“For years we lived together without any problems,” said Svetlana, a pensioner sitting on a bench looking out over the river, where, in a mirror image, Russians on the other side could be seen enjoying the springtime weather, walking along a promenade and sitting on a pair of swings. “Everything was good. There wasn’t any discrimination.”
She accused politicians in Tallinn and Brussels of scaremongering and fueling tensions among Estonians.
“There is no threat, Russia is not a threat,” her husband Gennady, agreed emphatically, wondering aloud why in Switzerland, where he studied and worked, having multiple languages wasn’t seen as a problem..
Although he held Russian citizenship he didn’t express any desire to live in Russia, and neither did his wife, an Estonian citizen. “We don’t belong there. We are just Russian-speaking Estonians. I will live here until I die. This is my place,” Svetlana said sadly. “But I feel worried for my children’s future here.”
The two declined to give their full names or ages or be photographed, out of concern that would put them on the radar of Estonia’s security service.
‘A great success’
In Estonia, the hype around the “Narva People’s Republic” campaign has sparked a painful internal debate, with much of the heat aimed at Propastop and the media for spreading the group’s message to an audience of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people.