Every year, the glorious victory in the "Great Patriotic War" is remembered with louder bands and more energetic ardour. Yet at first the place seems to have no history at all. Six alcoholics have made the iron circular sculpture commemorating the three cosmonauts of Kaliningrad their hangout. They are not alone. Groups of drunks and slumped drug addicts are more or less everywhere. Hunched and headscarfed babushkas flog buckets of their unappetising nodular vegetables. They are survivors of the Communist Party's drive to collectivise, Stalin's purges, Hitler's Barbarossa, Brezhnev's totalitarianism and Yeltsin's social chaos and economic casino. 

The factories have mostly closed. The jobs will not come back. Humiliated men without work turn to the bottle. Women talk about being abused. Their sons are not remotely equipped for the e-age. Pretty girls torture their waists and put themselves online to be "your Russian bride". Hustlers hook up these women with seedy losers who come here for cheap and easy sex. 

Normal Russians live in a socially failed modernity. Kaliningrad exemplifies this. Across the Federation, the average man dies at 59. Putin's government has admitted a 30 per cent surge in poverty since 2008. Officially, 24 million people are living on less than £110 a month. It is estimated that around six per cent of Russians go hungry. Around 10 per cent of Russian women are infertile due to crude abortions. Unemployment has at least doubled since 2008. Estimates of the number of heroin addicts range as high as six million. At least a million Russians are HIV-positive. Putin has restored stability and military power while creating a prosperous but disconnected super-elite. He has not stopped the social rot. 

Kaliningrad's misfortune is to be a colonial territory in the heart of Europe. The Kremlin has insisted that its isolated enclave has the same visa regulations as the rest of Russia. This has severed once rich economic ties with Poland and Lithuania. Like any other province in the country, the local governor is a Kremlin crony viewing his time here as a step on the way to bigger things in Moscow. 

People are growing angry. Kaliningrad has seen the biggest mass protest in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. On 30 January, more than 10,000 people gathered in the main square, calling for the governor and even for Putin to resign. The mass action shocked the Kremlin. The regime is strong enough to kill a few journalists but it does not have the strength for anything approaching a "Tiananmen option". In late February, around 2,000 demonstrators took to the streets again, demanding the right to elect regional officials. Nervously, the Kremlin told the governor to talk to a protest leader about "problems of an exclusively economic nature". Putin had blinked. Anti-Soviet protests broke out first in the Baltic because locals lived close enough to Europe to see how far their lives were lagging behind those further to the West. With the Baltic states now in the EU, the contrast is stark. "We have been left behind in this ghetto," sighed a chain-smoking hospital director. "They promised we'd catch up, but we've fallen further behind."