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Art Concrete

There’s a lot of Sovietica to trip out on in Kaliningrad. Something that does it for me are the iron and concrete roadsigns.

Make no mistake. This is art and not to be confused in any way with functional industrial design. For a start, the signs are neither illuminated nor reflective and they only work from one approaching direction. So if you can’t read cyrillic backwards in the dark, you’ll be none the wiser. Unless of course you happen to drive smack into one.

It’s a big concept.

Bordering Insanity

Dawn over the Kaliningrad-Polish border. In the night, we moved four car lengths.

Just when you are ready to run screaming out of Kaliningrad, you find you can’t.

I spent 40 hours in the queue at the Kaliningrad-Polish border at Mamonovo. Here they practice a kind of ethnic cleansing by lanes. There’s one lane for Russians and one for Poles and foreigners. Foreigners may get into the ‘less slow lane’ by shelling out backhanders – a facility that isn’t offered to anyone with Polish plates. But by the time I got back to the border, I’d had enough of handing out Euros to Kaliningrad’s corrupt.

The Mamonovo crossing is bordering insanitary, too. There’s just one toilet for a line of cars stretching as far as you can see. No one uses it, because it might be just the one time in two hours that the line moves, and no one wants to risk losing a place. So the immediate verges are a human waste dump. I wrote before that Kaliningrad is a third world country and, quite honestly, a couple of Red Crescent patrols wouldn’t go amiss here, along with a WHO slug clean-up programme. Early AM, it’s fairly slip slidey off-piste.

Nuts Bunch City Limits

This wonderful Soviet-built sleep factory is the Hotel Baltika. Since it’s centrally located in the middle of nowhere, outside Kaliningrad city limits, it’s about the silliest base you could choose for your visit to Kaliningrad.

How did it get here? Well, you have to remember that Kaliningrad was a closed town for forty odd years. Two minutes down the Moscow highway from the hotel there’s still a checkpoint to deter anyone with the foolish notion of motoring into Kaliningrad. Probably, on those old collective holiday outings from factories in Tomsk or Minsk, this is as close as workers ever got to the Baltic coast without a military escort. And still today, the checkpoint is at work dimensioning the oblast’s concept of anti-tourism.

The Baltika bills itself as a conference centre. Certainly, the first floor appears perfect for Politburo AGM’s, with two halls full of red leather chairs. But for some inscrutable reason, Internet only works on Mondays. To help you feel helpless, this vast and isolated complex doesn’t have a bankomat or a shop either. All of which is rather a pity, since the staff and the restaurant are well above local standard.

All Day Soviet Breakfast

One of the pleasures of camping in Russia is that it gets you out into the local markets sampling the local produce.

Actually, not a chance. I was fascinated to learn earlier that Russia even imports potatoes and vodka. (From Holland.) These days it appears Russia imports everything else as well. Barring Polish beef and ‘fascist’ sprats, of course.

So. For ‘zavtrak’, out goes yesterday evening’s borscht and stale kleb. In comes Heinz Beans and Baconburgers.

Russophile notes that Campbell’s is planning to enter the burgeoning Russian market with its own canned borscht. All I can say is that it will be a tough fight for shelf space at Kaliningrad’s Viktoria chain, alongside such traditional Russian favourites as Daucy’s Choucroute Alsacienne and Uncle Ben’s Cantonese Style Sweet’n'Sour.

Why is shelf space tight? According to Elsevier, it’s because the roads are too bad in Russia to drive out to hypermarkets. This they say explains the absence of leading multinationals like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco despite Russia’s impressive retail growth. Hypermarkets were non-existent in Russia five years ago and even now the number of operating hypermarkets in the entire country does not exceed 150 for a population of 144 million.

Georgy Boos’ Bananas Republic

Kaliningraders have made a few giant leaps towards mankind since the Soviet era. Yes there are bankomats and now kitchen roll is appearing in many shops. But be aware that this is still a third world country.

With more tin-roofed shanties than Kingston, Jamaica, overflowing drains, pain threshold border crossings and utterly corrupt police, it’s a bananas place. I counsel not to drive here as a tourist and – absolutely, positively, definitely – not ever with kids. You can just imagine the conversation:

‘Mummy, why has Daddy been sitting in the police car for three hours?’

‘They are just shaking down Daddy for some Euros, darling. Once he’s been marched back from the bankomat we can all go swimming.’

It doesn’t get much better if you live here. About eighty per cent of Kaliningraders live in sub standard housing. Well, ’sub standard’ is being nice. Essentially the old German houses, abandoned by the fleeing populace in 1945, are now derelict in every way, except that people somehow live in them. According to a recent report, the average waiting time for a new house in Kaliningrad is 35 years.

A typical Kaliningrad ‘hovelette’ inherited from Prussians. Even without tiles and plaster, the houses are nevertheless picturesque.

On Not Sightseeing In Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad has many old forts and ramparts. Konigsberg was a fortress city. But only a couple have been restored.

Some of the old gates, like the Sackheim gate above, don’t really lend themselves to happy snaps or history rambles. Which is a pity, since the whole of the Litovsky Val – formerly Litauer Valstraat – has many fine examples of the fortifications constructed in 1850.

Surviving sections of the ramparts have been variously converted into things like petrol stations, garages and night clubs, so it simply isn’t possible to wander round the back – or moat and drawbridge side – of many. The courtyard of the Fortress Caserne Kroonprins – largely intact – is a hang out for junkies and alkies.

Probably the best way to see Konigsberg’s ‘Monuments Of Defensive Architecture’ is not to visit Kaliningrad at all but to buy the beautifully produced book (in English) of the same name by Veniamin Eremeev.

ISBN number is 5-902949-07-6

The rear of the Sackheim is accessible, but the drawbridge is long gone

Dead Flowers

‘You can send me, dead flowers every morning

Dead flowers in the US mail

You can send me, dead flowers for my wedding

And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave’

- Rolling Stones, ‘Dead Flowers’

It’s a unique feature of Russia. You can hardly pass an old monument or wall bust, and certainly not a war memorial, that doesn’t have a lingering floral tribute. Even if it’s just a few petals.

Oooh So Soviet Kaliningrad is littered with dead flowers. The picture below is of the war memorial – an old tank – on the road between Kaliningrad and Svetlogorsk. These soldiers are on dead flower sweeping up duty.

In other towns in Russia, I’ve noticed that the wreaths by the war memorials can be plastic or paper. Not in Kaliningrad. You get real roses on your grave. Have a peek under the tank, where the soldier’s brooms have missed a few.

Umpteenth Nervous Shakedown

‘And it’s a heartbreak when you find out

That trouble is real

In a faraway city, with a faraway feel’

– Gram Parsons, ‘Hickory Wind’

There’s no chalk mark at the scene of the crime. Just a bankomat print-out registering the intersection where I was pulled over and shaken down for 400 Euro, one fine afternoon in August, by the Kaliningrad militsi.

To my shock and horror, I discover I have a documentation error. The temporary admission for my car is a couple of days out of date. Unknown to me, customs at the border had not followed their usual practice of validating the transit for the same period as my visa, car insurance and immigration card. I didn’t think to check the fine print this time. Militsi do.

So, it starts off with the usual piece of theatre. I’m sat in the police car. They confiscate all my documents. The goon takes out an incident report sheet – which he has no intention of filling out. Having ascertained that my name is John, he decides to call me George.

‘George. Money’.

Society Wedding

Weddings are just one of the social events that are celebrated on Kaliningrad’s new bridge, so my camera lucked in to this ready posed group.

Tacky dressing buffs may want to elaborate on the many style-pointers in this picture. It’s a bit advanced class tacky for me.

But I know what you’re wondering. The bride has awfully thick arms. Does she perhaps drive a tram?