The short stretch of highway from the Polish village of Gronowo to the Russian border is so quiet locals say you can lie down in the middle for hours and listen to chickens clucking on the Russian side.
For almost 30 years, Gronowo was one of only four vehicle crossings between Poland and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Cars and trucks jammed the road day and night, and the village cashed in.
The roadside was lined with duty-free shops, currency exchange kiosks, a couple of bars and four restaurants. A few faded signs in Russian still advertise deals on furniture, sausages, milk, vegetables – all “Tax Free” – along with 24-hour fast-food takeaway.
The good times ended when the crossing first closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic and then remained shut after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The 50 or so remaining villagers now live among derelict buildings with little more than fond memories.
“I miss it,” said Krzysztof Bukfas as he cast a wistful glance at the highway. “I want to remember the time that used to be.”
Russian-language signs in Gronowo promote a food wholesaler in Elblag, about 200 kilometres away, one of many businesses that once benefited from duty-free trade. Now that the Gronowo road is closed, travellers must head farther east to the Bezledy crossing.
Kaliningrad is an isolated chunk of Russia, a little bigger than Cape Breton, wedged between Poland and Lithuania. It’s historically western European and only became part of the USSR after the Second World War.
In the years since Russia invaded Ukraine, tensions between Moscow and its neighbours have been rising. But while the Polish and Lithuanian governments have taken a hard line on Russia’s aggression, the mood along the border with Kaliningrad is far more nuanced. Much of this area benefited enormously when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and trade opened up.
To get an idea of how life has changed in recent years, we drove from the Baltic Sea to one of the last outposts in Lithuania and talked to people in towns and villages whose lives have been intertwined with Kaliningrad for decades.
We both grew up near borders. Anna was born in a small town in Poland not far from the forested “green border” with Kaliningrad, but she never ventured across. Paul was raised in Winnipeg, and like a lot of Canadians he has made regular trips to the U.S.
We wanted to know how people along this border live and find out what they’ve lost, what they miss, what they imagine for the future.
Jolanta Czaplinska, a retired teacher, reminisces with Jadwiga Werner and her partner Krzysztof Bukfas. Her house in Gronowo was once a currency-exchange business.
Gronowo was our first stop and Mr. Bukfas was our first introduction to the complexities of border life today. He remembered the good times when villagers set up tables along the roadside to sell fruit to long lines of motorists and how everyone loved popping over to Russia to fill up their cars or buy cheap vodka and cigarettes. He missed the excitement so much that he travelled to Kaliningrad a few months ago via another route, just to relive the thrill of meeting old Russian friends.
Mr. Bukfas, 66, thrived professionally as well. He used to drive trucks back and forth to Russia, and he was never short of work. He’s retired now and lives outside the nearby city of Braniewo with his partner, Jadwiga Werner. They come to Gronowo often to visit their friend Jolanta Czaplinska, 63, who has a summer house on the highway that was once a money exchange shop.
The trio met recently in Ms. Czaplinska’s backyard to share coffee, memories and perspectives about the past. Mr. Bukfas launched into a list of ills that have befallen Poland, Europe and Gronowo since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has demonstrated how Poles have been cast aside, he said, and how places like Gronowo always lose out. “They are the same people as us,” he said of his neighbours. “Politicians try to stop the connection between us and Russians.”
The two women rolled their eyes. “We all have a different opinion,” Ms. Czaplinska said with exasperation.
Ms. Werner, 65, has never been to Kaliningrad and she wasn’t as enamoured with Russians as her partner was. Did she miss them? “Absolutely not,” she said flatly.
Mr. Bukfas waved them off and told us with a wry smile, “If you meet Putin, say hello and wish him good health.”
Wojciech Pietrzak lives near the Gronowo crossing and helps maintain its Polish side, in case it reopens. He seldom sees traffic anymore.
There are a handful of people who still work at the crossing, which is patrolled by guards on both sides.
Wojciech Pietrzak, 45, and his wife live in the last house before the border. Mr. Pietrzak used to rent out rooms to Russians who came over for work. Their friend made a small fortune selling homemade burgers to travellers.
“Now it’s just nothing,” he said.
He and his wife do maintenance and cleaning on the Polish side with the hopes that the border will reopen some day.
He thought back to when he lived in western Poland and never thought about heading out in any direction, regardless of national boundaries. Now he feels even more fenced in.
“They make me stand with my back to the Russian border,” he said, facing away from the border. “And think that the world is no longer there.”
Geography has always complicated life in these borderlands.
Much of the area was once part of Prussia. The capital city was known as Königsberg, a place where monarchs were crowned. When Prussia morphed into Germany in 1871, the city retained its stature. Under the Third Reich, it served as a launch pad for Hitler’s war in the East.
The Red Army captured Königsberg during the Second World War and the Soviets hung on to it when the Allied powers redrew the map of Europe in 1945. They named it Kaliningrad, after a Bolshevik hero, and the city and surrounding region have remained a sliver of Russia in the heart of Europe.
When the USSR broke apart in the early 1990s, some analysts predicted Kaliningrad would become Russia’s Hong Kong or join the European Union along with Poland and Lithuania.
Hopes of pulling Kaliningrad out of Russia were so high that the EU poured in money to improve economic, cultural and social ties between all three neighbours. In 2010, a new border crossing opened east of Gronowo capable of handling more than 6,000 cars a day, about the same as the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls. Two years later, Poland and Russia eased visa restrictions for border communities, and soon there were seven million crossings annually.
Not many cars come through the Bezledy crossing these days.Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail
While the rest of Poland remained wary of Russia, people living along the frontier had few complaints. Russians arrived in droves selling appliances, razors and every other kind of electronic product that was more expensive in Poland, and then spent their earnings in local shops. Poles went over to flog foodstuffs that were costly in Kaliningrad and soon Polish banks and other businesses opened branches on the Russian side.
Braniewo became a major terminal for Russian coal. The city’s sprawling Soviet cemetery, which contains the graves of 31,000 soldiers who died in the Second World War, attracted throngs of tourists, bikers and mourners from both nations.
But everything ground to a halt after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine eight years later. Several Polish-Russian border crossings have closed and the flow of people and goods has slowed to a trickle.
Wojciech Drazba looked toward the downtown of Suwalki and thought about everything this border city in eastern Poland has lost.
He spent a decade on city council when Suwalki was twinned with Chernyakhovsk, a nearby town in the Kaliningrad region.
Councillors from both communities met regularly to talk about shared concerns and work on projects such as renovating schools. The EU funded cultural events and a myriad of activities like sending kids from both communities on canoe trips together.
“The idea was to keep neighbours close,” Mr. Drazba recalled.
When the war in Ukraine started, council voted to scrap the partnership to show its outrage over Russia’s invasion. “It was cut in one day,” said Mr. Drazba, who didn’t run for re-election this year. “It will take decades to bring things back.”
Attitudes in town changed too. The city’s location – equidistant from Kaliningrad and Russia’s ally Belarus – made Suwalki a focal point for rising East-West tensions. Some locals feared Moscow and Minsk would try to close the 100-kilometre “Suwalki Gap” by force.
The "Suwalki Gap" between Kaliningrad and Belarus is, to some locals, a potential conflict zone if Ukraine’s enemies expand their war effort.
Mr. Drazba couldn’t stomach the fearmongering and he recoiled when Polish soldiers put on a nationalist display in the city centre last year and sang patriotic songs. They called on people to be the “murem za polskim mundurem” or “a wall behind the Polish uniform.”
City councillors were later asked to adopt the motto for Suwalki, but Mr. Drazba balked. “I went out from the town hall and said ‘I will not vote for this because it’s not so simple,’” he recalled.
He has a theory about how the world got into this mess. He’s a geographer by training, and years ago he took a train trip across Russia and marvelled at the scenery. All that space and natural beauty convinced him that something had seeped into the nation’s soul to make Russians feel superior. And that’s what Mr. Putin had tapped into when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
“When you see on the television that you have such big, brave soldiers, you think you live in the best country in the world,” Mr. Drazba said. “So maybe the nature that is so vast and so beautiful does bad things.”
A little north of Suwalki there’s a small obelisk in a farm field. It was built a decade ago as part of the EU’s “Neighbours in Action Program” and it marks the exact point where the borders of Poland, Kaliningrad and Lithuania converge. It was an open space and visitors used to come and lean over a railing to dangle their feet in Russia and Lithuania.
Last year, Polish authorities built a fence along the border. And they surrounded the obelisk with razor wire.
Just north of Suwalki, Russian goods and people continue to pass through the Lithuanian city of Kybartai almost without notice.
Kybartai straddles the border with Kaliningrad and it has long been a major transit point for cars, trucks, pedestrians and trains.
The city’s small railway station provides a critical supply line for Kaliningrad. Its many tracks are lined with Russian cargo cars filled with natural gas, coal and other commodities coming from mainland Russia.
And every day, three or four Russian passenger trains pull in. Their arrival and departure go unannounced, and the trains don’t appear on the station’s schedule.
Lithuanian border guards in Kybartai inspect a train from Kaliningrad heading to Moscow, while a Lithuanian engine replaces the Russian one for the rest of its journey across the Baltic country.
One Wednesday afternoon in May, Russian passengers peered out the windows at the empty platform as the train sat silently on the tracks. They were heading to Moscow for Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany and Mr. Putin sings the praises of soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
A team of Lithuanian border guards boarded each of the seven cars and checked travel documents while customs officers searched the mail car for contraband. When a young Russian woman showed up at the station and asked if she could get on the train, she was told no one was allowed on or off.
Russia and Lithuania have had a long-standing agreement that allows Russian trains to transit through the Baltic country to keep Moscow connected to Kaliningrad. That arrangement has been strained since Russia’s invasion and Lithuanian officials’ decision to vigilantly enforce EU sanctions.
Russian engineers aren’t allowed to haul passenger trains from Kaliningrad across Lithuania. Instead, a Lithuanian engine is attached in Kybartai and a crew drives the train to the Belarus border, where a Russian engine and operator take over again.
For a while after Russia’s invasion, Lithuania’s train stations were filled with Ukrainian flags. They’re gone from Kybartai’s station, but Rūta Skeltienė, a local school guidance councillor, put up a blue and yellow sign on the highway into town with the Ukrainian phrases; “Glory to Ukraine” and “Glory to the Heroes.”
It has been defaced twice, she said, once with the letter Z, which is a sign of support for the Russian army, and once with a swastika. “It was some people who are Russian,” Ms. Skeltienė said of the culprits. “But I cleaned it.”
As the sun set over the Lithuanian village of Smalininkai on a picture-perfect evening in early May, an old man walked up from the banks of the Nemunas River to talk to Tom Antanavicius about history and Russians.
The Nemunas holds a special place in the hearts of Lithuanians. They call it “the father of rivers,” and it has been immortalized in poetry and legends. It runs for nearly 1,000 kilometres from central Belarus across Lithuania to the Baltic Sea, and for the final 200 km of its journey, the Nemunas serves as the border with Kaliningrad.
Mr. Antanavicius moved here a few years ago with his family and he isn’t familiar with the local history. The old man gave him an introduction.
He talked about how the river served people on both sides. Smalininkai was a fishing port and its now abandoned train station used to be full of railcars stacked with timber. He pointed to a giant photograph from 1915 plastered on the side of a building which showed men building a wooden bridge across the water.
“Good Russians, no problem,” the old man told Mr. Antanavicius.
Mr. Antanavicius smiled, but he had a hard time accepting that there had been co-operation with Russians. There were no traces of the bridge, and interactions with the other side nowadays are minimal.
“We are trying to bring the community together so that it will be nice for new people to come here,” he said. That doesn’t include Russians. And as far as he’s concerned, it would be best if both sides kept to themselves.
As the Nemunas flows across western Lithuania to the Baltic, it passes under the majestic Queen Louise bridge. For more than a century it has connected the city of Sovetsk in Kaliningrad to the Lithuanian town of Panemunė.
On a bright Wednesday afternoon in May, two taxis sat at the foot of the bridge on the Panemunė side, waiting hopefully for a fare.
Sigis Yencius sat in the backseat of one, chatting to a pair of cabbies who were playing cards up front. The street was deserted. A rundown, vacant store stood next to a small restaurant that had no patrons.
“There was life here,” said Mr. Yencius, a rugged 60-year-old with an easy smile. “Interesting life.”
He’s lived here for 20 years and fondly recalled when he and his friends frequented the bars in Sovetsk and ne’er-do-wells ran riot in Panemunė.
Few places in Lithuania were more raucous than Panemunė when the border opened in the 1990s. The town gained a reputation across Europe as a haven for smuggling and Wild West lawlessness. Gangs fought for control of the illicit trade and enlisted schoolchildren as lookouts. Just about anything that could be bought cheaper in Russia was spirited over to Panemunė in cars, trucks or on the backs of people who swam across the river.
Mr. Yencius played his part too. He joked about having an unofficial job at the border “in administration” and then pointed across the river. “And I know it is exactly 300 metres to the Russian bank because I have swum this distance more than many times.”
The smuggling eased over time, but for a while Panemunė had enough shops and restaurants to keep visitors coming, and the bars in Sovetsk remained alluring.
But after Russia’s invasion in 2022, authorities on both sides closed the bridge to vehicles and sucked the life out of Panemunė. Pedestrians can still cross, but Mr. Yencius says unless you have relatives in Russia getting a visa is next to impossible. Even a wily veteran of Panemunė’s bad old days like him has only been able to go across a handful of times.
“We lived together like friend to friend,” he said, the smile fading from his face as he stared at the bridge. “The war cut off the relationship like a knife, and in all likelihood that relationship will not come back.”
The busiest place in town these days is the parking lot. It’s overflowing with cars, including some that have been here so long grass has grown up to the door handles.
Sigis Yencius says it’s been months since his last visit to Sovetsk on the Russian side.
A figurine of Russian bears helps to remind Mr. Yencius of a time when the border was less of an obstacle.
Mr. Yencius said people from all Europe over drive here, park their cars and walk over to Sovetsk. From there they make connections to other parts of Russia. Men from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan come the other way for jobs in the EU.
Enterprising Russians – who are no longer allowed to drive their cars in Lithuania or Poland – have also started buying cars in Lithuania and leaving them in Panemunė to use whenever they cross.
But nobody sticks around Panemunė anymore.
Mr. Yencius spends most of his days hanging around the main street, chatting with cabbies and watching people cross. He lives alone in a two-storey house that overlooks the bridge, surrounded by reminders of happier days when the border wasn’t a barrier.
On a shelf near his fridge, there are boxes of salt and other dry goods labelled in Russian and Lithuanian. A table under the window is adorned with a figurine of a Russian mother bear and her two cubs. And the living room wall is dominated by a print of The Bogatyrs, a famous painting that depicts three heroes of Russian folklore.
Mr. Yencius is a proud Lithuanian, but he keeps his radio tuned to a station in Kaliningrad to monitor Russian news and propaganda. One of his prize possessions is a box of photos from his time in the Soviet army in the 1980s when he was a sergeant stationed in Ukraine.
He’s wary enough about Russia that he’s turned his basement into a bomb shelter and he keeps another hideaway in a nearby row of cabins, just in case the Red Army invades. But all he really wants is for the war to end and for the good times to return.
One of the buildings in Sovetsk has a giant Z, commonly used to show support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As he walked along a path to the riverside, Mr. Yencius looked over the water to Sovetsk. There was a giant Z on one building – a show of support for the Russian army – and patriotic flags flying in preparation for Victory Day celebrations. Most nights Mr. Yencius can hear Russians partying in the bars along the river and memories come flooding back. “They drink vodka, shout, dance,” he said with envy. “How Russian.”
He paused and tried to explain how the war has affected people here. It’s like two neighbours who live side by side without any trouble, he said. Then one neighbour invites a friend to visit and he ridicules the people next door. After the visitor leaves, relations between the neighbours are never the same. “Simple story, from nothing you start being hostile with your neighbour,” he said.
He fell silent and turned back up the path to his house. He pulled up a stool outside the front door, sat down and stared at the empty street.
A deer quietly emerged and slowly made his way toward the bridge. The buck has become such a regular sight that people have named him Baby. He’s tried to cross the bridge twice, but the Russian guards stopped him.
Locals keep an eye on Baby the deer as he wanders along the empty road in Panemunė.