In Putin's Footsteps

1 KALININGRAD ^{THE AMBER-TINTED GAZE OF AN EMPIRE TIME ZONE: MSK-1; UTC+2}

Kaliningrad, formerly the German city of Königsberg, has often been called Russia’s western door, yet this door is not always a welcoming one. From here, the country’s exclave (officially, the Kaliningrad Oblast, or region) that borders Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic Sea, the empire gazes with suspicion at anyone who may doubt its superiority and strength.

We arrived late one cool, clear-skied April afternoon at Kaliningrad’s shambolic, undersized airport—an architectural remnant from Soviet times when it was a “closed” city (off-limits, that is, to nonresidents, owing to its strategic significance as the Soviet’s westernmost military outpost) and had just a handful of visitors. We found ourselves greeted with distrust. As we walked off the runway and entered the terminal building, stern blue-uniformed border guards brusquely took all the passengers’ passports. The guards divided us into two lines, one for foreigners, the other for Russians. One guard detained Jeff, an American citizen, and led him up to a “detention” office—a room on the second floor that was empty, save for a fluorescent light and a desk. The guard handed his detainee over to his two colleagues, who questioned him about why he had come to Kaliningrad and the people on his contact list for the city.

“What do you think of Putin?” one of the officers demanded, his doughy face, slack paunch, and diminutive stature belying the seriousness of his expression. His comrade noted down Jeff’s answers. The short man’s questions were coming at a rapid pace.

“What are you doing here?”

“How is it that you speak Russian?”

“You say you’re writing a book about Russia. About what, exactly?”

“Where are you staying in Kaliningrad?”

“Who’s accompanying you?”

“What flight are you taking out of here, and on what date?”

The Western press was reporting that Russia, in apparent violation of a decades-old arms control treaty signed with the United States, had been busy stationing nuclear-capable intermediate-range Iskander missiles in the oblast, so such scrutiny was to be expected. Yet the guards relented when they learned that Jeff was a frequent foreign-policy commentator on the Russian airwaves and was married to a Russian.

Then the officers asked him to call Nina, a Russian citizen, and have her come up for her own cross-examination.

Easier said than done. The airport officials, when she had asked for directions, did not know where the apparently “secret” facility was located. Impatient, the border guards finally sent the American subject of their interrogation down to find her himself.

Nina found it hard to take her interrogator seriously, given his resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. But then it dawned on her—this clever, persistent young man had overcome his looks to turn himself into a duty-bound Guardian of the Motherland, though, as it turned out, a polite and apologetic one. Nonetheless, his questions were still intrusive, a point-by-point verification of all the answers Jeff had given; the guard treated Nina as if she were Jeff’s minder, as they would have done to most women seen with foreign men during the Cold War. They paid particular attention to his feelings about Putin.

“Does he approve of him? Do you?”

“Sometimes,” she answered.

The point came, though, when she had had enough.

“Why all these questions?” she asked. “Kaliningrad isn’t a closed city anymore, right?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “We’re very sorry. You see, this American is a foreigner. You do understand, don’t you?”

Nina nodded, recalling similar interviews by American border officials when she first arrived in New York almost three decades earlier. And now, with relations between the two countries worsening by the day, a guarded approach to Western visitors was back in vogue again.

Jeff, for all intents and purposes a Muscovite now, didn’t bat an eye at such a suspicious reception. Nina, living in New York, was choking with disgust.

“I feel violated,” she said, shaking her head.

Finally we made our way out of the terminal. From the various souvenir stalls and a medley of amber amulets and portraits of varying dimensions made in his image, Vladimir Putin’s stern gaze was fixed upon us with icy distrust. In addition to the amulets, the stalls held an array of amber bracelets, statuettes, and portraits of the double-headed eagle—Russia’s coat of arms.

Amber, colloquially known as Baltiyskoye zoloto (“Baltic gold,” except that it is fossilized tree resin), was everywhere on display, crowding shelves in the terminal’s cluttered arrival hall. Artisans had turned the oblast’s signature treasure into a local strategic resource on a par with oil and gas but utilized it to glorify the nation’s president and insignia of state. It is, of course, a valuable resource. Nine-tenths of the world’s supply of this unique substance originates in the oblast; Kremlin insiders hold a monopoly on its trade, worth more than a billion dollars a year.

Annexed by the Soviets after World War II—in Russia most commonly known as the Great Patriotic War—the Kaliningrad Oblast had previously belonged to the seven-hundred-year-old East Prussian region of Germany. Königsberg was the region’s serene redbrick capital. Renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 to honor the just-deceased Soviet prime minister Mikhail Kalinin, the ceremonial head of state under Lenin and Stalin, the city became the capital of the Soviet Union’s westernmost territory. Yet, apparently, some young people nowadays do not even know the origins of its name. We asked a twenty-five-year-old resident if he knew who Kalinin was, but, flustered, he admitted he did not. In any case, Kaliningrad’s history is fraught with contradictions: the city has retained a Soviet functionary’s name but has removed its hulking Lenin statue from its main square. In its place, municipal authorities have erected an obelisk to the Great Patriotic War. Nobody here would argue with that.

We took a taxi into town, approaching its skyline of mostly ten-story concrete apartment blocks and then trundling down often mud-splattered, potholed, and at times unmarked roads busy with slick, foreign-made cars. Some cars—especially BMWs, Audis, or Volkswagens, bore bumper stickers that read as an exhortation to attack: ON TO BERLIN, AGAIN! That militancy—Russians had defeated Nazi Germany and now use their automobiles to relive the victory—also displayed deep insecurity and evoked a sad, telling irony: they prize German automobiles above their own. The war had dealt cruelly with the city: the old cobbled German streets and quaint, gingerbread German houses remain intact almost exclusively in the Amalienau and Maraunenhof districts. Elsewhere, Kaliningrad, two and a half decades after the demise of the communist state, is Soviet and gray.

A Soviet war trophy of sorts, the Kaliningrad Oblast was, oddly, never formally transferred to the communist government; although Germany has never officially demanded its return, it has never renounced it, either. Perhaps, because of this, the fear of “re-Germanization” looms. Today, the Kremlin uses the exclave’s very ambiguity to ratchet up anti-Western rhetoric.

But what does the fear of “re-Germanization” mean, exactly? Germanization in Kaliningrad—as understood by Russians—is the belief that Germany is eager to relocate ethnic Germans back to Kaliningrad, actively and aggressively infusing the territory with German culture. If such were to occur, it would surely be as bad as the Nazi occupation, the state insists. This fear of “re-Germanization” isn’t novel; it was a constant undercurrent in Kaliningrad’s Soviet history. And even though people here frequently travel to the Baltics, Poland, and Germany on long-term Schengen visas and witness little evidence of this “threat” while there, in a country where the state is so imposing, how does one disregard the propaganda? The Western menace is often discussed on television and the harrowing memory of Nazism is never allowed to quite fade into historical oblivion. And, the argument goes, just about the only thing protecting the country from this threat is Putin.

The next day was rainy and cool—typical Baltic weather. Maxim, the enterprising, thirtysomething son of a Moscow acquaintance of ours, kindly offered to give us a tour of the city and the surrounding towns. We drove out in his slick black Audi through morning traffic into the rain-sodden fields and forests of the countryside, briefly stopping at the military hamlet of Pionersky, our first encounter with Putin’s specter on this trip. Rumor has it that the Russian president, who visits frequently, stays in a villa behind a tall green wall. We also dropped in on Svetlogorsk, an up-and-coming resort hardly renowned during the Soviet era. Then, the Soviets boasted of Latvia as their major Baltic vacation spot.

Maxim had previously worked as an engineer in the ports of Kaliningrad and Baltiysk (formerly the German town of Pillau) but now finds himself employed by the Chinese, preparing their soybean oil containers for shipping. These two ports shelter Russia’s Baltic fleet and have, since the Soviet era, formed the epicenter of the region’s military-oriented economy. Maxim told us that he was disappointed to have lost his state-related job recently owing to the Kremlin’s shift of resources toward the Crimean Peninsula.

Crimea—in 988 it became the cradle of Orthodox Christianity for Kievan Rus, the original protostate for both Russia and Ukraine—had been officially Russian since 1783, when Empress Catherine the Great seized it from the Crimean Khanate, then a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. In the Soviet Union Crimea remained under the Kremlin’s jurisdiction, but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Joseph Stalin after his death, transferred it to Ukraine, which was, just like Russia, one of fifteen Soviet Republics within one country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). There were many reasons for that transfer, administrative and economic, but uppermost was the desire to overcome Stalin’s legacy of central control. Khrushchev thought of Ukraine and Russia as equal nations; he assigned historical primacy to ninth-century Kiev, not to Moscow, which until the 1100s was just an obscure village in the woods.

But following the Euromaidan protest movement in Kiev that led to the 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, Russia annexed Crimea with a stealth invasion. Announcing the annexation in March 2014, Putin insisted that “in people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.”[9] He thereby vilified Khrushchev—by whose action Russia was not “simply robbed, it was plundered.” The speech set up a dichotomy that now stands at the core of Russian identity: strong-hand rulers like Putin or Stalin—those who collect Russian lands—standing against reformers like Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev, who give them away. Kievan Rus, too, was eventually torn apart—Great Russia versus Small Russia (“Malorossiya,” an old Russian name for Ukraine).

Arguing that for sixty years the Crimean dream has been to return under the wings of Mother Russia, the Kremlin had to deliver on its promise to improve life on the peninsula. The minimum monthly cost of living on the peninsula has been around 14,000 rubles ($240), which is more than half the average salary and 10 percent higher than that of Russia’s southern regions bordering Crimea.[10] Moreover, the price for upgrading or rebuilding the peninsula’s economic and social infrastructure has been calculated—so far—as anything from $10 billion (300 billion rubles) to $85 billion (3 trillion rubles).[11] And since Crimea lacked an overland connection to Russia (one of the reasons for Khrushchev’s transfer), Russia constructed a bridge across the Kerch Strait, which consumed funds (almost $4 billion) that would have gone to other regions of the country. The bridge opened last year, shortly after Putin’s triumphant win in presidential elections and his inauguration; its opening was, as one would expect, a grand affair, with Putin the first to cross it—in a giant Kamaz truck, an event broadcast throughout the country. The almost twelve-mile-long steel structure—the longest bridge in Europe—physically reunited Russia and Crimea. Or “Russia’s birthplace,”[12] as Putin called it in his remarks.

To build that bridge and accomplish everything else it planned to do, the Russian government had been awarding contracts to Crimean businesses to keep them afloat as they went through the transition from Ukrainian to Russian sovereignty. And even though the military has been aggressively returning to the Kaliningrad exclave—as a strategic territory inside the West it has recently become one of Europe’s most militarized places—the city’s ports, which had once been thriving shipping centers, have slowly been abandoned as commercial entrepôts and taken on an important status as military installations. Replacing the Baltics, Crimea has become the new Russian showcase.

Maxim, displaying all the staple attributes of Russian (actually foreign) “cool”—Ray-Ban sunglasses, Polo jeans, and a blue quilted Barbour jacket—told us that his father, a Kaliningrad-born naval officer, had made a fortune on deals with the armed forces during the Putin years. Although unable to advance his own career, Maxim was certainly benefiting from his father’s success: he owned a nice car and traveled abroad frequently. The young man both criticized and supported the Kremlin, thereby evincing an attitude we would encounter elsewhere in Russia—people neither demonized nor deified Putin but viewed him and his administration in light of their achievements and failings.

“Putin is a smart man,” Maxim said admiringly, as his Audi carried us through the austere Baltic landscape—here, mostly coniferous forest. The air was redolent of the calming scents of pine cones and the nearby sea.

He spoke at length about the Kaliningrad Oblast’s status as Russia’s paramount “strategic zone.”

“Do you believe that the Germans are really planning on invading?” we asked.

He did not, but he understood why the Russian government needed to send such a message—to instill in the oblast’s population a mind-set for potential confrontation, so that no one would be taken by surprise if the West did attack. This might seem like a far-fetched notion, but the dramatic deterioration of relations between the West and Russia following the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, and the buildup of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in the Baltic region, made it a justifiable concern for the Russian government.

Yet Maxim was disillusioned. Since the 2014 annexation, life had become so much more expensive in Kaliningrad that shopping for food in Poland was cheaper. The ports, once bustling with trade, were now less busy. If at times they were employed, it was for the purpose of impressing on German cruise ship passengers the purportedly formidable might of the Russian navy.

“Once the cruise ships dock,” Maxim told us, “a submarine, already retired from the fleet, surfaces within their view. The tourists don’t know it’s been retired. It’s just used to show off, to tell them, ‘See what Russia can do against your NATO!’ And the Germans are frightened,” he added with a chuckle, “and start taking pictures.”

Although Maxim only half believed in the threat supposedly emanating from NATO, an older taxi driver we later struck up a conversation with unquestionably did. “In Russia, with all the history we have had, why should we be afraid of NATO? Of the Germans?” he asked sarcastically. Such is the sentiment prevailing throughout Russia, as we would discover during our travels across the country’s eleven time zones. Fears dormant for two decades have been reemerging with the renewed volatility in relations with NATO countries. In a country thrice invaded from the West in recent centuries—the last time in 1941, within living memory of so many Russians—the scars of war are real, the fear of it is hard to appreciate for those living with a more peaceful past.

The Kaliningrad Oblast, home to almost a million people, is now about 80 percent ethnically Russian, yet its Russian identity seems more fragile than elsewhere in the country. Perhaps this derives from a profound sense of cultural dislocation: through a program of coercion and promises, after the war the Soviet Union encouraged its peasants from central Russia to relocate as urban dwellers to the newly obtained exclave by way of tax credits and internal passports. Peasants didn’t have such passports at the time, but urban dwellers did. They were also lured with a promise of comfortable homes and better supplies of food. Roughly 400,000 peasants moved to Kaliningrad between 1947 and 1950, to restart their lives and rebuild the city in the Soviet image.

Kaliningrad residents have since been taught to celebrate and, moreover, take credit for the legacy of a history that is not their own—for example, the fourteenth-century Königsberg Cathedral; the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant; the famed Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, author of a fairy tale that the world-famous story “The Nutcracker” is based on, made even more famous by the ballet set to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s music. Marvelous, these—but not all Russian.

The currently Russian Kaliningrad region, with so little of its own Russian history, strikingly manifests the split personality disorder afflicting the country as a whole. Nothing symbolizes this division more than the bicephalous eagle. The eagle is a vestige of the Russian Empire, which claimed to be the successor to the Byzantine Empire from which Russia adopted its Christian beliefs. The Soviet Union abandoned the bird after 1917, but it was revived again when the new Russia was searching its past for a new identity.

Following the fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century, Russia, fortified with its new double-headed eagle emblem, began seeing itself as the Guardian of the True Faith, in opposition to “heretical” Rome-based Catholicism. The eastern and western churches had excommunicated each other in the Schism of 1054, an event that would have momentous consequences for Russia and its relations with the West. Russians dubbed their own capital, Moscow, the “Third Rome” (the first Rome having been Rome, the second Constantinople). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church reemerged from the shadows. During the Soviet era, after initial persecution, the church was tolerated; in post-1991 Russia, it has been celebrated and recognized in the country’s otherwise secular constitution for the special role it had played in Russian history. As it had in bygone Byzantium, the double-headed eagle signifies Russian domination over a territory encompassing parts of both Europe and Asia. Russia’s borders, after all, extend from Kaliningrad in Europe to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Asia (on the Pacific Ocean) and Chukotka, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska.

In the Putin years, the eagle’s significance has come to rival that of the communist-era red star. The not-so-subtle idea behind the Byzantine connection is that Russia can (and should) exist only as a counterweight to the West; the West had troubled, often competitive relations with Byzantium just as it does now with Byzantium’s spiritual heir, Russia. Nowadays, more than ever before, the double eagle embodies the country’s split personality, the deep-rooted anxiety of a former superpower torn between the old and the new, between the past and present. We are Western, European, people told us in Kaliningrad, yet their behavior, both haughty and insecure, could not have been more Russian. They argue that Russia, a continent of its own, doesn’t need approval from abroad to prosper. Yet, simultaneously, they crave that approval.

In Kaliningrad a Western lifestyle has emerged, at least as residents understand it. They pass long hours in cafés and go on frequent shopping sprees to Poland. The “Westernness” of Russian towns and cities may be evaluated, to an extent, by the ease with which they have accepted the café culture of Europe—the sharing of leisurely moments over a cup of coffee, something less substantial than a meal or a drink. This, we would see, varies greatly from place to place. When, for example, people have disposable income in Tyumen (the capital of Siberian oil), they mostly spend it on furs, jewelry, and appliances; there, cafés are hard to come by. But in Kaliningrad—so close to the West and bearing a history that makes it Western—café culture exists, yet only in a superficial, inchoate form. Naturally, it has not cured the paranoid attitude of the authorities.

When asked how they feel about being Russian in this once so Prussian a city, the locals responded, “Well, Krym nash [Crimea is ours]!” In other words, “What we’ve taken we keep and make ours, by virtue of our strength, our military power; we took back Crimea, and we will not give it up!”

Many Russians indeed believe in their inherent ownership—97 percent of Crimeans voted for the annexation in March 2014; 88 percent of all Russians supported the move at the time, and in March 2018 the number is almost unchanged—86 percent.[13] The takeover has not only pitted Ukraine and the West against Russia, it has also divided many families. Even Khrushchev’s son Sergei, Nina’s uncle, once said that for the Russians, the public referendum that supported Crimea’s takeover was as legitimate as throwing out Yanukovych was for the Ukrainians.

“Krym nash,” the typical Russian response to any militant or oppressive move by the Kremlin, we saw as a display of feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once. Again, think of the double-headed eagle, the split-personality syndrome.

This newly revived fear of foreign associations—somewhat odd in an exclave so proud of its Western heritage—may well have been shared by one of our potential contacts, Andrei Klemeshev, the rector of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Despite our repeated attempts to arrange an interview for this book, he avoided meeting us. We did not expect this: after all, his university was once the open-minded Albertina (as the University of Königsberg was formerly known), where Kant himself served as rector and taught logic and metaphysics; it was also the alma mater of Hoffmann and the birthplace of German Romanticism. Cordial on the phone at first, Klemeshev soon stopped answering our calls and ignored our texts. In a militarized city on the border, he might have decided that meeting with us would create problems for him with the authorities. This was a reasonable, if a slightly paranoid, supposition: after all, we—one of us an American, the other a Russian critic of Putin living in New York—might have served to incriminate him by mere association. His response reflected the increasing animosity between Russia and the West and was reminiscent of suspicions that made Russians wary of entertaining Westerners during the Cold War era. Others in Kaliningrad, too—including the head of the German Relations Center—refused to see us, citing busy schedules or forthcoming trips.

Our difficulties in arranging meetings put us in mind of a scene from Russian literature. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita—which for so many Russians was, during the atheist decades of communism, a Soviet gospel of sorts—a theater administrator, Varenukha, dodged phone calls from those hoping to secure tickets to a scandalous show featuring Satan (the character Woland, in Bulgakov’s telling). Spoofing Goethe’s Faust and Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, Bulgakov, writing in the Stalin era, depicted Woland as surveilling Muscovites en masse. Perhaps Klemeshev, too, thought he was being watched, and that we had come to town to ask him probing, even judgmental, questions.

One person, though, did agree to meet with us—Igor Rudnikov, a deputy of the Kaliningrad City Council and the editor of the popular opposition newspaper Novye Kolesa (New Wheels). (He would pay dearly for his political views; in November 2017 he was arrested on trumped-up charges of extortion.)

On an afternoon of rain and whipping wind we found him in his office in a nondescript suburb, which, like so much of Kaliningrad, resembled a construction site. A balding, trim bespectacled man in his early fifties, Rudnikov seemed excited. He had just returned from a court case that pitted him and his clients against a “criminal businessman” who wanted to build a fourteen-story hotel without the requisite permits. There had been two murders in Kaliningrad recently, he explained, but “The police are on the side of killers, of course.”

Rudnikov was eager to talk to an American. In him, as in others we would encounter on our travels, Westerners—especially Americans—still inspire reverence and often receive preferential treatment, despite the xenophobic attitude of the authorities. The Soviet Union was largely closed to foreigners, and curiosity is still evident in now rather common encounters. Moreover, Russia has felt inferior and envious toward the West throughout its history, hence its often-militant display of grandstanding and superiority in human relations translates as fascination and desire for contact.

Receiving the American’s attention, for an hour and a half, Rudnikov lectured us on Russian politics: “For a century, our country has been in the grip of total lies.” As had the border guards at the airport, he treated Nina as Jeff’s helper–a reflection of sexist bias still so common in Russia. Sure, women write books in Russia all the time, but a male foreigner is in any case worthier of serious attention than a Russian female. (We did not advertise Nina’s Khrushchev connection.)

Rudnikov was particularly concerned about the vulnerability of an American writer traveling around Russia, believing that such an American would inevitably provoke suspicion. “Yesterday you Americans were our friends. Today, you aren’t, and no one will want to talk to you. The way it is nowadays,” he added, channeling the state’s message, “if you explain you’re writing a book, you’ll be immediately considered a spy, a provocateur. You have to come up with a better cover.”

Cover? The odd, very Cold War choice of words made us doubt what he was saying. The expressions on our faces surely reflected this, possibly prompting him to clarify: “But here in Kaliningrad it’s different, of course. Europe is a stone’s throw away. Here we see Russian patriots only at soccer matches.”

This was not quite our impression. Rudnikov was a member of the opposition, after all, but as it turned out, he had it wrong. In places we were to visit farther east, which we expected to be more nationalist and patriotic, people were, in fact, much less suspicious than in Kaliningrad.

We told him of our travails in attempting to interview people in town. He offered an explanation that contradicted what he had just said. In his view, what made some in Kaliningrad so closed-minded, was the oblast’s proximity to the West and, therefore, at least as the authorities saw it, the distinct possibility that Kaliningrad might succumb to Western influence.

Rudnikov told us that in the early 2000s Kaliningrad was proud that Putin’s then-wife Lyudmila hailed from here.

“Putin was no stranger to this town,” he said. “What’s more, for the first two terms of his presidency, Kaliningrad was supposed to become Russia’s European enclave, a qualitative test for Russo-European relationships that would then be replicated in the rest of the country.” In fact, he explained, in 2005 Königsberg/Kaliningrad celebrated its 750th anniversary as a joint German-Russian city. This reflected a dramatic change in the authorities’ attitude toward Kaliningrad’s history, which they had previously depicted as beginning, basically, only in 1945. Germany welcomed the inclusive continuity of the “new” view of the city’s past; German tourists whose families were originally from the area could now visit without feeling burdened by the Nazis’ crimes in the Soviet Union. The government then proclaimed Kaliningrad a Free Economic Zone (appropriately nicknamed Yantar, or Amber) and dubbed it Russia’s Hong Kong, with tax tariffs lower than elsewhere in the country. Rudnikov detailed for us the inevitable distortions to which such status led: clever entrepreneurs imported goods—from foodstuffs to automobiles—from Germany and other European countries only to repackage and relabel them “Made in Kaliningrad,” so that they might sell them as authentically Russian.

Kaliningrad’s pro-Western orientation, however, began to change in 2002, when President George W. Bush announced that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (a cornerstone arms control agreement of the Cold War) it had signed with the Soviet Union. He further decided to deploy missile defense systems (supposedly against threats emanating from Iran) in Poland and other Eastern European countries. Relations soured further after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent imposition of Western economic sanctions on the Russian economy. Kaliningrad set about converting itself into a fortress of sorts, in preparation for conflict with the NATO alliance. Russia accomplished this easily; after all, it had never fully dismantled the oblast’s military infrastructure and continued sheltering its Baltic fleet there. In addition to basing Iskander missiles in the oblast, which became official in 2018, it has recently set about building long-range anti-missile radar installations.

During the Prussian centuries, the city was a fortress, too, then facing the Russian frontier. In the Soviet decades, the old German forts—seven in total, grim, all built of grimy red brick—were converted into Great Patriotic War museums and operate as such today. The tanks and submarines strategically placed by these forts serve as a reminder to visitors of the threat from the West.

Rudnikov insisted that actual warfare was not looming; instead, a virtual combat involving a “hybrid” war of perceptions and information was on, because neither side—for obvious reasons—actually wants to fight. Nevertheless, “This threat,” he said, “helps bolster the state’s propaganda. After the Soviet collapse there was talk that Kaliningrad might split from Russia, just as parts of Yugoslavia broke away, and became independent.” He termed the “threat of Germanization” a convenient political tool, nothing more.

During the war the Soviets decimated large parts of the city in retaliation for the Nazi destruction of so much of western Russia. The city had been laid to waste: infrastructure was in ruins, there was no running water or electricity, and a shortage of food and medical supplies persisted. Stalin, however, saw an opportunity amid the destruction. He would have Königsberg completely rebuilt to represent the New Soviet City. This transformation—from a “fascist” city embedded in almost a millennium of German culture into a Socialist dream town devoid of German influence—necessitated a complete erasure of its past.

Nevertheless, the Soviet government followed political considerations in determining what it destroyed and what it left standing. Miraculously surviving both the Nazi and the Soviet assaults, Königsberg Cathedral is still the focal point of the city. It stands on the stone embankment of the lightly wooded Kant Island (once Kneiphof Island) in the Pregel River, amid Kaliningrad’s Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks. Kant is interred beside its north wall, in a triple-plinthed grave supporting an elongated pyramidal slab. The Bolsheviks considered Kant a precursor to Karl Marx, and Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason was seen as an argument against the existence of God. Hence, the Soviet government decided to leave the cathedral intact.

During the Soviet decades the house of worship fell into disrepair, but under Putin, the maintenance of Kaliningrad’s cultural heritage became a priority. The Gothic cathedral was renovated and restored to much of its glory.

Much, but not all. One drizzly morning, we took a taxi to the cathedral, passing by older women selling flowers, fruits, and vegetables from little stands on the sidewalks, and noting scruffy men of all ages bundled up against the weather, fishing for pike in the canal’s pewter-colored waters. We walked around the massive redbrick structure, where, despite ten years of restoration, many of its windows still sported shoddy slabs of cardboard instead of the original stained glass. Approaching Kant’s tomb, we heard a Russian guide addressing a group of fifteen Russian tourists. After informing her guests that Kant lay buried in front of them, she added, with a schoolmarm’s imperiousness, “And now I invite you to honor the memory of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant with a moment of silence.”

The group fell silent, and so did we—out of shock. After all, who honors a philosopher, a thinker whose legacy consists of words, with silence? Such a practice was eerily familiar from Soviet days, when it was common to observe “moments of silence” for the memory of Lenin, Stalin, or Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev after his ouster in 1964. We half-expected her to refer to Kant as “our Soviet comrade.”

After some seventy years of communism, during which the state told its citizens not only how to think about politics, but what to make of history, philosophy, and pretty much everything else, Soviet bureaucratic jargon still has a grip on the Russian psyche. When czarist-era peasants became post-1917 proletarian revolutionaries, they adopted this officialese to convince themselves and others of their new status, affirming their transformation from peasant to urbanite. One of Bulgakov’s satirical masterpieces, The Heart of a Dog, recounts just such a phenomenon. The writer had a Russian scientist transmogrify a lovable mutt into a despicable communist functionary spouting militantly officious lingo to humorous effect. After the Soviet Union’s collapse such language still permeates the interactions between citizens and state employees—and even those in the private sector.

We found evidence of this at the cathedral’s elaborate lavatory, where a sign outside indicated its rezhim raboty, or “work regime.” “Regime” is a holdover from the Soviet past, when all sorts of institutions, from airports to factories to local bakeries to corner cobblers, were governmental entities serving the nation in accordance with criteria laid out in five-year plans. The economy was planned, and everything was ready for potential militarization. (Twenty-five years since the end of communism, a good number of cafés and restaurants—and not only in Kaliningrad—still present themselves to the public as if they were national security installations.) Inside the lavatory, the middle-age female attendant, when we complimented her on the lush, even exotic, potted flowers gracing the atrium between the men’s and women’s rooms, replied gruffly that they exist “po rasporyazheniyu administratsii.” She meant that the flowers were arranged according to the instructions of the church’s administration. State planning has not only failed to fade away, it has extended to public toilets.

The cathedral opens every day starting at ten in the morning. Much more than a church, it now hosts, on its upper stories, a museum devoted to Kant. On the ground floor it houses a spectacular music hall staging concerts in the evenings and featuring a Baroque organ dating back to the 1800s; two chapels are in operation just inside the entrance portals. Yet here, even religious faith bears traces of history and politics: one chapel is Lutheran, a tribute to the Protestantism of its builders; the other, Russian Orthodox.

We were among the first to walk in that morning. By the ticket office we immediately found ourselves witness to a conversation reflecting Russia’s internal tensions—between its history and its ideology, its geography, and its identity.

An elderly cleaning woman saluted the uniformed guard on duty and wished him a pleasant Border Guard Day. In fact she was a month early; Border Guard Day falls on May 28. No matter: in Russia, holidays honoring members of various professions—journalists, teachers, postmen, the armed forces, and so on—sprinkle the calendar.

The man replied, “I’m guarding the cathedral, not the border.”

“No,” the woman said, “we’re surrounded by borders. We must be vigilant! We’re all border guards here!”

A passing Lutheran priest, stern and silver-haired, jumped into the conversation. “Why do they even bother to worship God when the only person they truly worship is Stalin?”

The cleaner answered, “Well, we have to pray to someone, and Stalin is the worthiest. He instilled the fear of God in everyone.” The incongruity of describing an atheist tyrant—in the 1930s alone almost 200,000 priests were arrested,[14] and half were shot to death—as capable of arousing piety eluded her, as it eludes many increasingly patriotic Russians. She then turned to an icon of Christ above the entrance to the Orthodox chapel and crossed herself.

Once inside the Lutheran chapel, we looked to the priest—also a tour guide, as it happened—for an explanation. Why would Stalin be so openly worshipped in such a “Western” city? Moreover, in a cathedral the Bolsheviks might have leveled, had they governed the oblast in their first decades in power? Even in Moscow, adoration for the tyrant—many Russians do hold him in high regard and his rating as the “most outstanding” Russian tops everyone’s list, including Putin’s—finds expression in subtler ways.[15]

The priest shrugged. “She’s a drill sergeant,” he said sarcastically. “So is everyone here.”

He had a point. A base, Soviet mind-set survives in much of Russia, even in a place as un-Soviet as a cathedral. We soon encountered further evidence of this. We sat down on a bench in front of the music hall to check the concert schedule, only to be ordered by an elegantly dressed attendant to get up and move—now!

“You can’t sit here!” she barked.

“Why not?”

“You just can’t!”

We could hear music—musicians rehearsing for their evening concert?—coming from behind the door to the concert hall. Perhaps, we thought, she didn’t want us to listen for free. Still, there were polite ways of asking us to leave. The underlying assumption of Soviet life, and much of Russian life, too, is that things are forbidden—unless you are advised otherwise.

The Lutheran priest, who turned out to be ethnically German, informed us that he’s “here because of my German roots.” His mien displayed the arrogance of a Westerner certain that his right to reside in Kaliningrad trumped that of the presumably “inferior” Russian usurpers surrounding him. He went on to tell us that he descended from Germans who, some 250 years ago, heeded the call of the Prussian-born empress Catherine the Great to her former countrymen to come to Russia and establish orderly, German-style farming amid disorderly Russian peasants, mostly along the Volga River. (His family ended up in Kaliningrad after the war, possibly uprooted by Stalin’s forced transfer of potentially “treasonous” populations.) Catherine the Great’s invitation marked the beginning of the country’s Russo-German history, and thereby set up a dichotomy within Russia itself—enlightened European Russia versus ignorant Russian Russia—the very Russia embodied, at least for this priest, by the “drill sergeant” janitor.

We ascended the stairs to the cathedral’s Kant museum, walking in past a table where a vendor sold Kant chocolate, Kant kitchen magnets, and Kant mugs, alongside Putin portraits, Putin mugs, and a variety of badges and paraphernalia bearing the eagle. Inside the museum proper, we examined Kant busts, Kant sculptures, and books by and about Kant in many languages. Soon we came upon a diorama of old Königsberg, with its miniature brick buildings and cobbled streets laid out in perfect order beneath churches with soaring spires—all in all, a placid, quaint depiction of a past era.

The blind arrogance of such a display here was cynical indeed; after all, it was the Russians who reduced the city to rubble in 1945 to stamp out traces of its German past.

And Stalin’s vision of rebuilding the city was a far more complicated affair than the display let on; it involved cultural nuances, propaganda, and ethnic cleansing.

It is important to remember that as the Russian peasantry rebuilt their new city, Stalin was effectively convincing Soviet citizens that the biggest enemy facing the Soviet Union often came from within the country—and particularly from ethnic minorities such as Germans, Chechens and Dagestanis in the Caucasus, and others elsewhere. Ultimately, both the Soviet Union and the newly relocated Russian peasants of Kaliningrad blamed ethnic Germans for the war. By that time, many people, and not just the Soviets in fact, had come to believe that Germans were inherently fascist. So the Germans had to be blamed for difficulties suffered in Kaliningrad’s struggle to become the New Soviet City.

Through locally taken decisions the Russian peasants occupying the city began removing traces of Germanness: the boulevards were widened, the German-like facades of buildings were removed, the ruins of castles were destroyed, and monuments were taken down. The final step was the expulsion of 100,000 Germans from Kaliningrad. Some were either expelled to East Germany; others became forced laborers or starved.

Effectively, within five years, the city had wiped out the greater part of its historical legacy.

The diorama in the cathedral’s museum appeared designed to tout Russia’s ability to bridge the old and the new, as if Russia had nothing to do with the death of the past. That death was evident as soon as one stepped outside the cathedral. As the contrast between the idyllic diorama of the museum and the roughshod cement cityscape demonstrated, Russia was neither at ease with its history nor capable of entirely rejecting it. Despite all the efforts made—by both the state and its people—the idea of a new Soviet Kaliningrad was never fully realized, nor did the city fully erase its German roots.

And yet nowhere was this visible in the idyllic diorama. Nor, of course, was Kaliningrad’s most prominent present-day feature: the gigantic twenty-one-story House of Soviets. The building calls to mind a shoddily designed modernist office chair built in the 1970s. Built during Brezhnev’s time, it is the embodiment of an era once known as “developed socialism.” So developed, in fact, that it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the building never completed as a result.

Kaliningradians joke that the House of Soviets is their most prominent landmark. At least, we learned, it is a useful one. For a reasonable price, they told us, you can bribe a guard to enter it at night for wall climbing or to throw a drinking party with a view of the city and the sea.

After sifting through two floors of the museum’s Kant memorabilia, we mounted a steep staircase leading up to a half-empty chamber where the philosopher’s openmouthed plaster death mask, so fragile and delicate, lay under glass. The mask left us with the impression that we had come across a more refined version of Lenin embalmed in his mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square. Indeed, Kant’s iconic presence here and throughout the museum and town, is almost Lenin-like, appearing when least expected, yet almost omnipresent. To paraphrase an old Russian saying—first it was the nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin who was nashe vse (our everything); then it was Lenin; and here in Kaliningrad it is Kant.

Our stay in Kaliningrad drew to a close. Early on the first sunny afternoon we had experienced since landing, we arrived at the city’s airport to find its departure hall in chaos. Unruly lines of passengers shifted between registration counters—inexplicably, check-ins for flights were first announced at one counter but then switched to others without warning. No one could say why. Loud gaggles of Chinese students showed up and barged in, pressing around us, leaving us little hope of making our flight. We managed to reach a counter only by cutting into lines, as did everyone else. So much about traveling in Russia has become easier, but the Russians’ behavior made sense here, and was a reversion to historical norms: in the past, the Russian version of standing in line was akin to storming a cattle wagon. Putin’s stern gaze set in amber fixed us from the souvenir stands as, just barely, we managed to check in and head for the gate to board our flight. Even in the city Putin once hoped to transform into a tiny “Europe within Russia,” chaos Russian style was still, at least in places, a fact of life.

We flew out over the sea, circled around, and turned east. From high above we saw the land beyond Kaliningrad’s concrete bounds sweep away into rain-drenched countryside—the Baltic Plain, a band of sandy-soiled terrain and pine forests stretching from Germany in the west across Poland all the way to Saint Petersburg in the east. Seen from the sky, the plain offered somnolent vistas promising a tranquility that surely helped men of letters, including Kant and Hoffmann, in their meditation and creative labors. We even spotted the resort town of Svetlogorsk that we had visited earlier with Maxim in his Audi. There, we had found the facades of new shops and markets copying the old, resembling Disney-like re-creations of the prewar Prussian buildings surrounded by drab Soviet suburbs; for us, the scene stood for the spirit of Putin’s country, a country often in contradiction with itself.