Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad is the largest city and administrative centre of Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave of Russia between Lithuania and Poland. 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 seventh-largest city on the Baltic Sea.
The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement Twangste by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and named Königsberg in honor of King Ottokar II of Bohemia. 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. From 1454 to 1455, the city under the name of Królewiec belonged to the Kingdom of Poland, and from 1466 to 1657 it was a Polish fief. 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 honor of Russian Bolshevik leader Mikhail Kalinin and repopulated by Russians starting in 1946 in the ruins of Königsberg, in which only Lithuanian inhabitants were allowed to remain. Meanwhile, 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.
History
The history of the city may be divided into four periods: the Old Prussian settlement known as Twangste before 1255; the Polish city of Królewiec from 1454 to 1455 and then fief of Poland from 1456 to 1657; the German city of Königsberg from 1657 to 1945; and the Russian city of Kaliningrad from 1945 to present.Königsberg was preceded by a Sambian fort called Twangste. 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.
Königsberg
During the conquest of the Sambians by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, Twangste was destroyed and replaced by a fortress named Königsberg in honor of Bohemian King Ottokar II. The crusade was followed by a settlement of Germans, and the city became predominantly German, with Polish, Lithuanian, French and Latvian minorities.In 1454, Königsberg integrated within borders of Poland for a year as the capital of the Królewiec Voivodeship, and became a fief of Poland from 1466, also considered part of "one and indivisible" Kingdom of Poland. After the secularization of the Teutonic Order in 1525, Königsberg became the capital of the Duchy of Prussia, remaining under Polish suzerainty, and the black Prussian eagle had a crown around its neck bearing the letter "S" from the Latinized name of Polish King Sigismund I the Old. The multi-ethnic city was an important center of Polish and Lithuanian culture, especially as one of the pioneering centers of Polish and Lithuanian printing, and also thanks to the University of Königsberg, the second-oldest university of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The population became predominantly Lutheran, although in the 17th century Roman Catholic and Calvinist churches were erected with Polish and German 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, and in 1657 it became controlled in personal union with Brandenburg. The city had strong ties with Poland, and 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.
File:Preussen 1701 Königsberg.jpg|thumb|left|Anointment of Frederick I after his coronation as King in Prussia in Königsberg, 1701
From 1701, Brandenberg–Prussia became a kingdom, and the entire area was referred to as the Kingdom of Prussia. While the Brandenberg portion was a part of the Holy Roman Empire and later the German Confederation, 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.
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 center of Prussia and the German Empire. Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann, notable sons of the city, were born before this time. One of the first civil airports in Germany 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.
World War II
During World War II, the city's Polish and Jewish populations were persecuted by Nazi Germany with mass arrests and deportations to concentration camps, and Poles and Jews were among forced labourers in the city. 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.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 :VI. CITY OF KOENIGSBERG AND THE ADJACENT AREA
The 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 honor 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 and Kaliningrad. 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 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 1950, there were 1,165,000 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 neighboring 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 was a basis for social and scientific development, in particular oceanography.
In 1957, an agreement was signed and later came into force which delimited the border between the Polish People's Republic 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.
In 2010, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a report claiming that Kaliningrad had been offered to Germany in 1990. 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.