And where there aren’t pines, silver birch fill any leaf space left. Svetlogorsk - Kaliningrad’s Baltic beach - is a heavily wooded resort where only shafts of light make it through. Chances of a deep tan are slim and the only really bronzed resident I’ve come across is Pavlov. In sculpted form, of course.

Odd meeting Pavlov here since he died in 1936, a decade before Kaliningrad was annexed by Russia. Perhaps he may have had some dialogue with the famous Kant university in Konigsberg days. Who knows. But probably not important. Kalinin himself never once visited Kaliningrad, the town that bears his name. The Pavlov sculpture was part of the Sovietisation of Svetlogorsk, something that never really worked. The tall pines and steeply gabled Prussian villas somehow rise above it. Changing the names of these quiet cobbled pathways to Lenin Street and October Way hasn’t changed the character of Svetlogorsk, which escaped the wartime destruction of Konigsberg, 30 kilometers away.

In the grand old days, Svetlogorsk - formerly Rauschen - was more about sanatoria than swimsuits. Which is just as well, because the beach is a fast-diminishing strip of sand and the promenade, like everywhere else, passes much of the day in shadow. The sun disappears early behind the steep cliff above.

Only on the diminutive beach is it possible grab some full-bat, Baltic ultra violet. Maybe this is why Svetlogorsk was never as popular as Sochi with old Soviet leaders. Yeltsin preferred the Karelian lakes. Only now are Muscovites discovering the time-warp charm of this old Prussian resort. If I haven’t been blogging lately, it’s because I’m playing catch-up too, hanging around here for the late late summer.