Similar to what happened with the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, the end of World War II reshaped the European map, with a special impact on the eastern part of the continent and the borders between Germany, Poland, Russia, and the present Baltic states.
This resulted in some cities that previously belonged to one country becoming part of another. A prime example is the current Russian city of Kaliningrad, formerly the German city of Königsberg. Its change in status had little significance until now, with the missile deployment issue.
Kaliningrad is a city located at the mouth of the Pregolya River, which flows into the Baltic Sea through the Vistula Lagoon after covering approximately 123 kilometers from its origin, at the confluence with the Angrapa. It is the capital of the Kaliningrad Oblast (an oblast is a type of Russian federal administrative division), famous for being the birthplace of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Additionally, it was once the capital of East Prussia, founded in 1255 by King Otakar II of Bohemia as a fortress to aid the Teutonic Order in the conquest and evangelization of the Lithuanian pagans.
At that time, it was known by its German name, Königsberg. It joined the Hanseatic League in 1340 and the Prussian Confederation a century later. In 1466, it became part of Poland along with all of Royal Prussia (claimed by the Poles as opposed to Ducal Prussia). Königsberg experienced a period of economic and cultural splendor because its port was the most important in the Baltic, along with those of Riga and Danzig. This importance was revealed in the 19th century when defeat against Napoleon’s troops forced Frederick William III to move his court there from Berlin.
In 1871, it became part of Germany during its unification process. After World War I, the Weimar Republic filled the imperial void, and East Prussia was separated from the rest of the country by the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig as a buffer state. The German-speaking territory was thus divided into two parts, a division that Nazism claimed the right to reunite as a pretext to invade Poland and initiate a new global conflict.
It was this conflict that determined the future of Königsberg and, consequently, all of East Prussia. Bombing raids devastated the city’s monumental heritage, and the unstoppable advance of the Red Army, preceded by the echo of the Nemmersdorf Massacre (now Mayakovsky), whether true or not (it was said that some soldiers cold-bloodedly killed fourteen people of German ethnicity, although there are doubts about the veracity and Nazi propaganda), led to an exodus of its inhabitants. When it fell into Soviet hands after a three-month siege, a significant part of its population had already left.
Nevertheless, about one hundred twenty thousand survivors (mostly women, children, and the elderly) remained and were used as forced labor until their repatriation to Germany, which took place over five years between 1945 and 1950. By then, many had died from diseases, malnutrition, and reprisals, leaving about twenty thousand. As for Prussia, the Potsdam Conference decided that its northern part would be under Soviet control, and in 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad.
The Soviet Union had already proposed this in 1943 during the Tehran Conference because thousands of Soviet citizens lived in that territory. Moreover, even before Germans were fully repatriated, hundreds of thousands of Soviet settlers, many compelled by their social conditions (alcoholics, illiterates, etc.), began to move into East Prussia to support the collective farms established on the spot. Later, in the 1950s, Khrushchev proposed integrating the Kaliningrad Oblast into Lithuania, but the Lithuanian Communist Party rejected it to avoid ethnic complications in its territory.
Consequently, it remained a Russian oblast until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, later becoming part of the Russian Federation. By then, descendants of the expelled had returned in search of their roots, realizing the idea that emerged in the 1980s of designating Kaliningrad for Soviets of German descent. Currently, more than seven thousand people of such characteristics are registered there. This raises the question of what Germany thinks about it, especially after its reunification.
Apparently, discussions between the Bonn and Moscow governments on this matter did take place, but the former never considered it a priority. Their focus was on ending the division of the country into two states. Subsequently, in 2001, the European Union addressed the issue in the context of Russia’s difficulties in repaying the billions in debt owed to Berlin. There were discussions about Germany buying Kaliningrad or finding a compromise solution of shared sovereignty, but nothing materialized.
Rumors on this topic have continued cyclically, with occasional news in the press of both countries. For instance, the Russian weekly Nash Continent published one suggesting an agreement between Vladimir Putin and Edmund Stoiber to cancel a significant portion of the aforementioned debt in exchange for the city. However, the German government has stated that it has no interest in reclaiming it and only sees it as a historical curiosity. They even ignored a bizarre proposal to establish a Lithuanian-Polish euroregion called Prussia.
The demand for the German identity of Kaliningrad is limited to the relatives of those repatriated and certain far-right sectors like the Gesellschaft für Siedlungsförderung in Trakehnen movement, which in the 1990s promoted a settlement in Yasnaya Polyana (a community in the Kaliningrad district). Another group, Aktion Deutsches Königsberg, financed a school, housing, and agricultural machinery in the oblast for a colony of Russians of German descent from the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. These initiatives, presented as NGO actions, clashed with the Russian government, which considered them otherwise and suppressed all actions in 2015.
With all this, and setting aside claims for specific territorial areas of the oblast by Lithuania and Poland (which they have since renounced), or the emergence of the Freistaat Preußen (an independence movement that split into two factions in 2017), the Kaliningrad Question seemed to have been definitively settled. However, recent international circumstances have changed things a bit.
The current war between Russia and Ukraine, following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, has brought the issue back into focus, particularly regarding the strategic location of the oblast for deploying Iskander missiles. Moscow had announced this in 2008 if NATO persisted in placing its missile defense system in Poland.
Ideas like internationally re-evaluating the status of Kaliningrad, which some Lithuanian politicians describe as colonial, have resurfaced. They advocate for it to become an independent republic, as they believe a referendum would yield a significant majority in favor of separating from Russia.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on January 7, 2019. Puedes leer la versión en español en Kaliningrado, la estratégica ciudad que nadie quiere
Sources
Richard J. Krickus, The Kaliningrad Question | Alexander C. Diener, Joshua Hagen, Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave: discontinuity as a threat to sovereignity | Brian Vitunic, Enclave To Exclave: Kaliningrad Between Russia And The European Union | Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 | David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1772–1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change | Andrew A. Michta, Kaliningrad and the Escalatory Spiral in the Baltics | Wikipedia
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