History, World War II, and the EU seem to conspire to make this strip of land either a future Hong Kong on the Baltic, or an isolated scrapyard.
#51: Kaliningrad, Russia: In Search of Long-Lost Konigsberg, East Prussia
15 August 2002
If you look at the map of Europe, you would notice a small chunk of Russian territory disconnected from the main bulk of the Russian land mass, lying on the coast of the Baltic Sea, hammered in by Poland in the south and Lithuania to its north and east. Moscow is more than 1100km to its far, far east. This is the Region (Oblast) of Kaliningrad, with just under 1 million people, named after its chief city (500,000 people).
Today’s Kaliningrad is a forgotten city full of faded paint and rundown Soviet tower blocks, a kind of scrapyard in a hidden corner of Europe. More than half a century ago, however, it was the illustrious city of Konigsberg in the German region of East Prussia, a region that is cut off from the main part of Germany by a narrow strip of Polish territory and the city state of Danzig (now the Polish port of Gdansk). It was the dispute over this narrow piece of Polish land that gave Hitler the excuse to invade Poland in 1939, sparking off WWII.
For centuries, Konigsberg has been the metropolis of eastern Germany. Kant, the great philosopher, lived and worked here. The city, dominated by the Royal Palace and Castle, was once HQ of the Teutonic Knights, a semi-religious order of crusader knights (some say, robber barons) who brought Christianity by the sword across the southern shores of the Baltic Sea.
The original people here were the Prussians, a tribe related to the Lithuanians and Latvians, who were slaughtered to extinction by the Knights, and most ironically gave their name to the German settlers who took their land. Later Konigsberg became the possession of the Dukes of Brandenburg, who then assumed the title of the Kings of Prussia. Konigsberg became the coronation town of Prussia, the most powerful German state and chief driver of German unification in the 19th century.
Arts and commerce flourished here. Grand merchant houses, banking offices, palaces and opera houses were erected in the city center, around the reddish Gothic Cathedral on Kneipfof Island. All were wiped out during the WWII, first by the devastating British air raids, then by the door-to-door fighting when the Soviet Army confronted the troops of Nazi Germany. The population of East Prussia was forced to flee westwards and the remaining people deported, after post-war settlement dictated the division of East Prussia between Poland and Soviet Russia.
Konigsberg, or “King’s Castle” in German, was renamed Kaliningrad, after the communist bureaucrat who was Stalin’s puppet Soviet President. The region was then repopulated with people from the USSR, mostly Russia and Ukraine. With the downfall of the USSR, which meant the independence of Lithuania, the region now found itself cut off from Russia, like an orphan stranded far away from her relative, undernourished and unloved. Today, the European Union demands that Lithuania impose visas on Russian citizens as a precondition to accession into the EU, which means that Kaliningrad’s citizens will be even more isolated than ever before – like a future Hong Kong on the Baltic (the declared aim of the local government in the early 1990s), or an isolated scrapyard on the Baltic?
I flew here from Moscow one sunny Monday morning. (I was to fly back to Moscow after this to continue my land journey from London to Singapore, so no rules were broken.) “Stop! Passport?” a lady officer demanded as I got off the plane.
“Where’s your return ticket?” I showed them the ticket. No problem. I was the only passenger commanded to show documents. Russia, as I have said in my previous reports, is a country with a surprisingly racist police force, whose favorite preoccupation is to check anyone non-European. My documents are correct and I, theoretically, have nothing to worry about, but again the almost-daily checks are beginning to get on my nerves and are particularly irritating when you want to get on with things fast.
Across the sunny Nordic-looking meadows, littered with pretty sunflowers that characterized Kaliningrad region, I took a bus into the city center. Here Soviet-style housing estates with faded paint stand side-by-side with the few remnants of Germanic urban shophouses with Bavarian-type rooftops and scattered cobbled stone streets. I checked into a partially Western-style renovated hotel (where of course I stayed in the spartan original Soviet style rooms for lower rates) called Moskva. The city center is dominated by a huge statue of Lenin and not far from here, of Mother Russia. Bright new shopfronts and boutiques, ATMs and cellular phone advertisement billboards, however, betray signs of a new Russia driven more by dollars than by ideology.
I explored the old center of the city, i.e., pre-WWII Konigsberg. Not much is left of that old bustling scene. Kneipfof Island is just a large city park with the old cathedral in the center. All the opera houses, crowded buildings and mansions of old Konigsberg, so pretty along the city’s canals and waterways – almost a kind of northern Venice – were leveled during and after the war. The Dom, or Cathedral looks restored from the outside, but it remains a mere shell. A few rooms have been turned into a museum with incredible pictures, paintings and mementos of the old city which no longer exist. It’s like the whole City of London totally destroyed and turned into a huge park, leaving only St Paul’s Cathedral in the middle. (OK, I know some of you think it should be destroyed anyway and Hyde Park should extend all the way there, given the terrible traffic mess, pollution and ugly buildings… Prince Charles probably think likewise).
Most of the interior remains in ruins. A bare-chested Russian tourist walked around the cathedral with his bear-like chest – something unimaginable in churches anywhere; Kant, who was buried here, must be turning in his grave. Not far from here is the site of the old Prussian Royal Castle. In 1968, the Soviets blew up the beautiful complex, once a symbol of the city, on the pretext that it was a manifestation of German militarism, and built a huge, monstrous complex, House of the Soviets, over it.
Unfortunately, they discovered a massive mediaeval tunnel complex beneath, which flooded the entire structure. The ugly complex, despite its enormous size and stage of completion, was quickly abandoned. Today it stands there, at the heart of one of Kaliningrad’s best real estates, the symbol of not only the failure of the Soviet system, but also the terrible acts of vandalism committed by the Soviets on what used to be one of the most beautiful and historical cities of Europe.
There aren’t many backpackers in Kaliningrad, given complex visa requirements, but a lot of old East Prussians now living in Germany come in droves to their old homeland. I met an elderly man from Hamburg at the caf� in front of Hotel Kaliningrad. Born in 1938, he’s on his annual “pilgrimage” to his old hometown. “They have made a mess of this place,” he said. “They are trying to charge us a bomb for what little remains of our past,” referring to the difference in pricing for foreigners and locals in all aspects of life and tourism here.
I visited the Curonian Strip National Park, an UNESCO-listed World Heritage site. It’s a long, narrow peninsula that juts out into the Baltic Sea, forming a bay with its beautiful sand dunes and pine forests. Small fishing villages and towns line its shores, and holiday makers and hikers from Russia proper explore the unusually warm shores. All is not well. A careful examination of a local beach reveals a heavily polluted shoreline, with an atrociously thick layer of bluish chemical substances. What a shame!
As I write these words, the leaders of Russia and the EU are debating the future of Kaliningrad, or perhaps people thought so. When the USSR collapsed and during that early era of optimism, local leaders thought this might be turned into a new trading center of the East and West – Hong Kong was the marketing model, they declared. A decade later, this remains a backwater of Russia. In fact, local Kaliningraders face the prospect of becoming even more isolated if the EU succeeds in persuading (OK, forcing is more appropriate) Lithuania and Poland to abolish visa-free privileges for Russian citizens. Let’s see what happens. “Our fate lies in the hands of others, whether we become a Bhutan of New Europe, or a Hong Kong of the Baltic,” a local said.
With that, I flew back to Moscow, where I literally walked into the nasty reach of a corrupt police officer.