KALININGRAD - KÖNIGSBERG

KALININGRAD/KÖNIGSBERG 
  RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Train Leominster to Manchester Airport  £10.55

Ryanair flight to Gdansk, Poland £24.47 Taxi to Gdansk Bus Station £4

Bus Gdansk - Kaliningrad Russia  £9.51      Total travel cost to Russia  £48.53

I arrived at the frontier with no visa, only an email from a man called Timur -

“Dear Joe Cocker,   Everything is OK. Please don't forget colored photo. In special case call me           mob.  +79062389788.”

Having experienced the usual hassle of Russian visas this was a novel experience. 

PREAMBLE  

Tuesday January 26^th 2010.
 

   I arrived in Klaipeda, Lithuania with my Lithuanian friend Jovita. Klaipeda is the main port and third city of Lithuania.  It was once the German city of Memel. From Klaipeda it is a short ferry ride to the Curonian Spit. This is a 100 km long strip of land ranging from 400 metres wide to nearly 4 kms. It is wooded and the coast is backed by sand dunes . The southern half is in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.  The northern part is in south west Lithuania. It almost entirely encloses the Curonian lagoon only the northern part of which is open to the sea at Klaipeda.

  I had read about this geographic curiosity and despite it being winter thought at least a short visit would be interesting.  Winters are cold in this part of the world but this winter was exceptionally cold and the normally ice-free port was closed to traffic, you could walk on the sea. An icebreaker had made a channel for the ferry and with the temperature around minus 25 celsius Jovita and I made the crossing. It was a large ferry but there were very few passengers most of whom huddled inside. On the Spit the snow was around 20 – 30 cms deep and so even walking around was  difficult. 

There was hardly a soul about but curiously we came to a tourist information office that was open. There were three ladies inside and they told Jovita that they would like to have made us coffee but the water was frozen. There was a museum of fishing vessels  nearby but nothing else. Just then a lone bus appeared, on the  front it said клаипеда i.e. Klaipeda.  After discharging its passengers the destination board was altered to Калининград i.e. Kaliningrad 135 kms to the south. It must have been quite a journey through the forest in that snow but then Russians have some experience of this.

   Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave, separated from the rest of Russia by Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.  I imagine that Belarus is not a problem but for Russia the other two certainly are.  When in 2002 they became eligible to join the EU and NATO there were fierce exchanges, Russians wanted the right to cross the divide but this was not granted.  One of the reports I read from this time referred to the “tiny enclave” of Kaliningrad- more about that later.  Unless they have a visa other Russians can now only go to Kaliningrad by sea or air. This is one of the complications thrown up by the demise of the Soviet Union. 

 Fast forwarding for a moment this was brought home on a flight from Vilnius to Liverpool.  Beside me were a woman and 7 year old boy. The boy spoke to me in English, in fact he wouldn’t stop talking! When I asked the woman her nationality she said Russian. It turned out that she is a Lithuanian citizen but one of the substantial Russian minorities in most of the ex-Soviet states and now lives near Manchester. After all this time she still thinks of herself first and foremost as Russian.  I asked her if the fact that she is an ethnic Russian makes it easier for her to visit Russia. Apparently not, she needs a visa like all Lithuanians. It was interesting that she thinks of herself as Russian and the ethnic Russians in these countries including Ukraine deserve more understanding than they tend to get in the West. I told the lady that I had been to Kaliningrad and she has relatives there but has not visited for years because she needs a visa.

Back to the Curonian Spit.  Jovita and I trudged through the snow along a road to where she thought there would be another ferry.  I think we only met one person on the way.  Then a car came along, Jovita spoke to the driver in Lithuanian and for 10 euros he agreed to drive us not only to the ferry, but across on the ferry and to where we wished to go in Klaipeda.  Money well spent in the conditions, I thought.   So this was my brief introduction to the Curonian Spit and even briefer one to the idea of Kaliningrad. 

A CURIOSITY   Visiting Tobago many years ago I came across a monument to the Courlanders who briefly colonised part of the island in the 17^th century.  I later wondered if these people were from the Curonian area, not so, but not so far away. Courland was a duchy in Latvia, Lithuania’s northern neighbour.

FIRST ATTEMPT TO VISIT KALININGRAD  2012

For a couple of years after this I vaguely thought about making a short trip to Kaliningrad and investigated various possibilities online. There was talk of ferry trips from Gdansk and also bus trips. The internet is so often wonderful but at other times information can be very hard to obtain.  In April 2012 after attending a conference in Copenhagen I flew to Gdansk with a view to investigating the possibilities on the ground.   I found very little, Poland and Russia are not the best of friends and no one seemed to know of short trips.  This was not a disaster for me as Gdansk turned out to be a great place to visit.  You arrive at Lech Walensa Airport and there are many  monuments to the Solidarity movement.  I also visited the shipyards at Gdynia where I found a pre WW2 Polish Navy ship that had been built in the Isle of Wight.  Between these two ports there is a modern resort, Sopot, all in all, Dansk was well worth the visit and the weather was superb.

SECOND ATTEMPT TO VISIT KALININGRAD  AUGUST 2014

Early in 2014 I thought about Kaliningrad again. Online I found Kaliningrad visa information at Konigsberg.ru. It is curious that the website name is from the old German name of Kaliningrad.  There I found that there is a special 72 hour visa for Kaliningrad and only for Kaliningrad for various nationalities including UK which costs 77 euros. Out of interest I had downloaded the form for a standard Russian visa, a dense two A4 page document requiring among other things a list of all the countries you have visited in the last 10 years with dates! I have visited Russia five times but am put off a further visit to mainland Russia by the cost and hassle of the visa.

 The 72 hour visa was much simpler and an email produced a reply from a man called Timur with some information. In early August I applied for the visa giving just name, address, occupation, a scan of my passport and confirmation of a hotel room for three nights.The bank charged £20 for transferring the money and so the visa cost a total of about £77 pounds, more than a pound per hour of visit!  I had to state which bus  I would be taking and said  the 6.30 am bus from Gdansk.    

I received an email from Timur,

On 18 August 2014 10:01, Timur Kuchushev <kaliningradvisa@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Joe Cocker,  

Everything is OK. Please don't forget colored photo. In special case call me mob.     +79062389788.

Best regards, Timur.

That was it -  no reference number or similar, just this email – no mention even of a visa. Some might have thought this an elaborate scam but it had the ring of authenticity for me even if it was a little bizarre - a country renowned for its opaque bureaucracy delivering a visa in this way.

WE’RE ON OUR WAY   - GDANSK

I flew from Manchester to Gdansk for a two night stay. On the Ryanair Boeing 737 I reflected that my fellow passengers might not have enjoyed the flight I made before this one..  A couple of weeks before for my  birthdayI  treated myself to an aerobatic flight in a high powered Pitts Special Biplane  This included loops and rolls such as a four point roll where you bank first to 90^o, then 180^o when you are upside down and hanging in your straps (good idea to empty pockets before flight!), then on round to 270^o and back to level flight -exciting stuff.  It turned out to be a good cure for the hangover from the  birthday celebrations.

I had booked two nights at the Hotel Amber, Gdansk, in order to have time to buy my Kaliningrad bus ticket.The hotel is a little out of town but very comfortable and on a bus route, useful for the return from town up a long steep hill.  I arrived late evening and after a leisurely breakfast next morning strolled down the hill to town.

 I found the bus station and there appeared to be only one window. I was expecting to have to produce passport and possibly other documentation for a visit to Russia. The woman at the window was of the school from Communist days, she had attended the Ena Sharples Charm Academy. (Younger readers should google Ena Sharples). I timidly said in Polish, ‘Kaliningrad tomorrow please.’  She replied ‘yes, 6 am?’  ‘Yes, please.’  ‘50 zloty’ she said. I handed over a 50 zloty note and she produced one of those flimsy till receipts. That was it, my transport to Russia sorted for less than £10. It seemed to take around 30 seconds but even allowing for exaggeration it cannot have taken more than one minute.   That would not have been the case in the old days!

Now I was free to spend the rest of the day renewing my acquaintance with Gdansk. The name Amber Hotel reminded me that ‘amber’ is a name you find everywhere in this part of the Baltic, the world’s greatest producer of Amber.  As I was to discover Kaliningrad claims to be the biggest single source of the precious stone and a whole room in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, now part of the Hermitage Museum is called The Amber room, one of many sumptuously decorated rooms in the Hermitage.  In my life I have known several people with the surname Bernstein but I never realised until this journey that this is the German name for Amber.  (In Polish Burstin, in Russian Yantar).

Another hotel I have stayed in in the centre of Gdansk is called Wolne Miasto.  This means Free City and refers to the fact that Gdansk was once the free city of Danzig. The area had been part of various empires and became part of the German Empire in 1871. After WW1 Poland became an independent country once more and in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles Poland was guaranteed access to the sea and the City-State of Danzig was created but under the auspices of the United Nations and in the inter-war years it had High Commissioners, four of whom were British.  The population was over 90% German which led to much discord. 

New 'old' houses in Gdansk

I took a  trip on a sailing ship  like a pirate boat but with a good engine and we sailed past the shipyards. These yards were the birthplace of Solidarity and so here were sown seeds that led eventually to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.The boat sailed on to Westerplatte where, on September 1^st 1939, the first shots of WW2 were fired by Nazi forces on the Polish Garrison there.  It reminded me that a  couple of years before I stood on the spot in Sarajevo where Gavril Princip fired the shots that killed the Austrian Archduke and his wife and precipitated WW1. Footprints on the Sarajevo pavement make the alleged exact spot of the incident and there is a nearby museum. 

Since my previous visit Gdansk had acquired a smaller version of the London Eye, but quite spectacular. My only companion in the car was a young man  from Ukraine and we talk about that troubled country which I have visited twice. You have to gently ascertain whether a Ukrainian is a Western, Ukrainian speaking citizen, or an ethnic Russian one, my companion was the first. 

A Swiss couple on the boat chatted about their tour. As we drank a beer on deck in the sunshine I told them that my main aim was to visit Kalingrad and the preparations I had made but they were politely sceptical. I am pretty sure they thought I would never get there. Some very pleasant folk music was being broadcast, at least so I thought. On leaving the ship we discovered that the music was live, a man dressed like an old fashion sailor sang and played his guitar.

One of the things that will impress most people on first visiting Gdansk is the number of impressive “old” buildings. Old in parentheses because they did not exist 70 years ago, central Gdansk was reduced to rubble by allied bombing.  However buildings that you might think were 17^th century have been built since WW2. The main church is enormous, the largest parish church in Poland.

ON TO RUSSIA

In the morning my taxi arrived at 5.30 and it took only a few minutes to get to the bus station.  My till receipt told me that the bus would leave from Platform 11. I thought it was due to leave at 6.30 but it was 6.00 but luckily I was in good time.  The Russian bus pulled in and some passengers, all women, put their luggage in the hold at the back. I asked the driver if I should put my rucksack in and he did it for me – without looking at my ticket.  On board he came round, had a look at each ticket and away we went.  The countryside was rather boring and we stopped in a couple of places to pick up a few more passengers and after about an hour we came to the frontier.  There were only 15 of us and no other  tourists as far as I could tell.

There was a long delay for no obvious reason and it was raining in almost monsoon downpours with winds driving the rain sideways, it reminded me of an English Bank Holiday.  I was slightly concerned as I had no official visa, only Timur’s email and was hoping that I would not have to walk back across no mans’ land in the rain.  Eventually a Polish woman immigration officer entered the bus, young, tall, slim, blonde ponytail, high heeled shoes and a gun. She took all our passports and disappeared.  After a while she brought them back and we drove on to the Russian side.  Here in a reversal of expectations the Russian woman immigration officer who boarded the bus was a plumpish, motherly good natured woman who joked with some of the Russian speaking passengers. Again the passports were taken away and eventually returned. We then had to all go to the immigration queue.  

I had thought most of our passengers were Russian but not so. While we were waiting in line an officer came in and asked if there was anyone from Ukraine.  Two women were and it was off to a special office for them.They eventually rejoined us and they may of course have been ethnic Russians from Eastern Ukraine. Other passengers were from Poland, Kazakhstan and Russia plus me. I was third in line to be called forward and wondering what I was going to say, when a young woman rushed in with a sheaf of papers and said something in Russian. It took me a moment to realise that she had said my name. Yes, she had my visa, checked the paperwork, took the colour photo and peeled off a very smart visa and stuck it in my passport.  Among other things it gave my full name in Roman and Cyrillic script, кокер джозеф габризл   COCKER   JOSEPH GABRIEL      Good old Timur!

At the desk it seemed my passport would not scan and so after several attempts the officer had to type in all the numbers. A nervous moment. All was well and the next thing was to take our luggage through customs and scanners. The last time I entered Russia by bus was in 1962 at the Brest Litovsk crossing but that is another story. The books do warn of a lengthy delay at the  frontier for what should be quite a short trip, it is about 102 miles from Gdansk to Kaliningrad but it takes about 4.5 hours. 

I stepped out at Kaliningrad bus station and found myself surrounded by Russian speakers and in a forest of Cyrillic. I tried to get my bearings because I thought my hotel was nearby but I decided to take a taxi. He took me what seemed to be a long way round ,perhaps to justify the fact that the hotel was a five minute walk away, but it may have been due to the one way system. We passed through Lenin Square with its statue of the great man, one of the few left in Russia apparently. 

The Hotel Berlin was very pleasant. An online report had suggested that single rooms were on the small side so for the princely sum of around £35 per night I treated myself to a junior suite.  It was wonderful, large sofa, table and armchair, desk, coffee and tea, disposable slippers,   large double bed, bathroom with bathrobes as well as towels, very comfortable. One or two staff spoke a little English but most did not. 

So off to explore Kaliningrad. 

  I looked up the area of Kaliningrad and found it to be 223 kms²   (86 square miles).  At the bus station I had seen buses coming and going from many destinations and it had taken 45 minutes to drive from the frontier to Kalingrad and it would take more than that to drive to the Lithuanian border in 3 days time. Then it dawned on me, Kaliningrad is also the name of the entire region and the area of this is 15,100  kms²  or 5,830 miles².  This may be tiny by Russian standards but  not by European ones. This makes it slightly larger than Northern Ireland, much larger than Cyprus or nearly 50 times the size of the independent republic of Malta.   Many people I have spoken to have never heard of Kalingrad.

Some of the comments I read online before travelling said that Kaliningrad is boring with little to do or see. One person said that he visited and had ticked it off his list. However I thought I would probably enjoy it and certainly would appreciate its strange political and geographic situation.

On that first afternoon I walked down the main street, LENINSKI PROSPECT. The pavements showed what the guidebook said, that while Kaliningrad is advanced compared with most of Russia it is still poor compared with its neighbours. The street leads down to the Pregolya River with a wide bridge. Although my hotel was new and very modern they could not produce anything like a town map and so I bought one at a kiosk.  Within a couple of hours I had lost it and had to buy another from the same kiosk to the puzzlement of the kiosk lady.  The wide bridge over the  Pregolya or Pregel river is effectively two bridges as it crosses over an island lining both sides of the city to the island.  In German times there were seven bridges in Königsberg and this gave rise to a famous problem in mathematics.  I cannot do better than give the Wikipedia explanation.

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1735 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology.The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. The islands could not be reached by any route other than the bridges, and every bridge must have been crossed completely every time; one could not walk halfway onto the bridge and then turn around and later cross the other half from the other side (the walk need NOT start and end at the same spot). Euler proved that the problem has no solution. There could be no non-retracing the bridges. The difficulty was the development of a technique of analysis and of subsequent tests that established this assertion with mathematical rigor.

So that is one claim to fame for Kaliningrad.   On the island in the middle of the river there is a very well kept park lead down to the  old cathedral, now a concert hall but once the Lutheran cathedral. It has been beautifully restored and although nearly all the Germans were evicted from Kaliningrad after WW2 large numbers now visit and the cathedral and other buildings have benefitted from German money.

 The main attraction for most people visiting the cathedral is a mausoleum on the outside protected by pillars of pink granite. This is the tomb of Immanuel Kant, one of the greats of western  philosophy. His grandfather was Scottish but he was born in Königsberg and never left it.   If I want to try to understand at least something of the work of such philosophers my first port of call now is a book written for children, “Sophie’s World” by the Norwegian Jostein Gaarder.  It is a kind of novel where a mysterious personage introduces Sophie to the works of the great philosophers.  He tells Sophie what is meant by the Categorical Imperative, but something near the end of the chapter caught my eye. 

In his treatise “Perpetual Peace”, Kant wrote that all countries should unite in a league of the nations, which would ensure peaceful co-existence between nations.” 175 years later the League of Nations was founded after WW1.

                                                                               

The Lutheran Cathedral now a museum

Immanuel Kant's Mausoleum     

Detail

More recently I discovered that  the writer and philosopher  Hannah Arendt graduated from Konigsberg University.  She is probably best know for  writing about the Holocaust and “the banality of evil.”

It is a warm sunny midday at the end of August. I am in Freedom Square, Kaliningrad,  sitting in an outdoor area with an excellent beer. There is a well kept green space alongside the café. Across the square the sun is glinting off the golden domes of the new Russian Orthodox Cathedral.  In the centre of the square there is a 7 metre high statue of Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov, better known as Lenin.   Lightly clad Russian girls are walking by.  What’s not to like?

Russian girls deserve a special chapter, there seems to be a far higher number of stunningly pretty girls than you might expect by chance. At a conference in St Petersburg in June a few years ago the wife of a Norwegian delegate told me that he had developed a semi-permanent crick in his neck. I remember a Tabloid newspaper describing Anna Kornikova as “Tennis star and testosterone producer.” I tried to google the top countries for pretty girls but, as I should have expected, pretty is simply equated with sexy or hot. While they may be related they are not the same thing.

  Many Russian girls are  blonde sometimes to the point of being almost white haired and many are slightly snub-nosed. A young blonde girl working in  my hotel bar was extremely pretty in an understated, unselfconscious sort of way.I later saw a photo in the paper of Scarlett Johannson, very similar to the girl in the bar.  Because of the dispersion of peoples that occurred in Soviet times there are also girls who deviate from the blonde model. There were many non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union even though we often referred to the country as Russia.   A waitress in a restaurant in St Petersburg was a little darker than her sisters. I politely asked her where she was from. She laughed because she knew what I was really asking and replied in charming English, “I have four bloods.” Her grandparents were Russian, Ukrainian, Tadjikistani and Azerbaijani  Her features gave just a hint of the darker south and the mongoloid east. 

Back to Freedom Square, Kaliningrad. Not far from here is a Soviet Era building which the books describe as a monstrosity, I was expecting something so awful that the reality was not so bad. It is an enormous H shaped building totally out of keeping with its surroundings.

The ugly building     Note the decadent posters

  

I walked along the river bank where a Maritime Museum was being renovated and an old Soviet submarine could be visited.  I noted river trips being advertised and took one.  Buying a ticket should have been a simple matter but a girl called Svetlana had to be sent for to speak to me in English.  Pleasant trip in warm sunshine.  Walking back afterwards I came to a bar and decided on a beer.  Beer in most places was very cheap but I had picked the wrong, trendy, bar.

The town centre was downhill from my hotel and I decided to venture a bus back. At the bus stop I tried to ask a man where to get a ticket.  It occurred to me later that even if he understood what I was asking he would have thought it a stupid question.  Years ago it would have been a stupid question in England because of course you bought your ticket  from the conductor not from a kiosk or a machine. 

Kaliningrad boasts the greatest production of amber and the Amber museum is well worth a visit.  

The next day I went by bus to the resort of Svetogorsk to see a little more of Kaliningrad.  At the bus station ticket booth a young woman sold me a ticket and not speaking English produced number 11 on her calculator and pointed to bus stop 11. A nice touch.  As I hoped the resort contained far more houses from old German times. There was not much to do and so after wandering up and down the front I took a bus back.

The Kaliningrad bus station is alongside the impressive railway station.You could think that something has gone wrong when you look at the clock there.The clocks in all railway stations in Russia show Moscow Time which makes sense when you think of the number of time zones that some trains and especially the trans-siberian one pass through.The clock must be ‘right’ twice a day.

In the square by the station there a statue without a name on it.  I thought this must be Kalinin and a local confirmed this for me.  Kalinin was a Stalin henchman who never visited Kaliningrad!

The next day I went to the bus station for my onward journey to Klaipeda, Lithuania.  There was some confusion about the bus time, one suggestion was that it started in another part of town and then called here. The first people I asked were not going to Klaipeda but then a couple appeared who were.  The scheduled time was now in the past and as my 72 hour visa was about to expire I started to feel a little nervous, my companions just shrugged their shoulders.  While it would probably not have been a Salt Mines job the thought of the bureaucracy involved in breaching the regulations did not appeal.

Eventually the bus did appear and all was well.  We drove the length of the Curonian Spit and at one point stopped so people could alight to take photos of some wild boar. Klaipeda now felt like coming home.  This is ironic in that less than 30 years ago it was part of the same Soviet Union as Kaliningrad.  Would I return to Kaliningrad,  yes definitely.