German Pasts in a Russian City — Kaliningrad between 1946 and 2006

Abstract

In 1992 the Kaliningrad historian Juri Kostjažev and his team, after many years of painstaking oral history research, completed a manuscript that dealt with the history of the early Russian settlers who moved to the Kaliningrad region after 1945. However, the book was censored in Russia, as there were many fears and complaints that it focused on the many problems faced by the settlers and therefore undermined the heroic Soviet narrative of the resettling of Kaliningrad that had dominated post-war discourses in the region. Kostjazev highlighted the disappointments among the 400,000 settlers who had moved to the area by 1950 — the lack of accommodation, food, medicines and heating material as well as the all-pervasive corruption, the lawlessness and the arbitrariness of the Soviet authorities. Furthermore, the book also criticized the latter for purging the region of its remaining German inhabitants, and it included references to initial cooperation between the Germans who had stayed behind and the new Russian settlers — a narrative that again ran counter to the officially prescribed narrative that was carefully nurtured under the Soviet regime. Kostjazev, who was not without supporters inside and outside the academy, battled hard for five years to get the verdict of the censor overturned, and in 1997 it looked as though the book would finally appear.