Before the war, East Prussia was home to over two million people. The last of the few thousand survivors were all expelled by 1948.

The first Russian settlers of the new Kaliningrad Oblast arrived to eerie, half-empty houses in an alien landscape. Among the tiled German villas with steep gables, the Baltic sand and pines, there was nothing to remind them of Tver or Pskov. Only some makeshift signs in Russian identified their new location.

They were ill-at-ease in their allotted, unfamiliar dwellings, as if half-expecting the rightful owners to return at any moment.

Under Stalin, many Russians were ‘re-assigned’ to Kaliningrad province - such as Irina, the military prosecutor, whose husband had been denounced as an enemy of the people. Hurriedly divorcing him had not been enough to save her job or herself from relocation.

The name of her new town was printed on her ticket as Wehlau. But she arrived just as workmen were knocking its German name from the Station’s facade. She had arrived at a town without a name. She had arrived at No Such Place.

Growing up in the early settlement of Kaliningrad inspired Yuri Buida to write his stories: ‘Tales From Nowhere’. He depicts a colony of rootless people, randomly resettled, who kept within themselves ’suitcase syndrome’ and only ever referred to where they had come from as home.

In a place from which culture and history had been expelled, so had humanity. The random settlers were incapable of any kinship or connect. At school, Yuri’s teachers could tell him nothing about the origins of his birthplace beyond the fact that Kant once lived in Kaliningrad. If the settlers were connected by anything, it was only the intolerance, scapegoating and xenophobia driven by Stalin.

His story about Rita Schmidt, for example, begins in 1948. A Prussian mother facing deportation asks two newly-arrived Russian sisters to take her infant daughter. She persuades them with a clock and some silver spoons. The sisters, Maria and Martha, bring up the child in an atmosphere of physical and sexual abuse and hard labour. Although unable to speak a word of German and Russianised from infancy, Rita is nonetheless never allowed to forget her hated origins. Even when grown, Rita is cruelly abused by the whole town as a ‘fascist slut’.

Yuri’s work is often described as fiction from invented memories. But in No Such Place the past has been wiped in any case. Others call it ‘Grotesque Fantasy’. But the themes of of inter-ethnic ignorance and misunderstanding are real enough.

‘Tales from Nowhere’ is an interesting read and very relevant to Kaliningrad. You might say that the town only developed a soul once it began to reconnect with its past. Below is a picture of Kaliningrad in 1968 - an artificial, Russian replica city bearing no relation its geography, history or, by now, a second generation of estranged European settlers.