Enclave Sits on East-West Fault Line
KALININGRAD, Russia — The maritime museum in this Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea caps each summer with its i nternational Water Assembly, an antic parade of small historical vessels from around the Baltics, their crews wearing period costumes as they sail the Pregolya River.
But this year, said Svetlana G. Sivkova, the founding director of Kaliningrad’s Museum of the World Ocean, participants from neighboring Lithuania and Poland threatened to stay home.
“They said they could not come to us because Poles and Lithuanians are being beaten on the streets of Kaliningrad,” said Ms. Sivkova, appalled at what she called an abrupt and unwarranted change in mood. “It’s horrible propaganda,” she said. “We had to explain that it’s not true, that we are an open people.”
Kaliningrad — the city and surrounding province share the name — was once the heart of East Prussia and a German redoubt for 500 years before the Red Army captured it from the Third Reich in 1945. The city has about half the province’s one million people.
In the first 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow worked hard to bury Kaliningrad’s reputation as an armed garrison closed to foreigners. These days, the Kremlin seems determined to do the opposite, and senior Western military officials now regard the Baltic region as a main fault line in revived East-West tensions.
One of the most confrontational incidents in years occurred on April 12 about 60 nautical miles off Kaliningrad, where two Russian Su-24 planes buzzed the American guided missile destroyer Donald Cook, prompting protests from Washington. Two days later, a Russian warplane intercepted an American reconnaissance plane at an unsafe distance over the Baltic Sea.
In the immediate post-Soviet era, Moscow tried to reinvent Kaliningrad, which is more than 300 kilometers from mainland Russia, as its own duty-free Hong Kong.
In recent years, however, Moscow has heavily armed Kaliningrad, analysts say, equipping secretive bases with the long-range S- 400 antiaircraft missile system and mobile, medium-range Bastion anti-ship missiles. Russia has also held maneuvers here.
With recent Russian military adventures in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin has left the world guessing when or where he might intervene next. Some fear the next target might be the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are now members of the European Union and NATO. An attempt by NATO to defend them would have to get past Kaliningrad.
While military officials and other experts on both sides say war is unlikely, contingency planning proceeds. Sweden and Finland, Russian neighbors that once professed neutrality, are considering the once unthinkable prospect of joining NATO.
Russians mainly scoff at the idea of a war, although Kaliningrad residents generally seem to support buttressing the military.
“If you are my neighbor and you sit there with an ax, I will get an ax, too,” said Ms. Sivkova, the museum director.
But the fact that the “free economic zone” expired on April 1 causes far more consternation here than a renewed Cold War. “Nobody knows what will happen,” said Ivan A. Vlasov, the publisher of the Kaliningrad edition of the national RBC website.
The deteriorating relations between Russia and the West have already affected Kaliningrad.
BMW, one of the province’s largest employers, recently shelved expansion plans in the face of a 40 percent decline in Russian car sales. Decades of Swedish development aid are coming to a close. Cultural exchanges have been curtailed.
And there are people here who find being cast as a Russian fortress disorienting.
In downtown Kaliningrad, the Vorota Cafe’s young founders wanted an art space like those in Amsterdam or Berlin, and said they were surprised by a question about life on the new East-West fault line.
Eugene Makarkhin, 26, said, “It is a strange question, because we look at ourselves as being a bridge, not a fault line.”