VIENNA – Kaliningrad oblast, the non-contiguous portion of the Russian Federation, is again at the center of three major controversies – and this only six months after President Putin led the commemoration of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Königsburg and the 60th of the annexation of that German territory by the USSR.
The first of these controversies involves an appeal by the region’s governor for ethnic Russians living in Latvia and Estonia to move to the region, a call that has attracted few takers even as it has generated widespread skepticism about just what Moscow in fact intends for that region and the Baltic states.
Last fall, Georgiy Boos, the region’s newly appointed governor, announced that Kaliningrad is ready to take in and provide jobs and housing for up to five million people, including several hundred thousand ethnic Russians from Latvia and Estonia, an appeal one Russian journalist calls “an Anschluss in reverse” (“Noviy region,” December 22).
Because of the close ties Boos has with Putin and with Modest Kolerov, the Kremlin official responsible for relations with ethnic Russians living abroad, many observers have taken this appeal seriously even though it is far from clear just what Moscow intends and whether the Russian government can provide the necessary funding.
Many in Estonia and Latvia viewed Boos’ call as little more than yet another effort by Moscow to ethnicize politics in those two countries and thus involve European institutions in the supervision of the processes whereby those ethnic Russians lacking citizenship there can obtain it.
But it is not only ethnic Estonians and ethnic Latvians who have reacted cautiously to this idea. Tatiana Favorskaya, the vice president of the Russian Community of Latvia, told “Noviy region” that the situation in Kaliningrad is far from attractive and that ethnic Russians from Latvia would need “firm” guarantees before deciding to leave.
At present, she noted, 12.7 percent of Kaliningrad’s workers are unemployed, a situation that suggests that as many as half of the 40,000 ethnic Russians from Latvia Moscow says could move there in the first group would likely find themselves without work, let alone housing and other amenities.
According to Favorskaya, no more than 10 percent of Latvia’s ethnic Russian are currently interested in leaving that country and moving to the Russian Federation, and even among that small group, few she implied would be interested in going to the depressed area of Kaliningrad.
Favorskaya is not alone in her skepticism about this project. Vladimir Nikitin, the deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on CIS Affairs and Work with Compatriots Abroad, was even more dismissive. He told “Noviy region” he was sure that this latest in a long line of such ideas would remain “on paper.”
The second controversy arises from problems within the region itself, problems so severe that many ethnic Russians there are furious with the local authorities, the region’s Russian writers are forced to publish in Estonia rather than in their home city and officials have been forced to seek outside assistance even for the completion of a church under construction for the last nine years.
Ethnic Russians in Kaliningrad have been angered by Moscow’s decisions this year to play up the German heritage of the region at the expense of what they see as its Russian connections. Decisions to rename the university after native son Immanuel Kant and to erect statues to medieval German knights upset many Russian nationalists.
They have also been upset by Moscow’s failure to put more pressure on Lithuania regarding transit arrangements and to provide more assistance for rebuilding the region’s economy, cleaning its ravaged environment, and treating the large number of cases of HIV/AIDS and other diseases there.
But recently, ethnic Russians in Kaliningrad have been outraged by two other developments which highlight just how little Moscow appears to think of them whatever Russian leaders at the center or in the oblast choose to say in public.
On December 28, the Russkaya liniya website (
http://www.rusk.ru) reported that members of the Kaliningrad writers union lack the most basic institutions for their work. They do not have there own room to hold meetings in, and they are forced to publish in a Russian-language journal in Tallinn because there is not one issued in their home city.
Indeed, Russkaya liniya said, the status of Russian writers in Kaliningrad is like that of Russian writers in “an alien land.”
Only a few days earlier, on December 23, Interfax reported that Kaliningrad Governor Boos had been forced to seek foreign investors to help finish the Russian Orthodox Cathedral there because neither Moscow nor Kaliningrad has enough money to complete the job.
And the third was ignited when a Polish academic told a conference in Germany at the end of November that the European Union must not agree to any special relationship with Kaliningrad because that region represents a new “Trojan horse of the new Soviets” pointed at the heart of Europe.
Svetlana Chervonnaya, a professor at Torun University in Poland, added that the Russian Federation should apologize for seizing this territory from Germany and either return it to Berlin’s control or, failing that, divide the region among Poland, Lithuania, and other regional powers.
Several other participants at the Akademia Baltica meeting in Flensburg echoed her views. Among them was Latvian politician Juris Dobelis who from the Russian point of view added insult to injury by pointedly referring to Governor Boos’ call for ethnic Russians to move from the Baltic republics to Kaliningrad.
“Boos is calling!” Dobelis said. “True, he is calling not for a [genuine] return home but to a temporary home since Königsburg all the same is not Russian territory from time immemorial. Instead, if we look back into history, this is the territory of the Balts.”
Such statements, the Russkaya Liniya website suggested, call attention to “the recent activization” of European and especially German foundations in “our” Kaliningrad region. “Something is clearly going on,” the Russian nationalist site continued, but the question remains open as to “just what.”
Any transfer of sovereignty over Kaliningrad anytime soon, of course, is even less likely than the arrival of large numbers of ethnic Russians from Latvia, but despite that, this third controversy too almost certainly will continue to fester, inflaming attitudes on all sides of the debate and making any discussion of that region all the more difficult.
