THE BEGINNING
We first sense the New Year outside some Viktoria supermarket. You drop into Viktoria on 15 December and everything is as usual. You drop in on 22 December and you immediately realise something has changed.
The queues have grown, there are no free spaces in the car park, the baskets have run out, and in every basket there are delicacies, bottles, and tangerines piled up in a whole Efa Dune rather than a little sand-covered hillock in Central Park.
People pull five-thousand-rouble notes out of their wallets, and it is quite a spectacle. You could sit down near one of the tills and see enough money to last you a whole year ahead. The shoppers part with it cheerfully! Their eyes shine like Christmas-tree baubles. Already you can see in their eyes how the chicken will become bones, the tangerines peel, the full bottles empty, and everything else turn into wrappers and sweet papers.
But you won't meet the most sophisticated at Viktoria — they go to Poland, armed with checked Chinese bags. And it is not even that the goods there are cheaper or better; it is simply part of the procedure of seeing in the New Year. Because afterwards, at the festive table, you can say what a marvellous duck this is after all, raised in Katowice, and that this turkey was only a week ago trembling in the embrace of a male turkey from Poznań, and that this piece of cheese languished in the dairy section of a Biedronka store. And all your friends at the festive table will freeze for a second, widen their eyes and start munching in sync. And then, on the first, 1 January, close friends will ring them — not close enough to see in the New Year together, but close enough to call the next day first thing in the morning. They'll call and ask:
– Hi! Happy New Year! How did you see it in?
– Ate Kraków sausages.
– And I had Masurian pike!
– Cool!
– Yes, a great New Year!
– The best!
And this is only THE BEGINNING.
CLOSER
Around 27 December it becomes impossible to drive through the city. Practically no one is working any more, you could say, but everyone, up to their calves in red caviar, simply has to get somewhere.
– I call it tying up loose ends, — a talkative taxi driver tells me. — Yesterday I was driving this one guy. He said that right before New Year he just orders a taxi and rides around; he hasn't got any particular business, but when people ring him, he can answer from all different parts of town. He's the busiest man there is! And that helps his business the following year. Everyone remembers how busy he was on the eve of the holiday. So he must be a serious businessman.
Meanwhile the taxi driver himself pulls up at some greengrocer's stall, apologises and gets out. I watch him: he goes up to the stallholder and takes a wad of money out of his pocket. The stallholder smiles, the taxi driver smiles. Nobody wants to wake up on the first of January and realise they are in debt.
The city grinds to a halt. All the cars, naturally, pretend they are going somewhere, but in fact they are very successfully standing still.
Everyone lines up in huge queues on the avenues and one-way streets. At moments like these you wish someone would give the command: Kill the engines! Everyone would start climbing out of their cars, and at that moment a waltz would strike up.
THE EVE
This is the day of the fir trees. On the previous days, too, you can see people armed with fir trees, and many of them literally bolt themselves to their trees, fasten themselves to them with wire so as to be able to move around the city together without any particular difficulty. This is the day when the pairing of man and fir tree becomes far more relevant than the pairing of man and woman. Men with fir trees curiously eye the men with fir trees coming towards them. The assessment starts from the top. His has a rather scraggy top, and the trunk looks a bit sickly, and the whole tree is somehow not fluffy enough, and short-legged, and bandy-pawed. And the men who manage to get hold of a beauty of a fir then parade through the city until as late as 2 January, a gleam in their eyes, as if they still thought someone wanted to attack them and rob them of their beloved.
CHAMPAGNE
New Year is the only holiday when everyone drinks champagne. At least at the very beginning. I have asked hardened folk, who on ordinary days wouldn't touch all that girly sweet bubbly, why even they take one swig when the clock strikes 12. For them it is some kind of nostalgia.
Nostalgia for childhood and for fireworks. Because champagne is like fireworks, like absolute happiness.
But to celebrate New Year properly, it is nowhere near enough. Still, it is a kind of signal for the start of an eleven-day war with your own liver.
10 PM
At this time in Kaliningrad everyone sits down at the table. We are different. We may be the only ones in the country who celebrate New Year twice in a row. And we are certainly the only ones who first celebrate New Year by Moscow time and then, an hour later, by Kaliningrad time. I can imagine someone in Vladivostok who celebrates New Year by Vladivostok time, gets wasted, falls asleep, sleeps it off, wakes up 7 hours later and realises it is just the right time to listen to the Kremlin chimes, and it all starts all over again.
THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH
This is the most momentous moment. I haven't gone into the TV ratings much, but it seems to me that these are the most popular few minutes of airtime every year. What's more, at this time you simply cannot buy any advertising, for any money. It is not even a matter of what exactly the president will say. It is just important for us to see him; he matters as a guarantor of stability and of the hope that next year will be better.
It is important for us to see his breath steaming. We admire that steam.
For many Kaliningraders this year, that steam was actually the only reminder that it was winter in the country. Here the streets were nearly plus 10. Shortly before New Year my daughter said she was thinking of applying after school to the Vienna academy, the very one where Gustav Klimt studied. To the animation course. And it occurred to me that it would be no bad thing at all if she became a professional in that very steam. It is, after all, a kind of sacred symbol for a whole nation. It makes you feel good and warm.
THE CHIMES
This is the moment when the whole country rises. When our anthem simply plays, far from everyone does so. I, for example, don't remember viewers rising in front of the TV at some Olympic Games when the first chords of our great anthem rang out. And I really do think it is the most impressive and mighty anthem in the world. You very much want to stand up. But when it's the chimes and then straight away the anthem, even the dead ought to climb out of the ground. We stand around the festive table and count the strokes of the chimes. This is the moment of the country's highest unity. We drink at the same moment. We do nothing else so collectively.
AN HOUR LATER
But that is not enough for us. We are the inhabitants of the Kaliningrad region! Exactly an hour later we rise again and fill our glasses with champagne once more. This time far from all of us are united by the television. Some, of course, watch the governor's speech, some look at a picture of the Cathedral, some simply try to stay on their feet.
We don't always pay attention to the clock, either. This time the signal for us is the firecrackers exploding outside the window. We clink glasses, put on our shoes and walk towards the Christmas tree on Victory Square.
Why we walk to this tree no one can explain any more. We just go out and walk. Someone once suggested to me that we go there at around two in the morning simply to prove to ourselves that we can still walk. And since the city is small and everyone knows each other one way or another, you can see what state all the other citizens are in. Who made it, and who strayed from the path and started impersonating the missing snowdrift somewhere in a courtyard.
13 DAYS LATER
Well, after that we are no different from anyone else. Except perhaps that we can stand in the queue at the border on 2 or 3 January. Not to get out to Poland or Lithuania, but simply to stand in a queue. A very emotional pastime: you can post it on Instagram noting that you are number 469, and everyone who isn't in the queue will go crackers all over again.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
