Whether you have some prior warning of the cold, grey wastelands of former Soviet Russia or not, the first sight of Kaliningrad comes as a shock.
Its centrepiece is a half-built concrete box sitting in the middle of a windswept, weed-choked parking lot for long-distance lorries. To the left, a shoddy string of flats breaks up the skyline - more grey on grey sky - decorated with a slogan praising the workers of Soviet Kaliningrad. To the right, trolley buses, trams and clapped-out imported German cars lurch over a pot-holed bridge. The only colours are the spire and roof of a redbrick church peeping over the right shoulder of this lump of concrete and, further on, the blue and white flourish of a neo-baroque building.
Whatever the weather, you can't help shivering and sympathising, momentarily, with the Germans who come back and mourn the lost city of Königsberg, birthplace of Kant and pre-war capital of German East Prussia.
I wake up to a brief snow storm sweeping in from the Baltic. Fortunately, it melts into blue sky less than half an hour later. It's time to step outside and figure out why anyone should want to get to know this peculiar outpost of Russia, stuck on the edge of Lithuania and Poland - an irritant on the neatly-drawn map of now-independent eastern Europe.
There aren't any other tourists as we push open the door of the cathedral to meet Nikolai, sometime soldier, then builder, now guide to the museum and building works that will soon transform this place from ruined shell to concert hall. As he shows me round the museum's collection of bricks, imprinted with the marks of the original 14th-century builders and passing medieval cats and dogs, he tells of the dreadful raid in 1944 when British bombs rained down on Königsberg and firestorms swept through the cafés, the telegraph office and the shop where Königsberg's famous marzipan was sold.
"It was in revenge for Coventry and because of the Yalta conference," he explains. "The Allies knew that Königsberg would be Stalin's after the war and they did not want to leave the Soviet Union such a good prize."
The desire to blame someone for the destruction of Königsberg is easy to understand and a hard game not to play yourself as you wander from museum to war memorial in search of history. Who is responsible for the destruction of the streets down which Kant took his afternoon walk? What did the castle, symbol of the Teutonic knights' domination over the pagan peoples of Prus for eight centuries, look like? It is hard to imagine an ancient city once jostled up against the cathedral and castle walls. Still harder to think that this place, with its broken roads, treacherous potholes and muddy market place, ever had a past that was unconnected with shabby, shambolic Soviet Russia.
It is true, that the RAF did sweep over the city, but they left plenty of it intact for Hitler and Stalin, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army to fight over.
The story of Königsberg's capitulation is told several metres underground in General Otto von Lasch's bunker, hidden in a courtyard behind Lenin Prospect. Here a series of comically gory tableaux display the taking of Königsberg by the Red Army in April 1945. A plastic horse, its red-painted plastic guts spilled out, lies among dead model Germans and the occasional Red Army Action Man soldier.
The signs beside the exhibits and maps still talk of "fascists" and total up the number of war dead - 42,000 German soldiers, 60,000 Soviets and an untold number of civilians perished as the three-day battle raged. Lasch, threatened with hanging by his Führer if he surrendered and shooting by his enemy if he was captured, gave in after three days of heavy fighting. He survived both Hitler and Stalin, making it back to West Germany from Siberia to write his memoirs.
Were Lasch and his troops to blame for the destruction by holding out against the artillery shells of communist Moscow? Or was it the Soviet planners with their ruthless, but ultimately unsuccessful, dreams of wiping any trace of Germany from their newly-gained territory? Here, history is too complicated to be reduced to a quick postcard home.
At every turn, visitors are confronted by contradictions between the remains of Königsberg, the reality of Soviet Kaliningrad and the hopes for what this island "exclave", the western-most outcrop of Mother Russia, would like to be.
F or almost half a century, the city's past was closed off and foreigners were forbidden to enter what was rumoured to be the most militarised area of the Soviet Union. Even Soviet citizens elsewhere had the haziest notion of where Kaliningrad was and what it had once been.
Like an Atlantis, Königsberg sunk almost without trace at the end of the second world war. Only in the last decade has it resurfaced as a place visited by the intrepid, the curious and tourists wanting a distinctly different place to spend a holiday.
It takes more than a day to get your bearings in this remodelled city and a dose of patience to get its measure. I learned to love Kaliningrad sitting on the No 4 tram with Marina, conductress and one-woman campaign to dispel the myth of the grumpy babushka. As she hands me a two-rouble ticket to the German suburbs, she smiles a gold-flecked grin welcoming me to her city.
We rattle past the statue of Lenin on Victory Square and swing round - wheels screeching on iron rails - past the statue of Schiller, heading out to Peace Avenue, where flower-sellers old enough to be among Kaliningrad's first post-war Soviet settlers gather.
Almost the moment Lenin disappears from view, we are in a place that, while not quite German, is not entirely Soviet either. The houses have green moss creeping up their walls but their roofs are red-tiled and outside the entrances stand metal foot-scrapers, leftovers from neat German households.
Here and there, the clumsily-laid asphalt has broken up to reveal cobbles left over from before the war, and the streets are still lined with neat rows of lime trees planted by the ancestors of Königsbergers who now live in Bonn or Berlin.
Kaliningraders are now proud of their city's past and speak of themselves as true Europeans unlike their relatives back east. They talk of houses built to last, spacious, high-ceilinged flats. Those old enough to remember talk of neatly-kept gardens sprouting fruit trees. Most will have a story to tell of meeting the children and sometimes original inhabitants of the homes they took over half a century ago. The idea of blaming these descendants of Red Army soldiers and orphaned girls for the destruction of Königsberg seemed as ridiculous as Nikolai's condemnation of RAF bombers.
However, even a dozen trips on Marina's tramline, a day spent in the city's history museum or a conversation with a Kaliningrader about the past will not rid you of the nagging unease of never having found Kaliningrad centre proper or got to grips with its history. But there is always an escape, not over the border to less-complicated Poland or Lithuania - at most two hours' drive away - but to the nearby Baltic sea, which washes up amber on the shore as it has done for thousands of years.
Choose a day when storms have given way to bright sun-filled sky and, like Kalin ingraders, Königsbergers and the ancient Prus before, you can wander for miles across the pale sand, eyes down in search of glinting pieces of red and yellow amber.
When the sun catches these slivers of Jurassic resin hidden in ribbons of seaweed, the recent past fades and you understand why Kaliningraders want you to come to rediscover their city and the sea on which it stands. When you return to the city, lungs full of bracing Baltic air, Kaliningrad seems welcoming and untroubled as it offers you a glass of warming Russian vodka.
Where to go
• Kaliningrad is the place to experience a real Russian night out, crime free and relatively cheaply.
• You can do the traditional vodka, caviar and dancing to a local band at Traktir Razgulai, Sovietsky 13, which is popular for big nights out - birthdays and office parties.
• For a more sedate evening, the 12 Stuliev Art Club, at Prospekt Mira 67, has cocktails and blinis as well as live music.
• The Francis Drake pub, Sovietsky 19, is part-owned by an English farmer and has authentic pub decor shipped in from the West Country and pretty pictures of English beer on the menu. But problems with suppliers mean that, for the present, they serve only Russian beer and a few Russian dishes given jokey English names.
• The best café is the Kulinaria delicatessan next to the Kaliningrad hotel, which sells salads, a few hot dishes and cakes. The only drawback is that it is standing only. For a sit-down midday meal, walk up Leninsky Prospekt and try any one of the cafés there or the Monopol, Frunze 17/21.
• Splash out at a casino: Universal, Prospekt Mira 43, has a good restaurant and club as well as gaming tables. The minimum stake for the roulette wheel at Vanda, Frunze 6, is 50 roubles (approx £1.20), so you won't lose your shirt.
• Big spenders and flashy dressers go to Monetny Dvor, Leninsky 83, to show off and watch the strip show.
• The young head for Olshtyn on Olshtynskaya 1, where you can drink, dance and play billiards.
• Everyone else goes to Universal for the food or to Vagonka, Stanotchnaya 12, which, while a long way from the centre, has live bands (occasionally western ones) and a separate bar where you can drink in peace.
What to buy
• Amber from the amber museum and in the market, and vodka from the vodka factory (opposite the amber museum) at Ploshchad Vasilevskogo. An amber dust picture is the best modest present from the museum - Leonardo Di Caprio and Lady Di sell for 62 roubles (£1.25). The hotels sell matrioshki (Russian dolls) and other traditional souvenirs mostly made in central Russia.
The practicals
Regent Holidays (0117 291 1711) has a four day tour with a return flight on SAS via Copenhagen, staying at Hotel Kaliningradcosting £384pp. Kaliningrad In Your Pocket, an annual guide, is available from hotel kiosks in the city.
