Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad
City Information
Overview
Kaliningrad is a port situated on the Baltic Sea with a population of 408.000. The city was founded in 1255 and was known as Koenigsberg until 1946. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea is sandwiched between Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east.
Annexed from Germany in 1945, the territory was a closed military zone throughout the Soviet period.
More recently Russia has threatened to station missiles there if the United States goes ahead with its plan to deploy an anti-missile shield in neighbouring Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
Historical Information
Koenigsberg, as the city of Kaliningrad was once known, was founded by Teutonic knights in the 13th century. It became one of the cities of the Hanseatic League and was once the capital of Prussia. The philosopher Immanuel Kant spent all his life in the city and died there in 1804.
The region was part of Germany until annexation by the USSR following World War II when it saw bitter fighting and suffered rampant destruction. The German population was expelled or fled after the war ended.
During the Soviet period, Kaliningrad Region, administratively part of the Russian Federation, was separated from the rest of Russia, more than 300km to the east, by the then Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus.
Since Lithuania joined the EU it has been impossible to travel between the exclave and the rest of Russia over land without crossing the territory of at least one EU state. There has been friction, particularly with Lithuania, over transit regulations, but we can provide a full visa information for travelers to this region.
Kaliningrad was one of the most militarised and closed parts of the Soviet Union. Up to half a million servicemen were stationed there. The military were the region's chief economic mainstay in the Soviet years. When the USSR ceased to be, that military presence was decimated along with the economic benefits it provided.
Kaliningrad is still of great strategic importance to Moscow. It houses the Russian Baltic Fleet at the port of Baltiysk and is the country's only European ice-free port.
een outlawed and the largest synagogue in Asia was nationalized; it was only in 2004 that it was returned to a tiny Jewish community. Most of the small Jewish population of some one thousand people have emigrated to Israel since 1989. About two hundred Jews currently live in the city. These Jews originated from different parts of the former Soviet Union. Percentage of intermarriages is high because of lack of a real Jewish life and high assimilation.
