I’m just curious about this little bit of Russia all by its lonesome over by Poland and Lithuania. What’s it like? Do the people there like being Russians, or would they perhaps prefer to join the EU?
From everything I’ve read, the place is an absolute hell-hole. For a vivid description see The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through the History of Prussia by James Charles Roy.
My SIL is from Kaliningrad. She says that things are a bit better now than they were a few years ago; it’s looking a little more prosperous these days. That’s pretty relative, of course. Her parents still don’t have a phone and plant lots of potatoes so they will have enough to eat. But if you have specific questions, I can email her with them.
(I should add that they are ethnic Russians who moved there after the war. So I don’t know whether they want to be part of Russia or part of the EU.)
Why go there now? I’m sure they’ve added (and probably removed) a few bridges since Euler’s day.
Well I’ll be…I never put two and two together. I’m going to remember that.
I saw it once, at a distance from a beach on the Lithuania border, for what little that’s worth. I couldn’t see anything, of course (just a continuation of beach), and I couldn’t cross over since I didn’t have a visa. I read up on it a little bit afterwards, and it sounded like a pretty terrible place – tremendous rates of drug and alcohol abuse, poor economy, pollution, etc. Apparently almost anything of substance with the territory was destroyed during WWII, and what’s there now is mostly a Soviet-era wasteland. If you look online, you can find some articles about older Germans who grew up there before the war, who didn’t get to visit it until the collapse of the USSR – sad stuff.
I read some book (can’t remember which – maybe this one?) that theorized that Kaliningrad might be Russia’s key to further integration with Europe. I kinda doubt it though, the way things are going…
My dad’s family is from Zalese (sp?) Russia, left there in 1917, so the story goes. Closest city I could find to that spelling is near Kaliningrad. (It’s believed he stowed away to get to the U.S., so no ship name.) Nat’l Geographic had an article on it a few years back, it looked pretty hardscrabble.
It’s a wierd little place. I went there in 1998 as part of a study abroad road trip through Russia, poland and the Baltics. I think we stayed in Kalingrad for 3 nights. We were the first Westerners to stay in the recently opened hotel, which was very nice, considering. Immanuel Kant is buried in a cathedral there, IIRC, and there’s a plaque and everything. Besides that, it’s famous for being Russia’s only year-round ice-free port, it has an amber museum that is neat and wierd at the same time, as a lot of Soviet-era stuff is (a model of what was at that time the largest icebreaker in the world 1:32 scale carved out of 17 shades of fossilized tree sap. Uh, okay) and a vodka distillery that sold vodka infused with amber acid, which was supposed to stave off hangovers. That was a huge lie.
It was at heart a small Russian Navy town with unremarkable restaurants, lotsa hookers and some New Russians who couldn’t get to Moscow or Petersburg. If you have a chance it’s an interesting place to see and say you’ve been there.
And you get to see the Robot (scrool halfway down);;BBC NEWS | Business | Kaliningrad caught in no-man's land
Hey, thanks for your responses, and now I have another book to add to Ye Olde Wishlist.
Despite False God’s, um, ringing endorsement, I don’t know that I’ll be planning any trips to Kaliningrad in the near future, however.
To expound a little more on this “exclave”–and this is from reading only; I’ve never been there nor known anyone who has been there–the area was depopulated of its indigenous Germans at the end of World War II (partly by flight, and partly by expulsion), and afterward repopulated from scratch, mostly with ethnic Russians, as a Soviet naval base. During the Cold War it was completely off limits to Westerners.
So the mentality was somewhat what you would find at an American overseas military base–people surrounded by foreigners (in this case, Lithuanians and Poles, although Lithuanians on paper were “fellow Soviets”), very conscious of and proud of their Russian-ness, and “super-patriotic” to a degree perhaps greater than the mainland.
In other words, this isn’t a population that was looking to secede from Russia at the first sign of trouble.
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its military spending, obviously, things are going to be bad in a one-industry down like Kaliningrad. Picture an American small town when the Army closes down the local training base, and cube it.
So times are tough, and people have eyes–they can see that Poland and Lithuania are EU members and are doing much better. It will be interesting to see how the mind-set of the region changes over the years.