In 1945, Stalin seized East Prussia, Germany's venerable redoubt on the Baltic Sea, as a spoil of war. A portion went to the "People's Republic" that the Soviets had just created in Poland. He kept the rest. The last surviving Germans were killed or deported. The cozy old Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights—the home, during the Enlightenment, of no less than Immanuel Kant—was transformed into Kaliningrad—a bleak Soviet place named after Mikhail Kalinin, the token peasant who was titular head of Stalin's USSR.