Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 15 – Moscow’s threats
that it will use nuclear weapons if the West tries to isolate Kaliningrad from
the Russian Federation reflect not just its geopolitical agenda but also its
continuing concerns about the independent-minded attitudes of that exclave’s
residents, according to Vadim Shtepa.
The longtime specialist on regionalism
in Russia who edits the Tallinn-based Region.Expert
portal argues that what Moscow is doing is not just about the Western alliance
but also about its nervousness that Kaliningrad’s population is anything but
the loyal one Moscow claims and that many in the West uncritically accept (rus.postimees.ee/8563901/vadim-shtepa-kak-putin-prevratil-kaliningrad-v-antievropeyskiy-voennyy-placdarm).
Shtepa concedes that the Kremlin’s threatening
language is more about its effort to portray its policies as a response to
Western moves than anything else but says that “it is possible that it is
connected not with a foreign danger for this region but with Moscow’s fear that
the attitudes of residents there can have changed in serious ways.”
“In the 1990s,” he writes, “Kaliningrad
oblast was close to being the most Europeanized region of the Russian
Federation.” Its residents almost all of whom had passports traveled more often
to neighboring Poland and Lithuania than to the Russian Federation from which
it was separated by land and sea.
Such trips, he argues, “for work,
study or simply tourism, essentially changed and Europeanized the consciousness
of the residents of the oblast” and set them apart from ethnic Russians
elsewhere and even led to the formation in Kaliningrad of the Baltic Republic
Party. (On that party, see ps:/windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/05/an-independent-konigsberg-will-be.html.)
Until Putin banned all regional
parties in 2001, that party which advocated that Kaliningrad become “the fourth
Baltic republic” elected officials to local and regional bodies. And while it
is no longer legally operating, the values it reflected have not disappeared.
The isolation of Kaliningrad because
of Moscow’s moves in Ukraine in fact have intensified such feelings, Shtepa
suggests, given that people who once travelled freely to European countries now
cannot and that they see Moscow itself is willing to change borders in Ukraine
and so ask why they can’t do the same.
Over the last 25 years, Moscow has
militarized the exclave not simply to pose a challenge to the West but also to
prevent such attitudes in Kaliningrad from intensifying. But the longer Putin’s
war in Ukraine goes on and the more bellicose his behavior becomes, the more
likely it is that such attitudes will again be on the rise.
