This day in 1804 marked the death of famous philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Even though he was a German, he spent almost his entire life in his birth city of Königsberg, which is today located in the Russian Federation and bear the name Kaliningrad. There are some indications that Kant never went more than around 10 km from Königsberg during his entire life.
In Kant’s time Königsberg was the administrative center of Prussia, and had previously (in the Middle Ages) belonged to the Teutonic Order. In Kant’s time, Prussia was ruled by the German Hohenzollern dynasty, which had its capital at Berlin (the dynasty later ruled over the entire German Empire).
After the end of World War II, the USSR annexed Königsberg to its own territory, and changed the name to Kaliningrad in 1946, in honor of Bolshevik revolutionary Mihkail Kalinin. The entire Kaliningrad Oblast is still part of the Russian Federation today, though the region is not directly connected to the rest of Russia (Lithuania lies in between).
The Kaliningrad Oblast is today one of the strategically most important areas for the Russian Federation. The command of the Russian Baltic Fleet is located there since it is the only Baltic area under Russian control where there is no sea ice. The entire area of the Kaliningrad Oblast is some 15,100 square kilometers (slightly smaller than Kuwait), and it is inhabited by around 950,000 people.
