kaliningrad » History

Rural Decay

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:02:28 +0000

Goodness knows where Igor Yakimov found this old footage. The voice over says: ‘Ost Preussen ist das Deutsche Pferdeland‘ . . . For 200 years indeed it was. King Friedrich Wilhelm 1 had a stud here and bred the famous ‘Trakhener‘ horse. At one time it employed over 3,000 people.

When the Red Army advanced, the horses were moved out with Prussians fleeing west, though few survived the winter and the trek. The stables fell into ruins. They were still ruined when Joost Lemmens photographed them in 2000. Today the local town, Gusev, struggles to employ anyone.

This kind of rural decay characterises much of the Kaliningrad Oblast and explains why people are so unhappy with Moscow. Besides a couple of showpieces in the city, very little has been restored since the war, over sixty years ago.

The Rise And Fall Of Prussia

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:15:15 +0000

Here’s 500 years of history in about four minutes. Technology is so cool. Although it’s fun to watch the shaded areas, one tends to forget that these represent people. Thanks to Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, almost 17 million people were dispossessed when the map of Europe was redrawn at the Potsdam conference. Not only Germans, but Silesians, Pomeranians, Poles, Lithuanians . . .

The way history is rewritten is always fascinating. Here’s a contemporary cartoon of Russia ‘stealing Kaliningrad (Konigsberg) from Poland‘. No such thing of course, the carve up of Prussia between the ‘Great Powers’ happened simultaneously.

No Such Place As Kaliningrad

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:20:10 +0000

Before the war, East Prussia was home to over two million people. The last of the few thousand survivors were all expelled by 1948.

The first Russian settlers of the new Kaliningrad Oblast arrived to eerie, half-empty houses in an alien landscape. Among the tiled German villas with steep gables, the Baltic sand and pines, there was nothing to remind them of Tver or Pskov. Only some makeshift signs in Russian identified their new location.

were ill-at-ease in their allotted, unfamiliar dwellings, as if half-expecting the rightful owners to return at any moment.

Under Stalin, many Russians were ‘re-assigned’ to Kaliningrad province – such as Irina, the military prosecutor, whose husband had been denounced as an enemy of the people. Hurriedly divorcing him had not been enough to save her job or herself from relocation.

The name of her new town was printed on her ticket as Wehlau. But she arrived just as workmen were knocking its German name from the Station’s facade. She had arrived at a town without a name. She had arrived at No Such Place.

Growing up in the early settlement of Kaliningrad inspired Yuri Buida to write his stories: ‘Tales From Nowhere’ published in English as, ‘The Prussian Bride‘. He depicts a colony of rootless people, randomly resettled, who kept within themselves ’suitcase syndrome’ and only ever referred to where they had come from as home.

In a place from which culture and history had been expelled, so had humanity. The random settlers were incapable of any kinship or connect. At school, Yuri’s teachers could tell him nothing about the origins of his birthplace beyond the fact that Kant once lived in Kaliningrad. If the settlers were connected by anything, it was only the intolerance, scapegoating and xenophobia driven by Stalin.

His story about Rita Schmidt, for example, begins in 1948. A Prussian mother facing deportation asks two newly-arrived Russian sisters to take her infant daughter. She persuades them with a clock and some silver spoons. The sisters, Maria and Martha, bring up the child in an atmosphere of physical and sexual abuse and hard labour. Although unable to speak a word of German and Russianised from infancy, Rita is nonetheless never allowed to forget her hated origins. Even when grown, Rita is cruelly abused by the whole town as a ‘fascist slut’.

Yuri’s work is often described as fiction from invented memories. But in No Such Place the past had been wiped in any case.

‘The Prussian Bride’ is an interesting read and very relevant to Kaliningrad. You might say that the town only developed a soul once it began to reconnect with its past. Below is a picture of Kaliningrad in 1968 – an artificial, Russian replica city bearing no relation its geography, history or, by now, a second generation of estranged European settlers.

From Russia To Prussia

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:28:55 +0000

Kaliningrad isn’t quite like any other city in Russia. That’s because it isn’t in Russia at all. Until 1945, Kaliningrad was the Prussian port of Konigsberg.

Stalin won the territory in all that crude border shuffling that went on after WW2. Poland was pushed to the left and Konigsberg became the western boundary of the Soviet Empire. But today, the independence of the Baltic States and the expansion of the EU has left Kaliningrad as an ‘exclave’ – a dislocated Russian oblast wedged between Poland and Lithuania. The real Russian border and St. Petersburg is 1000 kilometers up the road.

To say Kaliningrad gets a bad press is an understatement. Being a closed town for 30 years probably aroused suspicions. In fact, Like St Petersburg, Kaliningrad had a complete face-lift recently, while celebrating its 750th anniversary. (No mean achievement for a town which dates from 1945.)

Little remains of the former majesty of Konigsberg, except in old picture postcards. There’s a good collection on the site, Castles of Poland. This is the old Konigsberg Castle, once a seat of Teutonic knights and lavishly enlarged with Gothic spires and great halls in the 18th Century.

Along with the magnificent schloss, Konigsberg boasted landscaped parks and ornate villas in chestnut-lined streets. So when you visit the landscape of Soviet poured concrete that is now Kaliningrad, there is a tendency to assume that it was pretty well vandalised by Russians. These two postcards show a nice contrast between pre and post-war Konigsberg.

Konigsberg – Prussian Town

Kaliningrad – Russian Town

In truth, Konigsberg was already destroyed before the Red Army arrived. The RAF technique of firebombing German cities was perfected over Konigsberg in 1944. What we refer to as ‘carpet bombing’ was then called ‘fan bombing’. The lead plane would drop marker flares and the following bombers would fan out at set degrees from the marker, dropping incendiary bombs at timed intervals. The result was an inextinguishable fire that the city itself would fuel and feed for days.

It wasn’t until 1968 that the Russians decided to do something creative with the ruins of the old castle. Which is how Kaliningrad acquired what is probably the world’s ugliest building: the House Of Soviets.

For some reason, the Russian architect of ‘Dom Sovietov’ overlooked the underground passages of the old castle. The world’s ugliest building cracked, was declared unsafe and has never once been occupied, even though it still dominates the Kaliningrad skyline. Despite numerous surveys, no one is quite sure how to demolish Dom Sovietov, how much it would cost or even where to start.

Although still largely a concrete-lovers paradise, Kaliningrad is seeing a lot of urban renewal. Wealthy Muscovites (read: scary mobsters) are transforming the old villas into private castles, a towering orthodox church adorns the old main parking lot and the cosmonaut monument – a masterpiece of Soviet iconography – has been given fresh flower beds.

The first man who walked in space came from Kaliningrad, but the town is now struggling, stifled and landlocked by Schengen, unable to reach out to anywhere.

More Tragic Than The Titanic

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:00:45 +0000

This is the Wilhelm Gustloff, all set to sail on an exotic cruise from Hamburg. It was built during the golden age of luxury liners, a floating showcase of shining brass, polished mahogany, pampering cabin staff and Captain’s Table cuisine.

During wartime it was pressed into service as a hospital ship. On its last voyage it was torpedoed while evacuating those fleeing the East Prussian front. As it listed and sank, some 9000 perished in the icy Baltic waters. Half of the dead were children.

The fate of the Wihelm Gustloff is an episode in a recent book by Isabel Denny about Konigsberg, ‘The Rise And Fall Of Hitler’s Fortress Town‘. Digging into Konigsberg/Kaliningrad history tends to turn over a lot of old bones. Konigsberg, like Dresden and Magdeburg, was one of those unfortunate German towns trashed and burned twice over, once by RAF fire-bombing and once by the Red Army.

This stuff is not usually for the squeamish. Isabel, however, writes well about the crazed mood of ‘anything goes’ revenge at the end of the war. Years of war, hunger and death led to a breakdown of society and inevitably to some of the greatest – and most unnecessesary – atrocities coming right at the end of the war, when the fight against Germany was really won and dusted. Konigsberg itself was surrounded and 100 kilometers behind enemy lines when the Red Army started its final assault.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is one of the world’s biggest but least known maritime disasters in history. It has never made it into pop culture. The curator of the excellent Wilhelm Gustloff site suggests a number of reasons. Certainly there was no Hollywood factor – no famous people were drowned – while Germany’s war guilt has always minimised the terrible retribution its people endured.

But perhaps the most interesting anecdote is about the submarine commander, Alexander Marinesko, who fired the fateful torpedos.

By all accounts, Alexander was both an ambitious Soviet officer and a wild card. He was known to fudge and exaggerate reports of his crew’s exploits. And worst of all, during the war, he disappeared for three days while onshore in Hanko with a Swedish restaurant hostess. In Stalinist times, fraternising with foreigners was one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Girls who had as much as a one night stand with the brave allied sailors from the Atlantic Convoys relieving Murmansk and Archaengelsk were regularly sent to the Gulag.

So, there was no hero’s medal for Alexander Marinesko after the sinking the great ‘fascist ship’ . His exploit was never headlined in Soviet propaganda of the day. The NKVD had a file on Marinesko and their attentions soon drove him to drink. In the same year as the fabled sinking, he was dismissed from the navy. By 1949, he found himself in a prison camp accused of common theft.

But twenty years later, things turned around. For some reason, a Soviet postcard from the seventies appears dramatising the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff refugee ship as if it were an even contest.

Even later, in 1990, Alexander was finally rehabilitated by Gorbachev with the hero’s medal he always wanted. Too bad he died in 1963. But move on another two decades, and Russians are wondering whether the remaining monument to Alexander Marinesko, in Kaliningrad, is ‘appropriate’.

If you can bear to read them, books like Isabel Denny’s are a very good insight into our changing brainframes, views and sympathies about the past. No matter who’s side you were on. Just this episode shows you that history is rewritten not once but several times over.

No Legal Right

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:26:37 +0000

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Konigsberg was overrun by the Red Army 1945. And any encyclo today will tell you it’s been part of Russia ever since. But as Raymond A. Smith points out, Russia has never held any formal legal title to the Oblast at all.

At the end of the war, Germany was being given away by the Allies like at a garage sale. Actually, totally against the Hague Laws of War of 1907. In this illegal way, Germany lost some 25% of its pre-war territory.

Prussia was abolished. So too were Pomerania and Silesia, following the bizarre arrangement in which the whole of Poland was simply ’shunted to the left and up a bit’. The Americans, who by this time were calling the shots, probably couldn’t even pronounce Pomerania, let alone point to it on a map.

Hey, Where The Fark Is Pomerania?

The arbitrary line delineating the southern border of the Kaliningrad Oblast was drawn by Stalin – they say on the back of fag packet at Yalta. The Great Powers always meant to have experts look at this border in detail, but never quite got around to it.

Moreover, Stalin’s stated claims to the Konigsberg region – because the Soviets wanted revenge and an ice-free port – never had any basis in International Law either. But the Red Army were there and not going away any time soon. So really, Kaliningrad was born out of muddle, bluff and procrastination. All Stalin ever had on paper was an acknowledgement of temporary administration pending review.

So why hasn’t any smart-ass International Lawyer brought all this up before? Basically, the Cold War intervened and no one wanted to poke the Bear with a stick. To be fair to participants, the Potsdam Conference of 1945 envisaged that many territorial issues concerning Germany would be buttoned down at a subsequent meeting – the ‘Final Settlement’. But again, due to the Cold War, this next meeting didn’t happen until forty five years later – not until the re-unification of Germany in 1990. Here, the contentious issue of Kaliningrad was sensitively left off the agenda.

In so doing, as Raymond Smith puts it, the precise legal status of Kaliningrad in International Law has been forever ‘lost in transit’.

Source

Though Raymond A. Smith argues the case for restitution rather well he admits it is largely an academic exercise and three possible claimants could dispute the territory – all apparently with a stronger legal case than Russia.

In the unlikely event of a successful court case, the lucky country would win a population of 900,000 Russians, several million tons of Soviet concrete buildings and the world’s oldest collection of Czechoslovakian trams.

Back To The Future

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:30:26 +0000

There are plans in Kaliningrad to rebuild the old Prussian castle.

Firebombed by the RAF in 1944, it was then levelled in 1969 to build the ill-conceived ‘House Of Soviets‘. Known locally is the ‘Monster’, this concrete egg-box has never been quite finished or occupied. Finally the blot on the landscape has to go.

Alexander Bahzin thinks he can recreate the famous schloss from old paintings and postcards. The architect has already made a cardboard model and now just needs a green light and 100 million. Alexander is a kitsch connoisseur and has built whole repro villas in Kaliningrad from pre-war photographs. ‘There was no complicated stonemasonry in the castle’ he says. ‘It was just bricks and plaster.’ Even so, it took the Teutonic Knights a couple of centuries but Alexander is looking at three years start to finish.

There’s a lot of support for the project. Putin, whose wife comes from Kaliningrad, has offered to put up 50 million. (From the state, not from his own pocket of course.) It will also please Germans who can remember the grandeur of Konigsberg prior to being concreted over by Russians. Elderly Germans today who revisit their old hometown have been known to break down in tears.