In 1945, after devastating raids by hundreds of RAF Lancaster bombers, the city fell to the Red Army. Along its rubble-strewn streets Soviet soldiers exacted a brutal revenge for Nazi aggression. Survivors were tortured, women raped and naked bodies nailed to doors. The few residents who remained alive in the ruins were then starved to death or forced into slave labour. Whereas in Estonia the Soviets had set out to weaken the indigenous population, in Königsberg they eradicated it.
For the next fifty years Kaliningrad, as it was renamed, was closed to the West. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians filled the vacated city and set to work for the military: servicing Moscow’s 100,000-man garrison, overhauling its Baltic fleet at Baltiysk, teaching at the cadet school, managing the stockpiles of conventional and nuclear weapons.
Kaliningrad has no common border with Russia, which lies almost 300 miles to the east, so to visit the territory I had to catch a train from Vilnius. Beyond the carriage window, overnight snow dusted the abandoned orchards and fields on either side of the rail line. A cement statue of a heroic farmworker guarded the entrance to a deserted collective farm. An old woman towed a churn of well water on a sleigh. Some 300 of the enclave’s villages remain abandoned to this day.
Soon the low lines of drab houses gave way to Khrushchyovka apartment blocks. In the spreading shadows every building looked colder than a Siberian icebox. Every third person seemed to be wearing a uniform. Across from the central station – built by Germans in 1929 – I found a hotel, dropped my bag and set out to explore.
Under hissing quartz street lamps, Kaliningrad revealed itself as one of the world’s ugliest cities: a chaos of shabby roads, glinting neon and crumbling estates. Electrical cables dangled across dirty avenues. Shards of broken vodka bottles splintered underfoot. Drunks and feral dogs roamed the ghostly parks where the old town had once stood. Atop the site of medieval Königsberg Castle – the remains of which were demolished on the orders of Leonid Brezhnev – rose the monstrous House of Soviets, declared unsafe as soon as it was built, its foundations collapsing into the tunnels and moat of the old fortress. Locals called the eyesore the ‘Revenge of the Prussians’.
I took in the Eternal Flame in Victory Park and a couple of the city’s ‘Euro’ malls. Late-night locals wandered in and out of them, staring at plasma screens, buying nothing. I was reminded that Kaliningrad’s residents are sixty-five times poorer than the average EU citizen, yet both the city’s former mayor and its governor own second homes on the Côte d’Azur.
At the Planet Entertainment mall, the Beer Club was a low-rent dive with blacked-out windows and surly waiters. I sat alone at a table writing up the day’s sparse notes. On the walls around me hung posters for Disco Boom dance parties and the Tet-a-Tet strip club. The upcoming Fashion Girls Night seemed to have little to do with wearing clothes.
To Western observers during the Cold War, Kaliningrad had been simply another chunk of stolen real estate in the Soviet empire. But with the enlargement of the European Union, the military fiefdom found itself in the heart of the continent, wedged between Poland and Lithuania, nearer to Berlin than to Moscow. Its sudden strategic importance was matched only by its alarming social collapse: 30 per cent unemployment, Russia’s highest crime rate, widespread prostitution and heroin use.[12] Baltic Tobacco was the town’s largest civilian employer, its cigarettes – especially its Jin Ling brand – smuggled by the billion into Western Europe. A single shipping container, filled with some 10 million cigarettes, could be bought for about $100,000 at its eight-acre port complex. But once secreted into Sweden or Germany, the shipment could be sold on for $3 million. If it reached the UK or Norway, where cigarette taxes are higher, the same shipment would be worth nearly $6 million.
I walked back to the hotel through a thick sea mist that tasted of burnt toast, generated by the raw sewage that’s pumped from the town’s failing pre-war treatment plant. When I turned off the bedside lamp, sulphurous yellow street light fell across the floor. Next door I heard throaty whispers and then the sound of sudden swift lovemaking. No other noise emerged through the paper-thin walls for the rest of the night. Around dawn I woke to the crack of gunfire and thump of explosions. At breakfast I was told that I’d heard a weekly live-fire exercise.
I knew no one in Moscow’s armed bastion, and it showed in the blank pages of my notebook. The door I’d opened seemed to lead to a dead end. In the restaurant I had a second cup of coffee. In my room I turned on the TV, then turned it off. At the reception desk I asked about city tours, clutching at straws. I bought a ticket for an afternoon visit to the Kaliningrad Amber Museum.
‘If you buy a second tour, it’s half price,’ said the receptionist.
I chose the Sobranie casino evening.
In the first years after the fall of the Wall, the Kremlin had toyed with the idea of liberalising Kaliningrad, spinning it as a Baltic Hong Kong. But when the elite realised that their survival was best assured by bigging up Russia’s military mission, the tune changed. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow was called upon to assert that Kaliningrad was the new ‘ideological battlefield between the West and Russia’ and a ‘beacon of the Russian World in Europe’. Tentative ties with the rest of the continent were severed and the most respected NGO in the oblast, the German-Russian House, was labelled a ‘foreign agent’. Both the local government and the Russian Orthodox Church then declared war on history, the Patriarch himself referred to the German heritage as a series of ‘old stones that should not be revered or given predominance over the legacy of Russian national culture’.
At the same time Kaliningrad started to build casinos. First up was the Sobranie, said to be among the largest in Europe. Over the next decade fourteen more cash cows – along with twenty-one hotels, three concert halls, a stadium and a water park – had begun to take shape in the ‘Amberland’ gambling zone.
In the hotel foyer our guide wore a cowboy hat, if you can believe it, and introduced himself as Lucky Lev. He had a boy’s face dotted with freckles and a thin-lipped smile. Our small group consisted of two middle-aged Americans, a Yorkshireman on a World Cup rebound visit and the young French couple from the adjoining room.
On the drive to the Sobranie we passed a military convoy en route to Baltiysk, home port of Russia’s Special Purpose Squadron (its mini-sub host ships are designed to tap and cut undersea internet cables). Lev explained about the house rules and warned us about forged Euro notes and prostitutes (one in three of Kaliningrad’s sex workers were said to be HIV positive). I tried to draw him out, on the off-chance that I could pen a portrait of him, but he said of his background only that he’d attended the local cadet school, as had all the region’s children, to learn ‘how to defend Russia from enemy incursions’.
Our taxi rattled off the potholed street and onto a Monaco-slick paving stone drive. A doorman stepped forward to open the rusty door and – with a flourish – ushered us into a turreted, mock-Louis XV chateau.
Under a mirrored ceiling, tuxedo-suited flunkies relieved us of our coats and more Euros, motioning forward attendants in fishnet stockings with silver trays of Crimean champagne. Together we strode across the marble foyer, through a golden yellow passageway and into the vast gaming hall. Starlights and cut-glass chandeliers glittered over red baize tables. A clutch of serious men in black turtlenecks and jackets leaned forward to place bets. Around us video lottery terminals pinged, ice rattled in cocktail shakers and decks of cards were shuffled.
Lev guided us to the blackjack and six-card poker tables. He hovered for a time at a roulette wheel, studying its spin. In an adjoining room, where banks of pulsating slots coiled around a raised mirror-glass bar, he told us that there were already more than a thousand of the machines in Amberland.
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All Kaliningrad’s public toilets are illuminated with blue light that makes veins undetectable and so prevents local users from injecting themselves.