Europe, getting closer

Petrograd

After May 27, 2003, St. Petersburg should change its name again - the new name of the former Leningrad will be Putingrad. At least that's the joke the residents of this city have been showering with "federal money" recently. By that date, about 55 billion rubles (approximately four billion German marks) should be poured from the budget of the Russian Federation in order for the city to celebrate its 300th anniversary in the best possible way. In the "Little Garden" pedestrian zone, there is a large clock that counts down the moments until the big moment. Russian President Vladimir Putin also came politically from Petersburg, and at least as far as supporting the reconstruction and improvement of the city is concerned, he shows himself to be a grateful son of the former imperial capital.

RENEWAL I CONSTRUCTION: Not only is a new presidential yacht being built in the local shipyard, with which Putin should cruise the Neva when the festivities begin in two years, but the entire city center has also been turned into a construction site. Among the most important undertakings is the construction of a bypass highway around the eastern part of the city, which should connect the route from Moscow with the road to Finland. Currently, the city is congested day and night with heavy traffic. The metro is being extended, pedestrian zones are expanding, museums are being renovated...

Numerous ventures in the city seem to be reflected in the mood of the population. The newspaper writes that for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city has again recorded an increase in natural growth. Modest, but still: two years ago, an average of 6,2 babies were born for every thousand inhabitants of the city - last year there were 6,7. The city's health minister, Yuri Shevchenko, said that "poor people don't want to have children because they don't want to produce more poverty." Judging, however, by the statement of the XNUMX-year-old second child Margarita Štitkova to the same newspaper, a person can get used to poverty: "People survive the first economic crisis, then the second, so they get tired of being afraid of the future." They realize that they have one life that goes on despite all the crises."

People in Russia seem to confirm the idea that the world has about them - that they can endure and accept a lot, even a kind of permanent state of war on a smaller scale. On the tracks of the Moscow railway station, a train was just being loaded with soldiers of the Typhoon special brigade on their way to Chechnya - this is their tenth three-month round of war with the "blackheads" since 1994, last time the two did not return, they were awarded posthumously. Big, hair-cut guys with cigarettes in their mouths, from whom crying women with children, girlfriends, mothers say goodbye. On the opposite track, a train from Moscow had just arrived, from which groups of Japanese and Korean tourists rushed, the "bursts" from the photographic cameras immediately began to work.

Tourists flocked in the last days of June, as always, to experience the "white nights" in Petrograd. Indeed, there is no darkness in the weeks around the equinox. The peak of entertainment for tourists, but also for locals, occurs every night a minute before two in the morning when the bridges on the Neva are raised so that ships can sail to the Finnish Sea. Thousands of tourists blackened the shores, many with "champagne" in hand, counting down the moments until the Nevsky bridges noiselessly split open. The excitement is palpable as before the New Year. Hundreds of boats and speedboats compete to be under the bridge at the exact moment when its span breaks. Pedestrians who get lost on the wrong side have to wait until five in the morning when the crossings are closed again. If he has money, he will perhaps stop at the Idiot restaurant (based on Dostoyevsky's novel), or, if he is not a vegetarian, at the Georgian Salcin or the Jewish Sjem Sorok.

BRIDGES I WALLS: By 2003, a new bridge for eight lanes of the highway - ring road, 730 meters long, at a height of 135 meters over the river in the south of the city, should be completed. It will be a new landmark of the city and the only bridge over the Neva that will not be raised at night. This will facilitate the transportation of goods and people towards the northwest, towards Finland, the only country of the European Union with which Russia now borders. Petrograd benefits from its proximity to Europe - if the European Union and everything that is politically, economically, and even civilizationally related to Western European integration is understood as the embodiment of the Continent. However, bringing Europe closer to that part of Russia does not only bring mutually beneficial things such as Western tourism, small-border trade and investment.

The Baltic states - until ten years ago an apparently indivisible part of the Soviet Union since the agreement between Hitler and Stalin - would like, if possible "yesterday", to become members not only of the European Union but perhaps even more of the North Atlantic Treaty. Again, the Western Europeans are clearly in no hurry to include Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia among the allies for which they are obliged to lay down their lives according to the NATO statute, there was no need for evil. Ferman from Washington, however, is quite clear: the Baltic states are slated for membership, perhaps precisely because the Russians are so nervous about the possibility of a new "Bondstyle" emerging within easy reach of the Hermitage.

Opponents of NATO's eastward expansion recognize the emergence of new geopolitical and military dividing lines in Europe, which, as they perceive it, are ancient conflicts between Western and Eastern Christians. That new line stretches, in the thinking of geopoliticians, from Petrograd in the Baltic all the way to Kotor in the Balkans. It also cuts across Ukraine and Belarus, widening the gap and schism among the supporters of alliances with either the West or Russia there.

That new "Roman limes", even if the expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans does not happen so quickly, will take, as Russian analysts write, quite tangible forms in the event of further penetration of the European Union to the east: if Poland and the Baltic states, as potential candidates for EU membership, they may even join "Schengen" (the Western European area named after the Schengen Agreement on a single regime of entry permits for people from third countries) even earlier, major obstacles will arise for travel from eastern, non-Schengen countries. This problem will become particularly acute for the residents of Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave, who will fall not only into military and geopolitical isolation, but also inevitably become impoverished in terms of economic and human contacts with their hinterland. The problems are the same as those that lie ahead for, say, Serbia and Montenegro when Hungary closes its border due to taking over the EU visa regime.

Immanuel Kant was born in the former Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, and he never moved from there. This did not prevent him from thinking about "eternal peace" in Europe, a project that the European Union now carries on its shield. However, instead of "exporting stability and democracy", as the declared goals of EU and NATO's expansion to the east, it seems that unexpected, difficult problems are arising for those who remain temporarily or long-term outside these new borders, perhaps even new sources of crises. A large number of "ethnic Russians" will be cut off from their immediate connection with the "mother" as citizens of the Baltic states.

Will Moscow perhaps start imitating the current Hungarian "status law" on Hungarians in Romania, Serbia and Slovakia, giving privileges to "its own" in the "close neighborhood"? Even now, heavy accusations against some of the Balts for discrimination against the Russian minority, including racism, neo-Nazism, are regularly coming from Moscow... In such conflicts, which are no longer hypothetical, but still unnoticed by the general public of Western Europe, both headquarters will undoubtedly be drawn into Brussels. In Moscow, however, the drunken Tsar Boris no longer rules, but the Chekist Putin. And when he raises Petrograd from the dust, he does it not only for future dollar income from tourism, but for the glory and power of Russia, no matter how far they are still, perhaps as much as the rise in the time of Peter the Great.