Deplore it, then ignore it

Date: 22/11/03

The problem of Kaliningrad

AND now for a “counter-factual”, as historians say - an imagining of what might have been. What if the Baltic revolutions had failed in 1990? What if the Soviet Union had not unravelled there even as communism was collapsing at its centre? Remarkably, something does exist to guide our imagination. Russia still holds a piece of land on the Baltic Sea, caught between Lithuania and Poland: it is Kaliningrad, a city of half a million people and a surrounding region of half a million more. The most we can say is that the Baltic countries would have looked a bit more like this: and it is one of the most depressed and depressing places in Europe.

When the Red Army took what was then called Konigsberg in 1945, it dynamited the city and killed or expelled the German population. The city and province were renamed Kaliningrad, after Russia's figurehead president of the day, Mikhail Kalinin. Russians and other Soviet nationalities settled the area. When Anne Applebaum, an American journalist (and a former writer for this newspaper), went to Kaliningrad in 1991 she could find only three pre-war Germans still recorded officially as living there, out of a former population of more than 1m.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has left Kaliningrad an “exclave” of Russia, separated from the rest of the country by Lithuania and Belarus. It is heavily militarised, the hometown of Russia's Baltic Sea fleet. Nobody challenged Russia's continuing claim to Kaliningrad when the Soviet Union broke up, nor do they do so now. But Russia talks edgily about the province in a way that betrays a measure of anxiety, and rightly so, about its tenure there.

Nationalist politicians in Moscow sometimes claim to detect signs that Germany is scheming to repossess Kaliningrad: for example, as settlement of Russia's sovereign debt to Germany. But nothing of the kind is in prospect. So complete was Russia's “cleansing” and levelling of the former Konigsberg that Germany has long since relegated to the history books its feelings of kinship with the province.

The real worry for Russia is that Kaliningrad will fall so far behind its Baltic neighbours in development that its inhabitants will want to cut loose from the Russian economy and join the European economy instead. At the start of this year the average wage in the Kaliningrad region was about $150 a month, roughly half the level prevailing in Lithuania and a third of that in Poland. The rate of HIV/AIDS, at more than 350 cases per 100,000 people, is among the highest in Europe - perhaps ten times greater than in Lithuania next door. The development gap between Kaliningrad and its neighbours is likely only to widen further after Poland and the Baltic countries join the EU next year.

Russia has fiddled around with special trade regimes for Kaliningrad since 1991, supposedly to stimulate economic growth there. But these have done little to encourage investment and lots to encourage smuggling and corruption. Now Russia talks vaguely about using Kaliningrad as a “pilot region” for developing deeper relations with the EU. The EU talks back in similarly vague terms.

But nothing much is happening, mainly because Russia rejects the idea of a “Hong Kong” solution for Kaliningrad, allowing it to become a de facto part of the EU while still under Russian sovereignty. Russia's worries about secession incline it towards the opposite strategy, a strengthening of central authority and an insistence that Kaliningrad will get less, not more, special treatment. When Russia complains that EU enlargement will make Kaliningrad even more isolated, the permanent remedy it seeks is not a special deal for Kaliningrad residents, but visa-free travel between all of Russia and all of the European Union.

In fact, by Russian standards, Kaliningrad is not isolated at all. Most of Russia east of the Urals is accessible only by air, or by gruelling overland routes, and some areas for only part of the year. But to insist on Kaliningrad's isolation, and to blame the EU for worsening it, is useful diplomatically for Russia. It supplies a permanent grievance against EU enlargement that Russia can link to negotiations in other areas. If the EU feigns deafness, then a deniable hint that Russia might build a nuclear power station in Kaliningrad, or stockpile tactical nuclear weapons there, is sure to get its attention. What can the EU do about this? Not much, save to hope that the rising prosperity of countries around Kaliningrad will make a new arrangement, integrating it more closely with the EU, irresistible one day even to Russia.

The problem of Kaliningrad. Article is part of a survey 'When east meets west: a survey of EU enlargement'.