LETTER FROM WARSAW
Polish workers replace road signs pointing to the city of Kaliningrad in a May 31, 2023 tweet. TWITTER / POLISH MINISTRY OF INFRASTRUCTURE
For the past few days, there has been widespread roadside commotion in north-eastern Poland, near Russia’s border with the Kaliningrad enclave, where workers are busy replacing traffic signs. in one tweet Two men in reflective clothing were seen by Poland’s infrastructure ministry on May 31 unscrewing a street sign that said “Kaliningrad” and writing “Krolewiec” instead.
Since May 9, the name Kaliningrad, which had been used in Poland until then, was replaced by the former Polish place name Krolewiec. Equal treatment for Kaliningrad Oblast – its administrative region – which is now called “Obwod Krolewiecki” and no longer “Kaliningradzki”. This was decided by the Commission for the Standardization of Geographical Names Outside the Republic of Poland, the Polish institution responsible for toponymy, last April. Although this is only a recommendation, it means that all road signs mentioning Kaliningrad as well as future maps need to be changed.
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“We do not want Russification in Poland, so we decided to call Kaliningrad and its region in our own language,” said Development and Technology Minister Waldemar Buda in an official statement from his ministry. “The fact that a large town near our border was named after Mr. Kalinin, a criminal who, among other things, was partly responsible for the decision to carry out the mass murder of Polish officers in Katyn in 1940, evokes something negative.” Emotions among Poles,” continues the press release, which, under the pretext of a threatened “ruski mir” (“the Russian world”), highlights the particularly sensitive context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and recalls a painful episode in Polish history of the Second World War. Just think of the execution of several thousand Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD political police in 1940, which was confirmed by Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. A fact long concealed by the USSR.
“A process that borders on madness”
However, the origin of the city, founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights on the Baltic Sea, is more German-speaking. The Conigsberg or Königsberg (“King’s Mountain”) was thus a homage to King Ottokar II of Bohemia, who had taken part in the Crusades in the region. In the 18th century the city was incorporated into Prussia and the philosopher Emanuel Kant was born. It belonged to Germany until the end of World War II and returned to Russia in 1945 after the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements. Moscow then hastened to rename the enclave after Mikhail Kalinin, Stalin’s collaborator. With the fall of the USSR, an impossible consensus will see it retain its Soviet toponym.
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