What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so
29 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
I go away for four weeks, and this is what happens! In my absence, someone has nipped off with three-quarters of the House of Soviets!
I must confess (no, it wasn’t me), as I sat on a bench with my coffee and sandwich, looking across the Lower Pond, that the sight of the House of Soviets dwindling into nothing plucked in my nostalgic heart a sentimental chord.
Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
Like it or not, the great concrete monolith has dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline for more than 50 years. Photographed arguably more times and from every conceivable angle than any other structure in Kaliningrad, in spite of itself and for all the wrong reasons, the towering, bulky edifice, with its plethora of empty windows achieved cult status, most notably, ironically and cynically, as a prime example of the best in Soviet architecture, and with its unfortunate reputation for being the house that never was occupied, haunted itself and the city with the cost of taking it down.
Its huge rectangular cross-bridged frame, which had incongruously, but none the less defiantly, replaced the splendour of Königsberg Castle in all its baroque and historical glory, had idled away the years as an unlikely city-centre successor to the 13th century Teutonic castle, later residence of choice for the region’s Prussian rulers, which eventually became the point of convergence for the city’s cultural and spiritual life.
Conversely, the House of Soviets never became anything more than an object of curiosity and a convenient hook for western media on which to hang derogatory.
In my 23 years of visiting and of living in Kaliningrad, I have to say I have never heard anyone admit to loving the House of Soviets, and yet, to balance that out, likewise, nobody ever committed themselves to hating it
In its lifetime ~ fairly long lifetime ~ I suppose we can conclude that the inhabitants of Kaliningrad neither revered nor reviled the building. It was simply there and where it was, and very soon it won’t be.
Published 2021: It is official: 51 years after its construction and the same number of years of non-occupation, arguably one of Kaliningrad’s most iconic buildings, and ironically one of its most lambasted, especially by the western press, is about to be demolished. I am, of course, referring to the House of Soviets, ninety per cent of which was completed in 1985 on a site close to where once stood the magnificent Königsberg Castle, the East Prussian city’s jewel in the crown, which was extensively damaged in the Second World War and then, in 1967, dynamited into oblivion.
Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino: a must for social history buffs
27 March 2024 ~ Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino Kaliningrad region
If you are planning on visiting Zalivino lighthouse or taking a day trip to Zalivino, you should take the time to stop off at Zalivino marine and maritime museum, aka Fisherman’s House. Although it is tucked away, if you head to the sandy cove at the far end of the village, a short walk from the village’s second bus stop, and follow the road to the left, you will find you are almost there. Now, just look for a white building with a painted seascape mural on its wall.
Zalivino’s museum is dedicated to the village’s fishing heritage. It provides an unforgettable insight into the working lives of the people who lived there across successive eras and subsequent generations from when it was German Labagienen, then Haffwinkel, throughout its Soviet years.
The museum, or rather how it came to be a museum, has an interesting history of its own. During the perestroika years, Zalivino, a once thriving community, which relied on the water for its livelihood, had declined so substantially that even access to the lagoon had been rendered virtually impossible. Left to its own devices, the coastline had clogged itself with vegetation, turning the erstwhile open shore into a dense and impenetrable forest, choked with invasive reeds, wetland plants and willows.
In 2015, local residents, some of whom personally remembered the coastline’s former glory from their childhood days, got together to form a group to action the shoreline’s reclamation.
Calling themselves ‘Clean Coast’, the group’s hard work won them recognition in a fund-raising competition. The proceeds from this competition enabled the group to launch an assault on the stifling shoreline foliage. They trimmed back trees and bushes, removed strewn rubbish and, when the clearing job was done, used its remaining funds to purchase planks with which to make public benches.
Inspired by their success, the group’s next venture was to establish a museum, which would tell Zalivino’s story as a working fishing village. The property in which the museum is now housed came to fruition following the Clean Coast’s group successful application for a charitable foundation grant, which once obtained was used to develop both the building and the site.
Research suggests that in German times the renovated building was less likely to have been a private dwelling than a warehouse or stable. Personal recollections from the Soviet period see it as a sawmill and a wood-working shop, turning out an array of goods from oars and boat boards to coffins, and later, in the 1990s, when the sawmill was relocated, as the village’s communal bathhouse.
From bathhouse to social history museum, the first exhibit to mark the transition was a sleigh of German origin dragged from the lagoon. According to those in the know, such sleighs in Soviet times were given a new lease of life. Come winter, they were attached to and drawn by horses to trawl the ice-bound waters across the bay for fish.
Zalivino’s museum may be small, but it is also neat and compact, every space having been carefully utilised to bring the story of the settlement’s past to life. Photographs, display boards and documents intermesh successfully with the exposition’s tell-tale artefacts ~ the fishing lines, nets, floats, waders, kerosene lamps and household items ~ all of which have a part to play in the biography of the village.
But whilst they aid the visitor to reconstruct a picture of what life was like in the village many years ago, the museum’s greatest assets are by far its guides, who, because of their palpable love for their subject, enthuse and infuse in equal measure, turning the pieces the past has left for us into a thought-provoking dynamic.
In days of old a fisherman’s life was hard ~ some would say, still is. Relying for your livelihood on the quantity and quality of fish caught in the surrounding waters, and fishing those waters come rain or shine, day in, day out, and often at ungodly hours, was no faint-hearted occupation. The photographs in the museum’s collection underscore this hardship. But they also reveal expressively in the gnarled and weathered faces, in the look of determination, in the brightness of the villager’s eyes and the smiles upon their lips, a satisfaction almost bucolic, deriving from sometimes aligning with, sometimes doing battle with but always being respectful of the laws and forces of nature. After all, to coin a phrase, every villager was in the same boat.
Overall, there is nothing in the Fisherman’s House museum that fails to captivate. But if I was asked to select from the many exhibits one that hits the unusual spot, then the one I would be inclined to choose would be the weathervane.
I am not talking about a wrought iron something that typically spins in the wind high above a chimney pot but of an intricately carved and brightly painted sign-board made of wood which, whilst effectively showing the wind’s direction as any weathervane should, had as its primary function to identify the sailing ship to which it was attached together with the details of its owner. All Curonian sailing ships would be marked by such a device, and those who were acquainted with the lexicon of their symbols would be able to decipher them without a second glance.
Museum Fisherman’s House, Zalivino, is not just a venue for examining relics from a sepia-coloured bygone age, as entrancing as they are, it is a meeting place for the past and present, which will take you into a world and introduce you to a way of life made obsolete by the tides of time and the undercurrents of ‘progress’.
The world it preserves was different then and life in its way much harder, but, as the exposition depicts, it was strong in kinship and fellowship ties. Visiting this museum will help you to understand that it is also Zalivino’s social history as much as its natural landscape that infuses it with allurement and awakens the senses to timeless mystery.
The main thing
Fisherman’s House Zalivino, Kaliningrad region, 238633
Tel: 8 (962) 266 44 57
Opening times Monday to Friday 3pm to 5pm Saturday and Sunday 11am to 4pm
24 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad Victory Square Flowers of Condolence
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 24 March to be a national day of mourning.
As the death toll from Russia’s worst terrorist attack for almost two decades reaches 137, moving scenes in Kaliningrad today see residents of the Kaliningrad region lay flowers, light candles and place toys at the base of the monument in Victory Square.
I share the grief and sorrow of my Russian friends.
13 March 2024 ~ Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Those of us in the UK who are firm believers in the importance of preserving traditions and the history of our country, and who do their bit in this regard by paying homage to, and overpaying for the beer in, one of the oldest legacies of our country’s heritage, I am talking about the British pub, will be well acquainted with such familiar pub names as the King’s Arms, Nag’s Head, Fox and Hounds etc, and had you been around in the 1980s and 90s the fad of renaming pubs with silly names, such as the Slug and Lettuce and Goose and Firkin, but in all your days of pub frequenting you may never have come across any drinking establishment, be it a pub or a bar, that goes by the name of Form.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Form is a malleable word with manifold definitions, as any search through online dictionaries testify. One of the simpler meanings is that of a hard, plain bench, the more complicated reserved for the exotic world of aesthetics. Then there’s ‘he’s got form’, which is, in police parlance, another way of saying he’s done time, which is another way of saying he’s been in the nick, which is another way of saying that he has been in prison. But whether ‘form’ has to do with a hard-arsed bench or is recognition of a criminal record, one thing we know for certain is that Form is the name of a Kaliningrad bar that sits next door to the Yeltsin.
In short, the Yeltsin and Form are geographical neighbours, located either in the same building or one that is joined and adjacent. I have not quite made up my mind which of the two it is, as usually when I visit them I have downed a pint or two, which seems to a certain extent to demagnetise my compass. Suffice it to say, for arguments sake, that the space between the two establishments is less than a stone’s throw away.
This convenience of vicinity does not automatically mean that once you have found the Yeltsin, you have also found Form. The Yeltsin has a belter of a sign and sits prominently on the cusp of a junction which, at certain times of the day, is fairly heaving with traffic. So, if you are looking out for bars, the Yeltsin is hard to miss, and those that say it isn’t should hurry along to SpecSavers.
Conversely, its bedfellow, Form, has no such startling signage, at least not one that is visible from the busy vehicular street, and as the entrance is off the pavement, down some steps and tucked at the back of a forecourt, getting to know that the bar is there either involves a pedestrian element or relies upon word of mouth.
Take us, for example, me and my fellow pub crawlers. It was the bar staff at the Yeltsin who apprised us of Form’s whereabouts in answer to our question where is the next nearest bar?
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Vicinity, and close proximity, are not the only things that the two bars have in common. Both bars cater predominantly for a young clientele. Both, in fact, are student hangouts. Both bars have an appealing basic look. Both have a vintage approach to décor, and some of their customers, not all, but some, have a bit of vintage about them. Both bars cater to the craft beer penchant for the names of beers and their respective strengths to be written in chalk on boards. And, last but by no means least, both bars have a reputation for keeping and serving premium beers on a selective, rotating basis.
Where the two differ is that the Yeltsin is more alpha male and Form more feminine. Now, don’t get excited and don’t go all western liberal gender woke on me, I do not mean it like that. My definition divides the two bars into one which seems geared to young male drinkers who equate craft beers with male camaraderie, and the other that seems to attract a more mixed crowd. Or, to put it another way, go to the Yeltsin for good beer, to listen to tracks on a classic juke box and a game of table football ~ you can also admire the urbanised bogs, with their lashings of bold graffiti ~ but go to Form if you want to sit in a group around tables you’ve pushed together to discuss the grades you got for your essays.
Neither of the two bars are better than the other, not in the strict comparative sense, but nuances in composition lend to each a slightly different feel.
From an architectural standpoint, Form has less form than Yeltsin. Yes, yes, I know: he was a larger-than-life man, with a lived-in and craggy face … Form, on the other hand, is little more than a room ~ little more than a large room, granted ~ hived off down one end by the inclusion of a shelving unit filled with intriguing vintage stuff, which acts as a screen for a makeshift cloakroom.
Form is not exactly spartan, but neither is it cluttered. It contains a number of antithetical but, even so, well-planned pieces that might not or ought not work together, but in Form they actually do. And Form is very comfortable. The floor may be plain old concrete, but it is patched with vintage mats — real, proper, woven mats, agog with interesting patterns. The retro furniture is hotch-potch, but all the more engaging for it. The wall mirrors look in shape as if they once belonged to, and are now on loan from, a 1970s’ lava lamp, and up there on the ceiling some strange artistic drawing is going on: lots of dark black swirling lines, some being tightly compressed, others apart and free flowing, which would not look less at home superimposed on a TV weather chart.
As for the lighting ~ how could I possibly not mention the lighting! ~ the ambient light is dimmed exactly to the right level, and the wall lights are of that special kind that direct illumination in an accommodating intensity only to where it needs to be and just as much as there needs to be, thus creating the sort of mellow cloistered moon-filled shadows in which a canoodling couple could easily fall in love or a single man could fall in love with his beer.
The bar within the bar, ie the actual bar itself, is straight out of DIY Ville. Wooden, too high for comfort, so that when you try to lean upon it, you look as if you’re begging, which, when the bar is full, I imagine you very well might be, all behind it is on display ~ buckets, pipes, barrels, glasses ~ whatever they use behind the bar you see it. It’s a wonderfully basic bar and that’s basic with a capital ‘Б’.
As the seating is notably mismatch, finding a chair to suit you should not be a crucial issue, but in the unlikely event it becomes one, there is plenty of scope for musical chairs.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
My most recent visit to Form was a strictly Jack Jones affair: I was going it alone. Having purchased for myself a half-litre of Kristoffel Blond, six percent in strength and 400 roubles a pop, I took up temporary residence in a low-slung, wooden-framed fully cushioned chair, which, in my professional opinion as an always-on-duty vintage dealer, had travelled into the 21st century from way back in the 1970s. The chair and I were perfectly matched. Within a few minutes of sitting there, a couple, on whom I had never laid eyes before, opted for the seats opposite and joined me at my table.
In broken Russian and beery English Me, and in beery Russian and broken English Them, we conversed quite satisfactorily. What the gentleman of the two did not know about craft beers you could write on a half-torn beer mat. Thus, we spent in our comfortable vintage chairs a pleasant 60 minutes talking the kind of talk that only beer drinkers are able to talk whilst they are drinking beer.
Definitively and succinctly put, Kaliningrad’s Form is a comfortable, laid-back place. It has a lighting system to sing about, a convincing vintage feel and beers you can fall in love with. It caters inexclusively, but let us hint predominantly, for those who are young and intelligent enough to know what it means to drink sensibly, but nevertheless probably don’t, and strange old English fellows who certainly do but don’t, never have and in all likelihood never will be able to, but who are skilled in waxing lyrical about beers of outstanding quality — which is something that Form has — and also about good bars — which is something that Form is.
If it was up to me, I would say that Form is always on form, but I’ll leave it up to you to form your own opinion.
Updated 5 March 2024 | First published: 16 September 2021 ~ Death of the House of Culture
Remembering Zalivino’s House of Culture. The space once occupied by the House of Culture is now just a bed of hardcore and thistles. Here is what it was like before they made a ghost of it. [First written in 2022; revised 2024]
We first noticed that there was more traffic than usual whilst we were sitting in the garden drinking tea. Although the road through the village goes nowhere, in other words the village is the end of the road, there is some light industry here, and so the odd truck or two passing by is understandable.
It was not until we walked to one of the two village shops, the one that is furthest away from us, that the reason for more trucks became startingly apparent. They were knocking down the House of Culture!
Death of the House of Culture
News had been leaked to us some time ago that the days of the House of Culture were numbered and that a demolition team was waiting in the wings. But it is one thing to know and another to see.
Where once had stood the concrete behemoth ~ aged, stained, neglected, pitifully dilapidated and inconsolably boarded-up ~ there was just a pile of rubble.
Death of the House of Culture
Some people say that my whole life has been built on demolition. I worked in demolition in my youth, demolishing airfields from the Second World War. Of course, being me, obsessed with the past and history, tearing up the runways and pulling down the buildings was a truly heart-breaking task, and yet, to coin a phrase, someone had to do it.
Besides, doing it gave me the opportunity to daydream of the lives and times of those who had lived on the airfields and all that had gone before, and yet, whilst I fully acknowledged this privilege, I could not quite elude the nagging thought that I was committing an act of cultural vandalism, which, of course, I was. Guilty as charged, as they say: guilty of destroying history, of wiping out the past, of erasing the nostalgic flags from the charts of people’s memories, the charts they would use in later life to navigate back to the days of their youth, and all I could say in my defence: “I was only following orders”. Now, who does that remind you of!
For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to derelict buildings: the pathos and melancholy, the silent history, the ghosts of their past inhabitants. And the House of Culture was no exception. In the short time I had known it, I had developed an affection for this victim of the concrete age.
And why not? What it was and where it was, was no fault of its own. It had no more claim to responsibility than we have on the bodies we inhabit and no more say on location than we have when we are thrown, without consultation or mercy, into a world we cannot disown.
Even so, the architecture of the 1960s is not easy to love. It is concrete dominated and imaginatively challenged, no matter where in the world it is, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the Soviet Union, where both reinforced and pre-cast concrete were the darlings of the day.
The House of Culture was a progeny of its time: conceived, gestated and born into concrete. For a diminutive backwater village, built on bricks and wood and consisting of humble dwellings, this new community hall was both far too big and remarkably out of place, and all that it had to say for itself in answer to aesthetics was that it had some height and angular difference built into it at roof level.
What the House of Culture certainly was not was the rural equivalent of Kaliningrad’s House of Soviets. Indeed, not. For whilst both structures had concrete in common, in so far as each epitomised the architectural limitations that would later define an era, one was redundant before completed, whilst the other played a dynamic, indeed a vital, cultural and social role at the heart of the small community for which it had been expressly built.
Back in its day, in the 1960s, the House of Culture had literally been the cultural centre of the village. We heard tell of myriad uses, of concerts, parties, important civic meetings, dances, educational classes, theatrical and film performances; even the Moscow Ballet Company had played at the House of Culture!
But by the time we arrived on the scene, all of this was little more than a rapidly fading memory. The biography of the House of Culture was already out of print; all that was left was the cover.
‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is a fortunate proverb for the House of Culture, since its cover was ruined beyond redemption ~ scarred, torn, split, coming apart at the seams, ruined by time and human indifference.
And yet to judge it from its exterior would be to do it a great disservice. In its later, neglected years, it would be easy to confuse it with the building that it wasn’t, the House that Knew No Culture, but what remained of its spent interior told an entirely different story, as I shall now reveal.
Gaining access to the House of Culture was the proverbial piece of cake. The windows had been boarded over, but where there’s a will there’s a way, and wilful people on gaining access had hardly bothered to put the boarding back. Inside it was discovered that in spite of the natural decay and the inevitable wanton damage inflicted by the corrosive action of the human virus vandalism, remnants of the House of Culture’s former interior glory were all too poignantly evident.
Many of its original three-quarter-glazed wooden doors were for the most part still intact, including the grand, tall double doors that opened into the building’s central hall. They were even in full possession of their brass and fluted handles. The embossed Art Deco plasterwork, rising from floor to ceiling on the walls of the main auditorium, had retained the splendour of its sweeping curves. And many of the building’s functional attributes had survived degradation: original light fittings, lampshades, seats, benches and other abandoned items from the forgotten realm of everyday use had somehow weathered the storm that neglect and dereliction slowly but surely unleash.
Doors passed through & passed over in the House of Culture
But these items, as remarkable as their longevity was, palled into insignificance with the discovery of the grand artwork and bold embellishments bestowed on the House of Culture, partly in recognition of its importance to the community but more so as emblematic reminders that the village owed its existence to its long marine and maritime heritage.
I have already mentioned that the walls in the auditorium were decorated in relief curves of an Art Deco nature, that the doors stood tall and strong, their brass handles large and fluted, but now came the pièce de résistance. In the rear of the building, away from the road, it looked when viewed from a distance as though the windows had been fitted with stained glass. Only on closer inspection did it become apparent that the starfish, whale, octopus and other sea-dwelling creatures had been lovingly painted by hand onto each of the separate panes.
The naïve artistry exhibited in this work, which, please do not misinterpret me, was priceless to behold, transcended into excellence in a full-scale bas relief that occupied an entire wall, and which had as its choice of composition emblematic motifs intended as celebrations of the concept of harmonic unity between the resources of the natural world and the ordained and natural order of traditional family life.
Within this tableaux of interdependence is the mother tending to her child and the fisherman at work. The sea, a mythical figure rising out of itself, is drawing a bow across a stringed instrument, thus invoking art and culture, and in the act of doing so completes an ideological circuit that has nature in its purest sense, proletariat toil, family and spiritual harmony symbiotically unified. The fisherman, not merely rewarded for his hard and honest graft but moreover for his familial devotion, trawls a net that is symbolically more than a commonplace tool of labour. It is integral and organic to the supportive world to which he is wed in his role as natural provider.
The artistic oeuvre almost reached its apotheosis in the bas relief of Poseidon, who, in spite of his fall from grace and imminent doom, winked wryly and philosophically like the silent sentinel he surely was.
As evocative as these compositions were, it was the ceiling in the auditorium that brought home the full extent of the impending tragedy about to unfold, namely that in a very short time from now more than sixty years of talent, inspiration and history would be lost to the world forever, would irreversibly cease to exist.
And embodied within that tragedy was the loss of the sea itself, since they, the architects of the House of Culture, had turned the ceiling into the sea.
In looking up to the ceiling, you looked as one would have looked, were it humanly possible, from the bottom of the ocean, gazing up from the briny depths below to the bright blue waves and foam above. The ceiling was a masterpiece, an indisputable triumph. Even without the presence of the other artistic accomplishments, all of which in their own right verged on cultural splendour, the ceiling alone possessed the power to transform this chunk of non-descript concrete into a monumental cathedral, a place to come and give heartfelt thanks to the life-sustaining godsend that was the sea, upon whose heavenly beneficence the small community, which the House of Culture had faithfully served, had depended for its livelihood for centuries.
In the 1960s, and for many years thereafter, the House of Culture had been a place where people came to give thanks for all that they had been given, for all that they had worked for and for the community in which they lived, and really, although it all devolved to the sea, or, to be more precise, to the sustenance that the sea provided, the House of Culture was, in the last analysis, according to Soviet thinking, a proletariat’s palace.
