Tag Archives: Kaliningrad

Getting Around Kaliningrad: Public Transport & Travel Guide

How to Use Public Transport and Get Around Kaliningrad Like a Seasoned Expat

1 November 2026 – Getting Around Kaliningrad: Public Transport & Travel Guide

Doddle. That’s what it is. Getting around Kaliningrad. Public transport, comprising as it does of an amalgamation of regular-sized buses, mini-buses, trolleybuses and trams, gets you where you want to go efficiently and, depending upon the level of traffic, in as rapid a time as you could wish for.

Getting Around Kaliningrad: Sections

Mini-buses
Trolleybuses
Trams
Kaliningrad Bus Routes: If in doubt, ask!

Bus Fares and How to Pay

For the foreign traveller, getting around Kaliningrad is made considerably easier by the flat-rate fare. Whichever mode of transport you choose, the cash price is pegged at 44 rubles (40 pence) payable to the driver or conductor. The price of a ride drops even lower should you happen to have in your possession a Volna Baltiki (Volna Baltiky) card and/or a Russian bank card, but as you most likely will not, keep in mind ‘44 rubles’, and with this you might think you cannot go wrong, whereas, in fact, you easily could.

Kaliningrad Public Transport Fare-Paying Options

Buses, trams, mini-buses and trolleybuses, whichever mode of travel you choose, fares are fixed per ride regardless of the distance travelled.

Payment Method	Cost Per Ride	Best For	Where to Buy / How to Use
💳 Volna Baltiki Card	33 RUB	Frequent travellers & budget backpackers	The card costs 100 RUB at local ‘Pressa’ kiosks or bus station ticket offices.
📱 Contactless Bank Card	38 RUB	Quick day trips	Tap your material plastic card onto the conductor’s mobile terminal or use a virtual MIR card via the Mir Pay app.
💵 Cash	44 RUB	Convenience. No unexpected card issues!	Pay cash to the conductor or mini-bus driver.

*Note: Luggage that takes up a passenger seat is treated as a passenger and will require an additional ticket, priced at the standard fare determined by your payment method.

Buses in Kaliningrad: What to Watch Out For

As everywhere and in all corners of the world where buses need to be caught, you obviously need to watch out for them. I won’t waste either your or my time expatiating on what a bus is and looks like, because if you don’t know by now, then perhaps you never will.

One thing that you do need to be aware of these days is that on some of Kaliningrad’s standard-size buses, human conductors have been replaced by electronic touch-card devices. There now follows a cautionary tale:

Oblivious to this development, I found myself a few months ago in the unenviable position of being on a bus that didn’t take money, which is something that I did have, but did take cards, which is something that I didn’t have. To avoid embarrassment, which, as you know, is the Englishman’s greatest fear, all I could do, I decided, was to nip sharpishly out of the central doors as soon as the driver opened them, a plan that could possibly not have gone wrong had he done what I thought he would do but, as it happened, didn’t. He only opened the front door so that he could cunningly check each passenger’s ticket as they disembarked. Oh dear, and what a bugger!

Clutching at my rubles whilst attempting to work out how I was going to explain myself in Russian, I nervously joined the queue, but luck for once was on my side. As my turn to present my ticket approached, the driver was distracted, and with a spasm of glee tempered by guilt, I floated past on a sigh of relief safely unnoticed and onto the street. In mitigation of my actions, the unforeseen and awkward circumstances into which I had been thrown were completely of an accidental nature. There was no attempt to fare dodge guvnor – and that’s the honest truth. And yet since that inauspicious ride, I have solemnly failed to determine which of the buses accept cards only, other than learning inadvertently that orange ones certainly do. So, take heed of my mistake, and let that be a lesson to you!

Orange buses take card payments in Kaliningrad. This one is parked, with a passenger enquiring whilst standing outside the door.

Mini-buses (Marshrutkas): The Popular Transit Option

Services across all three bus types – standard buses, mini-buses and trolleybuses – are exceedingly frequent and cater to numerous interconnecting routes. The smaller buses, ‘vans’, run in parallel with their larger counterparts, offering a nippy, if not when laden down with heavy or bulky bags, tricky-to-use alternative.

These small units are extremely popular and, therefore, often overcrowded. On tarmac surfaces, whether you are a seated or standing passenger, they pose no imminent threat, but when they are bouncing at speed across Königsberg’s bygone, cobbled streets, you tend to dance when standing, so that remaining perfectly upright can become a bit of a challenge. Equally challenging, when jam-packed full, is rising from your seat, always assuming, of course, that you have had the good fortune to nab one, as is struggling through the standing passengers to get to the door on time before you miss your stop.

The mini-buses of Kaliningrad are notorious little devils with infamous reputations for tearing along at breakneck speed, making diving on and off something of an art form; as is swinging the heavy door shut as you climb into the bus, an occupational difficulty very much compounded by, when having paid your fare, you reach back to close the door just as the bus is slammed into gear and flies off down the road. The sudden, startling momentum can have you rolling about as daft as if you are drunk when you’re not, and when you are, alas, making you instantly, tragically sober; an awkward and bouncy situation at best, this predicament is made far worse if the road on which the bus is travelling happens to be an ancient one, one built for horses and carts when Kaliningrad was Königsberg.

Mini-Buses (Marshrutkas): For Speed and Flexibility

These fixed-route mini-buses are Kaliningrad’s public-transport equivalent in speed and flexibility to the motorbike courier: they boldly go where big standard-sized buses have difficulty in going, and they do so with a nippy, sassy attitude.

Hail a mini bus like an expat: Marshrutkas can be flagged down by sticking your arm out as you would when hailing a London cab. In central city areas drivers strictly adhere to designated bus stops, but in quieter, residential districts, should they espie you on the pavement with your arm held up aloft, they may in effect pull over. Sometimes they will just flash their lights and go merrily sailing past. This is not an act of condescension; the driver is merely informing you that the bus is already full.

If in doubt, shout!: Now you are on the bus, you will want to get off somewhere. If they, mini-bus drivers, see in their rear-view mirrors nobody making a move to get off and ahead of them an empty bus stop, they may very well go charging by. As you approach your stop, it is just as well, therefore, to adopt the golden rule: If in doubt, call out!

A last and sanguine salutary piece of advice when it comes to travelling by mini-bus. I read recently on more than one travel site and was also told by Arthur Ingram (code name A.I.) that passengers must stump up their fares as they get off these buses. Once true, but not anymore. Now you pay when you get on. That’s the way to do it.

Getting Around Kaliningrad using mini-buses. Passengers climbing aboard.

A yellow mini-bus in Kaliningrad, with passengers milling nearby and a large block of flats in the distance.

Kaliningrad Trolleybuses: Because They Are Different

Now, these wheeled devices are an interesting collation. I look upon them as a cross between ‘normal’ buses and trams. I like them even more, as they do not exist in the UK and therefore form a novel mode of transport.

Like any other bus, trolleybuses run on pneumatic tyres without the need for tracks. They draw their power from overhead cables using a pair of spring-loaded poles hinged to the top of the roof. The bus is driven like any other, but the driver must ensure that the rods on top of the bus stay in contact with the overhead power source. Some of the older trolleybuses incorporate a battery backup and/or are fitted with an auxiliary diesel motor, both designed to permit them to stray short distances from the contact wires, delivering to mobility and manoeuvrability an extra dimension for pilot control, without which, in whose total absence, they would otherwise be reined in by absolute reliance on the wires’ prescriptive allowance.

Kaliningrad’s newest super-duper trolleybuses have the capability to disconnect from the overhead cobweb of wires and drive wirelessly away for up to a quite astonishing 80 kilometres. This is a handy contingency plan, enabling these souped-up trolleybuses to outmanoeuvre traffic jams and avoid being beached by mechanical mishaps and unforeseen malfunctioning and, when they can and do happen, power supply disruptions. Everything may stop, but the trolleybus keeps on rolling.

There’s no mistaking the new, sleek, Sinara-6254 trolleybuses. They look impressively modern, because they are. Come rain, hail, snow or shine, the Sinara’s built-in climate control takes over. USB ports come as standard, and next-stop announcements are fully automated.

Kaliningrad’s Trolleybuses Serve Key Routes

Paired down to a core set of lines, nevertheless, Lines 1, 2, and 7, cater marvellously for tourists, locals, and expats alike by interlinking major tourist hubs with residential satellites.

Lines 1 and 2 are a tourist’s dream. They criss-cross the city’s central squares, take in the historic gates and are conveniently accessible from the major northern transport rings.

What I like about the older trolleybuses is that they generally have a holding rail that runs along the inside ledge at the very rear of the bus, which a standing passenger can effectively use to steady oneself whilst gawping, as one invariably does, and whilst gawping to one’s heart’s content, out of the large rear window. I cannot begin to tell you whether the modern versions are similarly equipped, because, surprisingly enough, I am yet to travel on one of them.

Trolleybuses are truly lovely things, but they are not so plentiful in Kaliningrad as their standard bus or mini equivalents, so I do not get to journey on them as often as I would like. But in the general scheme of the city’s transport system, their contribution to getting around is no less valuable a transit resource than any of its partner vehicles.

A sleek, modern, green trolleybus on a wide Kaliningrad street with mid-rise buildings in the background,

Kaliningrad Trams: Scenic and Historic Routes

When I first came to Kaliningrad, which is now more than a quarter of a century ago, much of the old Königsberg tram network was still functioning, albeit after a fashion. The classic red-and-white-coloured trams, the ‘biscuit tins’ as I affectionately call them, whose history dates to the 1970s, would rattle along quite famously, as indeed today many still do. Nothing about them has changed that much, except perhaps for here and there the urban curse graffiti and for here and there again vandalistic etchings trending on victimised window panes, although looking back at the turn of the century there were a lot more trams in operation and many more tracks on which to operate.

Like a lot of things, its got smaller over time, meaning the Kaliningrad tram network, but riding the tram remains the best option for romancing the past, as it gently weaves its way across the city’s historic landscape.
My consciousness

In those days, now lost forever, when life was a lot more raw and real, children would make their own entertainment by hitching an illegal ride on the coupling link of the tram’s last carriage, hopping on and off at will. Some people never grow up, and I remember regarding these antics with more than a twinge of envy. In these health- and safety-conscious, robustly regulated and X-Box times, such daring-do is outlawed, and though much of the 1970s’ tram stock continues to rattle and roll, they are at any rate gradually being replaced by gleaming, swish, updated models, with significantly higher comfort specs, which do not include, as I recall, a child seat at the rear.

The traditional tram, comparatively speaking, already appears bone-shakingly basic and ambivalently dated, and whilst those with poetry in their hearts might be tempted to say all the more quaint for the fact, anything that holds back time is a feather in my romantic cap, the practical story inside is one of cold, hard, metal, lack-of-comfort pan-shaped seats, hardly supporting the folklore prejudice that because things in the past were simpler, particularly public-transport seats, simpler equals better. It is the sovereign right of pampered rumps to rail against the sacrifice that anachronisms such as this condone, but if you are owned by one of these, there’s always the option of standing.

Kaliningrad’s Vintage and Modern Trams

Venerable Vintage: Kaliningrad’s classic bright-red and cream trams are Soviet-era Czech-built Tatra cars. They have been roving around Kaliningrad for decades, and as with first come, first served, first seen, first loved. Given the choice, me being me, these are the trams I like riding best.

Current ‘Corsairs’: Sleek, air-conditioned, roomy, cushioned, with large viewing windows, low-floored access, smooth, silent acceleration and even USB charging ports, the modern ‘Corsair’ (Korsar) trams are a different beast altogether than their classic Tatra forbears. Payment options include touch terminals used in conjunction with Russian bank MIR cards and Kaliningrad’s dedicated transit card, the Volna Baltiki, (the cheapest fare option); or paying cash to the onboard conductor.

Green and white modern Corsair tram, showing the sleek, braod windowed front on an autumnal street in Kaliningrad, illustrating ways of getting around Kaliningrad.

Mick Hart, expat Englishman, getting around Kaliningrad on a modern tram with a contactless card machine, centre.

The past was certainly a time when ‘Commonsense ruled, OK! ’ – a time when self-preservation deferred to this and little else and on which its application solely depended, not, as it does today, on written laws and regulations. I cannot imagine, for example, witnessing now as I did then, at a busy intersection, the driver of the tram clambering out of his cab and with a long metal pole in his hand using it to lever the points to alter the tram’s direction. Does it still happen? I ask. But not availed of the answer, content myself with the supposition that this might be what is meant today when people say that he or she is very much a ‘hands-on’ person. It’s not conclusive in itself, but the explanation could hold water, and sometimes an iron pole, and after all it is less risqué.

Over the past 26 years, an interval in which Kaliningrad became the second home it is to me, large sections of its tramline system have suffered ignominiously the ravages of neglect (it’s not my fault) and have fallen, as a result, haphazardly, into a right old state of decline, as evidenced today by the long, broad, roadside stretches which, terminally abandoned, have been taken up and requisitioned as convenient car-parking spaces.

Non-functioning tram lines in Kaliningrad, now used for parking cars.

A long, broad Kaliningrad street in autumn showing cars parked on old tramlines.

A long, green, tree-lined avenue, centred between a dual carriageway showing an abandoned tram line in the historic German district of Maraunenhof, Kaliningrad

Abandonned tram avenue in the historic German district of Maraunenhof, Kaliningrad

Until about a year ago, or perhaps by dint of accuracy it could be slightly more – time has a habit of slipping away unnoticed, don’t you know – the only tram line functioning was tram route Number 5, but Number 5 has been recently augmented by the newly restored route Number 3.

Together, these two tram lines service the city’s key central routes and, since they retrace in part sections of the tram map original to Königsberg, offer to their passengers a distinctly historical, often scenic and trundlesome alternative to getting around Kaliningrad. Seeing and stopping off at the sights in whatever proportion takes your fancy, you pays your money and you takes your choice, and you takes your choice and pays your money: getting around Kaliningrad is choice-replete and inexpensive.

Tram Line Number 5: Scenic and Nostalgic

Tram line Number 5 potters along through some of Kaliningrad’s finest urban memories.

In autumn, when Kaliningrad is a sea of russet browns, auburns and gold, you can expect to delight in leafy vista journeys retracing the transport pathways of old Prussian Königsberg. On the way, you will meet with the red-brick fortifications housing the Amber Museum, you will circle and swoop by the soaring gothic spires of Königsberg Cathedral on Kant Island and wend your way through the half-timbered Fishing Village, its eclectic array of hotels, boutique shops and cafes embroidered by the Pregolya River.

Unlike Kaliningrad’s buses, big or small, that shoot along at a frantic pace, Kaliningrad’s trams offer the tourist a more sedate travel experience, allowing that smartphone camera of yours to earn its pocket- and bag-bulky keep whenever an ancient or Soviet landmark yearn to become your keepsake.

A classic Kaliningrad Soviet-era tram, red and white, on a Kaliningrad street in autumn, illustrative of getting around Kaliningrad on public transport.

Identifying Kaliningrad Bus Routes: If in doubt, ask!

The one consideration, and it is a relevant one, that a lot of travel guides forget to mention, or suggest you tackle with ‘handy learnt phrases’ is the language barrier. A short course in Russian specifically tailored to bus-type questions could be in order, but are you going to? And will you? Really?

Whilst there is no shortage of public transport to get you where you want to go, strangely enough, apart from the Arabic numbering system, all destinations are written in Cyrillic. You could, of course, ask someone waiting for a bus, except that most of Kaliningrad’s city bus stops are fairly, if not, frantically busy, so there is little time to get out your phrase book or resort to your translation app. With the latter, however, you can at least stop and and ask someone what you want to know before you reach the bus stop; a precaution simple enough, but one I have found that works rather well. Alternatively, see below: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

What You Want to Say	Russian (Cyrillic)	Pronunciation Guide	When to Use It
“At the stop, please.”	На остановке, пожалуйста.	Na os-ta-nov-ke, po-zhal-uy-sta	Call this out to a mini-bus (marshrutka) driver when you want to get off.
“Do you accept cards?”	Можно картой?	Mozh-no kar-toy?	Ask the bus conductor if you want to pay with a contactless bank card.
“One ticket, please.”	Один билет, пожалуйста.	O-deen bee-lyet, po-zhal-uy-sta	Use this when buying a single ticket with cash from a conductor or driver.
“Does this go to…?”	Этот идет до…?	E-tot ee-dyot do…?	Show a landmark name on your phone to double-check if you are on the right vehicle.
“Are you getting off at the next one?”	Вы выходите на следующей?	Vy vy-kho-dee-tye na slye-doo-yush-chey?	Say this politely if someone is blocking the exit on a crowded bus.

Getting around Kaliningrad: The Last Word … or more

Kaliningrad’s internal transport system is like a perfectly handcrafted toupée: it works, is convincing and you can’t see the joins. If anything will be daunting to the city’s first-time visitor, it will not be for want of ways to travel but the many ways of travelling and the umpteen routes to travel on. Navigating the hybrid options provided by the transport system may take some getting used to, but, once you’ve passed your logistics exams, getting around Kaliningrad is, as I should have made clear at the outset, really a bit of a doddle.

Associated posts

How to Get to Kaliningrad from the UK
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information
From Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad

Hats the way to do it! There are uniforms, but there’s nothing uniform at the Uniform Museum Restaurant

15 August 2026 -Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

What is it about hats that wants to make you plonk one on your head? Perhaps it’s because if you plonked one anywhere else, it might look suspicious.

Suffice it to say, when we owned a vintage warehouse, we had a lot of hats, and, of course, people tried them on. We didn’t mind that, as long as they were doing so with a real intent to buy. But some people came to the shop to try them on and try it on, simply because they wanted to take photos and selfies and stick them on social media. Very often, as they handled the genuine vintage merchandise, which they had no more intention of buying than I have of voting Labour, and may I say, handled it in a cavalier fashion, including the cavalier headgear, I felt as though I could stick one on them. Such was my annoyance that I could have very easily cast myself as the Basil Fawlty of the antiques world. Indeed, I am fairly certain there were some who believed I was.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

Cozy industrial cafe with warm lighting, wood tables, and a long bar lined with stools on the right. The Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad.

In Kaliningrad, where there is no shortage of one-off bars and restaurants, a quirky venue exists which resembles a giant wardrobe, hung with historical military uniforms and hats from bygone eras, allowing patrons, as they see fit, and even when they do not fit, to try on at their leisure. No Basil fawlty there!

Cunningly catering to the selfie and social media crowd, this dine, drink and dress-up emporium located on Gorkogo Street stands recessed from the thoroughfare, its large glass-fronted prospect belying the formal municipal image which people of a certain age freely ascribe to venues traditionally charged with the responsible task of curating, preserving and presenting the remnants of former epochs. I would say that its modern appearance works in an opposite way to mine, in that on the other side of purported modernity, when you become familiar with it, lies a sanctuary for the old and interesting, the curious and the antiquated.

Bar half-lit, with stools in the foreground. Scene inside the Uniform Museum Restaurant, Kaliningrad.

Furthermore, in keeping with the adventurous proclivity exercised by today’s museums to fully embrace modernity, turning to all that interaction can bring to the minds of those that cannot live without it, the Uniform Museum Restaurant does not attempt to confine itself to merely encouraging admiration for selective obsolescence, which is something, for example, that Kaliningrad’s London Pub has got off to a fine art. By contrast, this unusual restaurant, because remember that this establishment is first and foremost a place to eat and drink and not a vintage clothes emporium, is an open invitation to see, touch and then try on any clothing that takes your fancy, be it any one specific garment or multiples thereof, which, for those whose lives are ruled by the constant need to nurture social media, is an opportunity made in heaven; nor is it one to be discouraged by the restaurant-bar itself should you naturally have the inclination when posting yourself in their attire to name the location that made it possible.

The number and the variety of uniforms on display combine to produce a rather staggering prop piece, and whilst, as one might not unreasonably expect, the majority of the uniforms are rooted in Russia’s Soviet past, interspersed among them, spanning several Soviet-era decades and covering all of its three main military services, together with law enforcement clothing, are equivalents fetched from further afield, from countries that spark the dealer’s question, “I wonder who they sourced those from?” This consideration makes for a quiet sport; convenient, pleasant and erudite in the distraction it affords, as you wait to receive your orders from the bar, which, unlike certain orders, are ones you will want to act upon with relish and with gusto.

Cozy bar and cafe with a row of colorful jackets on a rack behind the bar, string lights overhead, wooden tables in the foreground.

As I was waiting for my beer to arrive at the table appointed for that purpose, my observations had yielded examples of various military uniforms pertaining to, I estimated, several different nations. The compulsion to leap out of one’s seat in defiance of the natural instinct to honour one’s drinking fidelity and to do so with an alacrity that might dangerously suggest one wasn’t nearly as old as the uniforms surrounding one, was not, for all its magnetism (bygone clothing has this effect), a powerful enough enticement to waylay enjoyment of the restaurant’s beer, arguably the best of which is brewed there on the premises. Forbearance in this matter was not induced by mind over matter but rather by what mattered most; as beer outranking the highest office projected by the most powerful uniforms mustered in that place commanded unstinting obedience and called for immediate respect. This was indeed a ceremony I honoured to its utmost, raising my hand several times in a dignified salute, which just happened in the process to have a tankard grasped within it.

The restaurant’s onsite brewery centres its craft on brewing beers Germanic in style and origin (Quick! Put that German helmet on! And now, just as quickly, take it off!) offering connoisseurs the loyalty incentive which a regular rotation of fine premium beers never fails to recruit.

I was slurping my way through one of these beers when some battered mushrooms and smoky cheese straws as limp as an evening without Viagra requisitioned my mouth, whilst other diners in my vicinity resourced the pleasure of choosing fare from a rather more substantial selection of European and Russian dishes or, staying strictly within the rigid framework of masculine convention, organised their eating campaign around a manly well-done steak or tactically mapped out a safer strategy by enlisting burgers and chips.

“Tell me,” a voice enquired, heavily tinged with exasperation, “do you ever eat a proper meal?” The gap from where the voice ensued was wrapped around the very thing that the adjective ‘proper’ qualified.

“Only when I do,” came my guarded reply, “but if I were wearing that suit of clothes –” I pointed my hand in such a way as to suggest the arrival of reinforcements, which, pursuant to my gesticulation, were at the bend of the stairs – “I’d do it 18th-century style. ” For that was my conclusion.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

Of all the garments arrayed that day in the Uniform Museum Restaurant (like many Russian names of restaurants, the translated version can be a bit of a mouthful), there was none among the myriad that recommended themselves more strongly than those that adorned the turn of the stairs, garments which, in their masterful cut and sparing no expense in the tailored art of procuring embellishment, were all that elegance could possibly wish for. And here we have reached a stage convenient in our encomium on the triumphs of a restaurant interior second only in bygone clothing to the renowned costumeries of Angels and Bermans’, where nothing can deter us longer from digressing into a proverb that will, I ardently promise you, return full circle in later paragraphs.

The proverb ‘Manners Maketh Man’ must surely, at the didactic level, a place where virtue and morality superintend its every attribute, be underwritten by the observation that the part played by sartorial elegance underscores the doctrine and, whenever elegance is commendable – and when feasibly can it not be? – attends to the spirit of that attainment that William of Wykeham most properly endorsed, his being the sort of opinion that one would expect from the Bishop of Winchester installed as such in the 14th century.

In today’s world, however, anywhere in that portion to which the conceit ‘developed’ can be pinned, clothes, and not just they alone, reflect our fall from grace; but the former in loss of style and finesse stands as our greatest reminder of the miserable depth to which relentlessly we are descending because visually clothes so boldly demonstrate how cattle-minded we have become.

Try to imagine, for example, how liberated you would feel if you caught yourself in the act of casting aside those ruddy awful, oh-so-ugly work-like pants hung with unsightly cargo pockets, or divesting yourself and your tortured image of that ‘Ee-mon!’ thuggish hoody, or burning those nasty cheap tracksuit bottoms, like those pitiful, sad, ill-advised and now quite droopy feminists did back in the 1960s, who were made to look so very daft by burning their bras in public; and you, having reclaimed yourself by shedding those awful clothes like the skin of the snake or the caterpillar, with an independence beyond your experience, attire yourself instead in such an elegant livery of bold exquisiteness as that depicted faithfully on the unassuming stairway wall of the Uniform Museum Restaurant. (See, I told you we’d get there in the end!)

UNIFORM MUSEUM RESTAURANT

… garments which, in their masterful cut and sparing no expense in the tailored art of procuring embellishment, were all that elegance could possibly wish for.

Imagine the dash you would cut, the Beau Brummell you would unfurl, and how, on a scale of 1 to 10, effectively transformed and influentially transformational, you and your image would become; better by far than any sex change, if not more controversial, the outcome of such a wardrobe shift would be marked with approbation, your own, of course, for yourself included.

Three ornate, embellished coats on display under studio lighting, with white wigs above them on mannequin heads above the rack. Some of the vintage clothes in the Uniform Museum Restaurant.

On the feasibility of this exercise I leave you to ponder thoughtfully, examining the 18th-century styles that hang on the bend of the stairs, as, thinking it proper between pints, I venture now to reconnoitre the restaurant’s upper quarters with a wish to observe the scope and nature of the uniforms it holds and to assess the ambience that dwells therein.

To me, that is to say, to my particular way of thinking, which, I most humbly own, is not the way of everyone’s or, to tell the truth, of anyone I’ve met, the restaurant’s extensive room upstairs is a low-lit, smoochy, mood-infusing, clubby kind of a place, whose snob-screened and comfortable encompassing cushioned booth-style seats make the prospect of assignations an almost mandatory ritual, whether in your own mind you consider yourself to be one of a kind with Leslie Phillips, that is to say, an old-school romantic, or are one half of a typical pair of timeless canny canoodlers.

Cozy dimly lit cafe with wooden beams, string lights, and coats hanging on wall racks.

Mick Hart and Olga Hart posing for a mirror selfie in a costume shop with racks of red and black jackets behind them ."The photo shows a man and woman standing close, taking a selfie in a costume boutique, which is actually a Russian restaurant.

Dimly lit dining area with a wall of colorful military-style jackets displayed along the wall, above seated diners.

Both the ground and first floors of the Uniform Museum Bar in Kaliningrad are bathed in a uniform dimly lit style, which brings out the best, I feel, in drinking and dining ambience if liking it darker is your thing, whilst allowing the spotlights to do what they do at their most effective, which is to highlight and illuminate the thematicising principle donated by the vintage attire.

It would not be based on empirical science should I venture the suggestion that the upper echelons of this most eccentric, most unusual bar and restaurant are more replete with uniforms than its contemporaneous downstairs cousin’s; possibly yes, possibly no, but whatever the final reckoning, the amount of such is prodigious and wants for nothing in great variety; moreover, the lower ceilings of the upstairs room and the lowered lighting framing the spot-lit clothes lend something familiar to its character, which, I would bet my best cravat on, is akin to a boutique feel, as though the venue in its entirety would not be out of place should it be lifted and transported back to the days when Carnaby Street in London was incontestably chic, that is, back to the 1960s, before London became a migrant warehouse (I did mean ‘warehouse’, didn’t I?). This is an image also bolstered by hat stands full of hats – what else! – and where military visors in abundance are contrasted here and there with civilian and vernacular headwear, which, like those in the shop I used to own, immediately tempt you to pick them up and plonk them on your head. I said so, did I not, in the opening sprint of this post?

Museum-style display of assorted military hats mounted on a dark wall, with a beige dress coat hanging to the right.

Older man with white beard sits at a wooden table in a dim room with navy military jackets and hats on display on the wall. It's Mick Hart, author of expatkaliningrad.com at the Uniform Museum Restaurant.

Black ceremonial military hat with gold embroidery of an eagle and laurel leaves.

Woman in a black captain's hat sits at a wooden table, chin resting on her hand, in a dim cafe setting. Olga Hart at the Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

I was most surprised, and may I say not only a little impressed, to find displayed among these hats a traditional British coppers’ helmet, one of those Noddy-like pointy things, sometimes called the ‘custodian’, which sadly Britain’s ‘bobbies’ wear less and less these days because life on the streets has become too dangerous and nothing short of a reinforced bucket, painted regulatory police force blue, would do the job intended of it.

Museum display of a medieval suit of armor with a red-and-black shield and a dark British policeman's helmet on a wooden stand.

It is only the second of these helmets that I have witnessed in Kaliningrad; the other is known to me, as it was the one I carried from England, circa 2007. I gave it as a present to artist Victor Ryabinin, later to be told by him, with a grin lighting up his face, that of all the many and interesting items dotted around his studio, the one that intrigued his art students most was the British policeman’s helmet.

But let us now put our helmet away and make that significant move from anecdotal reverie to ponder on the nitty-gritty that makes a restaurant and a bar, and, where they still exist, a UK public house, the particular place you think it is, and go there via our intuition with a word or two on personality.

The selection process by which we nominate any one person for membership to our private club of liking and appreciation, an individual whom, from the moment of introduction, stands unambiguously out from the crowd, is one that sifts computer-style through numerous character attributes, sometimes instantaneously, at others with measured deliberation but certainly decisively, all but for the exception of those who are wanting in judge of character, before approval can be stamped. Yet, deeper qualities notwithstanding, the mostly initial yet often sustaining credentials by which these fellows gain admittance to the inner circle of ourselves are defined intuitively and subjectively by that all-appealing influence that goes by the name of personality.

You may ask, or if you won’t, I may ask it for you: what is there that makes one place more memorable than the next, assuming that nothing too bizarre or rather out of the ordinary happens to exert a disproportionate influence over recall and reflection, be such as they are thought good or bad? What is it that attracts us to one particular bar and restaurant to the full and obliging extent that with the first visit now completed, we vow to return and do? The perceived quality of beer and food, of course, plays a major part, but there is never not at least something persuasively more in addition, the absolute magic ingredient, unless you are a cheapskate whose only seduction is less to pay, and that extension to delight is synonymous with, or no different to, our reaction to personality.

Personality, when ascribed to objects other than strictly human, is typically, generically and often loosely defined by the substitution of atmosphere. We often do not say that a venue has personality when, in actual fact, we do, for personality is what we mean when we talk of a somewhere or something which, according to our sentiments, is endowed with attractive, positive qualities to which we are receptive and of which our senses firmly approve.

An example here in Kaliningrad would be if I were asked to judge which of the two, the London Pub or the subject of this post, the Uniform Museum Restaurant, tops the personality league. And the winner, ladies and gentlemen, but only by a narrow margin and perhaps because the building itself is old, is to pull no punches or wriggle from under the clinch and to honour honesty without reservation none other than the London Pub.

The reasons for this evaluation are beyond the scope of this current post, but a word or two in explanation should make the distinction clear enough, for what the Uniform Museum Restaurant surrenders in personality to its charismatic competitor, apart from and including an excellent range of beers and, I am told, a competent menu, it more than advances positively with a gimmick that stamps its mark not casually, nor sufficiently, but with a lasting indelibility, like the backstamp on a fine piece of Minton, except that in this case, on the ledger of your memory.

By building itself around the theme of vintage military clothes, it guarantees by power of novelty, uncontested as the restaurant is by any Kaliningrad equal, a retentive, singular character trait more than considerably capable of rescuing its reputation from run-of-the-mill obscurity. This leitmotif of archived military clothing, which, when it is shared with others, both by word of mouth and inevitably via the techie-grapevine, will encourage those that learn of it and feel they are missing out to hurry along there double quick to try on those lovely tunics and hats. They may also, whilst they are doing this, purchase food and drink, thereby making the circuit complete.

And when you acknowledge the unholy alliance forged between the ubiquitous smartphone camera and social media’s inducive drug-like fix, linking that manipulation to the irresistible urge to bedeck oneself with vintage clothes and to plonk on a vintage hat or two, which I did, mark my words, and with no less care for restraint than I appear to have for hypocrisy, then Wallah! Look no further! Your restaurant-bar has a winning formula.

Smiling man with a gray beard wearing a captain's hat in a dim room, standing beside vintage red and leopard-print sarmorial plaques with brass accents. It's Mick Hart in Kaliningrad at the Uniform Museum Restaurant

Of course, the litmus test for any bar or restaurant worth its weight in food and beer is, after having drunk and dined there, will you recall the holistic event as one of quality and with affection, and will you have the will, or even better, a great desire, to make yourself no stranger to the venue? If the answer to both is ‘yes,’ and recommendation by word of mouth asserts itself with no hesitation or obstructive second thought, then all the right boxes have been ticked. Apropos of which, I think we can let on here that the Uniform Museum Restaurant has all the vital boxes covered and has therefore lost little of that which otherwise could exert itself to impactful lasting detriment; its only concern, maybe, is that the presence of all those vintage clothes, should this review be appraised by moths, attract the opposite of the right clientele, the sort of clientele that any keeper of ancient textiles would rather do without. About which I am able to speak with no less of a lot of authority, having, as I undertook to mention in this wise post’s prologue, been once the proud and insufferable owner of a vintage clothes emporium. So, that is where we’re going to leave it now: trying them on, taking them off, and generally enjoying the food and beer at the Uniform Museum Restaurant, Gorkogo Street, Kaliningrad.

Vital Statistics

Uniform Museum Restaurant
150a Gorkogo St, Kaliningrad 236029 Russia

Tel: +7 963 350-73-09

Opening times
Monday to Thursday: 12pm to 12 midnight
Fri, Sat and Sunday: 12pm to 1am

Food – International Cuisine
German, European, Russian, Eastern European, Ukrainian

Kant’s Tomb at Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad

If you like thinking, Kant’s tomb is a good place to do it

26 March 2026 – Kant’s Tomb at Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad

A visit to Königsberg’s Cathedral and/or the Kant Museum, which it contains, would hardly be complete without stopping off to pause philosophically next to Kant’s tomb, which, as every trip-advising website will tell you, is located at the cathedral’s northeast corner. If, like me, however, you haven’t got a compass either in your head or in your shoe, such directional information may not be a whole lot of use to you, so we’ll say that the tomb is located at the back of the cathedral opposite the river. It is easy to navigate from Honey Bridge. Cross that and turn immediately right. Conversely, if you are approaching the cathedral from the front, walk around the back.

Kant’s Tomb at Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad

Initially, Kant was interred inside the cathedral, but his remains were exhumed in 1880 and reinterred beneath a neo-Gothic chapel, which stood on the site of the present-day mausoleum.

Prominent German architect Friedrich Lahrs designed the replacement to the dilapidated Gothic structure in a neoclassical ‘monumental’ style, constructed in 1924 as an open-hall, colonnaded chapel. The design is simplistic but effective, and I am quite convinced that Kant would not have disapproved.

The sepulchre contains a stone sarcophagus, beneath which the philosopher’s remains are buried.

It is particularly atmospheric on a dark night, when the tomb’s illumination, reflecting from its red granite surface, bathes the whole in a warm glow, casting angled shadows in stark relief across the imposing Gothic structure to which it is appended.

Kant’s Tomb at Königsberg Cathedral — **I know, it’s not red and warm as it sometimes is; it’s turquoise. Either way, it’s illuminating.**

The tomb is accessible to visitors all year round and is an integral part of the cathedral’s tours, which take in the cathedral, the Kant Museum, Kant’s grave, Kneiphof (Kant Island) and the history of Königsberg.

Visitors Information

Location of Kant’s tomb: Kanta Street, 1, Kaliningrad, Russia 236039

Guided tour details of Königsberg Cathedral, the Kant Museum, Kant’s Tomb and Kneiphof Island are available from https://sobor39.ru/en/events/excursions/

International Women’s Day Kaliningrad

The perfect presents for Women’s Day

Revised 7 March 2026 | First published 6 March 2020 ~ International Women’s Day Kaliningrad

Just before the dawn of International Women’s Day 2020, we took a trip to the BauCenter, where I bought Olga a nice trowel and some other romantic garden implements. I thought these would make excellent presents, and I was right. The garden has now matured and looks very nice indeed.

Travelling across Kaliningrad today on our way to the garden centre, we marveled at how the city had swung into action in readiness for International Women’s Day on Sunday.

The city was festooned with flower-sellers, ranging from one person with literally a handful of flowers to stalls consisting of two and three tables profusely bedecked with all manner of blooms.

The flower-selling booths, which are there on a permanent basis, were, of course, also in full swing, helping to transform the city into a charming early-spring festival ablaze with refreshing and natural bright colours.

International Women’s Day Kaliningrad

To Kaliningradians, International Women’s Day is an important date in the yearly calendar. It is a celebration of femininity, a time to show appreciation for the love, devotion, work and commitment that women invest in relationships and the value they impart to motherhood and family. I remember last year [2019], even with the sleet and snow, how many men of all ages were out on the streets of Kaliningrad purchasing flowers to present to their wives and girlfriends.

I tried comparing International Women’s Day in Kaliningrad with its UK counterpart, but, try as I might, there was nothing to recall. Perhaps, on March the 8th, I had always been in the wrong place at the wrong time (ie, hiding in the pub), or, then again, perhaps buying flowers for one’s other heterosexual half is frowned on in the UK as an unforgivable act of sexism.

Hmmm, well, the last thing that I would want to be accused of is sexism. Perish the thought.

So, I refrained from purchasing my wife flowers this year (which makes it sound as if I bought her flowers last year), and instead I bought her a shovel and a trowel so that she could plant her own in the garden.

Which just goes to show that leading your wife up the garden path does not have to spark a gender war!

It’s 2026, and the garden is looking lovely!

Olga Hart's garden in 2025 — Trowelling on the appreciation

More on Daily Life in Kaliningrad

Russia Pays Tribute to its Men
Kaliningrad Leaves Autumn to the Leaf Suckers

Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

A step-by-step guide to the six days it took to create the world

10 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

Holiness, theological doctrines and a biblical view of the world, these are some of the many spiritual components of our mortal existence with which, I imagine, I am rarely associated. I can think of hardly anybody among those few who think they know me, and that includes myself, who would even half believe that I would take an active interest in the genesis creation narrative. And yet, there I was ~ where, I shall tell you in good time ~ not merely taking an interest in, but following in the footsteps of, the Divine Creator’s plan.

The first question that was put to us was, “How long did it take God to create the world?” Where my wife got three days from, I have no idea. Her god must have been on piecework. My answer, after rummaging hastily through my Church of England primary education archives, “seven days”, was nearer to the mark, but our guide, a Lutheran priest, corrected me, just as I remembered what I have always considered to be a nitpicking distinction, claiming that the world was made in six days and on the seventh, the Good Lord rested.

This genesis paradigm has been used to explain why we go to, or in England used to go to, church on Sundays and why on that same day, before the evil ones changed the licensing laws, the pubs worked fewer hours, so that we, the people who used the pubs, would stay at home and rest in order to work greater hours in the restless week to come. Is nothing sacred to exploitation? The answer to that is no.

I had not been asked such searching biblical questions since I was a nipper, and, as far as I can recall, had never been asked them whilst standing in front of a giant globe of the world, lit up and suspended within a hushed and semi-darkened room, bathed in a red-filtered light, with a Lutheran priest standing before me dressed in a pair of jeans surrounded by a semi-circle of orange-painted rocking horses.

Something for the weekend, Sir?
Victor Ryabinin Art Exhibition retrospective 2021
Where Art Meets Interior Design
Telegraph Art Restaurant, Svetlogorsk

If this was not enough to persuade me that I had wandered onto the TV film set of the cult 1960s’ series The Prisoner, then the presence of a dinosaur’s skeleton poised at the side of the globe primordially grinning extinction at me brought me back to earth with a surrealistic jolt.

Ponart Brewery Creation: Dinosaur and large world installation at Kaliningrad's Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

In telling you that the cavernous, scarred, hollowed out, red-brick room in which myself, my wife, the priest, the globe and the dinosaur were congregated was one piece in the mammoth jigsaw of Königsberg’s Pomart Brewery, a rambling late-19^th century pile undergoing restoration and emerging from its ruined condition as a multifarious public space, those who think they know me, and this includes myself, will pick up on the one word ‘brewery’ and whisper slyly under their breath, ‘Hmm, so that’s why he was there!” But both of us could not be more wrong. Though it shames me to admit it, I was not strictly or exclusively at Pomart’s for the beer.

Mick Hart at the Ponart Brewery in Kaliningrad

Not that I have not been aware of the Pomart Brewery’s existence; could I of all people be guilty of this oversight? I have known it as a historic landmark fallen into dereliction and, in more recent months, as an ambitious restoration project, complete with functioning brewery. The fact, therefore, that I have not had time to explore it in either its faded former or current glory testifies to the many things that there are to see and do in and around Kaliningrad. But here we were, or rather there we were, at last, attending an exhibition called Creation, a deceptively simple title for something of such conceptual and spatial magnitude.

Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

The art group ‘Grain’, Creation’s creators, originates from ‘Annenkirche’ (in Russian: Анненкирхе), or the easier to relate to St Anne’s Lutheran Church in the Russian city of St Petersburg.

The group describes their exhibition as a “biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern art … where the past and the present, faith and creativity, deep meaning and stunning visual design are harmoniously combined.

“At the exhibition, you will learn all the most important things about the days of the creation,” Creation’s creators promise. “You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether or not to bite the forbidden fruit.”

Tempted? I wouldn’t recommend it. Although among the exhibition’s stimulating props and large-scale installations, you will find no shortage of apples, like everything else in this tour de force the apples are only as real as symbolic licence permits them to be. The creators of Creation invite you to leave this material world and sink your teeth into something that you may have bitten into before, but which lies beyond the secular yonder to which you have grown accustomed.

Apples of Temptation at the Creation of the World Exhibition

Ponart’s Brewery was not created as a venue for Creation, it was created for the creation of Pilsner lager (there’s no accounting for taste), but as an exact fit for Creation’s needs, it is difficult to imagine anywhere else coming reasonably close. Ponart swallows everything whole ~ you, me, apples and all, even the giant globe of the world and the looming sphere of the moon. To the exhibition’s props, the gargantuan scarred-brick labyrinth constitutes a compatible universe, an expanse in which each exhibit finds its own unique space, providing the parabolic journey, along whose line the exhibits lead you, with a transport of celestial commentary and a glimpse into your own beliefs, which, latent within your spiritual landscape, are as revealing in their intimacy as they are in cosmic proportion.

Each exhibit seems to signpost biblical images in your childhood past, which, as you are gradually reacquainted, shuffle to and fro against an ever-changing, dream-like scenery, part comprised of book illustrations, part the work of your own young hand. You can almost feel the wax of the crayons brushing against your fingers and feel the smile on your face at the Rembrandt you have created.

Ponart Brewery Creation: All creatures great and small at Ponart Brewery Exhibition, Kaliningrad

Creation is the kind of exhibition, the startling kind, where you can live the Earth’s first six days of life at a pace that suits your ruminations, and when you feel you have reached the seventh, you can take a well-earnt rest, for example, in one of Ponart’s relaxing bars or atmospheric restaurants.

Creation has never been so creative and Ponart’s never so tempting.

Creation’s Website
Выставка Сотворение в Калининграде

Russia Day in Kaliningrad Honours Past and Present

Commemorate and Celebrate

4 December 2024 ~ Russia Day in Kaliningrad Honours Past and Present

RUSSIA DAY has been celebrated annually on 12 June since 1992. It is the national holiday of the Russian Federation, originally and officially known as the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), but that was a bit of a mouthful, even for Russians, so mercifully it was changed in 1998, so that even I can say it.

The idea that the Russian calendar is dominated by celebrations is not entirely misleading if you factor in everything from music, film, theatre, food, famous people to winter. However, Russia has no more public holidays than most other countries ~ eight, I believe.

Just like Bank Holidays in the UK, most public offices and schools are closed on 12^th June. It’s a national day off, with events taking place throughout the country.

It’s also a chance for Russians to revisit, remind themselves of and celebrate all things Russian.

For some people, older people, those who were brought up in the USSR, the day has different significances. For those who bemoan the loss of the Soviet Union, it is a day of fond, if not sad, remembrance; for those who answer ‘No’ to my question, “Do you miss the Soviet Union?”, it is a day to celebrate pre-Soviet history, the Russia of the here and now and/or the Russia of the future.

Without mastery of the crystal ball to preview destiny, at least two of these time periods coalesced in Kaliningrad’s 2024 Russian Day festival. Held in the attractive grass and meandering paved precincts bordering Königsberg’s Upper Pond, Russian culture and its past were brought evocatively to life in colourful costumed pageants, tableau vivant and displays of living history. Craft stalls of a multifarious nature plied their trade in traditional hand-made Russian goods, augmented by the up to date and novel to attract the eyes of children and appeal to less retrospective types.

Also at hand was costume and fine jewellery, which, If you failed to keep your navigational wits about you, could eventually end up on the hands, around the wrists and upon the neck of your wife or girlfriend.

“Look, over there! [away from the jewellery stalls]. There’s a very interesting, er, what do you call it, thingymajig.”

June, like most other months of the year, can be temperamental (I knew a girl called June once. Heaven knows why they christened her that, they would better have called her December.), but I am pleased to say that on the twelth day of this June, the clouds rolled back in the heavens, the sun came out to join us and Russia Day in Kaliningrad was a gala day to remember.

The English are told to celebrate everybody else’s culture (hint almost everybody else’s!)
Unfortunately, the English, what’s left of us, have no such state-ordained or government-supported equivalent to Russia Day; in fact, quite the opposite. We are encouraged to celebrate Black History Month. (I’m sure they would like to extend this to Black History 12 months, which they are doing anyway via the TV commercials.) Headlines in the liberal press exhort us to learn about everyone else, all except ourselves: “What you should know about Ramadan and Eid” “What you should know about Diwali” and “What you shouldn’t know about any of your own Christian festivals, coz it don’t matter!”

St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday for the Irish, but St George’s Day (the Patron Saint of England) is hardly recognised anymore and deliberately suppressed by the left, who are afraid that it could remind the English of their ancestral history, and thus consolidate their cultural identity, which they, the left, have for some time now been working hard to eradicate.

One black activist operating in the UK has put it on record that in his opinion the English do not deserve a day off to celebrate its culture. I should imagine that the English feel that they don’t deserve him.

Hopefully, Farage and Reform will change all that in the very near future! 👍

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Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us

Change, Spare Change, All Change, Why Change?

22 September 2024 ~ Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us

Have you ever noticed that when you go away for a few weeks, on your return not everything has changed, but some things have and subtly. For example, after my recent sojourn in the UK, I returned to Kaliningrad to find that the vacuum cleaner appliances had strangely disappeared, that someone had half-inched the mat from my office/study/drinking den, that the water jug had vanished, that a small table was where it wasn’t, and that the cat’s bowls had turned from plastic to ceramic. On a not so subtle and more depressing note, I learnt that the neighbour’s cat ~ I used to call her ‘Big Eyes’ ~ had scaled her last plank backwards. She used this technique to descend from a flat roof on the second storey of her owner’s house after her owners cut down the birch tree along whose branches she used to scramble.

Unlike our stay-at-home Ginger, she was an out-and-about sort of cat, a brave and intrepid adventurer, who, alas, was to put too much faith in the mythical tale that cats have nine lives and met with the truth abruptly whilst she was crossing the road.

The old philosophical question is there life after death is problematic enough without appending to that question are cats accorded a similar privilege?

“Of course, cat heaven exists,” cat lovers cry indignantly, but does it follow from this assumption that parity heavens exist for pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and every other animal species that are brought into this world merely to be slaughtered for the tastebud pleasures of carnivores?

Abstractions of this nature, though they may well have once occurred to me in some distant, cynical, cerebral past, found no room in my consciousness on returning to Kaliningrad, for soon I would be fretting about an entirely different dilemma ~ is there life after YouTube?

In the short while I had been away not only had my rug gone west but also YouTube with it, or to be more precise, had thereto been confined. “That’s buggered it,” I thought ~ I am prone to moments of eloquence like this ~ for though I could not give a monkey’s for the loss of Western mainstream media, where would I go with YouTube gone for my daily fix of music, for documentaries of an historical nature and for classic pre-woke TV dramas like 1960s’ Dangerman, filmed in glorious black and white when the use of the term black and white was not endowed with racial undertones and even if it had been nobody British at that time would have given a monkey’s f.ck. Ah, Happy Days indeed!

Sixty minutes searching Google for credible alternatives to the sort of content with which I engage on YouTube was enough to reassure me that whilst life without YouTube was not as we know it ~ YouTube is but one place in the internet’s vast and expanding universe but in itself it seems infinite ~ life without it was not unsupportable.

I found a site I had used in the past which offered a reasonably good selection of archived TV dramas and classic black and white films, and I also upturned a second site which, although containing the sort of stuff I would not touch with a barge polack ~ modern, glossy, tacky and geared to a left-leaning audience ~ tendered the consolation of half a dozen history programmes of a fairly reputable nature.

I was conscious that I was doing something that the so-called entitled millennials are only just coming to terms with in these rapidly changing times: I was having to ‘make do’. The derivation actually precedes the generation to which I belong. It has its origins in wartime slogans, and was born out of the real necessity of making the best of a bad situation, using whatever scant resources were at hand. Making do in the age of misinformation/disinformation, the cast offs and the hand me downs of second- and third-best websites represent a collateral revision of the quid pro quo arrangement of if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine, rehashed by modern politics as so long as you let me show you mine then I’ll let you show me yours.

I sometimes wonder if any of our contemporary politicians have bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels, written and published by Jonathan Swift in 1726, and if the answer is yes, did they find it illuminating. I for one believe that Swift’s seminal work should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is contemplating taking up a career in politics.

Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong

Ping pong, aka table tennis, is a game like many other games, such as cricket, rugby, tennis and football, I can honestly say I have never much cared for. I don’t care much for the tit for tat and the way in which the ball, be it big or small, gets passed back and forth with monotonous regularity between two opposing but rules-based players or carefully hand-picked teams, with no apparent benefit to anyone else outside of the game, give or take a cheer or two, which quickly fade in euphoria’s twilight.

Above: Ping and Pong. It’s batty.

At least in the UK when the sad illusion Democracy has been stripped down naked like the tired old whore she is, which many, out of trained submission or a sense of misplaced respect, shy away from doing, the rules of the game, whose they are and who it is that benefits from them are as transparent as a Nylon negligee (What happened to that in my absence?). Thanks to long experience of the electoral system’s hocus pocus, the who will it be first past the post, we know that whether we make our mark or not, we are guaranteed for the next five years to be saddled with one or the other bunch of ineffectual dunderheads and that, give or take a nuance or two, whichever party claims Number 10 as its prize will be singing, rather badly as usual, from the communal globalist hymn sheet: Money, Money, Money. Please to sing along now. You are all familiar with the refrain.

During my last assignment in the UK, I was treated to the spectacle of this perfectly meaningless political role play, the changing of the old guard ~ ping pong, ping pong … pong, pong, pong. Out with the old and in with the old: the Tories on their way out, Labour on their way in, but significantly rather more out than in and with many of them clearly quite out of it. Bring on the men in white coats. (Sorry I did not mention women; I’m taking a course in misogyny.)

This rotational, completely predictable, seesaw-moment momentum has less to do with change than it does with continuity, as most of the Tories’ acclaimed centre right are so way left of centre that they ought to be in the Labour Party, as many of them effectively are, whilst the Labour party itself knows no longer what it is, what it wants to be and least of all where it is going. Shame it is taking the nation with it. Half of Labour is hard left, half of it is half hearted and the other half is clearly insane (and clearly possess a triple ‘A’ in Maths). Neither Labour or the Cons ever recovered from Tony Blair. Both exhibit incurable symptoms, and the plague they exhale collusively is addling minds and destroying the country.

Nowhere is this emergency better illustrated than when the media cries exultantly that one or other of the old two parties has ‘won it by a landslide’.

The only landslide the public sense is that things are slipping away from them, that things are going from bad to worse. And yet as catastrophic as British life now is, many in the UK are yet to grasp the intelligence that by hook or by crook the old two parties need to be put out to grass. Change is as good as a rest, as they say, and a rest from them is badly needed and, more to the point, excessively overdue.

The Labour and Conservative parties: two old horses out to grass

Above: I think it’s self-explanatory …

To be fair, if that is the same as being honest, Liebour did in its accession usher in some changes, albeit typically hurriedly, typically without much thought and typically in the process breaking most if not at all of its pre-election promises. But as the changes so far instituted are typically Labour in character, they have in the absolute sense changed very little at all. For example, if a Labour government did not raise taxes what a momentous change that would be. But then if Labour did not raise taxes would anybody know they were there?

Whoever it was who thought to dub Labour the party of taxation was a percipient man indeed, so much more than just perspicacious that the chances of him being a woman are nil (Excuse me for being sexist, you see I’m taking this course in misogyny.). But don’t you dare complain, not about being a man when you would rather you were a woman (it’s something you cannot change) and don’t complain about Labour’s tax hikes. You were warned that Liebour would tax you, and tax you into the ground, so why did you vote them in!

It is a fact of life that some things change and some things plainly don’t (Come on now transvestites, don’t get those knickers into a twist!); some things change a lot and others don’t change that much; some things get done for a change, and just for a change some things don’t; and there’s not a lot of change to be had out of six quid for a pint. But there are some things that will never change, though given time they probably will, but by the time they do will it be too late? Let’s talk immigration. Somebody ought to, has to, as it should be abundantly clear by now that that somebody is not Starmer.

Immigration is possibly the one issue that leading up to the General Election the Liebour party did not lie about; perhaps they simply forgot. Those of us who did not vote Labour were right, not far-right mind you, but right that we did not do so, if only for this reason, since with depressing predictability Labour has not done, and has no intention of ever doing, as much as diddly squit to resolve the immigration crisis, a dastardly weaponisation programme which represents the one real threat to the stability of the British nation and the safety of its indigenous people.

Spare Some Change for immigration: the elephant in the political room

Where Labour has excelled itself is channelling more resources into the conflict in Ukraine at a time when we need to squander it least on globalist-led agendas. Do you ever ask yourself what it is that they do with your money which they take in the name of ‘council tax’? Could it be used to foot the bill for conflicts in which we have no legitimate role, even if we started them, and for paving the way for dinghy migrants to live it up in luxury?

Immigration has changed and also it has not. It has not changed in that we still have it, has not changed in that we don’t want it, but has changed inasmuch that want it or want it not, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Central to this change is that the major EU powers no longer deem it necessary to conceal their complicit role in organising and facilitating the migrant invasion of Britain.

The infectiousness of this invasion is far more virulent and far more lethal than any contrived plandemic could be. Perhaps we should call on dear old Bill. Come on Bill, old boy, whip us up a jab or six to provide the British people with the immunity they so desperately need to protect themselves from Coronomigrant. Violent crime is rampant, acts of terrorism sweep the nation, the police are no longer a force but a branch of the social services and the government is so dismally limp it is crying out for a shot of moral Viagra.

White fight not far right

One thing that was markedly different during recent months in England, which was not necessarily good but understandably necessary as an alternative stay of civil war, was that when the riots came, as come they did and come they will, it was the whiteys on the war path. Now that did make a change!!!

It was no change at Notting Hill Carnival. Yet again it proved to be London’s annual ethnic stab fest. Any other event with a history resembling the mind of an on-the-rampage serial killer would have been banned years ago, as would the Notting Hill Carnival if it was anything other than black. It is patently inconceivable that a white British festival with a similar record of bloodlust would be allowed to continue year on year. Murder or no murder, it would have been denounced from the outset as unfit for ethnic consumption and that without equivocation would have rapidly been the end of that. This year’s Boot Hill incident cost two more people their lives, adding to the festival’s ever increasing death toll. Meanwhile, the Labour government is contemplating doubling down on the British tradition of fox hunting. It seems that rural blood sports must be banned whilst urban ones are tolerated, encouraged one might say. Brrr! it felt as if something just walked over the United Kingdom’s grave. Could that something be two-tier policing?

Over to our new prime minister. He may resemble a disciplinarian, a 1950s’ schoolmaster parachuted strategically in from a time when Britain was really Britain, but as far as ethnics are concerned looks can be deceiving. Did he give the carnival organisers the six of the best he gave the white rioters? Did he give them lines to write, “Thou shalt not stab at the Notting Hill Carnival”? Did he heck as like. He caned himself instead, by forgetting the lines of condemnation the public were waiting to hear from him, either that or the savage events and the fear of being called racist deprived him of his left-wing backbone and left him morally speechless. He eventually did cough something up, but before you could say one rule for them and a different rule for us, and before some impudent scallywag could raise the uncomfortable spectre of policing on a two-tier level, he was banging the same old distraction drum about the number one priority being the need to protect society from the heinous actions of right-wing thugs. As for random knife attacks by men whose names we can’t pronounce and acts of organised terrorism by medieval hostiles (I’ve just had a call from my stockbroker ~ invest in inflatable dinghies), the message from Britain’s political elite is as masters of the hen house they have every right to fill it with as many foreign foxes as the ECHR permits, so just sit back and enjoy your fate.

Immigration: the Fox in the UK hen house

I began this post from the perspective of change and seem to have moved mesmerically into the realm where déjà vu governs the laws of momentum, and yet not everything in the world is as predictable as we would like to think. Those who live in a certain street in Kaliningrad thought they would never see the day when they would get themselves a brand-new pavement, but that day eventually dawned, despite one woman tutting, “It’s taken thirty years!” and now that vital change for which we had all been waiting seems as though it was always thus, that the pavement has always been there.

The same could be said of a certain sub-post office in a certain UK shire town. The post office seems to have been there for as long as memory itself, and mine is quite a long one, but it’s ‘all change’ when you scratch the surface. I am sure that this has got nothing to do with the fact it is run by Asians ~ which British post office isn’t! ~ but everything to do with the erratic hours it keeps. It is the first post office I have ever encountered that opens when it likes, making it an excellent venue whenever you catch it right, because since nobody trusts its opening hours very few people use it, hence the absence of queues. Not having to stand in line makes such a welcome change from a trip to your average post office, where you need to go armed with a sleeping bag and enough provisions to last you a fortnight, and yet it is such an odd phenomenon that it has you asking the question, could this peculiar post office that is more often shut than not, in fact be a front for something else? Like all these foreign food stores that pop up overnight and the multitude of barber’s shops purporting to be Turkish when the owners and all who work in them look and talk Albanian. Perhaps the owners of these businesses are engaged in some other activity, such as laundering, for example. There’s no hard left sign visible outside the coven of Hope Not Hate, but just because you cannot see the twin tubs does not mean that they are not there and the country is not being rinsed.

Whilst every street in every town and every city in England have fallen forfeit to immigration (you may have heard the phrase ‘Our cities have changed beyond recognition’), the streets of Russian Kaliningrad have decidedly changed for the better, that is to say materially and, with the restitution of law and order and regaining of self-respect, which had been partly laid to waste as a repercussion of perestroika, in matters of social decorum.

Whenever I walk the perimeters of Königsberg’s ancient ponds, this variance in urban life does not leap up and out at me like something dark on a no-go street in Peckham but is inviting enough to assail my senses with what we have lost in Britain. The contrast in the cultural climates is visible, audible, palpable, and it starts with the way in which people dress.

From New York to the South Pole, almost everybody these days is hardwired to dressing casual. I suspect that I am one of the few remaining sartorial standard bearers who espouses cravat, frock coat and top hat ~ not forgetting silver-topped cane ~ rather than wear a pair of trainers.

Above: “I don’t as a rule wear any, but I always make sure not to go out with, or in, a strong wind”

Kaliningradians and Kaliningrad visitors from other parts of Russia tend to follow a smart-casual trend. Whereas, as in every other sphere of cultural life, dress code in the UK has taken a turn for the worse and worst, going from ultra-smart to smart-casual, to trendy casual, to half casual, to dumb-down casual to bags of shit.

Who is not acquainted with that funny old Asian man? Let me point him out to you: that’s him there, there, there, over there and over here … See how he wears all sorts of oddments, everything thrown together: the workshop apron, pantaloon trousers, corny ill-fitting jacket bought from yonder charity shop and, of course, a pair of iridescent trainers ~ what lovely colour combinations, orange, yellow and purple. And he is indisputably the best dressed man in Bedford.

Now turn around and cast your gaze on those beautiful English ladies amorphously squashed in over-tight leggings, all bums and large tums, with cattle rings through their noses, shrapnel embedded in brows and lips and covered in head to foot with tats. Isn’t their language colourful: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. And what is that pervasive smell, no not that smell, this smell! Pooh! It is the town centre gently marinating in the stench of stale and smoking Ganja. Look up, it’s a live one, and he’s heading in our direction! Time to take evasive action! Cross to the opposite side of the street and quick!

UK's city centres are filling up with Zombies

The fundamental difference between Britain’s streets and the streets of Kaliningrad is not confined to sartorial consciousness: manners maketh man (they seem not to maketh UK women). Public behaviour on Kaliningrad’s streets, give or take the inevitable exception, is generally better than it is England. And, with the Russian accent on family values, traditional family groups of traditional Russian heritage freely and with confidence enjoy the streets of their city. Contrast homely scenes like this with the kind of groups you can expect to find, and more’s the pity do, hanging around in England’s cities and degrading its small-town centres.

Lefties would have us believe that the gangs of blacks and Asians, and the johnny-come-lately tribes flooding in on the promise tide of benefits, rights and endless freebies from far-flung parts of the world’s subcontinent are an enriching sight for monocultural eyes. But such postulations are unconvincing even through their glasses. Excelling the attitude and behavioural problems evinced by their white ne’er-do-well counterparts, a pervasive air of ‘up to no good’ hangs above the Ganja cloud and fills the vacuum on Britain’s streets left by the absence of coppers with an ‘at any moment it could all kick off’ incertitude. Menace and apprehension rule. Britain’s streets are not just uncouth, they are gravely infected with passive aggression.

Yes, things have certainly changed from the Britain I once knew and loved. I wonder what the Victorians and Edwardians would make of it. I wonder what those who fought for their country and died in two world wars would make of it. What would Sir Winston Churchill say? We know what Enoch Powell would say, since he said it back in the 1960s. Lord, if only someone had listened to him!

Spare some change, please!

I read somewhere (please tell me that this is not true) that housebreakers in the UK do not qualify for prison sentences until they have been convicted of 26 successive accounts of burglary. It is an indisputable fact that you have got more chance of winning the lottery or stopping the boats at Dover than getting arrested for shoplifting. It’s take your pick skanky ladies and nothing resembling gentlemen, you’ve really nothing to lose. In the unlikely event you get caught in the act, just give the merchandise back and have it away from the shop next door. Nice one, mate: Ha! Ha! Ha! Easy-touch-Britain, innit!

I have no idea if shoplifting is as prevalent in Kaliningrad as it is in every British town and city. I somehow feel it is not. But I do know, as I have witnessed it personally, that Kaliningrad has a boy-racer problem and that those that race are not all boys. Thankfully, however, one of the more applaudable changes has been the city-wide installation of efficacious pedestrian crossings. Gone are the days when we used to huddle in groups of five or more on the opposite sides of the four-lane roads and then, on the count of 10, make a nervous dash for it. Oh, how the drama of youth gives way to prudence in later life!

If someone was to ask me, and I don’t suppose they will, what is the one thing you would like to see changed in Kaliningrad, the answer without a second thought would be the introduction of a law to stamp out dugs that bark incessantly or, better still, to penalise their owners. These must-be mutton-jeff mut-lovers can never have heard of noise pollution, possibly because like the rest of us, they can hear precious little above the row that their barking dugs are making. It’s a dugs life, as someone said, someone who couldn’t spell dogs correctly.

Since the subject of this post is change, I expect that you expect that at some point in the narrative, at this point, for example, the temptation to make some corny remark about change in relation to underpants would finally prove too much for me, but I hate to disappoint you that I am about to disappoint you, because someone might pull them up on me, I mean pull me up on it, and I do not intend to stoop so low, so let’s instead be briefs.

Ringing the changes is happening in a negative way on the Polish border. Always slow and unhelpful, the Polish border authorities are excelling their own track record for putting obstacles in one’s way where none should be encountered, thus holding up one’s journey as though suspending it in empty space by a very strong pair of invisible braces (we’re suspiciously close to pants again!). The object of the exercise appears to be none other than to subject the weary traveller to the torment of terminal boredom or failing in that ambition to simply delay one long enough to make one miss one’s flight. If you have been an unhappy recipient of this apparent change in policy and believe you are being short-changed by conditions of an adverse nature at the Russian-Polish border, here is where you can lodge your complaint:

Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)!

I was going to finish this post on change by saying something profound, like ‘things change and that’s a fact, and very often not for the better’. And then it suddenly occurred to me that women in leopard print tights rarely change their spots. So, then I revised my ending to read, ‘if it don’t change it will stay the same’, but whilst I know it will not change anything, I went and changed my mind.

Something for the weekend, sir?

UK Anti-immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Lies & Democracy are they now the same thing?
Don’t Kill Cash
Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

Image attributions

Beggar: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/homeless-man-sitting-ground-flat-vector-illustration-desperate-hungry-poor-male-person-sitting-street-near-trash-bin-asking-help-getting-into-financial-trouble-poverty-concept_24644540.htm#query=street%20beggar&position=0&from_view=keyword&track=ais_hybrid&uuid=af6b8f40-80ae-4929-ae9a-94b805e40e71″>Image by pch.vector</a> on Freepik

Suit: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Wedding-suit-on-a-stand-vector-clip-art/20642.html

Outline map UK: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/UK-silhouette/55420.html

Playing table tennis: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Kids-play-table-tennis/87262.html

Scotsman: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Orator-in-black-and-white/77202.html

Two horses grazing: https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/media/two-horses-grazing-3dbc66?action=download&size=1024 [Arthur B. Davies (American, Utica, New York 1862–1928 Florence)]

Elephant: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Elephant-contour-vector-clip-art/7929.html

Empty room: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Empty-room/70655.html

Fox in the hen house: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Fox-in-hen-house/81729.html

Zombie silhouette: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/zombie-silhouettes_805714.htm#fromView=keyword&page=1&position=8&uuid=31cda339-13bb-4ae8-b7a7-d96bb5b9b834″>Image by freepik</a>

Life in Kaliningrad through the lens of a camera

A few snapshots from my Kaliningrad album

22 May 2024 ~ Life in Kaliningrad through the lens of a camera

They could be curated, they could be aggregated, but I suspect that they are a random collection of photographs, some more recent than others, taken in and of Kaliningrad. Judge for yourselves.

Life in Kaliningrad

Above: Trams {Click on images to enlarge}
The new and the old ~ and I am not referring to myself. Here am I riding one of Kaliningrad’s latest trams. They are smooth and swish, and you can buy your ticket using touch-card technology. The old trams, c1970s (second photograph), good looks, as far as I am concerned. For me, these two-carriage ‘biscuit tins’ have classic kudos. I love the sounds and the movements they make. I even love the metal seats. Whenever I use these trams, our old friend Victor Ryabinin comes to mind. I can see him now, holding onto the rail at the back of the tram, observing life, as artists do, through the tram’s rear window. Rear Window! That’s a good name for a film.

Mick Hart and Olga Hart at Kaliningrad vintage car show 2019

Above: 2019 Golden Shadow of Königsberg
When things were different, and they often are, the Auto Retro Club Kaliningrad held an international and classic car show. The photo of me in a wide-brimmed trilby (a Fedora) was taken in what was that year (2019) the main arena for car competitions, the carpark of the King’s Residence, Kaliningrad’s most elaborate family leisure centre and restaurant complex. (Tweed jacket courtesy of Mr Wilcox)

Mick Hart in front of Kaliningrad's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

Orthodox Christian Cathedral Kaliningrad
The photograph of yours truly was taken in March of this year (2024) in Victory Square in front of The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Kaliningrad. In days of yore, meaning the early 2000s, this spot was dominated by a large bronze statue of Lenin, since removed to another quarter of the town. With the construction of the cathedral, the centre of Kaliningrad moved from Königsberg’s cultural and spiritual centre, directly in front of the Kaliningrad Hotel, to where it is today. In Königsberg’s days, the area known as Victory Square and everything beyond lay outside the city’s defensive walls. (Yes, I know, from a compositional perspective, it would have been much better had I stood so that I was centred in the photograph in line with the door. It annoys me as well!)

Königsberg relics at fleamarket in Kaliningrad

< Left: Königsberg Relics
A lot of Königsberg was blown into bits and pieces during World War Two, so it is hardly surprising that bits and pieces of its past keep turning up, and a good place to find them ~ in fact the best ~ is at Kaliningrad’s flea market, just to one side of the city’s central market. This photo illustrates why I love this market so much.

Below: QR Code Checkers
Here’s a blast from the past ~ and let’s sincerely hope that it remains that way. Here we have QR Code Checking Officers on duty during the Coronavirus era, not letting anybody inside the cathedral unless they had a QR code proving they had been ‘jabbed’. Looking back on this sinister period of history makes walking in and out of doorways unchallenged instantly gratifying.

Life in Kaliningrad

QR Code checkers monitor access to Kaliningrad Cathedral in the Coronavirus year of 2021

Kaliningrad Botanical Gardens: an autumnal scene of the lake

Above: Kaliningrad Botanical Gardens
Unlike many cities, you do not have to travel far in Kaliningrad to enjoy nature in its natural habitat. This photograph captures the tranquility of the lake in Kaliningrad’s Botanical Gardens. It was taken in autumn 2023.

Above: Kaliningrad Sculptures {Click on images to enlarge}
Kaliningrad is renowned for its sculptures: Schiller, Kant, Lenin and the composition of two fighting bison to name but four. They may possess an attitude of assumed permanence thanks to who and what they are, but this distinction should not cancel out the ephemeral and the esoteric. This purple faceted moggy was last seen sitting statuesque outside Kaliningrad’s latest shopping centre in the central market district, and it is not everyday you will see an updated Russian samovar sitting on top of an oil drum in the grounds of Königsberg Cathedral.

Life in Kaliningrad: Three iconic buildings in Kaliningrad, but the House of Soviets is no more ...

Above: House of Soviets
A poignant picture of the House of Soviets framed between the hotel and restaurant buildings of Kaliningrad’s Fishing Village and the reconstructed ‘New Synagogue’ c.2023. Stand in the same spot today where the photograph was taken to appreciate the laws of transience by which our lives are governed.

Above: CCCP (that’s USSR to you)
As you know, because it’s general knowledge, there’s no time like the past, which is why as a collector of what’s left of it, I was thrilled to discover on a hot day in ’22 an ice cream with an historical theme. After chilling out on it, I was able to say with impunity, “ I enjoyed the USSR”.

Above: Sunny Day in Youth Park {Click on images to enlarge}
They say that ‘youth is wasted on the young’, but whenever I stroll through Kaliningrad’s Youth Park, I put this prejudice behind me and think instead ‘young at heart’. Some would say, ‘never grown up!’ I vow one day that I will attempt to complete every adult ride in the park in series. Until that day dawns, I will continue to enjoy those days when the park is less rumbustious. At the time these photos were taken (May 2024), I was more than happy simply to purchase a cup of specialty tea and sit and drink it on a park bench. The park attendants were filling the planters with flowers, and the sun had got its hat on.

Königsberg villa in modern-day Kaliningrad

Above: Königsberg Villas
It is hardly surprising that when residents of Moscow, Siberia and other far-flung places across this huge territory that is Russia, visit Kaliningrad, they fall in love with the city. Kaliningrad, in all its many and diverse facets, is, by virtue of its Prussian-Russian history, a unique experience, central to which is its surviving German buildings. Contrary to the belief that all of Königsberg was raised to the ground during WWII, many splendid, curious and fine examples of architectural merit are extant, and it is not always necessary to adopt a ‘seek and ye shall find’ approach. In the districts of Amalienau and Maraunenhof, for example, almost every street contains something of architectural significance, and some streets have enough large houses and grand villas on them to make even the most abstemious ashamed of their secret envy.

Above: Contrasting Scenes of Kaliningrad {Click on images to enlarge}
Two cityscape views: one taken from a high-rise flat complex; the other from a balcony (May 2024), to coincide with the first blooms of spring.

Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets

Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro with a Heart of Gold

It’s a venue which immortalises the House of Soviets, serves good beer, hosts music evenings and likes you, the customer.

13 April 2024 ~ Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets

Do you believe in coincidences? In my most recent post I wrote about the gradual disappearance of Kaliningrad’s most infamous and controversial landmark, the House of Soviets. Less than a week later, I find myself in a subterranean bar dedicated to that very building.

Bar Sovetov is located in what once was, during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the residential quarter of choice for Königsberg’s affluent citizens.

On foot, it is something of a trek from the city centre to this still sought-after district, but it is one I made on numerous occasions in the days when a bar, long since gone, the enigmatically named Twelve Chairs, exercised a consistent influence and justified the effort.

Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad

Whilst in the character of its rooms, Bar Sovetov does not possess the intricacy or the old-world charm that gave Twelve Chairs its je ne sais quoi, it is no less thought-provoking in the nature of its decoration and appurtenances of thematic quirk.

The two-roomed bar, with its truncated corridor leading to the lavs, is very much a pop art haven. Victor Ryabinin, former artist and local historian, would have adored it! Symbolism abounds: ‘Look Out!’ the slogan reads. ‘Big Brother is Watching you!’ You see it above the full-sized wall mirror in which you are watching yourself.

A white face mask framed between two suspended lamps exudes from the wall. Wearing a baseball cap in such a way that it partly conceals its features, it holds to its lips an admonitory finger attached to a long white arm. As with the face above it, the arm emerges from solid brickwork as it would through the fold of a curtain. Both face and arm are whimsical, especially in the matter of their relative dislocation, but irony and surrealism are the uniting forces that bring them together.

These are just two of many examples of Bar Sovetov’s camp milieu. Wherever you look, be it high or low, another element of the quaint and fanciful leaps out to greet and surprise you.

With the obvious exception of Aleks Smirnov’s Badger Club, lovers of the out-of-the-ordinary will be hard pushed to find even among Kaliningrad’s most unconventional watering holes anything that surpasses Bar Sovetov’s quaint burlesque. But for all that it camps it up, the nostalgia has a genuine ring; it springs from a source of real affection. And the humour the props elicit, be it aimed at you and me or tailored to the refined perception of the discerning intellectual, leaves plenty of form intact for the inquisitive mind of the history buff.

The genesis, erection, completion and the long-standing but idle years of the House of Soviets’ occupation are captured step by step in a series of timelined photographs. The images of the building in its promising phase of construction, with cranes on either side, are particularly poignant memories, given that in its obliteration almost identical cranes in almost identical places stand either side of the shrinking structure.

On the opposite side of actuality, a wall in the bar’s first room is a bold painted visual replica, close up and in your face, of the House of Soviet’s exterior. The effect is profoundly Gotham City, gaudy, haunting, claustrophobic but seminally cartoon, a perfect piece of ‘dark deco’ kitsch. Further urbanisation occurs not in the question itself, which is off the wall whilst on the wall, but in the way it is daubed across the wall, which reflects the mind of graffiti man stretched to its utmost limit: “Who,” it asks, “killed the House of Soviets?” If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.

More real photos of the fated hulk that over its 53-year existence dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline, exciting in its awesome prospect, ambivalent and contentious in what it actually stood for and why it stood for so long, can be found in the bar’s back room.

Mick Hart and Inara at Bar Sovetov in Kaliningrad

It is here that the structure’s rightful place in the socio-political era into which it was given a sort of life or maybe a life of sorts is given historical context. Framed copies of Soviet art, amusing, powerful and all iconic, visually break up the hard brick-wall to which they are attached, whilst in one corner of the room a little shrine pays tribute to the final days of Sovietism.

There, upon a shelf, rubbing shoulders with the printed word and a quaint assortment of nick-nacks, sits a large portrait photograph of if not the architect of perestroika then the man who is widely considered to be its chief executive officer, former General Secretary Gorbachev, twinned in the opposite corner with a replica set of traffic lights, which, for some exotic reason or perhaps no reason at all beyond their anomalous presence and illuminative oddity, cast a lurid reddish glow across the whitewashed brickwork.

The seats in this comic-strip memory, when not authentic 70s’ vintage, are made from wooden pallets, painted to look distressed, put together as benches and kindly equipped with padded seats. However, recalling the slatted wood benches with which Kaliningrad’s trains were furnished twenty-three years ago, such convenient cushioned luxury may be but the useful product of indulgent historical revisionism. Whilst the past is unrelenting in its prescribed but often unforgiving and impractical perpetuity, concessions ought to be made, don’t you think, to our poor post-Soviet posteriors. Historical accuracy has its virtues, but is it worth corns and blisters?

Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad

The bar itself, that is the thing on which when you buy your beer it temporarily rests on top and the area to the rear of it, is a content-managed zone, where normal things normally sold behind bars share more than their fair share of shelving space with the weird, the wild and the whimsically whacky. Note the hollow concrete blocks shown in the photo below that have been used to comprise the wall of the bar. Is that or is it not a passing nod to the House of Soviets?

A conforming principle of all such bars, that is to say craft-beer bars, is that the beer selection is written in chalk on good old-fashioned blackboards. What is it, I ask myself, and I suppose you ask yourself too, about this rudimentary practice that makes it so applicable, so pleasingly, conventionally and fundamentally right and so well received in its prime objective, which is to call to our eager attention the dispensation of quality brews? When you’ve found the answer to that one, you might go on to answer the question ‘Who killed the House of Soviets?’ I have a hunch that in both cases we will discover the hand of Old Father Time.

From the six or so beers on offer, I ordered myself a ‘Milk of …?’ Er, a ‘Milk of …?’ What was the name of that beer? Ah yes, now I remember, I bought myself a ‘Milk of Amnesia’. How could you not drink a beer like that, with a name so unforgettable?

In summing up the Bar Sovetov experience, the beer is good. The atmosphere is atmospheric. The people who run the bar are real; in other words, they are genuinely friendly and they are also good at what they do. They effortlessly embody and earnestly convey the qualities prerequisite for fulfilling the role they have given themselves, that of convivial mine host, in an age when many are either not up to it or simply not fit for purpose.

Those who earn their living in the hospitality trade at customer-facing level, would do well to bookmark this truth, that the bar or pub in which they perform is as much a stage as any other and their customers are their audience. Once the curtain goes up, if you cannot manage authenticity, you must put yourself out there, put on a smile and remember that it’s show time! If the act is one the punters like or at least is one that they can believe in, and the beer is good and well kept, they’ll keep on coming back. Loyalty is everything, and that applies to the service industry as it does to everything else, and I cannot think of a better bar more deserving of it than Sovetov.

The main thing:

Bar Sovetov
Prospekt Mira, 118 ground floor, Central District, Kaliningrad, 236022

Link to street map: https://2gis.ru/kaliningrad/firm/70000001082036462

Tel: +7 921 616 36 26
Telegram: https://t.me/barsovetov
VK: https://vk.com/barsovetov

Opening times:
Mon: Closed
Tues to Thurs: 4pm to 12 midnight
Fri, Sat & Sun: 4pm to 2am

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

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 13^th 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.

<It’s Curtains for the House of Soviets>

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.