There is a Prussian spirit here, but it smells of Russia...

Abstract

After the Great Patriotic War, the Russian settlers were going to build their own world on the ruins of Königsberg and other cities in East Prussia, from where the Germans were deported in 1947. Architects designed neoclassical ensembles, but those plans were not realised. The Soviet towns of East Prussia were built up in the 60s and 70s with five-storey panel blocks and faceless modernist public buildings. The Kaliningrad region did not receive the Soviet identity associated with constructivism and neoclassicism, nor did it ever have a Russian identity. Today people discuss a diffusion of German and Russian cultures, but in reality it comes down to a call to restore the remaining German pre-war buildings and to bring the new buildings in line with them, using explicit and implicit quotations. There are no bearers of German culture in the Kaliningrad region.