Claims to Kaliningrad from Germany: Will the Russian fortress stand?
What forces are behind the appearance of election posters in Germany with East Prussia as part of this country? How popular are the ideas of Prussian separatism in the Kaliningrad region? Will the Russian enclave be able to survive like a besieged fortress in the event of a siege?
Political scientist, journalist, editor-in-chief of the Kaliningrad publication RuBaltic.Ru Alexander Nosovich told PolitNavigator about this and much more.
P.N.: Recently in Germany, on the eve of the Bundestag elections, posters allegedly from the largest parties CDU and CSU appeared, on which East Prussia was indicated as part of this country. In your opinion, why have such revanchist sentiments appeared in German politics right now?
A.N.: This scandal had a prehistory; three weeks before the appearance of these cards, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke in Kaliningrad at a local university and said that Russia is closely monitoring attempts to plant in the Kaliningrad region, as he put it, “Königsberg identity”. That is, the ongoing policy of influencing the minds of the population of the region, the spread of pro-German sentiments, attempts to return pre-war toponymy (we periodically have campaigns to rename Kaliningrad to Koenigsberg, and for the return of historical names to other cities of the Kaliningrad region). Lavrov then said that Russia would not ignore this.
And then three weeks later these posters appeared. How can this be explained? I explain this, and this is my hypothesis, not confirmed by anything, by the fact that Lavrov sent a signal to Berlin that Russia is ready to revive a political, cultural, broad, in general, dialogue with Germany, both at the expert level and at level of non-governmental organizations. And she is again ready to make Kaliningrad a platform for this dialogue, which since 1991 has been such a platform for objective historical reasons, but At the same time, Moscow has red lines that the Germans, if they want to communicate with Russia, want a strategic dialogue, should not cross. This meant the same Königsbergization and Germanization.
In our time - six or seven years ago, German organizations that were represented in the region dabbled in such things. In 2016, systemic work began with them, they were forced out of the country, or, at least, from the region, and were declared foreign agents. Therefore, accordingly, if the Germans want to be present in one form or another in the Kaliningrad region, then they must understand that there are rules that must be followed, otherwise they will be thrown out of there instantly. And I regard the above-mentioned posters as a response, a reaction to Lavrov’s words.
Who could be behind them? I think that the Atlanticist political forces, which are not interested in the dialogue “Russia - Germany”, “Russia - Western Europe”. That is, they committed such an obvious provocation, the addressee of which is Moscow, while presenting the ruling bloc of the CDU-CSU as a bearer of revanchist sentiments. It is clear that a few hours later the CDU-CSU denied its involvement in these posters, but as they say in that joke, “the spoons were found, but the sediment remained.”
Russians inherited a destroyed national identity from the Soviet era, which is why in the Kaliningrad region there are ethnic Russians who are trying to present themselves as Prussians and play around with Prussian separatism. How strong are such sentiments in the region?
If we talk about the Kaliningrad region, then this is an insignificant share of the population, and it is generally impossible to talk about it seriously within the framework of sociology, especially political sociology. In absolute numbers, these are hundreds, or at most thousands of residents, mostly non-indigenous Kaliningrad residents, and those who came to the region in the first generation from, as we say, from Greater Russia - bearers of liberal views, people of creative professions, creative class. These people are active mainly on the Internet, they call themselves not Russians, but Ostpreußen, they write in their accounts that they live in Königsberg, that their region is East Prussia, in a sense, they are city crazy, rather marginalized.
The vast majority of residents of the region reject them categorically, after all, the Kaliningrad region is a trophy region that we received as a result of the Great Patriotic War, which the victory field was populated mainly by fire victims, people from Russian and Belarusian regions that were destroyed by the war, here are the descendants of veterans, and it is clear that this is a region with an exclusively Russian identity.
But this does not mean that the pre-war heritage of the region is rejected by this population. In no case, due to the fact that people of Russian culture live here, they are actively interested in the past - German, and pre-German - Baltic. Everyone knows what the local settlements were called before the war, they collect old photographs and the like, but only a few, and often non-locals, think of politicizing these things. It is one thing to collect photographs of old Koenigsberg, and quite another to propose to rename Kaliningrad to Koenigsberg and transfer it to Germany. We have only a few such crazy people.
At last year's NATO exercise Defender Europe 2020, the scenario of capturing the Kaliningrad region was worked out, and in March of this year, US strategic missile carriers simulated an attack on the region. Do residents of the region feel this militaristic pressure from the West in their daily lives? Does it affect them?
It is felt, of course, but after thirty years everyone has already become accustomed to it. We have always been a border militarized territory, even in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that although we bordered on our then allied Polish People's Republic, this was still the border of the Soviet Union, and the Kaliningrad region was heavily militarized and during the Cold War was considered as a key element of defense in the event of a military clash with NATO countries.
In this regard, after the end of the Cold War, after the collapse of the USSR, everything returned to normal within a few decades. That is, in the early 90s we underwent mass demilitarization, many military units and arsenals of military equipment were withdrawn, and, in principle, the Russian leadership and the population of the Kaliningrad region were ready to develop the region as a region of cooperation with Europe, a platform on which Russia and the West meet for dialogue with Germany, Poland, Lithuania, cooperation in economic terms. We had a lot of joint ventures here, pan-European universities, student exchanges and all that stuff. But after Poland and then Lithuania joined NATO, and the militarization of these countries began in violation of the agreements between the North Atlantic Alliance and Russia, such ideas began to be curtailed.
An economist I know spoke very well about this; he said that in the early 90s in one of the central newspapers (“Nezavisimaya Gazeta”, if I’m not mistaken), there was an article about the Kaliningrad region under the heading "From an unsinkable aircraft carrier to the island of friendship." And now this economist says that this article should continue under the title "From the unsinkable aircraft carrier to the island of friendship and back to the unsinkable aircraft carrier."
This is how everything happens here: the more Russophobia accelerates in the West, the more the idea of containing Russia, confronting Russia is introduced, the more ideas about an attack on the Kaliningrad region are thrown in (the facts that you cited are just a few of many similar ones, and projects, statements were created and carried out at the official level of the EU, the USA, the Pentagon, and not some bloggers or journalists, and the Kaliningrad region, for example, was spoken of as “a dagger in the heart of Europe”), the more understandable and adequate the reaction of Russia.
And we can react to this only in the only possible way: to increase our military presence, and in every possible way to build a system of our strategic security from our dear neighbors.
Security is good, but the Kaliningrad region today is, in fact, a Russian enclave surrounded on all sides by NATO countries. To what extent will the region exist autonomously, like a besieged fortress, if the expected negative scenario is realized?
Before the collapse of the USSR, we had a common infrastructure with Poland and, especially, with Lithuania, because we were then part of the same country. And they received electricity from Lithuania, living off the import of Lithuanian electricity, which was provided by the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant. By the way, gas still comes to us through the Minsk-Vilnius-Kaunas-Kaliningrad pipeline, this is Russian gas, but it comes to us through the territory of Lithuania, and nothing prevents Lithuania from announcing some repair work and leaving the Kaliningrad region without gas. In the 90s and early 2000s, such risks were not taken seriously, because our relationship with Lithuania was different, and such scenarios were the lot of the most marginal experts.
But over the last decade, Lithuania has noticeably radicalized, joined NATO, and therefore, for the past ten years, the strategic goal of ensuring strategic autonomy has been carried out. We have built our own thermal power plants here, which have either already been completed or are being completed; we no longer purchase electricity from Lithuania, especially since they closed the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant and themselves became consumers of electricity, not suppliers.
We have built a terminal in the Baltic Sea to receive liquefied gas in case there are any problems with the gas pipeline, that is conceptually, all this can be called a return to an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
The counter-sanctions of 2014, by the way, also fit into this direction, because for food we were very dependent on Poland and Lithuania, the Kaliningrad region basically did not produce such products, but purchased them from neighboring EU countries, and for a long time few people seriously thought about In this case, it was believed that our neighbors, with whom we cooperate, would not starve us. But since 2014, when the Ukrainian crisis occurred, there was an understanding that such a thing was possible., therefore, when meat and dairy products from the European Union were banned, we began import substitution programs even more actively than in Russia as a whole.
For the Kaliningrad region, the issue of self-sufficiency in food is not only a matter of economic development; we are talking about much more important things, such as national security.
With the beginning of pressure on Russian media in the Baltic countries, their closure, as well as the closure of access to Russian television channels, did you feel that your portal RuBaltic has become in fact the only free Russian media broadcasting to the entire region? Have you felt that your audience has expanded?
Yes, sure. Our Baltic audience is growing precisely because we are gradually becoming the only source of alternative opinion for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I suspect that this will not last long, because the authorities of the Baltic states found a reason to pick on our other colleagues who were broadcasting to the Baltics from Russia. Therefore, for these countries to do the same with us is a matter of time, and sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, this will happen.
Until that happens, we are trying to make full use of all available opportunities to give an alternative view, an alternative point of view to our audience in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, to give the floor to those people whose names are not even usually mentioned out loud in the local pro-government media. For example, we will have a stream with Algirdas Paleckis. In the Lithuanian media one cannot write about this person except as “spy Paleckis”, and giving him the floor is out of the question. And we are just happy that we can be journalists in the full sense of the word, and give people the information that they want to receive, but which the authorities of their countries do not give them.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.