Part One
Consider a port that is perfectly protected from the ravages of winter storms by the graceful arc of a long sandy spit. Behind the spit, there is a placid lagoon that rarely freezes. Ships arriving from the Baltic sail through a narrow gap in the spit to enter the lagoon, which they cross to reach the wharves and quaysides of the city. The city itself brims with trade and commerce, but it is also a place of learning - one of Europe's most illustrious university cities. It has a handsome red-brick cathedral, a dozen other churches with slender spires, green parks and gentle walks along the waterfront. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he treated it as the most natural thing in the world that our Baltic port would have trading links with cities as distant as Amsterdam and Lisbon. And so it did! In the late eighteenth century, the port of Königsberg exported corn to Portugal, receiving fruit and wine in return..
Such was the Königsberg of Adam Smith's day. Just imagine: the hushed chatter in the bookshop as a consignment of books is unpacked - new satirical essays from London, musical scores from Salzburg, Dutch atlases, French philosophy books and scientific monographs from Russia.
Down at the docks the weekly steamer to Stettin is just casting off, its upper decks lined with wealthy families bound for Pomerania, couriers with letters destined for Paris and Berlin, and traders anxious to keep their share of flourishing Baltic commerce. At a nearby wharf, Robert Motherby, a hard working immigrant from Scotland married to a French Huguenot, is checking a consignment of timber and spices bound for Hull. Motherby's business partner Joseph Green is having his habitual late afternoon conversation with a respected local philosopher, a learned gentleman named Immanuel Kant.
So whatever happened to Königsberg? The one-time capital of Prussia's easternmost province seems to have slipped from view. The shelves of German supermarkets are lined with packets of Königsberger Klopse - little meat dumplings. But what of the Prussian city that gave its name to this food staple and where Friedrich the First was crowned King? The city of Kant is still a Baltic port, but one that has little visibility in western Europe.
Since 1945 it has been part of Russia — and the city’s name is now Kaliningrad. That doesn’t stop many locals referring to the city colloquially as Koenig — a sort of hip rebuttal to the authorities who foisted upon the city an association with one of the Soviet Union’s more uncharismatic politicians. Mikhail Kalinin, the arch survivor of Stalinist politics, conveniently died in 1946 just as the Soviet authorities were pondering what new name might be given to their post-war Baltic acquisition — preferably one that sounded so authentically Russian as to mask Königsberg’s German past. Kalinin’s timely demise provided the answer. Königsberg became Kaliningrad.

The coast of the Kaliningrad region is largely defined by spits. Here, the Curonian Spit (photo © hidden europe).
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the independence of the Baltic States, Kaliningrad found itself strangely isolated from the rest of Russia: a very good example of an exclave and a remarkable geopolitical oddity. That isolation was reinforced when Poland and Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, and became even more acute when those same two countries joined the Schengen group of nations in 2007. Just as West Berlin survived in post-war Europe as a island of western capitalism in the heart of East Germany, so now Kaliningrad is a fragment of Russia hemmed in by the EU.
When Chris Patten was an EU Commissioner, he referred to Kaliningrad as Russia’s hell-hole exclave. Patten knows a thing or two about exclaves, having served as Britain’s last Governor in Hong Kong. But Kaliningrad is certainly no hell-hole. It is, on the contrary, an interesting city at the heart of a hugely attractive region.
Soviet era rhetoric may have glossed over Königsberg history, but Kaliningrad and its hinterland are full of visual references to a Prussian past: once elegant German coastal resorts have been recast as popular destinations for Russians; cobbled village lanes and rural highways lined with avenues of trees look for all the world like the countryside around Berlin; and, were it not for the telltale signs in Cyrillic script, some Kaliningrad suburbs look just like parts of Berlin.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the independence of the Baltic States, Kaliningrad found itself strangely isolated from the rest of Russia. It became a geopolitical oddity.
Some politicians have floated the idea that Russia’s outpost on the Baltic might form a test bed for Russian entrepreneurs anxious to develop good links with businesses based in the European Union. A sort of Russia-lite, with a business environment more amenable to western investment. There has been a lot of talk about a special economic zone in the Kaliningrad oblast, somehow echoing the non-interventionist model over which Patten presided in Hong Kong. But these grand plans have never quite come to fruition, as the Moscow authorities are reluctant to see one small region benefitting from privileges denied to other regions of the Russian Federation. Not to mention endless tit-for-tat recriminations between Russia and the EU over issues of customs, visas and pollution control in the Kaliningrad region. The city and its surrounding area is a flashpoint in the often tetchy relationship between Brussels and Moscow.
These issues of power politics reverberate through the lives of ordinary Kaliningraders. No longer can they just hop on a Moscow bound train at Kaliningrad’s grand South Station and head for the capital; no, now they must secure a permit from the EU authorities that will allow them to transit through Lithuania en route to Belarus and mainland Russia. No wonder therefore that air travel from the Kaliningrad region’s modest airport at Khrabrovo has really taken off in recent years, with the local airline KD Avia providing lifeline links not just from Kaliningrad to Moscow but also to a dozen other regional cities across Russia.
Part Two
Kaliningrad’s South Station is a place that still has a very Soviet demeanour. The daily train from Berlin, reinstated less than five years ago after a gap of more than half a century, arrives on platform 6. The train is a very tangible reminder of the hopes of some Kaliningraders that one day, somehow, Moscow and Brussels will come to a rapprochement over Kaliningrad — one which will allow inhabitants of the Russian exclave the privilege of visa-free travel beyond its borders. The single blue and white sleeping car from Berlin is a reminder too of the ghost of old Königsberg. Elderly Germans with family ties to East Prussia are now venturing to return to see this city which was once so very German and is now so very Russian.
Elenore Kallweit climbs slowly down from the railway carriage. The Russian provodnik, who has accompanied the train all the way from Berlin, gives the old lady a helping hand down onto the platform. For Elenore, now seventyfive years old, the journey to old Königsberg is a chance to catch the traces of her childhood years on the family farm near Klycken (today Klyukvennoye). Misty memories of horse chestnut trees laden with white blossom, orchards heavy with the scent of ripe apples, picnics by the lake that fed the old mill stream, her school class taking a train journey to Königsberg to see the cathedral and summer family excursions to the coast at Rauschen where Elenore and her sister would run down to the beach at dawn to hunt for little pieces of amber washed up by the waves. Memories too of things that are best forgotten. Of seeing her father depart for the Russian Front and never return. Of escaping west in January 1945, getting separated from her mother and sister in the coastal town of Pillau and never seeing them again.

Kaliningrad South station, a nicely retro Soviet relic that serves as the main station for the Russian city (photo © hidden europe).
Elenore is under no illusions that Königsberg will ever again be German. The statue of Mother Russia near the railway station makes the point. Mother Russia, towering sternly on her plinth, points firmly at the Kaliningrad soil as if to tell Elenore and all the world that this is Russia and will forever be so.
Yet visitors to Kaliningrad cannot escape the German history of both the city and its hinterland. A double ring of fortifications surrounds the city. The red brick city walls, broken by six castellated gateways, reveal that the city has more than just Soviet heritage: on the principal gateways into the city, Teutonic knights and Prussian kings jostle for position with the philosophers and scientists who helped give so much character to old Königsberg. The King’s Gate, the Rossgarten Gate and, yes, even a Brandenburg Gate serve as everyday reminders to Kaliningraders that theirs is a city with a history like no other city in Russia.
And a new generation of forward looking citizens are determined to put Kaliningrad on the map. “I love this place,” enthuses Olga Danilova, an energetic, endlessly amusing and thoughtfully provocative guide and interpreter who has become a passionate advocate for her home city. “Yes, it will always be Russian, but now we are exploring Kaliningrad’s past.”
Yet the process of recovering history has to be carefully negotiated. Igor Odintsov presides over the restoration of the old German cathedral on an island in the Pregolya river in the very heart of the city. Odintsov is a controversial and larger-than-life character. A former Soviet military engineer, he moved to Kaliningrad in 1982. During the perestroika years he developed plans to conserve the crumbling remains of the old German cathedral. The burnt out shell had fallen into an ever worse state of disrepair over the forty years since the war. It was a place where kids from the local estates played in the ruins.
Odintsov initially proposed merely conservation, but quickly found his plans struck a chord with Germans anxious to recover and mark their East Prussian roots. Conservation turned to full blown restoration and today, for returning Germans like Elenore Kallweit, the Königsberger Dom is the inevitable first stop upon alighting in Kaliningrad from the train from Berlin. Nowadays the one-time cathedral is used as a space for concerts, and there are exhibits on the restoration process and a small museum about Immanuel Kant. This is a canny move, defusing any thoughts of Königsberg as a centre of German military aggression and instead reinforcing the image of old Königsberg as a focal point of European enlightenment. Bach booms out on the new organ and Igor Odinstsov talks intensely to foreigners who visit the restored cathedral. Odintsov stresses how much the locals have supported his venture.
Jana lives just a stone’s throw distant from the cathedral in an apartment block across one of the branches of the Pregolya River. Every year the shabby grey building in which Jana lives sinks another centimetre or two into the marshy subsoil, and every year the balconies crumble a little more. Jana is less than complimentary about the cathedral restoration. “My brothers and I played there as children. Those red ruins were part of my Kaliningrad childhood. We explored every corner of those walls. And we were free to imagine whatever we wanted. The ruins inspired us to create our own histories for our city. Now, with the restoration of the building, a past generation of German residents have reclaimed a part of my city as their own.”
Even ruins command affection. Images of the ruins where Jana used to play, reproduced a thousand times in the West German media during the cold war years, were the spur to Elenore’s imagination — a spark of creative nostalgia that is consummated as the old lady, pale and tired from her long overnight train journey, walks across the threshold of the Königsberger Dom. “Ah, yes,” she murmurs. “Still there is something of old Königsberg in Kaliningrad.”
It is a view echoed by Stanislav Laurushonis, who has taken up residence in Fort Stein, a fabulously rambling series of fortifications built in the nineteenth century as part of Königsberg’s outer ring of defences. For many years after the Second World War, Fort Stein, like other similar old German forts that ring the city, was used by the Soviet military as a storage depot. Some of the forts still are the preserves of the army. But not Fort Stein, where Stanislav lives with his wife, children and fifteen hundred French skeletons. The latter were dug up when a new development in the middle of Kaliningrad unearthed a mass grave, evidently dating from the winter of 1812 / 1813 when the French were retreating in disarray from Russia. For want of any final resting place, these remnants of Napoléon’s Grande Armée are lodged in Fort Stein, where Stanislav has a couple of hundred unheated and unlit rooms to spare. Lush summer foliage almost covers the moat and drapes the battlements of Fort Stein. Occasional visitors venture out to the fort for re-enactments of the last days of Königsberg in early 1945, as soldiers of the Red Army combed the corridors and passages of the fort to flush out the last elements of German resistance. “Fort Stein,” says Stanislav, “is a sort of time machine — a place where both Kaliningraders and visitors can feel the pulse of our region’s history.”
The Reich that was to last a thousand years lasted but a dozen. Königsberg was its greatest sacrifice. And some of its greatest victims are women like Elenore who lost their histories in the reshaping of Europe after the war. “Nothing is forever,” says Elenore wistfully as she arranges for a taxi to take her out to the small village where she lived as a child. “Nothing is forever.”
The hopeful newly weds who seal their marriage by attaching a padlock to the railings of the footbridge over the river in the middle of Kaliningrad think otherwise. Soon there will be no space left for any more padlocks. Irena and Pyotr bought a very handsome large padlock and had it professionally engraved with words and symbols that captured their undying love. Elena and Oleg just use a small suitcase lock that they found in a cellar. They scratched their names on the rusty lock with a nail. “Oleg and Elena. For ever.” Together they attach the lock to the railings and throw the key into the Pregolya River. Kaliningrad folk may be rediscovering their history, but that does not diminish their appetite for the future.
A new generation of beachcombers enjoy Baltic sun and sand where once Elenore Kallweit searched for shards of amber at dawn. The Rauschen of Elenore’s childhood has a new Russian name of course: nowadays it is known as Svetlogorsk, a place to which New Russians come to flaunt their wealth. Caipirinhas on the promenade for breakfast and the bling-bling glitz of a golden generation that knew how to make a fast buck when the Soviet Union fell apart. But Svetlogorsk, with its leafy avenues, Jugendstil villas and old German church is not just a preserve for the rich. Ordinary Russians, people like Elena and Oleg, save a few roubles so that they can take the local train from Kaliningrad for a day trip to Svetlogorsk. The coastal town is just an hour away on the elektrichka. Everyone deserves a day at the beach. Play on the sand, dip a toe in the Baltic, enjoy a couple of beers. The local brew is called Königsberg. Kaliningrad, it seems, is eventually coming to terms with its past.
We had a wonderful time exploring Kaliningrad, receiving a lot of help along the way. Our special thanks to Olga Danilova, Loreta Durell and Elena Hrapovitskaya for their good humoured guidance and many sharp insights into the region.