And so we went. Oliver, who was born in Estonia in 1974 when it was part of the U.S.S.R., was impressed. “It’s a real achievement,” he told me afterward. “What used to be the grimmest and gloomiest of all places in Russia has been turned into a beacon of historical truth and freedom of thought.” I had been moved also. Something about the experience jogged my memory. I thought of Ayn Rand — my favourite novelist when I was 19 — and something she once said. I looked up the quotation and started my article with it, in the original context:

“Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” Rep. John McDowell of the House Committee on Un-American Activities asked the novelist Ayn Rand. “You paint a very dismal picture.” It was 1947 and Rand, a Russian émigré, was giving testimony before the committee regarding life in Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

“Look,” Rand retorted, “it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free.”

Had McDowell been able to see Perm-36, the last remaining Gulag forced-labor camp, which is now a tourist attraction and memorial, he’d have needed no further explanation. As I toured the facility myself recently, I wondered the same thing I’ve wondered while beholding the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the former KGB prison in Lithuania, and the wrecked streets of East Timor: How did this ever seem like the right thing?

You can read the whole article here, without being a WSJ subscriber.

You’d think you’d know it if you were on a mile-wide strip of sand with water on both sides. But the Curonian Spit is so heavily forested that you cannot see anything but trees when you drive along the main road.

The Spit is a geographical anomaly: it’s narrowness contributes to this, as does the fact that politically, it’s divided neatly in two, with the bottom half being in Russia and the northern half being Lithuanian. So halfway along the 98 km, you hit an international border (and in our case also a snafu involving undeclared cigarettes, but we’ll get to that).

View toward the Baltic from a lookout point on the Russian side.

Also interesting about the Curonian Spit is that it’s smack dab in the Baltic amber belt that runs down through to Poland and is centered on Kaliningrad, where some enormous percentage of the world’s amber is found. Kaliningrad, of course, was once East Prussia, and the Prussian king Frederick I built the legendary Amber Room, for his palace in Berlin, from the great stores of succinite (the scientific name for Baltic amber) found along his shores.

The stolen Amber Room (replica)

Peter the Great of Russia, on a visit, said sotto voce that he liked the room a lot, so the next king of Prussia, Frederick William I (Fred One’s son), made him a gift of it in 1716. Peter installed it in the Winter House in Saint Petes, and Tsaritsa Elizabeth moved it to another palace in nearby Tsarskoye Selo in 1755, where it remained until the mid 1980s when it was bought by an American tycoon for display at the King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia.

Actually, that’s a complete lie (just the last sentence). Would that the story were so simple! In fact what happened, as far as anyone really seems to know, like, for sure, is that the Nazis dismantled the Amber Room in 1941, packed it into 27 crates, and hauled it off to Konigsberg where it was kept in the castle (the self-same one demolished in 1969 to make room for the monstrous House of the Soviets).

Nobody’s seen the Amber Room since (though a bona fide wall panel turned up in 1997 in Bremen), and there’s an industry of treasure hunters who devote their lives to seeking it.

Amber’s natural beauty rendered tacky by the hand of man.

Leonid Sokolov, the bird man of Curonia.

The Curonian Spit is on a migratory path of zillions of birds. A Soviet ornithologist set up an avian monitoring station there in the mid 20th century. The station is a set of enormous funnel-shaped nets that the birds (lured by squeaky animal toys that sound like food to them) fly right into the gaping, benign mouths of.

The birds keep flying along till they’re trapped in a cage at the end.

Then someone like Leonid Sokolov or one of his colleagues removes the feathered friend from the trap and takes it inside a shack to type it, weigh it, slide a ruler under its wing, record the data, and clap a tiny coded ring onto the bird’s now quivering-with-deathly-fear leg.

“How long does it take,” I asked Leonid, “to get a bird out of the nets, do your thing, and send it on its way again?” Usually about 30 minutes, depending on traffic. “So it’s quicker to clear Russian customs as a bird than as a human! And how many litres of vodka can he bring with him?”

Me being bird-brained.

Ironically, on our way out of Kaliningrad, just as on our way in, we had another encounter with a female border guard. This time she was Lithuanian and not so boisterous, although she got very happy when she found 12 too many packs of those Belomorkanal ciggies in the boot. (EU law permits you to bring only two packs of unfiltered cigarettes across a land border. Not two cartons, two packs). The required duty was 10 times the retail price of the cigarettes, but we paid it without argument and got on with life.

Heading back out onto the highway, I deemed a Blues Brothers reference in order: “It’s 350km to Vilnius, we’ve got a full tank of petrol, 14 packs of cigarettes, it’s getting dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

Nobody in the car even cracked a smile. Was Belushi not big in the Baltics, too? I can’t believe that….

The Baltic Sea-side beach at Nida (Lithuania) is terrific…

…as are Nida’s dunes on the lagoon side.

Read Part 1.
Read Part 2.

There is a Baltic legend of the city Wanetha, a coastal conurbation which was sunk into the sea in retribution for the sins and errors of its citizens. Anybody familiar with this myth would certainly recall it when listening to the tale of Kaliningrad.

Konigsberg, as the city was called until 1946, was founded in 1255 as the seat of the Teutonic Knights, joined the Hanseatic League in 1340, and was the capital of East Prussia from 1878 to 1945; it became an exclave, part of but separated from Germany, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1918.

Konigsberg Castle, circa 1910

...and the "House of the Soviets" which replaced it

The city may once have looked as glamourous as, say, Prague, and been populated by Germans. But it doesn’t look like much of anything now, and is entirely Russian in composition. This is the consequence of British bombs and Brezhnev’s urban planning (Brezhnev wanted Kaliningrad to become a model Soviet city). And the Red Army’s misbehaviour.

The story of the origins of Kaliningrad is well told in Isabel Denny’s The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City: The Battle for Konigsberg, 1945. We had a copy in the back of the car and I read it as we drove. The accounts of women being raped and old men being nailed to barn doors as the marauding Soviet Army burned everything in 1945 – even food the loss of which caused them to go hungry – brought tears to my eyes. But some of the anecdotes are as interesting as they are hard to take:

The writer Arno Surminski, who was born in East Prussia in 1934, also saw young soldiers in 1945 with rows of watches up each of their arms:

“To these youths from central and Asiatic Russia, watches were a valuable rarity. These lads had experienced nothing but hardship; they had lived off dried bread, slept in barns and march for hundreds of kilometres. They had reached a part of Germany which had barely been touched by the war and the contrast with home was astounding to them.”

Most of these young soldiers were peasants and had never encountered prosperous houses full of furniture, china, clothes and jewellery; they were desperate to get their hands on any booty they could find. Many had never seen a bathroom or lavatory and did not know how to use them and there are stories of young Soviet troops cladding themselves in women’s lacy nightgowns and cavorting around the streets in their finery. Godfrey Lias us, however, noticed that, “In many cases the watches were thrown away or given away when they stopped because the looters did not know they needed winding.”

Unbelievable. And no doubt perfectly normal in wartime, which is one of a handful of ‘interesting times’ I hope to live out my days without being forced (or inspired) to experience firsthand.

In the end, Denny is unwavering. Her conclusion is not exactly that the citizens of Konigsberg deserved what they got (although they were among, or among them were, some of Hitler’s earliest and most devout champions). Rather, her conclusion is that the beyond-the-pale viciousness of Konigsberg’s overrun did not happen without context. As she writes in the 256-page book’s closing paragraph:

The manner in which the people of East Prussia had to flee and the fate of those who stayed behind were a direct result of German conduct during the war. Hitler’s refusal to countenance an orderly evacuation meant that the Germans of East Prussia and the citizens of the once beautiful city of Konigsburg became both his victims and part of his final sacrifice.

However you like to parse responsibility for the situation, the fact is that World War II erased Konigsberg, one of Europe’s most storied and unique cities, from the map entirely. Official records apparently list only 15 pre-war buildings still standing in modern Kaliningrad.

Fake old buildings show how the city used to look.

Kaliningrad's main square.

Oliver and Richard and the ad for the 'Chocolate School of Striptease"

The crew looking contemplative at Kant's tomb.

Oliver and Richard puff the rough Belomorkanal cigarettes.

My "Belomorigami" with the Belomorkanal cardboard filters.

So Kaliningrad is not an eye pleasing city, but it seems — to the casual empiricist — a decent one, and more than halfway prosperous.

The supermarkets were nicer than anything we’d ever seen in Tallinn or Vilnius.

Restaurants had good food and good service; ring a bell and the waitress comes.

One ‘fancy’ restaurant, in one of the old Konigsberg city gates, served the best meal I’ve had in the Baltics. We had it all to ourselves on a Sunday night. And I learned a new Russian word: zakuska. This is the food that accompanies the vodka course, the half-dill pickle slices you pop into your mouth to counteract the taste and fumes of the vodka shot you just downed. (The restaurant is called Solnechnyj Kamenj, in direct translation, “Sunny Stone,” a nickname amber; its address is on Vasilievsky Street, and its phone number is 539-106 or 539-105.)

The nightlife was hard to gauge since our own big night out fell on a Sunday. But even on an off-peak evening, we had options till well past the witching hour.

Planeta nightclub.

The shoe symbol asks for respect for a female driver.

The next day we took our time covering the 40km to the seaside resort town of Svetlogorsk. Like the rest of Kaliningrad Oblast that we’d seen, it impressed me more than anything else for how fully ‘first world’ it was compared to my expectations. Though not a place I’d particularly want to spend a long holiday myself, it was an utterly relaxing and convenient big city weekend getaway. Local visitors looked happy and well kept, and although Oliver’s paella was oddly prepared (it was laced with curry!) it, and most of the other food we had, tasted good.

Svetlogorsk’s seaside promenade.

After a night in Svetlogorsk, we climbed back in the car for the drive up the Curonian Spit, a 98-km long thin, curved sand dune peninsula that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The Spit was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000 because of the human efforts since prehistoric times which have prevented its complete erosion. We were eager to check it out.

Read Part 3.
Read Part 1.

The River Nemunas separates Lithuania and K'grad.

The grand entrance to Kaliningrad Oblast (the Russian exclave trapped inside the European Union between Poland and Lithuania) was, for us, marked by fishing militiamen and a dancing female border guard.

To set the scene, I have to tell you that we had a lot time on our hands there – nearly six hours, just waiting in the procession, first the 20th car in the queue, then the 19th, 18th, 17th…sitting in the car…standing by the car…walking up and down the bridge…pointing things out to each other.

I think it was Richard who first noticed the two militia officers (CORRECTION: it was Julija), down at the riverside, next to their jeep and in uniform (and presumably on the clock) with their pole in the water. And it was I who got the blue-shirted border guard shaking her stuff and grinning mischievously.

She was manning, as it were, the kiosk where people crossing the border on foot stop to flash their passports and papers. She spotted us loitering and came out to investigate, addressing me in Russian. Being Russian-less (save for some swear words wholly inappropriate at that moment) I pointed at the line of cars and made a wheel-steering gesture to indicate we were non-pedestrians, and hence, perhaps, beyond her jurisdiction.

No such luck.

To our delight, however, she pantomimed my “driving jiggle” (putting her own imprimatur on it), smiled, and told us politely and in no uncertain terms to scamper back to our vehicle. If they do a “Women of the Russian Customs Division” calendar, she’s my choice for Miss July.

Finally, long after sundown and many filled-out forms later, the gate – no fancier or sturdier than the ones you see all the time on condominium parking garages – opened and we were waved through. Within minutes of entering Sovetsk (once Tilsit, where Napolean signed a peace treaty with Russia in 1807), I knew this trip would be worth all the trouble and expense; the fascinations of this geopolitical anomaly (you’ll get the brief history lesson in Part 2) had begun to unfold.

Sovetsk is clean if poorly lit, with much intact Prussian and other worthy architecture.

Dresses, heels, hammers & sickles: Saturday night on the town.

The Rossiya Hotel (and Lenin out of view) dominates.

In one of the dim but ornamented boulevards, Oliver spotted a 35-ish woman in a white pantsuit smoking a cigarette outside a doorway. He talked her (Natalya was her name, and her rambunctious young daughter and drunken sailor of a father celebrating his 65th birthday also joined us on the pavement) into giving us a tour of the block.

As we walked, she described the history of the town, which she knew only a little about, and her boredom with Sovetsk, which was so overpowering that Oliver said later he was sure she would have ditched dad and daughter and jumped in the car with us, right then, had we just offered to take her out of that place.

That's Oliver on the right.

As charming as we found Tilsit, though, we left (sans Natalya) after an hour and half, pressing on to the big city of Kaliningrad, with Richard’s girlfriend Helen at the wheel ably battling darkness and raindrops (albeit on very, very good roads with an impressive lot of reflectors, reflective paint and reflective signs) ultimately rolling in to our guesthouse [recommended] at 2am.

The purported urban nightmare our crew had nicknamed K’grad as we planned the trip, this putative armpit of Russia, would be there for us in the morning.

And it would surprise us all.

Read Part 2.
Read Part 3.

In German, but you get the idea.

The restored Königsberg Cathedral

One hundred and fifty euros for a Russian visa. Nearly six hours waiting to cross the border at Sovetsk/Tilsit. And 134km from there to the city of Kaliningrad/Königsberg.

Königsberg Cathedral is the jewel of what precious little is left here of German architecture — the site the official tourist brochure says to visit first and foremost.

When we got there, at 1pm on a summer Sunday, it was closed of course.

Because it was the weekend.

Lesson: if you want to keep your customers, you MIGHT consider keeping your customers’ hours.

That said, we are really enjoying walking around this one-of-a-kind city, nourished by good, cheap beer (and no open container laws) and the legendary Belomorkanal pinch-filter cigarettes at 6 rubles (that’s almost 11 whole English pence) a pack.