I don't even know what it was — whether it was just an unlucky day or the stars were aligned the wrong way — but I came across a whole collection of beautifully written but entirely negative reviews:
The roads here are bad.
And the five shopping centres on Victory Square disfigure the city.
And there are traffic jams in the centre.
And there's no metro.
And infill high-rises squeezed in among the old German buildings with tiled roofs are an eyesore.
And the entire administration of the city and the region are thieves and scoundrels...
And the fact that there's no decent street food is downright criminal — a person literally has nowhere to eat and nothing to eat!
And wages here are low, 20 thousand is already happiness...
And worst of all, the city is small, everyone knows everyone, the same people meet in the same places and talk about the same things year after year, year after year, year after year...
And the migrants who come to us are from, excuse me, Kazakhstan, and for some reason not at all from, say, Canada.
And we have no winter here.
And we have nowhere to go, since apart from the five shopping centres mentioned above there are only three nightclubs, a dozen or so restaurants and two and a half museums with nothing to see in them...
And we have no international educational institutions, and the education we do have is terribly bad.
And medicine is completely and utterly absent.
And after visiting Zelenogradsk it is now shameful to look in the eye the Muscovites who came to visit having heard that it's supposedly just like Europe here.
And our sea is cold.
And there's no infrastructure on the beach.
But the worst thing of all is that Kaliningrad, it turns out, is not Gdańsk at all...
The next time I had a little free time, I decided to look at the "gloomy world" described in these notes from the positive side, got into the car and drove to the sea.
I drove along the beautiful Primorskoye Ring and thought that it really is a very good road. And that I couldn't care less who stole how much money while building it. The main thing is that now I can quickly and comfortably whizz from my front door to the seashore (in exactly 15 minutes). And I also thought that only someone who has never lived in other cities of our vast and beautiful Motherland could curse the roads of the Kaliningrad Region.
And, of course, perhaps there is a grain of sense in comparing
the Kaliningrad Region with Europe in everything, including the quality of the roads,
but if you compare it not with Europe but with the Russian backwoods,
then the Kaliningrad Region's roads are not just good, they're superb!
As I approached Zelenogradsk, I tried to look critically at the new, modern multi-storey residential complexes, and found nothing ugly about them. What's more, I liked them. Big, beautiful new buildings, each unlike the other. And if the hastily built post-war Soviet-style panel blocks in the centre of Kaliningrad were demolished and replaced with high-rises like these, I think most townspeople would say thank you, even though they might clash with the old two-storey German houses with tiled roofs...
Then again, on critical inspection the old German houses of Zelenogradsk didn't disappoint me either; rather, they pleased me, despite being a little run-down. And as for those offended Muscovites, it's a pity, of course, but they needn't come here if they didn't like it...
In Zelenogradsk I parked the car quickly and easily, bought doughnuts at 20 roubles per 100 grams (that's exactly three doughnuts with icing sugar) and, taking off my sandals, sat down on the seashore to devour my simple street food along with sweet, ripe pears picked straight from the tree. Meanwhile I contemplated the sea, the gulls and the pensioners strolling along the beautiful promenade, recently fitted with new outdoor exercise machines open to everyone.
Then I wandered barefoot in the sea water, unexpectedly warm for September,
and, smiling blissfully, thought that I was completely happy and that my decision
five years ago to move from Yekaterinburg to Kaliningrad had been right and,
perhaps, the most important and correct decision of my whole life.
After all, most people I know have to work all year round so that they can then, maybe, if there's enough money for tickets and hotels, escape to the sea for two weeks — and there's no telling whether they'll be lucky with the weather in those two weeks. But I have the sea every day: I open the beach season at the end of April and close it at the beginning of October, and even in winter I don't forget to drive to the coast at least once a week for a walk and a breath of air.
And then there's the chance to go to Europe regularly. At least once a week I get into the car and head for the Schengen zone. Either for cheap and tasty Polish groceries, or just to unwind — to see some new town. And such a trip takes me half a day at most, rather than turning into a whole epic with suitcases, visas, plane tickets and so on.
I also thought that here I have pears from the tree. And apples too. And plums. Whereas before, when I lived in Yekaterinburg, I bought all this in the shop for money. And here it all grows for free, plus cherry plums, nuts and cherries... Yes, wages here are lower, and it's harder to find work here than in the country's bigger cities, not to mention Moscow. But in Yekaterinburg, for example, if you go out after rain, you come home up to your ears in mud, and in autumn, when the slush starts, it's exactly the same story. Because the soil there is clay. Whereas here it's sand — the rain passes and everything is clean again.
And winter? A "wonderful" Ural winter is when it's minus thirty-five and the whites of your eyes start to ring from the cold, and when you get home, however warmly you dress, your legs are red from the frost. And you wait 30–40 minutes for transport at the stops, and to get to the centre you leave home an hour and a half early, or better two...
Whereas you can walk around the whole of Kaliningrad in two hours — at least
the centre, for sure! And I personally go about all winter long in a cardigan and shoes,
and I'm not cold. And that is happiness!
On the way back home I rang the dental clinic and booked treatment under compulsory medical insurance (meaning free of charge), smiled as I remembered our local annual free medical check-ups, including, by the way, MRI scans, and the local rates for private doctors compared with, say, Moscow price lists.
In the evening I took a little walk around my neighbourhood. It seems to me ideal from absolutely every point of view! There's even a fountain next to my building! And sculptural compositions, flowerbeds laid out with the help of landscape designers, little alleys with pretty lamps. Compared with this, the district I used to live in in Yekaterinburg is a monstrosity, although it was a residential district and everything there was "sort of as it should be". But that's just the point: the idea of "as it should be" differs very greatly depending on the city you live in and on your system of values.
What am I getting at with all this? That the world is big enough to find a place to live where you feel good. And life is not so long that you should waste time grumbling and being dissatisfied. Don't like it? You can always move, or make at least a small effort to make the place you have chosen even better.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
