As the end of Europe on Saturday afternoon, a man in a straw hat warmed up to go jogging, a father and teenage son in matching jeans and denim jackets shared a packet of cheap cigarettes, a small girl made sandcastles and two border guards strolled under the narrow single-span bridge over the swift-flowing Narva river. To their left lay Estonia; to their right, on the other bank, Russia.
"We are not too worried about politics here," said one guard, fiddling with his holstered handgun. "We prefer sitting drinking beer with friends on a bench in the sun."
Yet the bucolic scene and the border guard's insouciance seem increasingly out of place. This is because the slightly dilapidated but calm streets of Narva, Estonia's third-largest city, are now at the center of geopolitical tensions not seen in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago.
Some analysts are calling it the "new Cold War."
The concern spreads far beyond Narva. Estonia, known to visitors for the bars and pubs of its capital city, Tallinn, has been hit by riots linked to the tensions. New disputes pit states that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union throughout much of Eastern Europe against their former overlords.
And there is an international crisis setting Moscow against the EU and against Washington.
"I suppose we are in the eye of the storm," said Gregor Ivanov, a former factory worker, sitting on a bench in the sun on Narva's Puskini Street. "It's a shame ... everything was going so well."
The storm is large and potentially very dangerous. Locally, Russia is blamed for stoking riots in Tallinn last month -- in which one died and 153 were injured -- for the roughing up of Estonian diplomats in Moscow and for a massive "cyber-attack" on the infrastructure of the small Baltic state.
According to Andres Kasekamp, director of Tallinn's Foreign Policy Institute, the Russian government is mounting a deliberate attempt to destabilize former Soviet republics.
"This strategy is intensifying as Moscow's attitude to the US, the UK and the EU becomes more aggressive and assertive," Kasekamp said. "They are seeing how far they can push us, the European Union, NATO, the Americans, everybody."
Some Estonians even fear Moscow may be searching for a casus belli. The Russian testing last week of an intercontinental ballistic missile led to an extraordinary diplomatic spat between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- who deplored Moscow's "missile diplomacy" -- and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attacked US "imperialism."
For the UK, already strained relations were put under new stress when the dispute with Moscow over the poisoning in London of Russian dissident and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko six months ago took another turn for the worse.
The prime suspect, whose extradition has been demanded by Britain and refused by Russia, surfaced last Wednesday in Moscow. Andrei Lugovoi told TV cameras that the British secret services were behind Litvinenko's murder.
Then there are profound disagreements over the future of Kosovo and policy on Iran; a row over the rights of major British commercial investors to parts of the massive Siberian gas fields; harassment of British officials and diplomats in Moscow; and a series of apparently state-encouraged propaganda pieces in the Russian media against the West. Analysts are talking of relations between Moscow and London being at a 25-year low.
"This is a delayed confrontation between the Soviet past and the European future," said Igor Grazin, an Estonian member of parliament.
And his country, home to 1.3 million, is in the middle.
Narva is about 200km from Tallinn. There is a huge difference between the depressed northeastern old industrial town and the booming Estonian capital with its stunning medieval architecture, new industries, strip clubs and groups of drunken foreign stag-nighters staggering through the narrow streets.
It is at the gleaming new 9,000-seat Lillekula stadium on the outskirts of the capital that the England soccer team will play their crucial qualifying European Cup match against Estonia tonight. The stadium is sold out.
"Of course, all the tickets have gone," said Jan Sepp, a newspaper seller near the ground. "Beckham is coming."
In fact, the Los Angeles Galaxy's new star signing is not the only cause of the recent Estonian enthusiasm for soccer.
As with so much in Estonia -- such as the recent riots -- the Baltic state's complex and painful history plays a part. For decades the favored local sports were volleyball and basketball. There was no national team and soccer was identified with the Soviet Union and thus with repression and occupation.
The result, Kasekamp explained, was that when Estonia formally won its independence from the USSR in 1991, soccer surged in popularity. Estonia's membership of the EU, finalized three years ago, merely confirmed the trend.
"Now people look to the [English] Premier League, the Italian teams, the European championship. Soccer symbolizes Europe and the new Estonian future," Kasekamp said.
This turning toward the West is repeated in almost every field. The ruling coalition in Estonia, returned to power after elections in March, has continued the fiercely Thatcherite-Reaganite economics of its recent predecessors.
A single flat income tax of 22 percent, low business taxes and cheap, weak welfare provision have, government supporters claim, led to a spectacular annual economic growth of more than 10 percent and negligible unemployment -- outside the poorer industrial and agricultural areas. Even in and around relatively poor Narva, unemployment has dropped from 30 percent 10 years ago to 8 percent now -- with a drop of 2 percent in the past six months. Money is coming from the West, too. The overwhelming majority of foreign investment originates in Finland and Sweden or Western Europe, and less than one-tenth of trade activity involves Russia. Huge numbers of Estonians now work in Finland, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Britain.
In foreign policy, Estonia tilts toward the Atlantic. Its tiny army has deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where one was wounded fighting alongside the British in the south last week.
"We are successful, democratic, economically liberal, pro-American, pro-EU. We are everything that the Russians are not," said Raimo Poom, political editor of the major Esti Paevaleht newspaper. "It's no wonder they don't like us."
For James Nixey, of Chatham House -- at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, based in London -- Russia's recent broadside against Estonia is part of a wider vision of the region.
"It seems that Russia feels that those countries around it which are democratic and have liberal attitudes are a threat and those that are illiberal and autocratic are not," he said last week.
So Moscow's relations with Latvia and Lithuania, which joined the EU three years ago with Estonia, are frosty at best, those with Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan warm, and those with Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive leader of the former Soviet republic Belarus, depend on how vehemently anti-Western the latter's rhetoric is. Moscow, Nixey pointed out, similarly supported hardliners in Ukraine. Analysts and diplomats are working to decipher the logic behind Russia's hardening stance. The missile test last week was partly provoked by US plans to install an anti-missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
"The most explicit message from Moscow was that Russia is the main strategic partner for America," said Thomas Gomart, of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. "It's a way of marginalizing the Europeans and other emerging powers."
But domestic factors are also important. With parliamentary and presidential elections in the next year, Putin is playing to the crowd and strengthening the position of his possible successor, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.
"To an extent it's theater," said one UK-based diplomat. "And it is logical that Estonia has a key role."
Part of the reason is pride.
Estonia was ruled by Russia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Kadri Liik, director of Tallinn's International Center for Defense Studies, said it was "very difficult for Moscow to accept that a part of the former Russian empire is now part of the EU."
That resentment has recently crystallized around one issue: a memorial to Russian soldiers killed in World War II, known as "The Bronze Soldier." It was the relocation of the memorial from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the city's outskirts that provoked the riots last month.
The riots were clearly orchestrated. The question is by whom and for what purpose. No one is sure of the answer.
"Reports that there were Russian state agencies involved in some capacity are credible," said one Western diplomat in Tallinn.
Others talk of SMS campaigns, secret networks -- even money changing hands. Yet Moscow vehemently denies any involvement.
But even if there were outside interference, the demonstrations around the memorial and the riots were a powerful reminder to Estonia's government not to forget the country's ethnic Russian minority.
The road from Tallinn toward Narva follows the flat coastline of the Finnish Gulf, slicing through thick pine and birch forest, farmland and wide, empty marshes before reaching the open, windswept industrial heartland of the plains before the Russian frontier. Though some sections have been recently widened with some of the massive European structural aid now pouring into the country, along much of its length the road is little more than a rutted single carriageway running between the fields, old mines and historical memorials.
The drive reveals Estonia's checkered history -- and explains why feelings still run so high that relocating a statue can cause chaos.
"The statue is just a trigger; the issue has profound roots in recent and in ancient history," Nixey said.
After declaring its independence from Russia in 1918, Estonia was forcibly and bloodily incorporated into the USSR in 1940. A year later it was wrested from the Russians by the Germans. Just before Narva, war memorials and tombs line the Tallenberg Hills where German SS divisions held back a Russian onslaught for six months in 1944.
Over the four-and-a-half decades that followed, after a period of massive purges, violence and emigration, the Soviet Union ran Estonia with an iron grip, settling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians in the small country, most of whom stayed after independence in 1991. Integrating this minority into a new Estonian nation has not been easy. Narva is considerably closer to St Petersburg, physically and culturally, than to Tallinn.
"This is a country in permanent transition," said Rein Raud, chancellor of Tallinn University. "Its biggest challenge is to create political space for minorities and to engender loyalty to the Estonian state while allowing those that want it to maintain their traditions."
This bloody history explains why issues such as the Bronze Soldier can be so easily exploited. But though the Russian minority, concentrated in the northeast, is still poorer and less educated than most of the population and about 140,000 still do not speak enough Estonian to qualify for citizenship, the economic boom has meant that the chronic unemployment and hardship of the immediate post-communist time is almost gone.
"It's better now," said 63-year-old Tamara Yevchenko, a flower seller in Tallinn. "It's still tough, but it's better. Before, I wanted the USSR to come back, but now I am happy with the way things are."
And though HIV levels and drug use remain high and life expectancy for men remains low, Grazin, one of seven members of parliament (out of 101) of Russian origin, plays down ethnic tension, dismissing recent claims by international human rights organizations of massive discrimination against Estonian Russians as exaggerated.
"There's work to do, but a lot of progress has been made," one Western diplomat said.
Suggestions by others that the Russians should be "sent home" are "ludicrous," Poom said.
But even if this particularly problematic legacy of Estonia's bloody past is slowly being resolved, the drive to Narva exposes other dark elements of the past of a country that many like to paint as plucky, outnumbered democrats who have always stood up to brutal, conquering communists.
The German soldiers resisting the Russians included many Estonians -- and local police battalions guarded the forced labor camps where tens of thousands of Jews from all over Eastern Europe were worked to death. The process of coming to terms with that history continues. Last month a new synagogue opened in Tallinn, replacing those destroyed by the Nazis.
At the new synagogue, near the docks in Tallinn, Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot said anti-Semitism in the region was "more or less" a thing of the past.
"I feel safer here than in London or Paris," Kot said. "I can't say for sure, because the Estonian way is to keep things hidden, but in general we feel safe."
But last week such confidence in an entirely untroubled future was not necessarily that widespread. Today the G8 nations will meet for three days of talks at the German Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm. Estonian leaders are looking to the EU nations present to make their anger at Putin's strong-arm tactics known. They may be disappointed. The leaders of the US, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan will debate climate change, efforts to stop uranium enrichment by Iran, aid to Africa, currency exchange rates and global growth. Emerging economic powers such as China, Brazil and India are there as non-members. Diplomats hope that it will be a chance to calm angry tempers, not fuel fires.
Foreign Office spokesmen were conciliatory last week. "There are areas such as the rule of law and human rights where there is not a meeting of minds and we raise our concerns frankly with [the Russians] there," said one. "[But] Russia has to be part of our policy ... we have to engage."
For Liik, the Tallinn-based analyst, there is a longer-term concern. She says it is important to focus on the sentiments of 120 million Russians, not just the rhetoric of their leaders.
"Putin is telling the Russian people what they want to hear and doing what he thinks they want him to do. That says some very worrying things about Russian society and does not bode well for the future," she said. "What sort of a generation is coming through now who have been raised on all this aggressive, belligerent propaganda?"
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