The dish is named for the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and is one of the highlights of East Prussian cuisine. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the dish was officially called Kochklopse ("boiled meatballs") to avoid any reference to its namesake city, which in the aftermath of World War II had been annexed by the Soviet Union. The city's German inhabitants had been expelled, and the city had been repopulated with Russians and renamed after Mikhail Kalinin, a close ally of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet leadership.