Kaliningrad Joins ‘Parade of Separatist Cases’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 6 – Yesterday, FSB officials in Kaliningrad announced that they had opened a case against a resident of that Russian enclave for separatism, the first time that the authorities have used Article 281, Paragraph 1, there. Similar charges have been considered or officially brought against “separatists” in Tatarstan and Siberia.

            The oblast procuracy said that the individual was guilty of promoting ideas on the VKontakte social network “directed at the violation of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation (prokuratura39.ru/archive/item/6704-po-rezultatam-proverki-prokuraturyi-oblasti-zablokirovan-dostup-k-ekstremistskomu-materialu.html).

            In the past, Koenigsberg activists Mikhail Feldman, Aleg Savvin and Dmitry Fonaryev were arrested and kept in jail for 14 months after they raised the German flag over the garage of the Kaliningrad office of the FSB; but they were not charged with the more serious crime of calling for the independence of Kaliningrad or its return to German control.

            (On separatism in Kaliningrad, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/09/window-on-eurasia-kaliningrad.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/08/window-on-eurasia-putin-policies.html. On new separatist charges elsewhere in the Russian Federation, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/08/senior-omsk-official-accused-of.html.)

            In an interview with the NewKaliningrad.ru portal, Solomon Ginzburg, the head of the foreign relations committee of the regional legislature, says that with the appointment of a new governor, Vladimir Putin has made Kaliningrad his personal project, a reflection of the region’s importance and its problems (newkaliningrad.ru/news/politics/10304450-solomon-ginzburg-zinichev-budet-pokhozh-na-rannego-putina.html).

            On the one hand, Ginzburg suggests, that may not be a bad thing because the situation in the region is very troubled, and he welcomes the new governor’s statement that he wants to make Kaliningrad into “a calling card” for the Russian Federation in Europe rather than an afterthought as it has been.

            But on the other, the regional legislator says, Putin’s new man will have to move cautiously promising something for everyone much as Putin did in Moscow in the first years of his presidency because the attitudes behind the protests of 2009-2010 have not changed and could easily break out again.