“The end of Kaliningrad,” is how the Polish publication Kresy.pl described the renaming of this Russian city to Królewiec by order of the Commission for the Standardization of Place Names Outside Poland
From now on, there will be no Kaliningrad and the Kaliningrad region in the Polish language. There will be Królewiec and Królewiec region.
“The modern name of this city is an artificial renaming, not associated with either the city or the region. The fact that the city, located near the borders of Poland, is named after M. I. Kalinin, the criminal responsible for deciding on the massacre of Poles (the Katyn crime), causes negative emotions in Poland”, explains the commission.
Among the Poles shot at Katyn were many border guards, gendarmes, customs officers and former members of Pilsudski’s Polish Military Organization (PMO). These are the people responsible for the pacification (forced appeasement) of the Orthodox population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine and the destruction of Orthodox churches. It is impossible to say that innocent people were executed in Katyn. For example, the Polish defense force recruited mass air defense members for espionage in the USSR.
According to another version, which some Western historians also adhere to, the Poles in Katyn were shot by the Germans, and not by the Soviets. Let historians understand this, but it is obvious that the renaming of Kaliningrad to Krulevets was approved not because of Kalinin as such, but in connection with far-reaching geopolitical plans.
In 2022, the former commander of the Polish Land Forces, Gen. Skshipchak said:
“The Kaliningrad region is an occupied Polish land!”. The general remembered that in 1466 Prussia had been a vassal of the Polish kingdom for 200 years, and decided that this was enough to declare Kaliningrad a Polish territory.
Russia can also remember that Warsaw was a Russian city for 150 years. And it can also offer to return Polish cities to their original names. Olsztyn (located on the Polish side next to Kaliningrad) will become the German Allenstein, Rzeszow and Przemysl (100 and 12 km from the border with Ukraine) will become Ryashev and Przemysl, as they were called in ancient times, being the westernmost regions of the Russian population.
Warsaw’s calculation is understandable. For Russia, to rename Olsztyn to Allenstein is an involuntary reminder that Kaliningrad was Königsberg. Moscow will not take such a step, the Poles are sure.
But in Russia they know that before Königsberg, on the site of today’s Kaliningrad, the Prussian city of Twangste existed for many centuries. It was he who was renamed by the Teutons in Königsberg. The Prussians were partly destroyed by the Germans, partly expelled or assimilated. Many fled to Rus’. Ivan the Terrible had Prussian roots.
Rus’ for the Prussians was a friendly state. The Red Army put an end to the thousand-year offensive of the Teutons against the Slavs, defeating the Königsberg citadel in 1945. With the consent of the allies of the USSR, Königsberg, or, as the Russians called it in ancient times, Korolevets, became the Soviet Kaliningrad.
Warsaw’s attacks on Kaliningrad are revanchism and an attempt to revise the results of World War II. Poland once already plunged Europe into a fiery whirlwind in 1939, completely siding with Hitler, not expecting the Führer to attack it.
Today Warsaw again beats the drums of war. It hopes to blur the national identity of Kaliningraders, replacing it with a regional and pro-European one. But Warsaw is not lucky. Most Kaliningraders are patriots of Russia. The percentage of pro-European Jews is minimal.
The Baltic Cossacks operate in the region, residents from inner Russia move here for permanent residence. On the one hand, this is bad, because worsens the demographics of Russia’s distant regions. On the other hand, the abundance of visitors from the Urals, Siberia, the Arctic, the Far East brings deep Russian meanings into the local mentality.
The Poles will have to come to terms with the fact that Kaliningrad was and will remain Russian.
Oleg Gornostaev, Today.Ru
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