target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#note175" type="note">175. One can see that there is a dichotomy within the West, and Königsberg is represented as the hotbed of most negative features.
However, negative information about the history of the region has been available for a short time. Shortly after the beginning of the Kaliningrad resettlement, any mentions about East Prussia and people who inhabited it were erased from the printed historical materials. All mentions about Germany were removed from print media and publications. Phrases such as «on land reclaimed from the Germans» or «restore factory» were undesirable, because it is impossible to restore something that does not exist. It seems to be created anew, which means that the first Kaliningradians became «pioneers» of the new region.
Another important aspect of perception has been associated with the war. Immigrants is often seen a region as a trophy. On the one hand, the trophy can be seen as a gift that is easy to obtain and thus easy to lose. On the other, if take in account material and human losses incurred by the Soviet Union during World War II, the trophy has acquired a symbolic value. These two features led to perception of new habitat as an area filled with the symbolism of the official ideology. However, it was the interim habitat. Nobody knew how long would continue this interim phase: neither ordinary people, nor regional party authorities.
Under these circumstances, the construction of the collective memory of new residents becomes an important part of the official Soviet propaganda. The core element of the official discourse – which was the basis of this propaganda – is World War II as an initial point of reference to the history of the region. The long history of this area was deliberately suppressed. Artefacts of the past were destroyed, or simply not recovered.
It should be noted that this ideological politics was only partly successful. New residents – who found themselves surrounded by an alien cultural landscape – were forced to interact with material manifestations (artefacts): it was simply inevitable. Ideologues and representatives of the party apparatus themselves interacted with these material manifestations. Their interaction was understandably even closer than interaction of ordinary Soviet citizens.
Interest to the cultural and historical heritage of the past existed among professional historians and researchers, as well as among a range of local history enthusiasts who have always been. Their interest was permissible, but only within certain limits: for example, the study of ethnic or historical ties between East Prussia and Russia; search of lost Amber Room; but it is obvious that they have acquired knowledge extended far beyond that limits. In archives of party’s authorities were accumulated a lot of rare sources, which were analysed by party officials. Information about sources by word-of-mouth mechanism was passed to ordinary people.
Relation to the heritage of the past was inconsistent. On the one hand, dislike and nihilism that based on fabrications of propaganda; on the other, thrill and interest to something incomprehensible and unknown. It feels like you experience the mystery that you want, but at the same time, you are afraid to know. Therefore, the person has lost him/herself how better to proceed.
2.3.4. «Suitcase mood’
There was unequivocal official position of the Soviet authorities, which was based on the post-war agreements reached in Potsdam in August 1945, that the Kaliningrad region is an integral part of the Soviet Union. However, there were concerns among circles of the regional authorities and population, that their presence on this territory has a temporary nature. «Suitcase mood»176 was in the air, and particularly felt in the urban environment.
It is interesting to remember a phrase of Stalin, who, in conversation with Churchill at the Tehran Conference about the reasons for the transfer of part of East Prussia to the Soviet Union, noted that «historically this is native Slavic land»177. Churchill was not confused by this argument. Nevertheless, the ordinary Soviet citizens who were in the Kaliningrad region after the war could notice the striking difference between unfamiliar territory and the places where they had lived before. Therefore, there was a need to explain somehow the thesis of Stalin, whose statements were usually considered as axiomatic.
Professional scholars of the metropolitan universities and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR have been busy with scientific substantiation of this statement. Firstly, in July 1945, a group of archivists from the Main Archival Office was sent to Königsberg to survey the surviving archival collections. The people of Kaliningrad were regularly informed about the results of the excavation. «Many of these antiquities», wrote the regional newspaper, «convict German scientists in the falsification of history, utterly smash their pseudoscientific assertions that ancient population of East Prussia is not Slavs, but Goths»178. Propaganda literature was met with frankly ludicrous assertion: «In hoary antiquity lived on these lands ancestors of the Soviet people»179.
This statement was repeated in the «Large Soviet Encyclopaedia» in the article concerning Kaliningrad Oblast: «…on the ancient ancestral lands of the Baltic Slavs…»180
Therefore, the present of Kaliningrad was to be firmly embedded in the general Soviet context, not least in order to allay the fears of a possible return of territory to Germany. The urgent need to improve the living conditions was formally encoded in the pathos of altruistic work for the benefit of the Soviet Union181. Daily life in Kaliningrad should be based on the recovery of the region and its function as part of the Soviet Union.
Despite the active ideological rhetoric in the early years of post-war time seemed clear that «Soviet government had not concept of development of the city, because authorities were not sure which role the region will play in the future»182.
Given the lack of interest to Kaliningrad by the central authorities, «the regional authorities with their identity politics have gone further – the enemy was supposed to be a verifier of this policy. Constant assurances of authorities that the region would be Soviet „forever“ were reflected in relation to the pre-war history. Kaliningrad was the westernmost territory of the Soviet Union, the geographical edge of the Cold War, and regional authorities fully tried to use this fact in their propaganda»183.
The territory had an unusual landscape, architecture, and environment in eyes of first immigrants. In order to «make the region closer to the immigrants, authorities have started to use the idea of the relationship of this land to Slavic culture, history; they presented its accession to the USSR as a return to basics»184.
The development of Kaliningrad was the subject of identity politics. Forbidden history could not perform an instrumental role. The importance of Kaliningrad for the Soviet Union had to explain multivariate. However, in core was the idea that «Kaliningrad plays the role of the western Soviet outpost populated by «homo sovieticus kaliningradensis»185.
2.3.5. Turn of the ’60—70s: The initial mastering of the cultural landscape
After the Stalin era, regional authorities sought to build regional identity politics on economic criteria. Kaliningrad ought to be «the epitome of Soviet progressivity»186. However, despite this, the landscape
The definition «suitcase mood» was voiced by the Secretary of the party committee of Leningradskij district of Kaliningrad at the Third party conference of Kaliningrad in 1950. The reproach was made in address of party and government employees who had intention to leave the Oblast’ forever.
Sovetskij Sojuz na mezhdynarodnych konferencijach perioda Velikoj Otechestvennoj voiny 1941—1945.Teheranskaja konferencija. Мoscow 1984. Vol. 2, p. 167.
Kaliningradskaja Pravda, 26 July 1950.
«Brief course» of history was drawn up on the texts of regional radio broadcasts of 1947—1948: GAKO. The state archive of the Kaliningrad region. Box 19, folder 1.
Bolshaja Sovetskaja Enciklopedija. Moscow 1953. Vol. 19, p. 426.
Brodersen, Per: Op. cit., p. 170.
Hoppe, Bert: Op. cit., p. 42.
Brodersen, Per: Op. cit., p. 223—224.
Ibid. p, 239.
Ibid, p. 240.
Ibid.
