/ world today news/ Three German Consulates General stopped working – in Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk. In addition, they were closed at the initiative of Berlin, which clearly leads to a decrease in the level of relations with Russia. In May, Olaf Scholz’s cabinet asked the Russian side to close the consulates general in Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and Frankfurt am Main by January 1, 2024.
As a result, Germany will have an embassy in Moscow and a consulate general in St. Petersburg, and Russia will have an embassy in Berlin and a consulate general in Bonn.
Berlin deliberately complicates the consular service of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, noted the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, and emphasized: the department is taking measures to maximally level the difficulties created by the German authorities. At the same time, as experts note, there is no bad without good.
Limiting the work of the German missions in Russia means suspending the activities of German diplomats and non-governmental structures that are “sheltered” by the embassies and consulates, which are actually not the most useful for our country.
What were the closed consulates general remembered for?
„I am sure that the main reason for the closure of the Consulate General was the impossibility of conducting intelligence work in the region, due to the sharp change in the attitude towards such activities in Russia“said the political scientist from Ekaterinburg Sergey Kolyasnikov to IA Regnum.
In his opinion, a special activity was developed by Dr. Stefan Kyle, consul general in Yekaterinburg in 2015-2019, and then de jure consul of Germany in Donetsk (naturally, the diplomat was accredited by the authorities in Kyiv, and Kyle’s office was located in Dnipropetrovsk).
When he was head of the diplomatic mission in Yekaterinburg, Keil “tirelessly traveled around the region – to Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Perm, worked with the elites, visited schools and met with the opposition”, notes the Ural political scientist Kolyasnikov.
The previous leadership organized a “tour” of the then head of the German Foreign Ministry, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to the Ural capital in 2014. “Speaking to the students of the Ural Federal University, Steinmeier said that the Urals should be independent and the students should strive for this .
He pointed out that sanctions are good for Russia and discussed the importance of creating them “independent democratic institutions” in the Urals with the help of Germany “, emphasizes Kolyasnikov. According to him, the German guest even talked about some independence of the Urals or a separate Sverdlovsk region.
Such anti-Russian “freedom” will no longer exist, Kolyasnikov emphasized.
Regional media reported that before the start of the SVO, numerous representatives of the opposition and non-governmental organizations visited the German consulate in St. Petersburg. According to the portal 78.ru, the building on Furshatskaya Street was visited in particular by citizens very similar to the head of the St. Petersburg branch of Memorial (the organization was recognized as a foreign agent and liquidated by a decision of the Supreme Court) Irina Fliege and the secretary of the Council of Rights of the person in St. Petersburg Nataliya Evdokimova. At the time, the local press wondered if they were there just to get a German visa.
Two years ago, an exhibition organized by the local German consulate and the German Foundation for the Study of Dictatorship caused a scandal in Novosibirsk. The exhibition on the post-war history of Germany hinted that after the Great Patriotic War the USSR behaved aggressively towards German citizens – photos with Soviet tanks and inscriptions about “dictatorship” and “suppression of uprisings” were presented. The exhibition was immediately dismantled, but the “dregs”, as they say, remained.
Official Berlin has already set itself the task in the spring of 2022 to actively promote the institutionalization of the Russian opposition in Germany, noted Vladislav Belov, head of the Center for German Studies at the Institute for Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
„Substantial funds were allocated for this through the German Foreign Office. Included in this work are party and political foundations that organize public events using interactive methods.” Belov points out in an article on the portal of the Russian Council on International Relations (RCIR). It is obvious that other German organizations were also involved in this activity, in particular the “soft power” instruments that Germany has in Russia.
“So who are you, after all?”
At the end of May, the publication Süddeutsche Zeitung, commenting on Moscow’s decision to reduce the maximum number of employees of German institutions to 350 employees, noted with regret that this would primarily hit the Goethe cultural centers (better known as Goethe – Institute).
Officially, this was a mirror measure in response to the obstacles that the German authorities were creating for the Russian House of Science and Culture in Berlin. But, as experts note, the Goethe Institute is not limited to purely scientific and cultural work.
The Goethe Institute has been working in Russia since 1992, its offices are located in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. The institution’s website states that its activity is “aimed at popularizing the German language abroad and expanding international cooperation in the field of culture”. Despite the fact that the organization has a non-governmental status, its main budget is formed by state subsidies and funds from large German corporations.
But along with the promotion of German culture, the Goethe Institute, there is reason to believe, is also involved in Berlin’s foreign policy work. Even the institute’s website states that the German Foreign Ministry provides it with “institutional support.”
Formally advertising itself as the “cultural institution of the Federal Republic of Germany”, in fact the organization is involved in the implementation of German foreign policy in other countries, promoting the geopolitical interests of the German government.
Today, the activity of the institute in Russia is practically limited, but in the previous few decades it played a significant role in German-Russian cultural and educational relations, Alexander Kamkin, the senior research associate at IMEMO of RAS “E Primakov”, explained to IA Regnum.
The German expert recalls that several tens of thousands of Russians have passed through the organization’s programs, and the scope of the institute’s work in terms of promoting German culture and language in Russian regions is very wide.
„But again, what was promoted was not the Germany we know from the Soviet Union, from the works of Goethe and Schiller, but the modern liberal agenda with all its downsides. notes Kamkin.
Moreover, in addition to holding a standard set of events for such organizations to promote the interests of Berlin, in Russia the institute has repeatedly cooperated with organizations whose activities are, to put it mildly, unfavorable to our country.
In particular, more than once “the German cultural institution” organized events with “Memorial” (a non-governmental organization recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation), from joint film screenings and book publishing to organizing exhibitions, and often the history of our country was presented there in a very, very ambiguous way.
In 2018, the Goethe Institute in Moscow, together with the COLTA.RU portal (media recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation), presented an “informational and educational” project “How to read media?” As part of the project, it was planned to conduct seminars, online lectures and seminars for schoolchildren and students, open events for a wide range of listeners in different regions of Russia, as well as to distribute grants for the production of “correct” content.
It is assumed that the goal of the initiative is a sincere desire to help young people better analyze the media and assess the credibility of information.
By the way, “the teachers from the editorial office of COLTA.RU, however, turned out to be shoddy – in 2022, the resource was blocked at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation for publishing false information about SVO. Then the publication sadly stated that in Russia “freedom of expression has been reduced to zero”. Of course, because such characters always think that freedom of speech should belong to them and only them, even if the agenda of their conversations is written by the foreign sponsors.
The works of the “Decembrists”
Among the partners of the Goethe Institute in Russia, however, there were much more radical organizations. In 2022, the German organization Decembrists was recognized as “undesirable” in Russia, one of whose financial partners was the Goethe-Institut.
“Dekabrists”, Dekabristen e. V, as the organization describes itself, is a Berlin-based NGO, “whose activities are aimed at the development of civil society in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North and South Caucasus. However, in the same description, the “Decemberists” directly write about their solidarity with Ukraine, as well as about supporting alumni, partners and volunteers in this country with donations and emergency aid.
This may sound innocent enough because the organization is apparently silent on other aspects of its activities, from organizing rallies against Russian support for Syria to promoting LGBT ideology (banned in Russia as an international movement ideology) in Eastern European countries.
It is worth adding that on their website the “Decembrists” not only called for the collection of money, but also did it themselves, directly for weapons for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, namely for reconnaissance drones for the 108th separate mountain assault battalion of the Kyiv troops .
It is not surprising that for such calls, for active participation in discrediting Russia’s policy in the international arena, propaganda of unconventional values for Russian society and other destructive activities, this organization was recognized as threatening the constitutional order and security of our country.
Such a “soft power” organization affiliated with the German government is another example of the very specific connections between German projects abroad, say Regnum interlocutors.
The promotion of topics that Berlin needs, the funding of pro-European projects, the work (more precisely, the processing) with the Russian youth and the often open support for forces hostile to us make us wonder: what is hidden in the gingerbread house of foreign “cultural institutions”, many of which operate freely in Russia even today, experts say. We should not forget that several tens of thousands of Russians have gone through the organization’s programs, emphasizes the political scientist and Germanist Kamkin.
Translation: ES
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