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Russian Baltic city between Poland and Lithuania
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Kaliningrad, until 1946 known in English as Königsberg, is the largest city and administrative centre of Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave of Russia between Lithuania and Poland (663 kilometres (412 mi) west of the bulk of Russia). Located on the Pregolya River at the head of the Vistula Lagoon, it is the only ice-free Russian port on the Baltic Sea. Its population in 2020 was 489,359. Kaliningrad is the second-largest city in the Northwestern Federal District, after Saint Petersburg, and the eighth-largest city on the Baltic Sea.
Königsberg was founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement of Twangste, and was named in honor of King Ottokar II of Bohemia, its name meaning 'king's mountain'. A Baltic port city, it successively became the capital of the State of the Teutonic Order, the Duchy of Prussia and the provinces of East Prussia and Prussia. It was the coronation city of the Prussian monarchy, though the capital was moved to Berlin in 1701. Königsberg was the easternmost large city in Germany until World War II.
The city was heavily damaged by Allied bombing in 1944 and during the Battle of Königsberg in 1945; it was then captured by the Soviet Union on 9 April 1945. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 in honour of Russian Bolshevik leader Mikhail Kalinin and repopulated by Russians starting in 1946 in the ruins of Königsberg, in which Lithuanian inhabitants were allowed to remain while the German population was expelled.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad has been governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia. As a major transport hub with sea and river ports, the city is the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013, and 2014 in Kommersant's magazine The Firm's Secret, the best city in Russia for business in 2013 according to Forbes, and was ranked fifth in the Urban Environment Quality Index published by Minstroy in 2019. Kaliningrad has been a major internal migration attraction in Russia over the past two decades and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Königsberg was preceded by a Sambian (Old Prussian tribe) fort called Twangste (Prussian word tvinksta means "a pond made by a dam"). The declining Old Prussian culture became extinct around the early 18th century with the Great Northern War plague outbreak, and the surviving Old Prussians were integrated through assimilation.
During the conquest of the Sambians by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, Twangste was destroyed and replaced by a fortress named Königsberg in honour of Bohemian King Ottokar II. It was initially divided into three towns, the Old Town (German: Altstadt), Löbenicht and Kneiphof, which were granted town rights in 1286, 1300 and 1327, respectively. It was inhabited by German colonists and indigenous Old Prussians from the 13th century, then also by Poles from the 14th century with the 1327 charter of Kneiphof permitting the settlement of Poles (up to 30% in the 17th century), Lithuanians from the 15th century, and French from the 17th century (Huguenot community founded in 1686).
In 1454, Königsberg integrated within borders of Poland for a year as the capital of the Królewiec Voivodeship. As a result of the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), Königsberg and the surrounding region became a vassal state of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. During this period, trade relations developed with Poland, Lithuania, England, the Netherlands, Lübeck, Sweden and western France.
After the secularisation of the Teutonic Order in 1525, Königsberg became the capital of the Duchy of Prussia, remaining under Polish suzerainty. The city became an early and influential centre of the Reformation. Although predominantly inhabited by Germans, it was also an important centre of Polish and Lithuanian culture, especially as one of the pioneering centres of Polish and Lithuanian printing, and also thanks to the University of Königsberg, the second-oldest university of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city was the second largest centre of Polish printing after Kraków. The population became predominantly Lutheran, although in the 17th century Roman Catholic and Calvinist churches were erected with German and Polish services in both rites, Lithuanian in the Catholic and French and English in the Calvinist.
In 1618, the Duchy of Prussia fell under the control of the Electors of Brandenburg, a branch of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and in 1657 it became controlled in personal union with Brandenburg (sometimes referred to as Brandenburg–Prussia). Poland functioned as the guarantor of Königsberg's political freedoms within the duchy. While opposing incorporation into Poland, the city maintained close ties with the Polish crown. Polish authorities several times confirmed and extended its rights in support against absolutist ambitions of the Prussian dukes, and after 1657 the city actively opposed secession from Poland. The city acted as an intermediary in maritime trade between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Netherlands, England and France, with the 17th century stock exchange including a painting depicting a townswoman buying goods from a Pole and a Dutchman, embracing the notion that the city's prosperity was based on trade with the East and West, particularly Poland and the Netherlands. It was the preferred export port, although not the only one, for parts of Warmia, Masuria, Mazovia and Podlachia in Poland, and several important trade routes from other places in Poland also led to the city, and one of the main ports (alongside Riga and Klaipėda) for Lithuania.
From 1701, Brandenburg–Prussia became a kingdom, and the entire area was referred to as the Kingdom of Prussia. While the Brandenburg portion was a part of the Holy Roman Empire and later the German Confederation, Prussia (later called East Prussia) was not included within those territorial boundaries. In 1734–1736, during the War of the Polish Succession, it was the place of stay of Polish King Stanisław Leszczyński and many of his prominent supporters. Church services in Polish, Lithuanian and French were held until the 19th century.
In the context of the Seven Years' War, the city was conquered and occupied by the Russian Empire from 1758 to 1762, whose initial plan was to offer the city and region to Poland as part of a territorial exchange desired by Russia. From 1786 to 1791, it was the main port for grain exports from Lithuania.
In the ensuing two centuries, the city, first as part of the Kingdom of Prussia, then from 1866 as part of the North German Confederation, and then from 1871 as part of the German Empire, continued to flourish and many iconic landmarks were built. The city had around 370,000 inhabitants and was a cultural and administrative centre of Prussia and the German Empire. One of the first civil airports in Germany (Devau near Königsberg) was established in 1920 with its first scheduled service in 1922. In that time, a new central railway station and modern buildings for the harbour and trade fair were built.
During World War II, the Polish resistance movement was active, which served as one of the region's main transfer points for smuggled Polish underground press. In 1944, the city was heavily damaged by a British bombing attack, as well as a massive Soviet siege in the spring of 1945. At the end of World War II, the city became part of the Russian SFSR (as part of the Soviet Union).
Under the Potsdam Agreement of 1 August 1945, Königsberg became part of the Soviet Union pending the final determination of territorial borders. This final determination eventually took place on 12 September 1990 when the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed. The excerpt from the initial agreement pertaining to the partition of East Prussia, including the area surrounding Königsberg, is as follows (note that Königsberg is spelt "Koenigsberg" in the original document):
VI. CITY OF KOENIGSBERG AND THE ADJACENT AREAThe Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg – Goldep, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia. The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the city of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above, subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.
United States President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee supported the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.
Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in July 1946 in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who had recently died. Kalinin was unrelated to the city, and there were already cities named in honour of Kalinin in the Soviet Union, namely Kalinin (now Tver) and Kaliningrad (now Korolev, Moscow Oblast). Some historians speculate that the city may have originally been offered to the Lithuanian SSR because the resolution from the conference specifies that Kaliningrad's border would be at the (pre-war) Lithuanian frontier. The remaining German population was forcibly expelled between 1947 and 1948. The annexed territory was populated with Soviet citizens, mostly ethnic Russians but to a lesser extent also Ukrainians and Belarusians. The German language was replaced with the Russian language. In 1956, there were 188,000 inhabitants, which was only half the number of the pre-war population.
From 1953 to 1962, a monument to Joseph Stalin stood on Victory Square. In 1973, the town hall was turned into the House of Soviets. In 1975, the trolleybus was launched again. In 1980, a concert hall was opened in the building of the former Lutheran Church of the Holy Family. In 1986, the Kreuzkirche building was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. For foreigners, the city was completely closed and, with the exception of rare visits of friendship from neighbouring Poland, it was practically not visited by foreigners.
The old city was not restored, and the ruins of the Königsberg Castle were demolished in the late 1960s, on Leonid Brezhnev's personal orders, despite the protests of architects, historians and residents of the city. The reconstruction of the oblast, threatened by hunger in the immediate post-war years, was carried out through an ambitious policy of oceanic fishing with the creation of one of the main fishing harbours of the USSR in Kaliningrad. Fishing not only fed the regional economy but also provided a basis for social and scientific development, particularly in oceanography.
In 1957, an agreement was signed and later came into force, which delimited the border between the Polish People's Republic (a Soviet satellite state at the time) and the Soviet Union. The region was added as a semi-exclave to the Russian SFSR; since 1946 it has been known as the Kaliningrad Oblast. According to some historians, Stalin created it as an oblast separate from the Lithuanian SSR because it further separated the Baltic states from the West. Others think that the reason was that the region was far too strategic for the USSR to leave it in the hands of another SSR other than the Russian one. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev offered the entire Kaliningrad Oblast to the Lithuanian SSR, but Antanas Sniečkus refused to accept the territory because it would add at least a million ethnic Russians to Lithuania proper.
The Treaty of Moscow was signed on 12 August 1970 between the Soviet Union and West Germany. The signers renounced the use of force and recognised the postwar borders.
In 2010, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a report claiming that Kaliningrad had been offered to Germany in 1990 (against payment). The offer was not seriously considered by the West German government, which at the time saw reunification with East Germany as a higher priority. However, this story was later denied by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The town of Baltiysk, just outside Kaliningrad, is the only Russian Baltic Sea port said to be "ice-free" all year round, and the region hence plays an important role in maintenance of the Baltic Fleet.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kaliningrad became separated from the rest of Russia by independent countries. This isolation became even more pronounced politically when Poland and Lithuania became members of NATO and subsequently the European Union in 2004. All military and civilian land links between the region and the rest of Russia have to pass through members of NATO and the EU. Special travel arrangements for the territory's inhabitants have been made through the Facilitated Transit Document and Facilitated Rail Transit Document.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Kaliningrad”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.