NARVA, Estonia — Anna Gisser was out for a walk in Narva’s leafy Siivertsi Park last week when the 82-year-old retiree was stopped by two police officers and told to wait. Workers were in the park loading a Soviet-era tank memorial onto a truck and taking it to a museum – part of Tallinn’s effort to remove what for Estonians celebrates half a century of brutal Soviet occupation, but what local Russian-speaking fallen soldiers feel Red Army from World War II. “I feel disgusted,” said Gisher, a Russian-born former energy construction worker who has lived in Estonia since 1957. “For me, this is about memory … they didn’t respect my very existence.” Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu told POLITICO that the Soviet monuments are a “danger to public order” that has the potential to “create a rift within society” and therefore their removal was “much needed” to “avoid tensions” . The tank’s removal shows how the war in Ukraine is straining the delicate relationship between the Estonian government and the Russian-speaking minority that make up about a quarter of the Baltic country’s population of 1.3 million. Nowhere is this more evident than in Narva, a city of 54,000 that sits just across the Narva River from Ivangorod, Russia — complete with its now anachronistic-sounding “Friendship Bridge.” The city, which has changed hands between Danes, Swedes, Poles, Germans and Russians over the last millennium, was where Estonia ratified a military accord under pressure from the Soviet Union in 1939, ending its first run as an independent nation. Blighted by the Germans, the mineral-rich region then became a Soviet industrial heartland where thousands of Russians were sent to work – which the Estonians saw as a colonial effort to flood them with Russian settlers. About 85 percent of Narva’s population is Russian, and for two decades after Estonia’s independence and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Narva and Ivangorod launched joint construction projects and cultural initiatives. The city has also been one of the main trade arteries between Russia and Estonia — with trade between the two countries totaling nearly €3 billion last year. But Russia’s war in Ukraine is severing those ties. The city has suspended cooperation with Ivangorod, said Denis Larchenko, a member of the Narva city council. He said locals even staged small demonstrations outside the Russian consulate at the start of the war. “For Narva, it was a unique thing,” he said, “because normally, we don’t have that many people out on the streets.” Despite this small demonstration, for the Estonian government, the war reopens the question of the integration of the Russian minority. Anna Gisser | Victor Jack/POLITICO “Among the population of Estonia, suspicion has definitely increased towards the Russian-speaking population,” said Kristjan Kaldur, a senior analyst at the Institute for Baltic Studies, adding that Soviet memorial moves and Tallinn saying the Russian people were also to blame for the war. in Ukraine angers the Russians. In an article marking Estonia’s Independence Day on Saturday, the country’s President Alar Karis acknowledged that “trust must be restored between Narva and the government.” “Russia’s war revived the forgotten meaning of these monuments,” he said of the T-34 tank, while adding: “Estonia is a country for all of us, with all our differences.” Estonia’s integration policy has a fragmented history. For the first decade of independence, the government approached Russians in an “exclusive” way with restrictive citizenship and language laws, Kaldur said. “[There] it was an assumption that maybe if we treat them hard then they will come home,” he said. “If you fast forward to today’s situation, we can still see that this feeling of social exclusion from Western society definitely has its roots there.” At the turn of the millennium, the government turned to trying to integrate Russian speakers primarily through learning the Estonian language, which was still a “one-way street,” Kaldur said. In the mid-2000s, real efforts were made to boost investment and cultural exchange programs. However, many Russian speakers remain stuck in limbo, having Estonian passports but no citizenship, which requires an Estonian language test. This means that around 65,000 people – so-called gray citizens – can access public services, but have limited voting rights. More than 7,000 people are still gray citizens in Narva, according to the mayor’s office. It also doesn’t help that the city and the wider Ida-Virumaa region in which it is located, once a stronghold for the country’s oil shale production and textile manufacturing, have faced deindustrialization and underinvestment, said Triin Vihalemm, a sociology professor at the University of Tartu.
Aliens or allies?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine six months ago prompted the Estonian government to step up its efforts in the region. Tallinn quickly banned Russian state TV channels, while Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas visited Narva in March to announce new funding for roads and schools. But Tallinn’s moves to demolish six Soviet monuments in Narva and restrict cross-border travel last week are tearing the city apart and angering the local population. Flowers and candles at the site of the T-34 tank, a day after it was removed l Victor Jack/POLITICO “From the perspective of the security of some countries, maybe it’s a necessary step,” said Narva’s Larchenko, “but at the same time, speaking as a person … it’s hard to understand.” The local government collapsed late last week after a city councilor sent a letter to Callas threatening to take legal action to remove the tank, according to Larchenko. Opinions on the Soviet past are deeply divided. While a third of Russian speakers support the idea of relocating Soviet monuments to museums, 84 percent of Estonians think it’s a good idea, according to a recent poll. It also heightens concerns among local Russians, who say they feel targeted by the government and worry they might even be deported. A Foreign Office spokesman said the government would “never deport” Estonian citizens or residents, calling it: “Great talk fueled by Kremlin trolls.” In fact, the number of Russian-speakers applying for Estonian citizenship has more than doubled since the start of the war, to 383 from 149 in the same period last year, according to Estonian police. Efforts to remove traces of Soviet culture come at the same time as Estonia is cracking down on the ability of Russians to enter the country. With flights to the EU suspended, Estonia was one of the few open gateways to the bloc — 247,798 entered Estonia in the first half of this year, compared with 68,626 in the same period in 2021. Close relatives from Russia will still be allowed to cross the border under rules that came into effect last week, but Russians remain concerned. “It’s stupid,” said 66-year-old Vasily Naumov, a retiree who has lived in Narva all his life. “It’s only the people who will suffer — businessmen, hoteliers.” Despite concerns about the loyalty of Estonian Russians and Moscow’s occasional attempts to stoke separatist tensions, the region’s much higher standard of living than in Russia, more economic opportunities and tacit access to the Russian information sphere make it separatist sentiment almost non-existent in Ida-Virumaa, Kaldur said. But that doesn’t mean the two communities see eye to eye on the danger from the east. In a poll conducted after the start of the war in Ukraine, 88 percent of Russian speakers did not see Russia as a security threat, a view shared by only 28 percent of Estonian speakers. The day after the Soviet tank was shot down, locals, some of them in tears, decorated the site with flowers and candles. “What rights do we have?” Giesher said. “We built everything here, raised our kids here.” But then she added: “I have respect for Estonians… I am loyal to them… I don’t feel any difference between Russians and Estonians.”
