Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

Kaliningrad used to be known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Eastern Prussia, the home of Kant. It lies on the Baltic Sea, between Lithuania and Poland, opposite Sweden. At the end of World War II it was captured by the Soviets, renamed, repopulated with imported Soviets from across the empire, and made into a high-security, closed-off military port. It was the most western point of the USSR. After the Cold War the Russians held onto it, though Kaliningrad has no border with Russia proper. It is now an exclave of Russia inside the European Union, a geopolitical freak. The EU recognized “the special position of Kaliningrad” but had “concerns regarding soft security issues”; that is to say, it was leaking heroin, weapons, AIDS, and a mutant strain of tuberculosis into the EU. Kaliningrad either had to change or risk having a wall built around it. There were no direct flights from Europe.

home sweet home..closest city to where my Dad was born in East Pressia.

It was almost painful to see the difference between the tired, elegant nineteenth-century houses of the old Koenigsberg and the postwar Soviet new-builds. The red gothic cathedral, home to Kant’s grave, was surrounded, on one side by shabby hordes of aggressive, concrete apartment blocks and on the other by a harbor full of rusting, resting warships.

ouch

This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

succinct summary

“If you start saying one thing is another, then, well, then the whole thing will come tumbling down, . . . ” he would say, slapping his lighter on the table. And then, when he would calm down: “It’s like the West reflected in a crooked mirror.”

not so crooked any more