, Lithuania
introduced selective and prohibitive tariffs on train freight destined for Kaliningrad's port,
Baltisk, in order to favor its own largest port, Klaďpeda. Russia was forced to threaten that it would send
all its trade through Belarus
and Poland,
bypassing the Baltic lands.
Another consequence was
that Kaliningrad
became an important center of smuggling and crime. As an American reporter
described it in 1997, Kaliningrad had become a
"giant warehouse" in which everything was cheaper than elsewhere in Russia. Beer
and vodka reportedly sold at one third of their Moscow prices. It was also the "best place
to get smuggled cars and discount narcotics." Furthermore, some 5,000
prostitutes could be found on its streets, not including those working in clubs
and casinos. [2]
Moreover, the opening of Kaliningrad to trade also
opened it to the spread of disease. The syphilis rate was three times the
Russian average, and over 100 times the German rate. But most importantly, Kaliningrad became in the 1990s the epicenter of the
Russian AIDS epidemic. The World Health Organization's regional AIDS director
for Russia said of Kaliningrad: "All
the conditions are there for a disaster. And nobody is remotely ready for it.
The virus has spread so fast in Kaliningrad
that even the few people who are trying to do something about it are lost.
[...] What you see in Kaliningrad today is only
the beginning for Russia."[3]
In 1997, around 1,850 were infected with the virus, compared to a reported 28
the previous year: Kaliningrad had become
perhaps the city with the highest proportion of AIDS per habitant in Europe. The main cause of the city's vulnerability was
its unemployment rate of nearly 50%, which made attractive to many drugs such
as Hymka, a liquid opiate available
for as little as $20 for three doses. Whereas in 1996, only 5% of Kaliningrad's prostitutes
had AIDS, UNICEF reported that 85% of those it had sampled were infected in
1997. City authorities were forced to respond with a poster campaign that
compared the epidemic to the plague. The price of becoming an open city was
thus a kind of viral cosmopolitanism.
With the
opening of borders and the influx of contraband, corruption of public
authorities ensued. This is associated in particular with the rise to power of
the regional governor, Leonid Gorbenko. Gorbenko rose from a job in the port to
become a manager of the docks; despite widespread press reports about his
alleged corruption, he succeeded in becoming elected by Kaliningraders to the
position of governor in 1996. The promotion of localism in the early years of
the Yeltsin period encouraged many regional governors to establish themselves
as local potentates. Gorbenko seems to have done this with particularly
cynicism. Not long after taking office, he issued a decree giving himself
personal control over the cigarette, car and alcohol trade. He accepted a loan
from a German bank to finance his chicken ranch, which he then closed. He went
on a special mission to Moscow to gain support
for a plan to renationalize the oil, amber, shipping, fishing, rail and air
transport industries in Kaliningrad.
When the local Duma opened an investigation into his abuses of power in 1999,
he cut off electricity to its offices and suspended its members' salaries.
Alexander Khmurchik, the editor of the Kalinigradskaja
Pravda wondered at the time "whether one morning the citizens of Kaliningrad might wake up
to find the name of their region changed to Gorbenkograd." Putin's
accession to power seems, however, to have reined in Gorbenko: federal
investigators were sent to the city, and, in 2001, a new regional governor, the
former Baltic Fleet commander, Vladimir Yegorov, was elected.
II.
Hybrid
Identities
Post-1871 Königsberg was
German, post-1945 Kaliningrad was Soviet and
socialist: but what was a Kaliningrad separate
from a now-independent Russia,
no longer a closed city but more and more open to a globalized world?
One thing is certain: many
Germans returned, raising the old question of whether it is ever possible to
"go home". Statistics in 1989 put Kaliningrad region's Russian population at
78%, with Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Bielorussians making up another 15% -
and only 1000 or so Germans. By the early 90s, official figures recognized the
presence of 4,000 Germans, but unofficial reports put the number at 20,000 and
growing.[4]
In addition to the physical
presence of Germans, economic ties reinforced the emerging hybrid identity of
the city: the early 90s saw a threefold rise in exports towards Germany, a
fivefold rise in imports, and the creation of over 200 new joint ventures (in
1993). To make these ties official, Germany
recognized Raimer Neufeldt - who himself had been born in the city, and the
director there of the Russian-German house - to serve as Germany's
representative until a consulate opened.
A particularly interesting
figure in this exchange is Friedrich Wilhelm Christians. Christians was a young
panzer commander when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union
in 1941, and found himself stationed at end of war in Königsberg, from which he
narrowly managed to escape across the Baltic. He later became the chairman of
Deutsches Bank. In 1988, he visited Moscow,
where, in meetings with top government officials, including Eduard
Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, he floated the idea that Kaliningrad
be transformed into free trade zone, linking the old Soviet republics to Scandinavia, Poland
and Western Europe. With his German friends,
he founded a "Königsberg
initiative."[5]
It is interesting that many
are reluctant to characterize this influx of Germans into Kaliningrad in the post-91 era as a
"Germanization" of the city. Many Germans who have returned are
former residents, some of whom have expressed distress at the elimination of
the remnants of German culture there. Yet top Russian officials, like the
erstwhile mayor of the city, Vitaly Shipov, have declared: "There is no
Germanization of Kaliningrad, it has not happening and it will not happen. It
is a made-up issue."[6]
Germans like Christians have been pragmatic on this issue, or at least
sensitive to Russian concerns; he once said: "My proposal was: no
re-Germanization, but a Europeanization. Königsberg should be restored as a
great port, an exchange for people, ideas, capital and goods." He also
recognized that the willingness to accept a German presence is linked to
generation: "The younger they are, especially those 30 and 40 who were
born in Kaliningrad,
the more open they are. Recently I had a visit from a young artist and his
student friend. They were proud of the city's historical past. But with the
older generation it is different. Shevardnadze once said that for them, Kaliningrad remains a
trophy of the war."[7]
In any
case, the situation of post-Soviet Kaliningrad is novel, at least in that there
is no self-evident identity for the town: the establishment of the city as a
free trade zone, its status as an enclave, the need for investment and German
memory-tourism have made its identity multiple and hybrid - or at least allowed
these differences to once again surface, to be contested openly rather than
subversively.
III.
Cultural
Bricolage
Kaliningrad's culture has
ceased to be dictated from above, as part of a nation-building project. Its
citizens no longer have merely to assimilate into the ambient national
identity, or to accept a cultural identity foisted on them by political
authorities. Kaliningrad's
peculiar status in the post-91 period has made its own identity the outcome of
its residents' experiments, mixing-and-matching and bricolage - an idiosyncratic sewing together of bits and pieces of
fabric from the town's complex past.
In terms of the politics of
memory and commemoration, some of the tendencies that began during the 1960s
have continued to develop. Kaliningraders still find ways to appropriate the
Königsberg past, though since 1991, these projects have lost some of their
subversive quality. Moreover, at least some Kaliningraders have sought to
include Germans in their projects to celebrate the town's past.
In the early 1990s, for
instance, Maja Ellerman-Mollenhauer, the daughter of a Königsberg artist,
undertook a project to have a plaque put up in Kaliningrad commemorating the 17th
Königsberg poet, Simon Dach: though city authorities denied her the right to
have it installed at the Dom, Leonard
Kalinnikow, the Kant scholar, arranged to have it placed at a university
building at the former Paradeplatz
(which suggests that Kalinnikow both new the layout of the German town, and
grasped its relevance to a former resident). In September 1994, Kaliningrad
celebrated the 450th anniversary of the founding of Albertina
University - an interesting project, in that the University known by this name
was effectively closed at the war's end, and the Kaliningrad State University,
created over 20 years later, had no direct connection with it (It seems that
the newer university has since renamed itself after the earlier one. See the
website at www.albertina.ru ) The event
welcomed as speakers both German scholars as well as local ones, notably
Vladimir Gilmanov, a German studies graduate of Kaliningrad University
and Hamann specialist. Finally, in September 1993, to commemorate the 200th
anniversary of Kant's Critique of
Practical Reason, a bronze plaque was inaugurated near the former southern
tower of the Schloss. In imitation of
Lahrs' memorial from 1924, erected in honor of the 200 anniversary of Kant's
birth, the plaque presented the concluding lines of the second critique:
"Two things the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the
oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and
the moral law within." But whereas the original plaque - which was
subsequently taken to Duisberg, the German town that became the cultural center
of exiled Königsbergers - was entirely in German, the new one is in both German
and Russian. The presentation of the text in both languages symbolizes that way
in which some Kaliningraders have tried to negotiate their problematic
identity.
The
commemoration of old Königsberg has created some tensions amongst Russian
Kaliningraders as well. This is particularly evident in the restoration of the Dom (as Olga Sezneva's very interesting
work has shown). Soviet authorities did virtually nothing to restore the Dom following the war, despite the heavy
damage it sustained during the RAF bombing. For decades, it would appear that
the ruins of the Dom were nonetheless
a place for Kaliningraders to wander, explore and play. In the mid-70s,
authorities began some conservation work on it; by 1992, the Dom had been registered as a state
enterprise, and the regional cultural authorities began to plan a full-scale
restoration of the work. One official declared that the Dom would "become a center of spiritual and cultural life [in]
the city, its main historic site, a place attracting tourism, a monument of
sacral architecture, a symbol of a rich historic heritage of the territory [,]
filled with [a] museum, [a] memorial and antique rarities preserving in
themselves the spirit of the centuries passed."[8]
Yet whereas it would seem that this tardy official recognition of an old
monument was a concession to popular interest in local history, the
conservation plan nonetheless met with considerable protest, by those who
worried that the government was doing a botched job that would harm the
pristine ruins. In April 1992, a group of local intellectuals, including
historians, architects and journalists attacked the restoration, brandishing
slogans like "Stop the barbarism" and "Condemn the stupidity of
the government." Fliers attacked a restoration project with no master
plan, while others accused the firm in charge of the restoration of taking
advantage of popular enthusiasm for local history and of a collective sense of
guilt about the damages, as well as of cutting costs, using inexpensive
materials, and paying their workers with vodka.[9]
The
restored Dom has become postmodern
despite itself. Rather than an imitation of the original (or, to be precise, an
imitation of building as it was restored in the early 1900s), it has become an
architectural collage, blending together the different needs determining how
post-91 Kaliningrad might represent itself: the old cathedral contains a
Russian orthodox chapel on the first floor of the northern tower, an evangelic
church on the northern side, a Historic Museum, the Kant museum, and the 17th
century Wallenrodt library collection. According to Sezneva, the effect of the
restoration has been, for some, not so much to establish a new civic identity
for Kaliningrad
as to deprive its citizens of the role to which they had been accustomed in
forging their own imagined collective identity. According to one local tour
guide interviewed by Sezneva, "they took away my Königsberg by doing the
restoration." This leads Sezneva to suggest: "An imaginary trip to
Königsberg was for Kaliningraders a passage through a foreign land into a
foreign culture available for everyone's desires. It did not require visas,
passports, background checks or hard currency."[10]
IV.
European Future
A final aspect of Kaliningrad's new
identity lies in the thorny problem it creates in an age of Europe-building.
The current negotiations between the European Union and 10 countries applying
for entrance, including Poland
and Lithuania, make it
possible to imagine a Kaliningrad as a lone
Russian island within the sea of an enlarged Europe.
Kaliningrad is a major issue
on the agenda for the Danish presidency of the EU Council of Ministers, which
began on July 1,
2002. Among the other
complex questions that must be dealt with over the next six months - the reform
of the Common Agricultural Policy, the Irish referendum, European defense - the
Kaliningrad
question has recently been deemed somewhat secondary by Europeans. EU officials
favor the idea of requiring Russians travelling to the enclave to obtain a
visa, a position vehemently opposed by Moscow;
Russians have called for a corridor connecting Russia
and Kaliningrad,
a proposal which the Europeans have refused. Negotiations on this matter ended
in mid-July when the Lithuanian government unilaterally decided to impose visas on Russian citizens transiting through its
borders. The decision was denounced by Lithuania's president, Algirdas
Brazauskas, on July 18: he stated that though his country had participated in
negotiations on the question, "there is nothing left to discuss." But
shortly afterwards, the European position on the issue was disavowed by French
President Jacques Chirac during a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin
(whose wife apparently grew up in Kaliningrad...)
on July 19 - 20. After having supposedly discussed the issue at length with his
Russian colleague, Chirac declared that "[t]he solution cannot be found by
humiliating Russia",
and added: "I consider that a system of visas, to go from one place in Russia to another place in Russia, is not acceptable."
Danish officials have said that they would like to see the matter settled by
late October.[11]
Michael Behrent