When I began my postdoctoral research at Lund University’ I did not expect the team of scholars I joined to be so interested in the memory politics in Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast. I had just spent three years there as a diplomat which, on top of my previous academic research at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, had given me much food for thought. It thus did not take much for Per Anders Rudling and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to convince me to revise to my original Ph.D. dissertation to update it and make it fit the rigours of an academic monograph.
I embarked on a journey which turned out to be more straining and more satisfying than any other one in my hitherto academic life. Three years later, here it is. Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Kaliningrad Oblast has just been published as part of the Routledge Histories of Central & Eastern Europe series.
The book features summary of debates of what it meant to be an inhabitant of Russia’s westernmost region in the first 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It traces changes going beyond the region itself – from the initial high hopes and much uncertainty to the emergence of a certain degree of regional pride and to an increasingly sharp reaction of federal authorities against a diverse, inclusive narrative of the Oblast’s pre-1945 non-Russian and non-Soviet past.
Kaliningrad Oblast was a playground for refined official Russian memory policies already ten years ago. Its complex history reveals tensions affecting both domestic and foreign policies of the Kremlin and the inability to accommodate the rich cultural landscape of the northern part of East Prussia under the conditions of the increasingly authoritarian regime. The book is also a study of the use of old Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi Germany myths about East Prussia in the changed geopolitical circumstances after the Second World War and in the run-up to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, war in Donbas and full-scale invasion of Ukraine.