History of Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad is Russia’s westernmost regional capital and one of the few Russian cities whose history begins not with a chronicle entry or a merchants’ settlement, but with a fortified crusader castle on the Baltic shore. Over seven and a half centuries it has changed three names, four states and almost its entire population — yet it has kept the urban skeleton of Prussian Königsberg and the Baltic-typical mix of Gothic, brick and sea.

From a Prussian hillfort to the Teutonic Order’s castle

Before the Germans arrived, a stronghold of the Sambian Prussians called Twangste — “oak forest” — stood on a hill above the Pregel River. The Prussians, a Baltic people related to the Lithuanians and the Latvians, had lived here at least since the early Middle Ages and controlled the surrounding trade routes to the Baltic.

In January 1255, a wooden fortress of the new master — the Teutonic Order — appeared on the site of burned-down Twangste. By that time the Order had already been waging its crusade against the pagan Prussians for nearly three decades, and it was aided by the Bohemian king Ottokar II Přemysl — one of the wealthiest monarchs of his age, nicknamed “the Iron and Golden King.” The fortress was named Königsberg, “the King’s Mountain,” in his honour. Two years later a brick castle began to rise next to the wooden one; it would stand until 1968 and play a role in the city’s history comparable to that of the Moscow Kremlin.

Around the castle, three separate towns gradually took shape, each with its own town hall, burgomaster and court. Altstadt — “the old town” — received its town charter in 1286 and stood west of the castle. Löbenicht was formalised in 1300. Kneiphof appeared on an island in the middle of the Pregel in 1327, and it was here that the Cathedral, one of the largest brick-Gothic buildings of the region, would be founded in 1333. All three towns belonged to the Hanseatic League and traded grain, amber and herring with Lübeck, Gdańsk and Stockholm.

In 1457, after defeat in the Thirteen Years’ War and the loss of Marienburg, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order moved to Königsberg. The city became the capital of the Order’s state and remained so until the secularisation.

The Prussian duchy and kingdom

In 1525 the last Grand Master, Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, converted the Order’s lands into a secular Lutheran duchy — the first Protestant state in Europe. Königsberg became the capital of the Duchy of Prussia, and Albrecht immediately turned to what would define the city for the next four centuries: education. In 1544 he founded Albertina University — the oldest in this part of the Baltic and one of the leading centres of Protestant learning in the early modern era.

In the 17th century Königsberg, together with the duchy, passed to the Brandenburg electors of the House of Hohenzollern. In 1701, in the castle church, Frederick I was crowned the first king “in Prussia.” This was a compromise wording: what made him king “of Prussia” rather than “of Brandenburg” was precisely the fact that East Prussia lay outside the Holy Roman Empire and required no imperial consent. So Königsberg inadvertently became the cradle of the Prussian, and in the long run the German, royal tradition.

In 1724, King Frederick William I abolished the three-cities arrangement with a single decree and merged Altstadt, Löbenicht, Kneiphof and the suburbs into a single municipality of Königsberg. That same year, on 22 April, in the family of a saddle-maker on Sattlergasse, Immanuel Kant was born — the future philosopher who, over eighty years of life, hardly ever left his hometown and would put it into textbooks all over the world. Kant would begin lecturing at the Albertina in 1755, became rector twice, and by the end of the 18th century people were travelling to Königsberg specifically to attend his lectures on logic, metaphysics and physical geography.

Between Russia, Prussia and the German Empire

The Seven Years’ War brought the city its first Russian episode. On 22 January 1758 Russian troops occupied Königsberg without a fight, and the inhabitants — including Professor Kant — swore allegiance to the Russian Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. For more than four years East Prussia was officially part of the Russian Empire, minted coins bearing the Russian tsaritsa’s name and paid taxes to Saint Petersburg. The episode ended in 1762: the new emperor Peter III, an admirer of Frederick the Great, returned the province to Prussia without any conditions.

The 19th century turned Königsberg into a solid provincial capital. After the Napoleonic Wars it became the capital of the province of East Prussia within the kingdom, and from 1871 within the German Empire. The city was girdled by two rings of fortifications: the inner rampart line of 1626 gave way to a powerful belt of bastions and brick gates built in 1843–1873, and in 1872–1894 twelve large and three small forts rose around the city — one of the most advanced defensive perimeters in Europe. From this belt the Brandenburg, Royal, Sackheim and Ausfall Gates and the Dohna Tower of 1853, which today houses the Amber Museum, still survive.

Industrialisation went on in parallel. In 1853 the railway reached Königsberg, and four years later the direct line to Berlin was completed along the Prussian Eastern Railway. In 1895 the city launched an electric tram — one of the first on the Baltic, which would run with various interruptions all the way into the Soviet period. In 1896 the Königsberg Zoo opened, and it still operates on the same site today. By the eve of the First World War the city had about 250,000 inhabitants and was a major port, exchange and university centre.

Catastrophe and renaming

The Versailles Treaty of 1919 cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany by the “Polish Corridor,” turning Königsberg into a German exclave on the Baltic — more than seventy years before the same geographic fate, in mirror image, befell Soviet Kaliningrad.

The denouement came in August 1944. On the night of 27 August British Lancasters carried out a first raid, and on the night of 30 August 189 bombers dropped about 480 tonnes of bombs on the centre. Old Königsberg — Altstadt, Löbenicht, Kneiphof together with the Cathedral — burned out almost entirely; the total loss of pre-war building stock is estimated at roughly half.

From 6 to 9 April 1945 the Red Army stormed the fortress that had already been ringed with forts. The Königsberg operation lasted four days and ended with the surrender of the garrison under its commandant Otto Lasch. By the decisions of the Potsdam Conference in August of that year, the northern third of East Prussia together with Königsberg passed to the Soviet Union.

On 7 April 1946 the Königsberg Region was established within the RSFSR. Two months later, on 3 June, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin — the “All-Union Headman” and formal head of state, who had never been to Königsberg — died. Already on 4 July 1946, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the city was renamed Kaliningrad, and the region became the Kaliningrad Region. More neutral working options had also been discussed, but Kalinin’s death decided the name.

Soviet and Russian Kaliningrad

The post-war years transformed the city twice over. First the remaining German population was deported — by 1948 that operation was largely complete. Then resettlers from central Russia, Belarus and the Volga region moved into the vacated places under organised recruitment. The new Kaliningrad spoke Russian but lived in German houses, walked along German streets and rode trams on a track gauge laid down under the Kaiser.

The city remained closed: it housed the headquarters of the twice Red Banner Baltic Fleet (its main base was in Baltiysk, formerly Pillau), and it had shipbuilding, a fishing base and pulp-and-paper mills. Ideologically the authorities tried to distance themselves from the Prussian past: in 1968 the ruins of Königsberg Castle were blown up, and later the House of Soviets was begun — but never finished — on its site. In 1979 the country’s only Amber Museum was opened in the Dohna Tower, drawing on the raw material of the Amber Combine near Kaliningrad.

From 1991 Kaliningrad became an open city, finding itself in a difficult geography: between independent Lithuania and Poland, without a land link to the rest of Russia. Paradoxically, this accelerated the reassessment of its heritage. The Cathedral, which had stood as a ruin since 1944, was rebuilt by the mid-2000s as a cultural centre with an organ and a Kant museum. For the city’s 750th anniversary in 2005 the Royal Gate was restored, the Fish Village — stylised after pre-war Königsberg — appeared on the bank of the Pregel, and the Museum of the World Ocean began to unfold its exhibition with the submarine B-413 and the research ship Vityaz.

In 2018 Kaliningrad hosted matches of the FIFA World Cup: for the tournament a 35,000-seat stadium was built on Oktyabrsky Island and a major reconstruction of the embankments was completed. Since then the city has confidently joined the top ten Russian tourist destinations — and continues to inhabit its double heritage, where a Gothic cathedral faces a Soviet unfinished hulk and the villas of Amalienau sit alongside post-war Khrushchev-era blocks. It is precisely this splicing of eras that makes Kaliningrad the country’s most unusual regional capital.