Funny They Got Crimea We Get Kaliningrad
W hen relations betwixt Moscow and the west plummeted in 2014 over Vladimir Putin'southward seizure of Crimea, pro-Kremlin media went into overdrive. They portrayed European countries as morally depraved, harbouring a visceral hatred of Russians. The foreign ministry warned travellers away against the risk of being "seized" by vengeful western intelligence agencies.
For residents of Russian federation's vast heartland – the overwhelming majority of whom have never travelled to Europe – it was a potent and powerful propaganda campaign. Anti-European sentiment rocketed to its highest level since the cold state of war (the first 1, that is).
But in Kaliningrad, it was a much harder sell.
A little parcel of country smaller than Wales wedged upwards confronting the Baltic Body of water, Kaliningrad has no common edge with Russia, which is almost 300 miles to the e – and unlike virtually Russians its residents travel often to the EU. The city centre is 75 miles from the Lithuanian border, and a mere 30 miles from Poland. At weekends and on public holidays, there are long tailbacks at both border crossings. Gdansk, the nearby Polish port urban center, is a especially pop destination.
"I travel to Poland a lot and run across how people relate to Russians. Everything is fine, there are no problems," says Alexander, a 35-year-quondam office worker. "The Poles are people, but like usa." Like many others hither, he dismisses the state-run Russian media's unflattering depictions of European countries as "lies".
Many Kaliningrad residents travel to Poland and Lithuania to stock upwardly on western foodstuffs banned by Putin in 2014 in response to European and US sanctions. Although the quality of Russian-produced cheeses and hams has improved slightly in recent years, at that place remains a deep hunger for forbidden culinary delights: parmesan, camembert and jamón.
"It'south just like when I was a child in the Soviet Union," says Alexei Chabounine, the 48-year-quondam editor of a local news website. "Back then, we used to go to Lithuania all the time to become meat, milk and other things that nosotros couldn't get concord of in Russia. Of course, there were no borders then."
"Fifty-fifty a trip to a Smooth supermarket can have an influence on people," says Anna Alimpiyeva, a sociologist. She notes that over lxx% of Kaliningrad'south roughly one million residents accept a passport, compared to a nationwide effigy of lower than 30%.
"They run into Europe for themselves and not through a television screen."
That's non to say that Kaliningrad is a bastion of liberal values. In the compact urban center middle – a mishmash of Soviet-congenital flats, public squares and modern shopping centres – it's non uncommon to encounter people wearing T-shirts depicting Russian Iskander nuclear missiles, which the Kremlin deployed to the region in February.
Local government accept cracked down on independent media and opposition activists, while NOD, the ultra-nationalist pro-Putin motility that blames westerners for about of Russia's ills, has a thriving local branch. "Most of these people still go to Poland or Lithuania to practise their shopping though," laughs Chabounine.
During the communist era, getting from Kaliningrad to Moscow past country involved nothing more complicated than an overnight railroad train journey through neighbouring Soviet republics. But when the Soviet Union complanate in 1991, Kaliningrad suddenly institute itself cut off from Mother Russia by the newly contained countries of Belarus, Latvia and Lithuania. A decade later, when Republic of latvia, Republic of lithuania and Poland joined the Eu, Kaliningrad residents required visas to travel overland to Russia.
This sense of geographical isolation is reflected in common expressions: ahead of trips to Moscow, people will routinely say "I'g going to Russia"; ane local laughed when I pointed out he was already there. On national TV, Kaliningrad is sometimes left off conditions maps.
The Soviet collapse was the latest twist in Kaliningrad's foreign history. Founded past Teutonic knights in the 13th century, information technology was previously known as Königsberg, the capital letter of East Prussia, where Prussian kings were crowned. At the end of the second world state of war, the urban center was annexed by the Soviet Wedlock and renamed in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, a Bolshevik revolutionary.
Later Stalin expelled the ethnic German language population, Soviet citizens were shipped in to repopulate information technology – many were Russian military families who described their move to Kaliningrad equally "moving to the west". Lyudmila Putina, the Russian president's ex-wife, was born here in 1958. A key outpost for the Soviet armed forces, the entire Kaliningrad region was strictly off-limits to foreigners until 1991.
Even so Kaliningrad's proximity to Europe, and its Baltic port, meant information technology was exposed to far more western influences than the residue of the USSR. Soviet sailors would bring back clothes, books and vinyl from western Europe and beyond.
"People accept always likened themselves to Americans – our families all came here from different places across the Soviet Union and created a melting pot with what was practically a new ethos," says Oleg Kashin, a well-known Russian announcer who was born in Kaliningrad.
The defining symbol of that era is the foreboding Firm of the Soviets, a world-famous example of brutalist compages. This unfinished 28-storey building, which locals say resembles a robot'southward head jutting out of the earth, stands on the sometime site of the 13th century Königsberg Castle, whose ruins were blown up in 1968 on the orders of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. (The area effectually the House of Soviets will house the fan zone for this summer's Globe Loving cup.)
Otherwise, very few of the city's pre-Soviet buildings survived the twin assaults of an RAF bombing campaign and the Red Army's three-month performance to capture the urban center. Today, the well-nigh high-profile architectural remains of Kaliningrad's Prussian past are 7 neo-Gothic gates that band the erstwhile city limits, along with the Lutheran cathedral, a redbrick Gothic structure where Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who died hither in 1804, is buried. Gift stalls do a roaring trade in refrigerator magnets reading "Kant touch on it" and "Yes, I Kant". As well for sale: miniature busts of Putin and Stalin decorated with bister, the fossilised tree resin for which the region is famous.
As the Soviet past recedes, Kaliningrad is rediscovering its Prussian history: in that location are calls for the apply of alternative Prussian street names and to reconstruct Königsberg Castle.
The phenomenon has been condemned by local Kremlin supporters as a sign of "Germanisation". "Information technology'southward infantile," says a country-media journalist, Nikolay Dolgachev, of the interest in Prussian heritage. "Information technology would exist like today's Americans feeling nostalgic nigh Native American civilization." Pro-Putin political analysts in Moscow have gone further, suggesting that growing enthusiasm for the metropolis'south Prussian past is a sign of creeping separatism.
Critics say the accusations of "Germanisation" are ludicrous. "The term has no basis in reality," says Dmitry Selin, a former gallery curator.
There take been consequences, though. In 2016, the German-Russian House, a local cultural and educational center, was forced to close downward after being declared a "foreign agent". And earlier this year, an Aeroflot steward was fired after referring to Kaliningrad equally Königsberg ahead of a flight from Moscow.
"Sometimes," sighs Selin, "I can't get assist just get the feeling that the government want to fence us off from Europe."
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- This commodity's headline was amended on ane June 2018 to better characterise Kaliningrad as an exclave, rather than an enclave
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/31/kaliningrad-the-russian-enclave-with-a-taste-for-europe
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