Just had a brief conversation with a guy from one of the most unusual places in the world geographically, Kaliningrad. He was a cashier in an Exxon station of all places, I saw his name tag Timur and asked where he was from. I guessed he would say Mongolia or somewhere else in Central Asia from the name, but he said he was from Kaliningrad. (Turns out Timur is the Persian name for Tamerlane the Turkic-Mongol "conqueror" born in Uzbekistan.)
The city of Kaliningrad is the capital of Kaliningrad state (oblast) within Russia. The state is an exclave of Russia that between Poland and the Lithuania, 200 miles away from Russia proper, with a coast on the Baltic Sea. The territory has changed hands many times through history, including between Poland, Germany, and Russia. From 1878-1945, it was part of the former state of East Prussia and the capital city was called Königsberg in German. In 1946, after WW2 ended, as the allies carved up German territory it became part of the Soviet Union, which renamed both the city and state Kaliningrad.
I've always wondered if people who live in Kaliningrad are able to cross their border into Poland and Lithuania easily, or are they stuck in that pocket? So I asked him. He said you need a visa to cross the borders--there's definitely no way a part of Russia is going to be part of Europe's open-border Shengen Zone--but the visa is not that hard to get. So they can travel relatively easily.
It's also interesting that a guy named Timur was from Kaliningrad, it would be interesting to see how he or his ancestors ended up in there, migrating within Russia, and then in the US. Central Asia and the Middle East are quite a hike from Kaliningrad.
Coincidentally, a few months ago I had read a chunk of the chapter on Kaliningrad in Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms. He describes how the area was obliterated by WW2 and became a sort of wasteland full of crime, but recently I have read that it has improved and is doing better economically, including shipping at the port of Kaliningrad. Goes to show you never know when something you're reading will pop up. We also talked about Kaliningrad in my Cultural Geography class last spring as an example of an exclave.
Also, I met several Russian teenagers last summer in several national parks like Glacier National Park in Montana. They were working in the park bookstores and restaurants through the CIEE international exchange programs, along with kids from China and Taiwan, etc. None of them were from Moscow. One of them working in the gift shop at Glacier NP was from Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. I went to the car and brought back my geography textbook, which has a picture of coal mines in Krasnoyarsk, which lies in the Kuznets Basin, one of the world's largest coal regions in the middle of Siberia. She was pretty surprised. She showed me on the map where she will work when she goes back, an oil settlement up on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, as Russia is trying to exploit Arctic oil right now. Bundle up.
