German remnant: Kaliningrad's cathedral 

Kaliningrad is one of the world's ugliest cities. It is full of crumbling communist estates, with glinting neon hoardings. Maintenance is unheard of and faulty wiring hangs across dank, filthy socialist avenues, each wide enough for three tanks abreast. Entertainment of a sort exists at the five half-empty "Euro" malls, where things are seldom bought. There is a Karl Marx Avenue, a Felix Dzerzhinsky Street and a Lenin Prospect, just like anywhere else in Russia. A new yet tasteless church, a white slab of golden domes, is in Victory Square. There is a regular mist, which, because of the pollution, tastes a bit like toast. It is almost impossible to believe this misery was once a beautiful German city known as Königsberg, where Kant thought, Herder wrote and Prussia began. 

It is now Russia's outpost in the heart of Europe. The Kaliningrad Oblast (regional administrative area) is cut off from the motherland and sandwiched between the EU member states of Lithuania and Poland. The Kremlin regularly threatens to station short-range nuclear missiles here to cajole Nato into abandoning expansion or defence plans. Today, its population is almost entirely Russian, but its history is anything but. Prior to its capture in 1945 by the Red Army, it was known as East Prussia. Stalin renamed his prize after his blind lackey, Mikhail Kalinin, who sent his own wife off to the Gulag and never deigned to visit. 

This quintessentially German town was founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights. Here, the kings of Prussia were crowned and the virtues of order and militarism instilled for centuries. Expansive aristocratic estates surrounded old Königsberg. A great Lutheran university emerged, whose idealist philosophy would determine much of the course of Western civilisation. But the city was also cradle to an expansionary militarism that viciously denied Eastern Europe's ethnically mixed realities. Persecutions in East Prussia did not begin with the Nazis. In the late 19th century, forced Germanisation and discrimination against a large Polish minority attracted international opprobrium. 

When the province was detached from the fatherland by the Versailles Treaty, racism thrived. In the infamous 1933 election, the Weimar Repubic's last, more than 55 per cent of votes were cast for the Nazis. For Goebbels, this was "Fortress Königsberg". 

But "Fortress Königsberg" would become the first German city on the Red Army's relentless march westwards. Hitler's nightmare of the great Dark Age migrations of starving Germanic hordes began to come to life. Survivors recall that you could hear the frontline edging ever forward. Eight million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the territories formerly known as Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia. These territories had been German for longer than Bordeaux has been French. As Soviet forces bombarded the city from all sides, British bombers detonated phosphorous bombs on the civilian population. The combined effects upon Königsberg would be the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb. Today, these measures against non-combatants would be classed as war crimes.