The Kaliningrad Oblast, home to almost a million people, is now about 80 percent ethnically Russian, yet its Russian identity seems more fragile than elsewhere in the country. Perhaps this derives from a profound sense of cultural dislocation: through a program of coercion and promises, after the war the Soviet Union encouraged its peasants from central Russia to relocate as urban dwellers to the newly obtained exclave by way of tax credits and internal passports. Peasants didn’t have such passports at the time, but urban dwellers did. They were also lured with a promise of comfortable homes and better supplies of food. Roughly 400,000 peasants moved to Kaliningrad between 1947 and 1950, to restart their lives and rebuild the city in the Soviet image.
Kaliningrad residents have since been taught to celebrate and, moreover, take credit for the legacy of a history that is not their own—for example, the fourteenth-century Königsberg Cathedral; the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant; the famed Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, author of a fairy tale that the world-famous story “The Nutcracker” is based on, made even more famous by the ballet set to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s music. Marvelous, these—but not all Russian.
The currently Russian Kaliningrad region, with so little of its own Russian history, strikingly manifests the split personality disorder afflicting the country as a whole. Nothing symbolizes this division more than the bicephalous eagle. The eagle is a vestige of the Russian Empire, which claimed to be the successor to the Byzantine Empire from which Russia adopted its Christian beliefs. The Soviet Union abandoned the bird after 1917, but it was revived again when the new Russia was searching its past for a new identity.
Following the fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century, Russia, fortified with its new double-headed eagle emblem, began seeing itself as the Guardian of the True Faith, in opposition to “heretical” Rome-based Catholicism. The eastern and western churches had excommunicated each other in the Schism of 1054, an event that would have momentous consequences for Russia and its relations with the West. Russians dubbed their own capital, Moscow, the “Third Rome” (the first Rome having been Rome, the second Constantinople). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church reemerged from the shadows. During the Soviet era, after initial persecution, the church was tolerated; in post-1991 Russia, it has been celebrated and recognized in the country’s otherwise secular constitution for the special role it had played in Russian history. As it had in bygone Byzantium, the double-headed eagle signifies Russian domination over a territory encompassing parts of both Europe and Asia. Russia’s borders, after all, extend from Kaliningrad in Europe to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Asia (on the Pacific Ocean) and Chukotka, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
In the Putin years, the eagle’s significance has come to rival that of the communist-era red star. The not-so-subtle idea behind the Byzantine connection is that Russia can (and should) exist only as a counterweight to the West; the West had troubled, often competitive relations with Byzantium just as it does now with Byzantium’s spiritual heir, Russia. Nowadays, more than ever before, the double eagle embodies the country’s split personality, the deep-rooted anxiety of a former superpower torn between the old and the new, between the past and present. We are Western, European, people told us in Kaliningrad, yet their behavior, both haughty and insecure, could not have been more Russian. They argue that Russia, a continent of its own, doesn’t need approval from abroad to prosper. Yet, simultaneously, they crave that approval.
In Kaliningrad a Western lifestyle has emerged, at least as residents understand it. They pass long hours in cafés and go on frequent shopping sprees to Poland. The “Westernness” of Russian towns and cities may be evaluated, to an extent, by the ease with which they have accepted the café culture of Europe—the sharing of leisurely moments over a cup of coffee, something less substantial than a meal or a drink. This, we would see, varies greatly from place to place. When, for example, people have disposable income in Tyumen (the capital of Siberian oil), they mostly spend it on furs, jewelry, and appliances; there, cafés are hard to come by. But in Kaliningrad—so close to the West and bearing a history that makes it Western—café culture exists, yet only in a superficial, inchoate form. Naturally, it has not cured the paranoid attitude of the authorities.
When asked how they feel about being Russian in this once so Prussian a city, the locals responded, “Well, Krym nash [Crimea is ours]!” In other words, “What we’ve taken we keep and make ours, by virtue of our strength, our military power; we took back Crimea, and we will not give it up!”
Many Russians indeed believe in their inherent ownership—97 percent of Crimeans voted for the annexation in March 2014; 88 percent of all Russians supported the move at the time, and in March 2018 the number is almost unchanged—86 percent.[13] The takeover has not only pitted Ukraine and the West against Russia, it has also divided many families. Even Khrushchev’s son Sergei, Nina’s uncle, once said that for the Russians, the public referendum that supported Crimea’s takeover was as legitimate as throwing out Yanukovych was for the Ukrainians.
“Krym nash,” the typical Russian response to any militant or oppressive move by the Kremlin, we saw as a display of feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once. Again, think of the double-headed eagle, the split-personality syndrome.
This newly revived fear of foreign associations—somewhat odd in an exclave so proud of its Western heritage—may well have been shared by one of our potential contacts, Andrei Klemeshev, the rector of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Despite our repeated attempts to arrange an interview for this book, he avoided meeting us. We did not expect this: after all, his university was once the open-minded Albertina (as the University of Königsberg was formerly known), where Kant himself served as rector and taught logic and metaphysics; it was also the alma mater of Hoffmann and the birthplace of German Romanticism. Cordial on the phone at first, Klemeshev soon stopped answering our calls and ignored our texts. In a militarized city on the border, he might have decided that meeting with us would create problems for him with the authorities. This was a reasonable, if a slightly paranoid, supposition: after all, we—one of us an American, the other a Russian critic of Putin living in New York—might have served to incriminate him by mere association. His response reflected the increasing animosity between Russia and the West and was reminiscent of suspicions that made Russians wary of entertaining Westerners during the Cold War era. Others in Kaliningrad, too—including the head of the German Relations Center—refused to see us, citing busy schedules or forthcoming trips.
Our difficulties in arranging meetings put us in mind of a scene from Russian literature. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita—which for so many Russians was, during the atheist decades of communism, a Soviet gospel of sorts—a theater administrator, Varenukha, dodged phone calls from those hoping to secure tickets to a scandalous show featuring Satan (the character Woland, in Bulgakov’s telling). Spoofing Goethe’s Faust and Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, Bulgakov, writing in the Stalin era, depicted Woland as surveilling Muscovites en masse. Perhaps Klemeshev, too, thought he was being watched, and that we had come to town to ask him probing, even judgmental, questions.
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Alexei Levinson, “86% Za ‘KrymNash’” [86% Is for “Crimea Is Ours”],