Dawn over the Kaliningrad-Polish border. In the night, we moved four car lengths.

Just when you are ready to run screaming out of Kaliningrad, you find you can’t.

I spent 40 hours in the queue at the Kaliningrad-Polish border at Mamonovo. Here they practice a kind of ethnic cleansing by lanes. There’s one lane for Russians and one for Poles and foreigners. Foreigners may get into the ‘less slow lane’ by shelling out backhanders - a facility that isn’t offered to anyone with Polish plates. But by the time I got back to the border, I’d had enough of handing out Euros to Kaliningrad’s corrupt.

The Mamonovo crossing is bordering insanitary, too. There’s just one toilet for a line of cars stretching as far as you can see. No one uses it, because it might be just the one time in two hours that the line moves, and no one wants to risk losing a place. So the immediate verges are a human waste dump. I wrote before that Kaliningrad is a third world country and, quite honestly, a couple of Red Crescent patrols wouldn’t go amiss here, along with a WHO slug clean-up programme. Early AM, it’s fairly slip slidey off-piste.

The Russian version is that the Polish customs works too slowly. Not true. On the Russian side, the ‘Polish’ lane only ever moves at the whim of the Russian border controller. The Polish version is that all the Poles must be contrabandistes and their cars disassembled. Not entirely valid either. There’s so much unemployment in Poland now that crossing the border to buy even the allowance of cheap petrol, vodka and cigarettes is the only way to make ends meet.

Passing the time somehow. Some Polish guys panel beat the dents out of my tailgate. Actually, great job.

My friend Marek (62) is one of many Poles who has converted his rusting old Polski Fiat to LPG. He drives across the border and fills up the redundant tank with Russian petrol, then sells it in Poland. Not smuggling. He re-sells the petrol a little under the pump price in Poland and makes a miniscule profit. Since crossing at Mamonovo now takes nearly two days, he hopes to do about ten miserable trips a month in order to make a living.

Most of the Polish guys in the queue are counting pennies too. But even the street legal wouldn’t dream of handing in their passports at the Russian border without a few dollars tucked inside. Otherwise you don’t pass go ever.

It wasn’t always like this. The EU’s ‘reverse engineering’ of the iron curtain around Kaliningrad, and the inevitable Russian reaction to it, has only created an exercise in persecuting the poor. Is there any real customs work on this border? Over the past two years I’ve never seen anything on this route remotely resembling commercial traffic or road haulage. (Witness pic.)

The persecution generates a kind of wartime spirit among beleaguered motorists. People take it in turns to sleep and wake each other up when the line moves, to share coffee and rations, to play chess and pass the time somehow.

Ironically, I pass the time reading ‘Baltic Club’ news, a glossy Kaliningrad PR mag with (obligatory?) picture of Georgy Boos on the cover. It’s subtitled, ‘International Co-Operation In The Kaliningrad Region’. At least I have a good horse laugh.