Those who wonder where Russia's affections turned after its infatuation with the US soured should come to this enclave of farms and Baltic beachfront, a prize patch of German heartland until the Red Army seized it in 1945, and talk to Irina Korobova. They'll get an earful.
In a three-story factory where Soviet laborers once outfitted fishing trawlers, Korobova, 27, is the deputy director of Grammer AG Kaliningrad, a spotless German plant whose 380 workers produce upholstery for 5,000 BMWs, Volkswagens and Audis daily.
She learned German in high school. This year, she completed German business school.
"Just working at these enterprises is a great experience. You learn the mentality of Germans; you learn their punctuality," she said. "And we have the German system of quality control -- calculated in parts per million."
Nobody doubts that by virtue of wealth and power alone, the US will dominate Russia's foreign policy for decades. But when Russia seeks a Western soul mate these days, it looks not across the Atlantic, but just 370km west, where Poland stops -- and Germany begins.
Rekindled romance
It is not just that Russia's nouveau nationalists now believe the US icon has clay feet. Russians are trying to rekindle a centuries-old romance. When Germany and Russia were not fighting -- often at the cost of central and east Europeans squeezed in their embrace -- they carried on a torrid affair of heart and mind.
Germany sent Russia its nobility and expertise -- Catherine the Great; the last czarina, Alexandra Fyodorovna; Marx and Engels; an entire German province on the Volga (the Germans were lured by Catherine to modernize Russian farming, then exiled to Kazakhstan by Stalin). The Slavs, in turn, lent the Germans their passion, enticing them with the mystery within Russia's fusion of Europe and Asia.
The relationship has also caused great destruction. Take Kaliningrad itself: famous before World War II as Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, birthplace of Kant and a center of German culture.
Today, it is squalid and concrete-faced, the legacy of Soviet ambition and testimony to Russia's enduring thrust westward -- to Germany.
Only the nature of that thrust has changed. Where Khrushchev sought ideological hegemony, Russia now trolls for investment, business expertise and technology. And something equally vital: an affinity utterly lacking in its US dialogue.
Russia's partner
President Vladimir Putin, a fluent German speaker who served the KGB in the 1980s in Dresden, last year called Germany "Russia's leading partner in Europe and the world." He has showered Berlin with bouquets to prove it, from help for industry to his defense ministry's purchase of hundreds of new BMWs.
He has exchanged three visits with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (more than with any leader outside the former Soviet Union), and plans a September trip to Berlin. And that omits the Russian Christmas that the Schroeders spent at the Putins' home outside Moscow.
"Russians today sort of love Germans and hate Americans. A lot of people tell us that," said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. "It has something to do with big, big hopes. The Russians think that somehow, in the depths, Germany understands Russia and that Germans will help them out."
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