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Kaliningrad, June 2001.
“Hello, I’m Victor, Special Forces frogman, I’m your driver for today.” Victor is a poppet. He coaxes his hyperventilating Volkswagen, with its flag of the Baltic fleet hanging from the rear-view mirror as a warning to thieves, into the belching traffic.

“Welcome to Kaliningrad.” Underestimate the Russian at your peril. In particular never underestimate his capacity for corporate ugliness. It is boundless, bottomless, fathomless. It stretches in concrete waves over the horizon and Kaliningrad is its greatest monumental evocation.

Only a very big idea and a steely will could have so relentlessly removed every scintilla of aesthetic pleasure from the vista. Kaliningrad boasts the most stratospherically ghastly building every conceived: “the people’s palace.” Huge square towers linked by thick walkways, it stands on a slight eminence and is emphatically hellish. This is communism’s Taj Mahal or St. Peter’s: the 20th century’s anti-Sydney Opera House. It was built in the 1960s by Khrushchev, who ordered that a 14th–century castle be dynamited to give it space. The castle had the posthumous last laugh, though. Its dungeons and subterranean tunnels made the monster unsafe. It has never opened, and stands today as a symbolic crumbling ruin to everything Soviet. Russians like symbols, they love this one with a thin, grim humour, as they adore the motorway flyover that behind it, going from nowhere to no place bereft of motorway. There’s something rather restful about Kaliningrad’s unremitting hideousness. If you’re used to living among things picked with care and taste, if your eye is constantly snagged by decoration or by proportion, then their absence is somehow soothing. You know you’ll never have to arrange your face into a look of cultured interest, you’re excused cooing. You have to gasp a lot, though.

Kaliningrad, ugly old fishwife of the Baltic until a decade and a half ago, the secret, closed home port of Soviet Baltic fleet. An enclave the size of Northern Ireland, wedged between Poland Lithuania, home to a million-and-a-half Russian souls. Today it’s a naval scrap yard with a wallowing, oxidising fishing fleet cut off by 1,000 kilometres from the seedy bulk of Mother Russia. A place that was spat out of perestroika as a stunned, suddenly pointless anomaly. It boasts the highest proportion of drug addicts and associated Aids sufferers in the Russian Federation, and 40% of the population exist below the poverty line – that’s the Russian poverty line, which is as low as you can draw a line without falling over. Kaliningrad is gristled with corruption, drugs, smuggling, sex slavery, endemic theft and thuggery. There’s also spiralling TB and the associated diseases of pollution. Nobody really knows what military slurry is buried here, how many toxins rust and seep in the earth and air.

Two pulp mills spew chemicals into the river that is the only source of the city’s water. What everyone does know is that the emetic, heavily chlorinated and worryingly green stuff that splutters from the tap is undrinkable. Kaliningrad, is also the lifelong home and resting place of the philosopher Kant, and digs up 90% of the world’s amber. But it wasn’t always thus. Kaliningrad, named after Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the first chairman of the central executive committee of the USSR, was once Konigsberg.

Named as the birthplace of Prussian kings, a city founded by the Teutonic knights who were to become so politically eroticised by Hitler, Konigsberg was the capital of Ost Pussia, a sort of Kraut Kosovo, the spiritual home of Germanic chivalry and bellicosity. It’s also one of those historically buried fault lines, the scars that criss-cross old Europe and occasionally ache with ancient, half-remembered resentment. This is where the Teuton West met the Slav East, the furthest point of Russian Federation.

In 1945, the great, patriotic Soviet Belaussian Army bloodily stormed Königsberg after four days of incendiary carpet-bombing by the RAF that reduced 90% of the huddled German city to its constituent parts and 60,000 civilians into nameless graves. At Potsdam, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin carved up a new cold war, and it was agreed that Stalin could keep Königsberg as a year-round, ice-free port. He expelled all the Germans who hadn’t already departed westward in starving refugee columns, and moved in Russians from 28 republics. All remembrance of Aryans past would be expunged.

Landing at Kaliningrad airport is like stepping back into an early Len Deighton novel. The hammer and sickle and two very groovy 1950s jets are old-style Soviet. The current geopolitical scenario for Kaliningrad: in the euphoria of the collapse of the eastern bloc, among the scramble for booty and investment and the sprouting of perky little republics, nobody remembered disengaged Kaliningrad stuck up here on the cold-war coast. So it held its breath and settled into a stasis of residual authoritarianism and new corruption, governed by the Baltic fleet’s admiral and Russian mafia.

As the EU sets about expanding, they’ve suddenly looked at the map and, oh my God, noticed that if and when Poland and the Baltic States join up there will be an anomaly, a little bit of Old Russia stuck in the middle of our happy-clappy, free-trade kibbutz. So now, belatedly democratic, caring folk with rimless spectacles and concerned frowns are starting to think about Kaliningrad quite hard. The scenarios that slide to mind are disturbing. Already this is called the corridor of crime, and it could become an effluent conduit, pumping illegal immigrants, smuggled goods, prostitutes, drugs, pornography and arms into fortress, market-garden Europe. This is Russia’s Gibraltar. Europe’s Hong Kong. Twenty years after a tearful “Ode to Joy” was sung over the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall, will the West have to build another one further east to keep the Russkies and the filth out? And wouldn’t that be an irony? What’s to become of Kaliningrad?

Chris Patten, Europe’s foreign minister, recently spent a scant day here asking tricky questions like, could we buy it as scrap? Or would they tow it away as a headache eyesore? A stream of questing Eurocrats would come to wring hands, drink vodka and negotiate possible aid packages with prostitutes. If you’re looking for a plot for a post-cold-war thriller, you couldn’t do better than to start in the Kaliningrad hotel bar, where the startlingly beautiful, semi professional hookers from the technical college smile with a sleek knowing and cadge cigarettes (you have to pay a steep bribe to get into university these days). The barmaid picks up my passport with the reverence of a holy relic, opens it at my gawky photo, then putting it to her nose like a bouquet, inhales and whispers: “Ahh, Angerlish.” Passport-sniffing for a whiff of foreign travel is pretty desperate. But then Kaliningrad is the physical embodiment of desperation.

Outside, the sulphurous sky hangs like a grey laundry 100ft overhead. On the broad streets where the German cobbles are patchworked with crusty commie asphalt and potholes, hundreds of nicked western BMWs, Mercedes and Fiats lurch and belch around ancient trams and trolleybuses. On top of the bile-green, slurry-taupe and mortician-grey tenement blocks, the slogans of communism – “bread and motherland”, “victory to heroic Soviet workers” – cling on, but are being elbowed aside by the United Colours of Benetton, Panasonic and Coca-Cola. Kaliningrad doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. In fact, it’s doing both.

This is one of the last places in Russia that still boast public statues of Lenin. There are a lot of old Soviet memorials: a wonderful, huge and decidedly camp cosmonaut (Kaliningrad produced three), tanks and torpedo boats on concrete plinths. But it’s not all ugly. The girls are beautiful, with sickle cheekbones and hammering breasts. They favour tiny miniskirts and opaquely opalescent tights, and have the ice-eyed look of Natashas and Laras who might at the drop of a dollar give a man more trouble than he could conceivably imagine. They also have the worse dye jobs in the history of hairdressing. I can only imagine they go to salons with bits of liver, cement and broken Barbie dolls and say: “I want it this colour.” There’s a weird vogue for flesh-coloured bobs.

The men have those pinched Slavic or Mr Potato faces, and they universally lurk in black leather jackets that come with unpleasant design features, multiple pockets and emphatic stitching. Everyone seems to move in a world of their own, surrounded by a personal insulation of depression. Occasionally they try to walk right through you. This is a place of sliding eyes and sideways glances, blankly hostile faces that give away nothing and take on everything. Nobody wants to be photographed. This is a society ingrained with suspicion, which reads the tiniest instruction or warning in a gesture, a shoe, a watch or a pair of sunglasses. Only a culture cold-pressed into uniform sameness could produce so many whisper-thin layers of hierarchy and fear. There are a spectacular number of drunks, not laughing or fighting drunks, but dribbling, stoic drunks. Wasteland and parks are crunchy with broken bottles. On every bench and wall sit silent, hunched figures with thousand-yard stares. Men crouch over fishing rods dunked in stinking, turgid canals and other men crouch and watch them. How despairing does a place have to be before worm-drowning becomes a spectator attraction?

And over the bronchitic hum of traffic, it’s strangely silent. In all the time I was here, I never heard anyone laugh. And I hardly found anyone who spoke English, though I did manage to get a guide from Intourist, the government agency. Now normally, guides are quite facilitators, useful lexicons who hide unnoticed in the background of stories. But Natasha elbowed herself to the fore, an annoying and winning cross between Sally Bowles and Dick Emery. “I used to work for KGB. I was spy Mata Hari,” she said unconvincingly from beneath a kidney-coloured fizz of curls. “We had ships that picked up rubbish from western boats. I translated documents, now I teach English and have a small agency where my nice Russian ladies try to meet foreign men. There are no real men left in Kaliningrad. They drink and take drugs. They’re gangsters or have been killed by the bloody Chechens. Are you married?”

In many ways Natasha is emblematic, or maybe symptomatic, of Kaliningrad. She grew up in the 1960s and remembers the city as a bombed-out wasteland. Her parents were directed here from the Volga region. She flourished after a fashion through closed, cold communism and now lives in a grim apartment block with her aged father and 11-year-old daughter who inexplicably begs for rap music and email. Natasha’s trying to make sense of the new, rudderless Russia. She’s gone back to the church – “The Blessed Virgin Mary will protect us” – and has mixed it with the dregs of imported new-ageism: “Always wear amber on your charkas.”

She is an uncomfortable collection of contradictions. I learn that Russians can keep pairs of mutually exclusive thoughts in their heads at the same time. (Drunkenness is a social evil, but it’s impossible to have a good time or indeed be Russian without consuming heroic amounts of vodka.) She despises the old order, but equally fears and loathes the new lack of order. “Look at those new Russians.” She spits the name the way Ann Widdecombe refers to New Labour. New Russian is a euphemism for black-market pimp, smuggler, gangster, any tough young man with capitalist cash, and there are lots of them. Big blokes in slightly softer leather jackets, crew cuts and fat necks, chewing gum and holding mobile phones. They most resemble a Ross Kemp appreciation society. “This is what has become of Russian men.” In a very Russian way she wants certainty and a sense of order. “It’s common knowledge that Gorbachev was a Freemason…perestroika was a plot by international Jewish bankers. This is common knowledge.” In a society where all information has always been rumour, propaganda or wish fulfilment, this sort of nonsense is part for the course.

Victor the frogman drives us to the holy bunker where the Germans surrendered in 1945. If you think we have trouble getting the war out of our systems, go and talk to a Russian. Everything comes back to the great patriotic war sooner or later, generally sooner. “Russia has saved the world three times,” says Natasha. “Once from the Tartars and twice from the Germans.” It’s best not to argue or point out that perhaps they’ve only saved us once by proving so categorically and catastrophically that international communism doesn’t work.

The bunker and the city museum boast gory but fascinating dioramas of Russian boys going in with the bayonet – Slav Disneyland. Natasha contradictively points out that while the RAF bombing was an act of barbarous desecration of a beautiful city – revenge for Conventry, a peaceful little village – the Russian storming was an act of heroic liberation. We pass by the people’s wedding palace, a plan of eye-bulgingly vile kitsch. Inside, a pretty young couple plan their nuptials. She in jeans with borscht-coloured hair, he in uniform, though not the valedictory kit of the navy but the brown overalls of a United Parcel Service driver. A sign that the times are changing and can be delivered overnight. It used to be a tradition that brides placed their wedding bouquet on a war memorial tank, now only kids spray “Punk isn’t dead” on the eternal memories of the fallen. And the girls chuck their flowers on Kant’s grave.

We walk down the wooded dunes, and there, finally, is the gunmetal Baltic, Kaliningrad’s point, symbolically shrouded in an undulating, enigmatic fog. Through the opaque air, shadowy figures emerge like characters from Russian epics. Old ladies mummified in shawls searching for amber, a statuesque girl, head held high, tears rolling down her cheeks. Through the whiteness, the muffled drawl of a foghorn repeats. In halting English, Victor the frogman asks me what I think will happen to Kaliningrad, then proceeds to tell me what he thinks. This is the doomsday gavotte of veiled bribe and implied threat to gain some leverage from this lost city, Kaliningrad itself may take matters into its own hands.

The population falls in half. Almost everyone over 40 served in the military and feels cheated by the Russian Federation. Their respect and pensions dwindled to worthless, but still there’s an emotional link to the suffering of the past and the absent mother country. But the young, the sneery thugs, with their rip-off Rolexes and BMWs with popped locks, or dirty addictions and no hope, only want western things, and out, via the chimera of fast, easy money. They have no work ethic, no stoicism, no appetite for suffering and precious little reason to defer to old ethics or corrupt politics. There is a murmuring groundswell towards unilateral independence. Kaliningrad might declare itself as the fourth Baltic state and throw itself on the charity and self-interest of the EU and NATO. Maybe there’ll be a Balkan-style civil war. Christ knows, there’s enough military knowledge and kit about. Moscow – so Victor’s prediction goes – sees this as a humiliation too far and blames the West for imperial interfering. Moscow tries to intervene across, 1,000 kilometres of capitalist Europe.

If you ever wondered what we needed a European army for, maybe it’s Kaliningrad. If you wanted a scenario for a third great European war, maybe you should beware Kaliningrad. Who could have foreseen what a shot in Sarajevo first time, or the Italian invasion of Ethiopia second, would lead to? If we don’t want to wrest Armageddon from the jaws of a cosy decimal market, maybe we should think very, very hard about how to deal with this far, distant boil of which we know little. Well, that’s the hypothesis for apocalypse tomorrow.

Victor smiles and shrugs, digs his hands into his leather pockets and trudges on across the damp sand. He’s planning on surviving. Kaliningrad is two hours away – meet the neighbours. Its real curse is that it is caught in the middle, not just between Poland and Lithuania, two countries with long memories and no reason or inclination to love the ugly Russian. It is also caught between the worst of two political systems: a corrupt, crippled and haltingly reactive Russian Federation and carpet-bagging capitalism. Having promised that the free market would be the answer to all communism’s ills, we’ve dumped the worst of it. Bribed and squandered all over them, patronised their struggles and diminished their most precious commodity – their revered stock of collective suffering – as stupid and worthless.

The department stores on Kaliningard’s Lenin Street, under the shadow of the monumental bronze Mother Russia, sell cheap tat. There are display cabinets with nothing except Korean paper handkerchiefs. Russians, of course, are used to ersatz tat in their shops. But now it’s not home-grown or home-made dross: it’s dross from Korea, China, Poland and Turkey (I particularly yearned for a spectacle case emblazoned “Chris Dior”).

The large, fêted, grey free-enterprise food market sells lumps of pig fat from Poland, boiled sweets from China, and plastic bags advertising Scotch whisky. There are bruised, callused apples from Poland and dried apricots from Uzbekistan. The mountains of potatoes – eternal staple – are proudly Russian.

Russians are many things, but they’re not fools. They know they’ve been ripped off. There is no love left for communism, but neither do they see in capitalism’s big hello anything trustworthy or lovable. Conspicuous capitalism has conspicuously failed to earn the respect it needs as a socio-political foundation, what they have learnt, what we’ve cynically shown them, is short-term exploitation: the wasteful, careless market forces of the never-never merchant.

In search of more symbolism I wander into Kaliningrad’s zoo. In the kiosk an ancient Russian lady wrapped in glutinous rags writes out the tickets on brown tissue paper and tears them against a ruler. Kaliningrad is still garrisoned by a shadowy regiment of these babushkas, left over from a time when it was illegal not to work. They sit in solitary huddles of stupefied, pointless boredom at the end of the hotel landings, in dark, crepuscular corners, eternal keepers of the lavatory key. The zoo is a good symbol, the best yet. Half German gothic, half Soviet space-age brutalism, a stinking, thick canal slobs through its middle; the ornamental ponds are filled with rubbish, the jaunty mosaics peel like psoriasis, and there are no animals. This is Kant’s zoo. It’s only a zoo because the ancient at the door is selling tickets for a zoo she remembers. The animals have been given away. Virtually all that’s left are some bears.

All on his own in a concrete ditch, a scabrous, balding, old dirtbag Russian brown bear has obviously grown transcendentally mad with despair. He rocks, shuffles and chews a plastic bottle, then sits in that distressingly human way bears have with his back to the wall and lifts his face to a glimmer of watery sunshine. A troika of small boys, cocky and nervous proto-new Russians, lean over the rusting barbed wire and drool gobbets of spit onto his head. For a moment he stares straight at me, and I can see in his rheumy, tea-coloured eyes, all the sorrow, all the struggle, the suffering and pity. Through everything, in a dark place all his own, the bear has survived. Then it does the damnedest thing, I promise. It slowly lifts one cack-caked, scimitar-taloned paw and salutes.

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