Kremlin’s Threatening Rhetoric about Kaliningrad Not Just about West but also about Attitudes of that Exclave’s Residents, Shtepa Says

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.