Back in Kaliningrad

RUSSIA

copydude Kaliningrad. Crazy Place. Crazy Women.

I blipped and edited this earlier post because I couldn’t find quite the right pic. But then one just popped in my mailbox by happy chance. Baltic Lilya, pictured above, writes to me that she is interested in cooking, cleaning and pressing flowers. And she is interested in a man between the ages of 18 and 99. Well, it sounds like a perfect match! Think I should give her a call?

copydude Meanwhile Back In Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad pictures by Ed Austin

I last drove through Mamonovo on a midriff-baring summer day, passing the time in the border queue with a packed Olga lunch of chicken and Georgian wine.

Seasons change but the queue remains the same. I’m sure I recognise some of the Polish cars still here from last year. Obviously beef smugglers. The Polish line never appears to move.

It reminds one that Kaliningrad was a closed town for 50 years. Well, the whole oblast was closed. There’s a Wiki entry on Russian closed towns, but Greg McNafferson’s ‘Russian Geography’ is far more illuminating: In the times of the Iron Curtain there were many towns in Russia, where parts of nuclear bombs were manufactured. Such towns were called ‘post office boxes’, because they were represented only by a postal address like ANPR-566—833. Nobody knew where such a town was, whether it was big or small or what its inhabitants did.

The secrecy was so high that even inhabitants themselves didn’t know where their town was located — in the South or in the Far East, in Russia or another Soviet Republic of the great USSR. These towns were not marked on maps, of course.

Reading the recent publications on military history of Russia, I have found out that not only were there hidden towns and villages in Russia, but also whole hidden Republics!

And the main incredible discovery is that Russia itself was hidden!

Forget everything you think you know about Russia. Forget what you think you know about the country’s location. The power of the KGB has no borders. Do you really think the US government wanted to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 10, 1945? You are deeply mistaken. Rockets were aimed at Moscow, Russia. Or, to be correct, at the place where American secret service thought Moscow should be.

Foreseeing the possibility of the Russian capital location being uncovered, KGB moved the capital from one city to another every year and renamed many towns so that they would have similar names. Even today you can hear people saying something like ‘I am leaving for the north capital’ meaning St. Petersburg. In fact, there are still 134 cities named Moscow, 108 St. Petersburgs and many others. Such cities are called brother cities.

Only after perestroika did Gorbachev agree to lift the curtain of mystery over the country’s location, since international airlines had to know where to land.

As it happens, Baltijsk, the old Soviet naval base in Kaliningrad, is still partly restricted and if you plan to sail around this part of the Baltic you need special and highly complicated invitations from local yacht clubs. Otherwise a Soviet destroyer will dang your dinghy.

Kaliningrad takes on another character in winter. Despite all its recent Eurostyle rejuvenation the old, bleak Soviet landscape dominates. Here’s a nice picture of an old Soviet sculpture, originally designed to show the time in different parts of the world. The base is a map but nobody can remember the clocks ever working. Perhaps this was to prevent the residents of Kaliningrad from knowing their true co-ordinates