Who ruled Kaliningrad?

Kaliningrad stands on the Pregel (Pregolya) River a few kilometres above the Vistula Lagoon, close to the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. For almost seven centuries it was Königsberg, a German city and the cradle of the Prussian state. Since 1945 it has been Russian, and since 1991 the centre of an exclave cut off from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland. Few European cities have changed their population, language and name so completely in so short a time.

The lower Pregel was the land of the Sambians, one of the Baltic peoples known as the Old Prussians, who had a fort here called Twangste. In 1255, during the crusade to conquer and convert Prussia, the Teutonic Order destroyed it and built a castle in its place. They named it Königsberg, "King's Hill", after Ottokar II, the Bohemian king who had joined the campaign. Three towns grew up around the castle, Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof on its island, and the first joined the Hanseatic League in 1340. In 1457, after losing their great fortress at Marienburg in a war with Poland, the Grand Masters moved their seat here.

In 1525 the last Grand Master in Prussia, Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, turned the Order's lands into a Lutheran duchy under Polish overlordship, with Königsberg as its capital. He founded its university, the Albertina, in 1544. The duchy passed to the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg in 1618 and became fully sovereign in 1657. On 18 January 1701 the elector Frederick III crowned himself King in Prussia in Königsberg Castle, and the city remained the coronation place of the Kingdom of Prussia even after the court settled in Berlin. The three towns were formally united in 1724, the year Immanuel Kant was born there. Kant spent almost his whole life in the city and taught at its university. Russian troops occupied Königsberg from 1758 to 1762 during the Seven Years' War, and the Prussian royal family took refuge in the region after Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806.

After the First World War, East Prussia was separated from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor. In the Second World War British bombing in August 1944 burned out the historic centre, and the Red Army besieged the city for nearly three months before the German garrison surrendered on 9 April 1945. Under the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 the city and the northern part of East Prussia were placed under Soviet administration pending a final peace settlement. On 4 July 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad after the Soviet official Mikhail Kalinin. The surviving German inhabitants were deported to Germany, most of them by 1948, and settlers from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine took their place.

The Soviet authorities rebuilt Kaliningrad as a closed military and industrial city, and the ruins of the castle were demolished in 1968 and 1969. The restored cathedral on Kneiphof island, where Kant is buried, is one of the few old landmarks still standing. Germany formally accepted the post-war border in the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Kaliningrad Oblast stayed with Russia but became an exclave, and after Poland and Lithuania joined NATO and the European Union its position became a recurring point of tension, sharply so since 2022.

Today Kaliningrad has close to half a million people. It is the administrative centre of the oblast and a major Baltic port, and the Russian Baltic Fleet is headquartered in the region.