Rummaging in the Polish Revision Centre
Revised 30 June 2026 | First published 16 November 2024 ~Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
Update: Since first writing this post and revising it, I have passed through the Poland-Kaliningrad borders a number of times. Much has remained the same, except on the last occasion I travelled, the Polish were no longer hopping on the bus and taking photographs of each and every person with a hand-held camera. However, it is still necessary to have your mugshot scanned when you produce your documents at border control.
The other change, again at the Polish border, is that both travelling into and out of Kaliningrad, we were made to cart our luggage into the border control office and have that scanned, too. This is a new one, as border security used to check the baggage randomly by peeping into the hold underneath the bus.
Having your baggage scanned is no great shakes, as long as you haven’t got a bootlegging and tobacco-import fetish, as the Polish are hot on the alcohol and fags trail. However, the building into which you have to traipse to have your credentials and yourself gawped at is up a short, but rather steep, flight of steps, so stand by to struggle and curse as you drag your heavy luggage, like the Grand Old Duke of York, up to the scanner and down again. There are some who say that borders border on insanity and others who would reply, “Where would we be without them!” I’m saying nothing; just my rank and serial number.
The answer to the question is ‘yes’. Yes, it is possible to access Kaliningrad via the Polish-Kaliningrad border and vice versa. The only caveat is that before you go, stock up on patience.
In the not-too-distant past, the bus from Kaliningrad going to Gdansk was held up at the Polish border for as long as it took to miss a flight at Gdansk – seven hours, in fact. Whilst this particular case may be the exception to the rule, lengthy delays are not, and in response to this and other inconveniences generally assumed unnecessary, and some infer deliberately obstructive, a petition has been launched, which you, dear reader, can access here. Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)! {Note: to read this in English, you will need to click on ‘Translate’ and change the language from German.}
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
Not all border crossings are as bad as the last one you experienced, but some can sometimes be worse, and some can be worse but interesting. For example, take a crossing I made in 2024.
We cleared the formalities at the Russian border without let or hindrance and trundled off with great expectations, fifteen of us in all, onto Polish territory.
There were no other vehicles in transit, only our bus, and the usual procedures went smoothly enough. We were gawped at, our credentials were examined, we had our mugshots taken (again!) and, after 30 minutes, we were back on the bus.
We took our seats, brum, brum (that’s the sound of the bus starting up), and off we merrily went.
Traditionally, it is at this point of the journey when, with the inquisition over, the invisible stays shared by all release themselves collectively, letting relaxation spill palpably out in a sigh-giving rush of relief. The advent of this liberation is customarily celebrated by proper professional travellers in possession of proper professional travelling cases with a dignified mass unzipping, whilst those of us who own neither dignified travelling cases nor commendable travelling standards have to be content with rustling through our carrier bags. The end result is the same, however. Having given stress the elbow, it’s time for comfort eating.
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
I had just begun to tuck into my penultimate hummus and tomato sandwich when, ay up, mother! What’s going on? Instead of hitting the open road, our bus was being syphoned off into a fenced and gated compound.
“Ay up?” I thought again. Well, you would think that, wouldn’t you.
I cannot say for certain whether it was my fault or not. Perhaps I want to believe it was for the sake of an impudent ego. But the question kept repeating itself: were we locked inside this compound, sitting motionless inside our bus in front of this big, this bland, this ominous, this nondescript and bureaucratic building because of something I had said?
When the clam-faced female within the Polish border office had fired the question at me, “Cigarettes and alcohol?”, my facetious reply had been, “Yes please?” And then when she did not get the joke (what joke exactly would that be?) and barked the question again, I had waved it away with an Englishness, simpering yet polite, which Leslie Phillips would have been proud of, but possibly she was not.
Cigarettes? Alcohol? Never touch the stuff!!
Whoever was or was not to blame, there we sat on the bus, and we sat there for a bad 10 minutes, us and this dull, brick, windowless building, facing each other down, one with complete contempt, the other suggesting complete containment.
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
There was something about our situation and the building that confronted us that nudged my idling imagination into the realms of the deep mischievous. That sign at the compound’s entrance, did it really say ‘Work sets you free’? I am glad to say it didn’t. But what exactly did it mean, this reference to a ‘Revision Centre’?
The bland building was giving nothing away. Indeed, there is not much more to say about its external aspect, except that high upon the roof it had a prominent funnel-shaped air vent.
I could not see anything clearly, as the sun was in my eyes, but I am almost willing to swear on anything other than a stack of beer bottles that for one second I saw, or bore the conviction that I saw, poised at the mouth of the air vent, the shadows of two men. They were crouching down at the sides of the vent, leaning in towards it, and each had something in their hands, something that looked like canisters. I had just begun to focus on the containers’ labels when a shard of light leaping out of the sun temporarily blinded me. Through the eclipsing halo that ensued, and with the bus now moving in reverse and distorting my perspective, the words on the label were reduced to a blur, and all that I could make of them was a capital ‘Z’ at one end and a capital ‘B’ at the other.
How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia
Our bus had not entered the building by the floor-to-apex roller door in front of which we had initially parked. It had taxied around to the back of the building, where it slowly disappeared through a similar portal at that end. Creeping at a snail’s pace, it inched its way gradually in, permitting me to regard at will the character of the chamber into which we were being swallowed. We were saying goodbye to the outside world, but one hoped it was temporarily.
We were passing into an alley, just the right width for the size of the bus. To the left of us was a platform, solid, broad and deep, not unlike one you would loiter upon whilst waiting for a train. It was not the height of the vehicle’s windows but fell just a little below it.
At the back of this platform at regular intervals were two or three large doors. They were big doors, metal doors, with handles of such prodigious proportions that the only way to open them would surely be to enlist the brawn of two thick Polish men with arms that did not fit. In a corner close by the doors stood a bag that seemed familiar. It looked like one I had seen before on the lorry of KG Smith & Son, Northamptonshire’s premiere coal merchants.
Until now the bus had been trickling forward, but it suddenly drew to a shuddering halt. The driver got up from his seat, made an announcement I did not catch and opened the doors of the vehicle. Before you could say Polish sausage, especially before you could say it in Polish, a man in paramilitary uniform had bounded up the steps and, standing at the front of the bus, all officious-like ~ did I hear someone say ‘full of piss and importance’? ~ was presumably ordering us all to get off. Simultaneously, a larger man armed with a big black dog had stationed himself strategically next to the door at the side of the bus, from which the young and old, singles and couples, some with children, some without, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard were struggling to alight, laden down as they uncomfortably were with their assortment of bags and chattels.
The platform to which this innocuous group had descended was considerably narrower than that on the opposite side. Folk were bumping into each other as, ‘Roust! Roust! Schnell! Schnell!’, they were ordered to take their travelling bags from the hold beneath the bus.
Nobody seemed quite to know what it was that was expected of them. A big, as in overweight, man, looking not unlike Hermann Göring – perhaps it was his time-travelled brother – had already started rummaging through one of the passenger’s bags. He had the bag perched on a table placed at the side of the wall and was going through the contents as if he was pulling the entrails out of a late-for-Christmas turkey. He looked much more like a TV villain or an officer from the Guesswho than a man who ought to be showing respect to the public he was frisking.
Hermann’s brother had a very loud voice, which he used to good effect. Stopping in mid-rummage, with his hands inside some lady’s lingerie, he bellowed, “Form a queue!” at the meek, the innocent and the inoffensive, over whom he lauded ultimate power and whose only crime today was that they wanted to get from A to B. Obediently, one by one, they fell silently into line.
During this demonstration of ‘I’m a man in a uniform, so you’d better do as I say!’, two other guards had joined the jamboree: a flint-eyed woman in a boiler suit spoilt only by its insignia and one of those strutting cockerel types: ‘I’ve got tattoos on my neck, and I’ve come to throw my weight about’.
And now the carnival commenced in earnest: The man who had the sniffer dog was sniffing; the cockerel was in and out of the bus as if someone had knocked him off his perch. The flint-eyed thing was glaring. ‘Look at those eyes! Those eyes! Those eyes!’; and the mountain man with a skinhead haircut who went by the name of Hermann’s Brother was rifling through one’s personals as if he were mixing cement.
His brawny arms were in there, his paddle hands a-swirling. He had obviously learnt his cultured trade from washing his pants in a tub.
Fortunately for me, no such ignominy would besmirch my person. I was, as they say, travelling light. I only had a carrier bag, in which I had placed my laptop and the sad remains of a pack-up meal prepared for me by my wife.
Most of what had been packed for me, I had already scoffed. All that remained was a lonely sandwich, lolling half in and half out of one of those flimsy, thin plastic boxes routinely used in supermarkets for the display and sale of cakes.
Although I was not in the least bit hungry, having eaten just minutes before, the thought of the Polish strangler rinsing his mitts about my sandwich spurred me into action. Better to eat the sandwich now than have it used like a paper towel hanging next to the gents’ urinals. The problem was that Fatty Arms was getting through those bags like Joe Stink from the Secret Service, and the combination of hummus and bread not being the easiest thing to masticate resulted in a situation of alarming prematurity, an unfortunate occurrence whenever it chooses to strike and one not entirely limited to such incidental matters as love, proposals, life and death but also, or so it would seem, during the crucial business of crossing borders.
Thus, when the big you-know-what turned to me and barked, “Cigarettes? Alcohol?”, it was an effort of no small magnitude for me to reply, “Yes please.”
He glared at me contemptuously – well, can you blame him, really? – and pulling his girt big shoulders back in a show of manly authority (he had done the same with the 80-year-old standing frail and tired in front of me), said slowly and precisely, “We will wait until you have stopped eating, then you and I will talk!”
“Oh, really, what about?” I spluttered, choking on my sandwich. “The weather? Football? Religion? Politics? ~ Er, no, anything but politics.”
The sandwich safely swallowed, he sang the refrain again: “Cigarettes?” and “Alcohol?”
Do you know what I think? I think that he was asking me whether I had the aforenamed items concealed about my person or stashed inside my laptop. When I answered in the negative, first he looked suspicious, then profoundly disappointed.
I took a swig of mineral water. He probably thought the alcohol was hidden in that bottle ~ as if! ~ and that I had hurriedly eaten the illicit cigarettes between two slices of bread. Whatever it was he didn’t know, and I think it was a lot, he was not a happy man, which is hardly surprising really, looking and acting the way he did. But he wasn’t finished yet.
Furtively, he glanced down, looking at my little one – at the little bag that I was carrying – and a tiny ray of hope shone briefly through his cold pork pies, though it was tinged with disbelief by the answer he anticipated but did not want to hear.
“No big baggage?” he asked.
I could, of course, have just said ‘no’, thus putting him out of his misery, but Bernard Manning answered for me, “Just the wife,” said Bernard, “and she’s at home at present.”
Hermann Rummage pursed his lips, shuffled, scowled and then dismissed me. The interrogation over, I climbed back onto the bus.
Ten minutes after my ascension and with no contraband having been found, we were out on the open road again, steaming towards Gdansk: the young and the old, singles and couples – some with children, some without – two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard.
Those lovely chaps at the Polish border, I mused, stood a greater chance of finding a rational thought in a liberal’s head than illicit fags and booze on the God-fearing lot inside this bus, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Who of us can say with any degree of certainty what goes on in the cranky minds of liberals?
Yet the trees were green, the sky was blue, and every cloud has a silver lining: after all, we hadn’t been gassed, just inconvenienced and harassed.
It was just another sourpuss day at Checkpoint Proper Charlie.
How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia
Image attributions
Outline of a building: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Outline-vector-of-a-house/3503.html
Moonshiner: https://loc.getarchive.net/media/effects
Caveman statue: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/free-download.php?image=caveman-statue&id=161215
Hearts: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Hearts-for-Mom/8942.html