SUMMARY:

This article explores the Communist Soviet rulers’ attempts to resettle the formerly German Königsberg after 1945 with population from the rest of the USSR. One of the central questions in the article is the process of creating a new Soviet historical narrative for the city with an established architectural order. In order to accelerate Kaliningrad’s integration into the Soviet Union the city had to be transformed into a Soviet lieu de memoire. In this context the capture of Königsberg by the Red Army in April 1945 was the source for the foundation myth of the “new” city. The slow reconstruction of the city, however, undermined this strategy. The new inhabitants transformed the initially negatively connotated lieu de memoire Königsberg into a “retrospective promise”: Königsberg became a positive model for Soviet Kaliningrad.