Kaliningrad

Podcast Transcript

Located on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between the nations of Lithuania and Poland, is the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Kaliningrad, as it exists today, does not have a deep history.

For most of its history, it was known as Königsberg.

The reason it exists at all dates back to the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages and the aftermath of two world wars in the 20th century.

Today, its status is unique to say the least, and it has the potential to become a geopolitical flashpoint.

Learn more about Kaliningrad and its history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

To understand how Kaliningrad became a Russian exclave, we have to go way back in time.

The region currently known as Kaliningrad is situated around the Pregolya River.

The region was originally inhabited by a group known as the Old Prussians, a Baltic tribe with their own language and pagan culture. They spoke Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language closely related to Lithuanian and Latvian but now extinct.

Before their conquest in the 13th century, the Old Prussians were organized in clan-based societies, practiced a polytheistic religion centered on nature and ancestor worship, and were known for farming, amber trading, and occasional raids on neighboring lands.

It should be noted that the Old Prussians were not Germanic, despite the later association of the name with the Kingdom of “Prussia”.

In the thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights expanded along the southeastern Baltic coast during the Northern Crusades.

The Northern Crusades were a series of Christian military campaigns from the late 12th to the 14th centuries in which German, Danish, and Swedish forces, along with the papacy-backed Teutonic and Livonian Knights, sought to conquer and convert the pagan Baltic and Finnic peoples around the southeastern Baltic Sea, including the Prussians, Livonians, Lithuanians, and Estonians.

The area around the Baltic Sea was one of the last remaining pagan regions in Europe.

In 1255, they founded a fortress on the site of an Old Prussian settlement and named it Königsberg in honor of Ottokar II of Bohemia, whose forces joined the campaign. The name means the king’s mountain in German.

The Teutonic Knights systematically colonized the region, bringing in German settlers and converting or displacing the native Old Prussian population. By the 16th century, the Old Prussian language and culture had largely disappeared. Königsberg grew into a significant trading city, joining the Hanseatic League in 1340.

In 1525, the state run by the Teutonic Order was secularized by Grand Master Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who became Duke Albrecht and transformed the monastic territory into the Lutheran Duchy of Prussia under Polish rule. Königsberg became a center of the Reformation and a hub of learning.

The University of Königsberg, commonly referred to as the Albertina, was founded in 1544 and later gained fame through scholars such as Immanuel Kant. Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg and never traveled more than 10 miles from it.

While I’m on the subject of the university, I feel I should mention the famous Königsberg Bridge problem, as I have no idea if I’ll ever have another opportunity to do so.

The city of Königsberg in the 18th century was built around the previously mentioned Pregolya River, which split into two branches, forming two islands.

These landmasses were connected by seven bridges linking the north bank, south bank, and the two islands in various combinations. The popular puzzle asked Can a person start anywhere, walk through the city, and cross each bridge exactly once, without repeating any bridge, and end anywhere?

In 1736, Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler reduced the problem to an abstraction where he ignored the geography and focused only on how the land areas are connected.

Euler proved it was impossible, creating the foundation of modern graph theory and topology in the process.

In 1618, the duchy passed by inheritance to the Hohenzollern family of Brandenburg, creating the Kingdom of Brandenburg-Prussia. In 1701, the Hohenzollern king and elector in the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick III, crowned himself King of Prussia at Königsberg, finalizing the shift from a crusader state to a dynastic state.

During the Seven Years’ War, the city was occupied by Russia from 1758 to 1762, then returned to Prussia after the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Throughout the nineteenth century, Königsberg remained the principal city of East Prussia, boasting a provincial administration, an active port, and a growing industrial base.

Here, I would like to provide a brief overview of Prussia. They’ve appeared on a few episodes, but I’ve never really explained what Prussia was.

Prussia became the largest and most powerful of the German kingdoms. It was spread throughout much of what is today Northern Germany, which included various other duchies and principalities within it, like holes in swiss cheese, but it also extended east into what is today Northern Poland.

When Germany unified in the 19th century, Prussia was the driving force behind unification, and the Prussian King became the Kaiser of the new German Empire.

The important thing is that the Baltic Coast of what is today Poland was part of Prussia from Königsberg to the current German border. The area was primarily ethnically and linguistically German with significant Lithuanian and Polish minorities.

In fact, my ancestors were Prussian and arrived in the US before Germany was unified. On the census form, my great-great-great-grandfather listed Prussia as his country of birth, although today it is part of Poland.

Königsberg grew in population and importance throughout the 19th century. By 1910, it had reached a population of approximately 250,000 people and was a significant Baltic city.

During the First World War, East Prussia was briefly invaded by Russia in 1914, but German forces under Hindenburg and Ludendorff defeated the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg, becoming national heroes.

In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany by creating the Polish Corridor, also known as the Danzig Corridor and the Pomeranian Corridor, making Königsberg and its surrounding province an exclave of Germany.

East Prussia was separated both as punishment to Germany and to make Poland viable by guaranteeing a seaport and avoiding total dependence on German or Soviet goodwill.

Despite this isolation, the city remained an important German cultural and economic center.

However, the fact that it was cut off from the rest of Germany became a major issue.

Between Königsberg and the rest of Germany was some Polish territory and the semi-autonomous city of Danzig, which is today called Gdansk.

Germany resented the customs and passport controls across Polish territory to reach East Prussia. Poland resisted German demands for extraterritorial roads and rails to connect Königsberg to the rest of Germany.

After 1933, Berlin pressed harder. Hitler demanded the return of Danzig and an extraterritorial highway and railway across the corridor. Warsaw feared that conceding would unravel its position and invited further demands.

In March 1939, Britain and France guaranteed Poland’s independence. Over the summer of 1939, tensions rose in Danzig and along the border.

On September 1st, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Berlin framed the corridor dispute as a key justification for the invasion.

Allied bombing in 1944 devastated the historic center of the city, including much of the medieval core, and a prolonged siege by the Red Army ended with the Battle of Königsberg from April 6 to 9, 1945.

The status of Königsberg changed dramatically with the end of the war.

The Soviets, now occupying it, didn’t want to give it back. However, it wasn’t in the same way they didn’t want to give back the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Soviets sought to incorporate Königsberg and East Prussia into the Soviet Union itself.

The reasons why the Soviets wanted Königsberg were pretty straightforward.

First, they wanted an ice-free Baltic port and naval base. Königsberg and the nearby port of Pillau, now called Baltiysk, offered the Soviet Union its only ice-free, year-round port on the Baltic Sea. Leningrad could still freeze up in the winter.

Second, by occupying northern East Prussia, the USSR gained a fortified wedge between Poland and Lithuania, pushing its western military frontier farther from Leningrad.

Third, Stalin argued that Germany had invaded Russia twice in 25 years and that the Soviet Union had suffered the highest casualties of any Allied nation. Taking East Prussia, historically the core of Prussian militarism, was presented as both punishment and compensation.

At the Potsdam Conference, which took place in July and August of 1945, the US and UK accepted Stalin’s claim with minimal resistance, partly because they needed Soviet cooperation in occupying Germany, they wanted Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and they were already conceding Poland’s borders and didn’t want another major fight.

Technically, the final Potsdam wording stated that the area would be placed “under the administration of the USSR” pending a final peace treaty, which never occurred, effectively making Soviet control permanent.

In 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in honor of Mikhail Kalinin, the former titular head of the Supreme Soviet who had just died months earlier.

The Soviets had a problem. Kaliningrad was filled with Germans. Germans whose families had lived there for generations.

Many Germans had fled when the Red Army was approaching, and more were killed in the fighting.

The remaining Germans were subject to what historians now consider an ethnic cleansing.

Surviving Germans in Königsberg and the countryside were concentrated, registered, and often pressed into forced labor for clearing ruins and rebuilding. The NKVD ran camps and holding sites. Food was scarce, disease was common, and mortality rates were high in the first months.

The Potsdam Conference authorized the transfer of German populations from areas assigned to Poland and the USSR, supposedly in an orderly and humane way. In practice, it was rough and coercive.

In the new Kaliningrad Oblast, Soviet authorities stripped Germans of property, restricted movement, and organized deportation trains. Some were sent deeper into the USSR for labor. Most were expelled to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, and from there, many moved west.

By 1948, almost all Germans had been removed from the oblast. The region was repopulated mainly by Russians, with additional Ukrainians and Belarusians. Place names were changed, German institutions were dissolved, and visible traces of German life were reduced or erased.

The next big change to Kaliningrad occurred with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

When all the other Soviet republics gained independence, Kaliningrad, which was technically part of the Russian Soviet Republic, remained part of the new Russian Federation.

The former Eastern Bloc countries and the former Soviet States lined up to join the European Union and NATO as quickly as possible to distance themselves from Russia and to provide protection.

As a result, Kaliningrad found itself wedged between Lithuania and Poland, both of whic became EU and NATO members. The gap between Kaliningrad and Belarus, a Russian ally, is known as the Suwa?ki Gap.

The gap is only 65 kilometers, or approximately 40 miles, and is one of the most strategically important pieces of real estate in Europe. The gap prevents Russia from having land access to Kaliningrad, and if it were to take it, it would cut off the Baltic states from the rest of Europe.

As the westernmost point of Russia, it has become highly militarized. It is also believed to be where a great deal of Russian toxic waste is stored.

Today, the Kaliningrad Oblast has approximately 1 million residents, predominantly Russian. The region faces economic challenges due to its isolation, but it remains strategically vital to Russia. The Kaliningrad question, due to its unusual geographic position, remains a sensitive geopolitical issue and probably will for quite some time.

The region stands as a unique geopolitical anomaly, a Russian military outpost surrounded by NATO and EU territory, carrying the complex legacy of its German past while firmly rooted in its Russian present.