On the 4th July 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in honour of Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, a Bolshevik activist who subsequently fronted the political administration (as the nominal head of state) under Jozef Stalin, following his death from cancer at the age of 70 a month earlier. This memorial, with his statue standing atop a plinth bearing the Soviet ‘hammer and sickle’ emblem, was inaugurated in 1959.