A view of Peetri Plats in Narva. Photo: Andrew Stuttaford.

V ladimir Putin doesn’t take much interest in the rights of Russians at home, but when it comes to the millions of Russians stranded in a sudden abroad after the collapse of the USSR, it’s a different matter. In a speech last year, he made clear that his idea of a wider “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) came with a threat: “our country will . . . defend the rights of . . . our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means.”

The entire range of available means: after the Crimea came eastern Ukraine, and then? Nearly half a century of Soviet occupation left Estonia with a large Russian minority. This has shrunk since independence, but “Russian speakers” still account for around 28 percent of the population. About a half are Estonian citizens, with the balance roughly divided between Russian citizens and “non-citizens,” the latter a status (there’s something similar in neighboring Latvia) that Putin has described as “shameful.”

Most of the country’s Russian speakers are concentrated in either the capital, Tallinn, or in Ida-Virumaa, a region in the northeast. Only four percent of the inhabitants of Narva, that region’s principal city, just across a narrow river from Russia, are ethnic Estonians.

“Where you going next?” asks the Estonian bellhop as I check out of my hotel in Tallinn’s beguiling medieval center.

“Narva.”

A quiet “oh,” is the reply, but Estonians are an undemonstrative people. His gently arched eyebrows are an unusually expressive response.

Few places are at their best when first seen from a bus stop half an hour before midnight, especially when that bus stop is little more than a patch of dimly lit ground, a soda dispenser, and a shuttered ticket booth. But a trudge to my hotel through deserted streets lined by the exhausted Soviet architecture of Estonia’s third largest city confirmed that three hours on the Lux Express to the east had taken me to no kind of Xanadu. Only the illuminated tower of an old castle, whitewashed and stark, hinted at the Narva that once was.

In Baltic Corner (1939), an enthusiastic and accidentally elegiac account of a stay in Estonia published shortly before doomsday, Ronald Seth celebrated how for “sheer romantic medievalism” Narva ranked “even above Tallinn.” E. C. Davies (A Wayfarer in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 1937) found “ancient, wonderful” Narva to be “a treasure house of the [Northern] Baroque,” but noted, melodramatically if inaccurately, that the city had “seen little else but war.” War was soon to return, more devastating than anything that Narva had seen under Danes, Teutonic Knights, Russians, Swedes, and Russians (again), and finally, it was thought, the Estonian Republic. But, in 1940, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union. In 1941, the Germans swept in, only to be swept out again by the Red Army in 1944.

Located at the edge of an isthmus where Russia merges into Estonia, its strategic importance underlined by Narva’s Hermann Castle—first established by the Danes—guarding the west bank of the Narva river and Muscovy’s Ivangorod Fortress the east, Narva had found itself at the center of fierce German resistance to the Soviet attack. That Estonians were on both sides of the fighting was another twist of history’s knife. Narva’s surviving civilian population was evacuated in January 1944. Two months later Soviet bombers obliterated the venerable heart of the city and just about everything else besides.

Narva's Hermann Castle to the west and Ivangorod Fortress to the east. Photo: Andrew Stuttaford.

E arly plans to restore old Narva were shelved. Avoiding any dangerous nostalgia, a drab, slovenly “socialist city” was built on the standard Soviet model: Neanderthal modernism and at least one architectural grotesque. Almost all that remains of what was (much of it heavily reconstructed) is the castle, an Orthodox cathedral, a Lutheran church, the old Swedish town hall, the massive Swedish bastions that were an important part of Narva’s defenses, and, in a southern quarter of the city, the confident late-Victorian red-brick of the vast Kreenholm textile complex, home to a business that survived wars, revolution, and nationalization, only to be finished off by the free market.

In Estonia, books—collections of vintage photographs and postcards—are still published that show glimpses of a vanished Narva: a town of spires, stepped gables, winding streets and pale-plastered walls, the house of a long-gone burgomaster, and the old pharmacy in Raekoja Plats (Town Hall Square), there since 1668. It had five years to go at the time the photograph was taken in 1939. The photographer, Carl Sarap, had even less: one of over ten thousand Estonians deported by the country’s Soviet occupiers in June 1941, he perished in the Gulag the following year.

That there is a demand for such books (I noticed three titles dedicated to “old Narva” in one Tallinn bookstore alone) is just one reminder of the way Estonia’s interwar republic haunts the country’s imagination. Its memory fueled the drive to independence and shaped the form that independence would take. There was to be a return to “normal” (an adjective I heard a lot during a visit to Estonia in 1993) where normal was the West: Soviet occupation had been the aberration.

But modern Narvans saw things differently. They were a Soviet people with a Soviet consciousness. If they knew anything of the Estonian Republic, it was as the “bourgeois dictatorship” of Soviet propaganda. After the Red Army recaptured the city’s ruins in 1944, the remnants of the original population were not allowed back. Instead settlers—mainly Russian—from the rest of the USSR moved in, and did so in increasing numbers as Moscow exploited nearby oil-shale deposits both for uranium oxide (a handy by-product at the dawn of the Cold War) and as a source of power for new industries in the area.

Narva’s new inhabitants lived in a Soviet city with a past that began in 1944, a past cut off from Estonia’s lost independence and a small people’s desire to be themselves. The border between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was not much more than a line on the map, an insincere nod to the shreds of history. Moving to Narva, closer to Leningrad than to Tallinn, was not seen as either immigration or, for that matter, colonization. It implied no change in identity, let alone nationality. There was no need to learn any Estonian, and anyone who did so would have found few opportunities to try out this exotic new skill.

Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that Narva’s Russian speakers saw little to like about the drive towards Estonian independence, a movement inspired by a history that was not theirs towards a future in which they had no clear place.

In most newly independent Soviet republics, most of which had scant, if any, recent experience of statehood, citizenship was open to all permanent residents. But the three Baltic States—independent until 1940—did not so much declare independence as restore it, a psychologically powerful distinction that played no small part in these countries’ successful emergence from Soviet rule, but that came with a potentially incendiary legal complication. What was to be the status of those who had settled there during decades of illegal occupation, not to speak of that of their descendants, born in someone else’s land?

Lithuania, blessed by comfortable demographics (ethnic Lithuanians accounted for some 80 percent of the inhabitants of their republic in 1989), could afford the luxury of pragmatism and essentially offered citizenship to all long-term residents. That was not a risk that Estonia or Latvia (where ethnic Estonians and Latvians then accounted for just 62 and 52 percent of their respective populations) could afford to take. In 1989, Lennart Meri, a future president of Estonia, spoke of the “biological and social terror of belonging to a people that is dying out.” Fewer than one million ethnic Estonians lived within their country’s borders, and they lived next to a giant and greedy neighbor. Restoring their stolen republic was not only good law, it was a matter of survival.

But the “restorationist” model had disturbing implications for Estonia’s already unsettled Russian speakers. The reintroduction of a toughened version of Estonia’s prewar citizenship law effectively restricted Estonian citizenship (in the short term) to citizens of the old republic and their descendants, and briefly threatened everyone else with the loss of residence rights. Russian, once the imperial lingua franca, had been downgraded: Estonia was too small, and its identity too fragile, to be bilingual, at least formally. Narva’s Russian speakers had come to oppose the idea of independence. They liked the reality even less.

Compounding their misery, jobs were evaporating: the large Soviet enterprises that employed so many in the industrialized northeast were in a state of collapse. But attempts (including a local referendum in favor of “national autonomy”) to stir up a secessionist movement in Narva got nowhere. The chaotic Russia of the early 1990s was not much of a magnet, and, although some angry words were thrown Estonia’s way, in that more liberal era the Kremlin had little appetite for intervention.

For their part, successive Estonian governments came to terms with the fact that most of the country’s Russians were not going away, and, prodded by the West, adapted the country’s laws to that still unloved reality. Non-citizens can vote in local elections and have equal access to the benefits that the state has to offer. The citizenship laws have been gradually, if grudgingly, relaxed.

Meanwhile, the northeast was left largely to itself, an arrangement neatly underscored by the fact that Lenin was not toppled in Narva, merely moved from centrally located Peetri Plats (St. Peter’s Square) to a corner in the castle’s bailey, near a plaque commemorating Finnish volunteers who fought the Bolsheviks in 1919—just one of the strange juxtapositions in this strange place. Another is the ornamentation of the city’s modest railway station, a pleasant enough example of Stalinist neo-classicism, which includes bas-reliefs of Red Army soldiers. Across the road is a memorial to Estonians deported east along those tracks by the Soviets in 1941 and again in 1949, not so long after “liberation” by that same Red Army.

A statue of Lenin in Narva. Photo: Andrew Stuttaford.

A s the rest of Estonia roller-coastered to a level of prosperity unthinkable in Soviet times, Narva lagged behind, slower to adapt. It was neglected by investors who could not see where this spiky city fit within the new Estonia, and, to a degree, by governments in Tallinn that felt the same way. Unemployment in Ida-Virumaa ran at more than twice the national average, and a high rate of needle-borne HIV infection in Narva (one of the worst in Europe) was evidence of deeper pathologies at work, as was a steady fall in the city’s population, which continues.

There is a sense that it is a place apart, a Russian “island” (not so, Narva’s Mayor Eduard East assured me). In Narva the signs are in Estonian, but the talk is in Russian. There’s a street named after the proletariat and another for a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary. The city is run by the Center Party, a nominally Estonian party with close links to Putin’s United Russia. And then there’s television: there’s a legitimate concern in Tallinn that Estonia’s Russian speakers live in a “Russian information space,” with attitudes shaped by the fun, glamorous, and dangerously deceptive Russian TV. This is probably nowhere more true than in Narva, a city that has never quite left Russia behind (indeed over a third of its 60 thousand residents are Russian citizens). 2011 research from Estonia’s Tartu University suggests that only some 50 percent of Estonia’s Russian speakers have achieved a reasonable degree of integration: the total will be significantly lower in Narva.

A nd yet not all is gloom. Unemployment in Ida-Virumaa (some 9 percent) is far below the dismal heights of the past. New industries have been set up, and Narva’s outskirts are dotted with bright, big-box stores, partly aimed, I was told, at shoppers from Ivangorod as well as Russian tourists driving through Narva from St. Petersburg to Tallinn or to a nearby resort on the Baltic coast, a trade now pressured by a softer ruble and harder times.

For a long time, Narva’s seventeenth-century baroque Swedish town hall, beautifully restored but underused (the city government is housed in Soviet-era accommodation elsewhere), sat in lonely splendor on Town Hall Square, out of place in a city with little interest in the wrong sort of past. But it has now been joined there by a striking, cleverly designed building housing Tartu University’s Narva College, a teachers’ training college where the language of instruction is Estonian, something badly needed in a country slowly integrating a school system still divided into Russian and Estonian.

Run by a dedicated team of those rare ethnic Estonians prepared to make the trek to Narva, the college also seems to operate as a sort of Estonian embassy to the city, as well, for those prepared to look, as a pointed evocation of Narva’s lost past: the front of its building is a reverse image of the old Swedish stock exchange that once stood on the college’s site. There’s free Wi-Fi for anyone who wants to drop by its welcoming entrance hall, and a good café, too. Its elegantly restored cellars, once the cellars of the Swedish Stock Exchange, play host to local musicians and artists. The college’s success has contributed to another encouraging phenomenon: the increasing presence in city politics of the left-leaning, but pro-western Social Democrats as an alternative to Center Party domination.

Ask around, and you will find few residents who think that Narvans would welcome a Donetsk-style “rescue” of their city by Mr. Putin. They may approve of Russia’s adventures in the Crimea, but they know that they are healthier, wealthier, and more secure in Estonia, a member of the European Union, than they would be in Russia. Unlike struggling Ukraine, Estonia could never be mistaken for a failed state. And Narvans have seen the destruction in eastern Ukraine on TV. They know what “liberation” can look like. Then again, the head of Narva College was quoted as saying last year that minds could quickly change if Russian troops were patrolling the city: after all, most Crimeans had opposed separation from Ukraine before the invaders arrived.

Estonia is a member of NATO, entitled to the assistance of its allies in the event of an attack. But Estonians fret that a carefully ambiguous incursion, camouflaged as a rising by Narva’s supposedly oppressed Russians—Moscow could always arm a handful of discontented locals or their surrogates—could be used as an excuse (an “internal matter,” you see) for hesitant allies not eager to help out. Such a failure, as Putin realizes, would be a devastating blow to NATO’s credibility, but who in NATO really wants to die for Narva?

To be sure, NATO is signaling that it will stand firm. In February, American and other NATO troops marched through Narva in an Estonian Independence Day parade, part of a more general increase in NATO’s previously negligible presence in the Baltic, undeniably helpful, but still with the smack of the symbolic about it.

Will symbolism be enough to deter an opponent who is playing for real?