Kaliningrad, a remote Russian outpost, is worth the trouble of trying to get in
A beautiful coastline and rich, if turbulent, history reward the determined visitor to the Baltic enclave
If you think it is necessary to reach Russia from the European Union by travelling east, think again.
I enter Kaliningrad from Lithuania at Sovetsk, over the Queen Louise Bridge, which straddles the broad River Neman at the spot where Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met on a raft to sign a treaty of peace in 1807.
Kaliningrad and sections of northern Poland were once part of East Prussia, and then Germany, until the map of Europe was redrawn after the second world war. Joseph Stalin expelled all remaining Germans from the region – a total of 14 million people – and the bulk of East Prussia has been Russian ever since. This made a degree of sense in 1945 (though perhaps not to the Germans) but is anomalous now, with the Iron Curtain having fallen and modern Kaliningrad Oblast (the administrative centre of the territory is also known as Kaliningrad) bordered only by the EU and Nato states of Poland and Lithuania.
Entry proves to be a complicated business. I hand my documents through a tiny window in a prefabricated cabin that could best be described as “cold war circa 1982”. The guard sits before a massive computer monitor and a row of black Bakelite telephones, above which manila folders are busy gathering dust, and asks me a series of questions using Google Translate.