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Description
Happy Easter everyone! So to celebrate this (and also my birthday, which is on Thursday 20 April), here's a map.

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Prussia was (and still is) known for many things in Europe. For one, it was widely known for its amber along its Baltic coast, which so attracted the Baltic tribes an eventually the Teutonic knights who subdued them. One of those knights soon founded a duchy that will later become a powerful kingdom with a formidable war machine, that ultimately became the core of a unified German nation. But the best-known epithet of this small plucky country is actually the most recent: the "Baltic Phoenix," for all the horrors of the 20th century, it had managed to rise above the ravages of Nazism, war, and communism to take its place once more in the international community.

For after the Second World War, the Soviets swept the Nazis from the east, soon occupying what was then the northern part of East Prussia, and they began eliminating any trace of its Germanic roots. They expelled the German populations, replacing them with mainly Russian and Ukrainian colonists. Gone were the old German names, replaced with names reflecting the new "socialist reality," with whatever structures that survived or reduced to ruin (like the famed Königsberg Castle) demolished and replaced them with blocky and ugly monuments to communism and the New Soviet ideal. Such was the fate of a region reduced to a humble oblast in the western edge of the RSFSR until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev (alongside transferring the Crimea in Ukraine), against the advice of the commissars, upgraded the region into an full SSR. Thus, the West Baltic SSR was born, though because the Soviet Union still existed with all its power, this newfound status didn't amount to much.

Fast-forward to the late 1980s. With the stirrings of freedom in the air across the Iron Curtain, governments around the Eastern Bloc, spearheaded by the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, were fast reforming themselves or getting themselves overthrown. Soon the Soviet Union itself was being buffeted by these changes, with the Baltic SSRs soon demanding their independence, and even though the West Baltic SSR was by then majority-Russian, it was also one of the most liberal-minded in the whole union (not to mention separate from the RSFSR for the better part of forty years) and thus sympathetic to the stirrings of Baltic separatism. In 1990, the Baltic Republican Party soon took power, thus setting the stage for the republic to declare independence (as the Prussian Republic) in the aftermath of the August coup attempt, which was finalized by December.

The Baltic Republicans wasted no time creating a new identity based on the country's Germanic past and Russian present, and removing any trace of the Soviet past, evident in the renaming of towns and cities across the country to Russianized forms of the German names, the tearing down of statues of Lenin and many communist leaders, and the rebuilding of the many castles and buildings destroyed during the Soviet era. Nowadays, Prussia is known as Europe's window to the former Soviet Union. As a member of both NATO and the European Union (both since 2004) it is one of the most pro-Western of the Soviet states and a beacon of hope for other Soviet states looking to ally with the West (to the consternation of President Putin). And while ethnic Russians still make up the vast majority of the population (and Russian the lingua franca), the Germans that were expelled and their descendants have started to trickle back, futher contributing to Prussia's independent Western-oriented streak.

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This map is dedicated to zalezsky (:iconzalezsky:). For those not in the know, he's a rather prolific mapmaker with a host of stunning maps (including a few commissions for the Great War) under his belt. He also did a request of mine when he did a map of Christian Japan. Anyways, check him out when you can .

By the way, credits to Neoteros (don't know his Deviantart handle, so I'm just going by his AH.com username) for the flag. I've actually kept the basic design but shifted it into a 3:5 flag ratio instead of a 2:3

Description
Happy Easter everyone! So to celebrate this (and also my birthday, which is on Thursday 20 April), here's a map.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prussia was (and still is) known for many things in Europe. For one, it was widely known for its amber along its Baltic coast, which so attracted the Baltic tribes an eventually the Teutonic knights who subdued them. One of those knights soon founded a duchy that will later become a powerful kingdom with a formidable war machine, that ultimately became the core of a unified German nation. But the best-known epithet of this small plucky country is actually the most recent: the "Baltic Phoenix," for all the horrors of the 20th century, it had managed to rise above the ravages of Nazism, war, and communism to take its place once more in the international community.

For after the Second World War, the Soviets swept the Nazis from the east, soon occupying what was then the northern part of East Prussia, and they began eliminating any trace of its Germanic roots. They expelled the German populations, replacing them with mainly Russian and Ukrainian colonists. Gone were the old German names, replaced with names reflecting the new "socialist reality," with whatever structures that survived or reduced to ruin (like the famed Königsberg Castle) demolished and replaced them with blocky and ugly monuments to communism and the New Soviet ideal. Such was the fate of a region reduced to a humble oblast in the western edge of the RSFSR until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev (alongside transferring the Crimea in Ukraine), against the advice of the commissars, upgraded the region into an full SSR. Thus, the West Baltic SSR was born, though because the Soviet Union still existed with all its power, this newfound status didn't amount to much.

Fast-forward to the late 1980s. With the stirrings of freedom in the air across the Iron Curtain, governments around the Eastern Bloc, spearheaded by the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, were fast reforming themselves or getting themselves overthrown. Soon the Soviet Union itself was being buffeted by these changes, with the Baltic SSRs soon demanding their independence, and even though the West Baltic SSR was by then majority-Russian, it was also one of the most liberal-minded in the whole union (not to mention separate from the RSFSR for the better part of forty years) and thus sympathetic to the stirrings of Baltic separatism. In 1990, the Baltic Republican Party soon took power, thus setting the stage for the republic to declare independence (as the Prussian Republic) in the aftermath of the August coup attempt, which was finalized by December.

The Baltic Republicans wasted no time creating a new identity based on the country's Germanic past and Russian present, and removing any trace of the Soviet past, evident in the renaming of towns and cities across the country to Russianized forms of the German names, the tearing down of statues of Lenin and many communist leaders, and the rebuilding of the many castles and buildings destroyed during the Soviet era. Nowadays, Prussia is known as Europe's window to the former Soviet Union. As a member of both NATO and the European Union (both since 2004) it is one of the most pro-Western of the Soviet states and a beacon of hope for other Soviet states looking to ally with the West (to the consternation of President Putin). And while ethnic Russians still make up the vast majority of the population (and Russian the lingua franca), the Germans that were expelled and their descendants have started to trickle back, futher contributing to Prussia's independent Western-oriented streak.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This map is dedicated to zalezsky (:iconzalezsky:). For those not in the know, he's a rather prolific mapmaker with a host of stunning maps (including a few commissions for the Great War) under his belt. He also did a request of mine when he did a map of Christian Japan. Anyways, check him out when you can .

By the way, credits to Neoteros (don't know his Deviantart handle, so I'm just going by his AH.com username) for the flag. I've actually kept the basic design but shifted it into a 3:5 flag ratio instead of a 2:3