Vodka and the Beatles on a New Year’s Eve in Narva

Narva, the northern Estonian city right on the border with Russia, has been much in the news of late. Not only is it where the Estonians expect any Russian invasion to take place – most of the rest of the frontier passes straight through the middle of Lake Peipus – but it has also become the scene of constant provocations from the Kremlin. There have been border-demarcation symbols snatched by night, local sat-nav jamming, and a host of psychological wind-ups. In the past month reports have come of a clunky Russian surveillance-zeppelin flying over Narva, sporting the letter ‘Z’. This city – in which an estimated 96 per cent of people speak Russian as their first language – is one we may well be hearing more of in the next few years. There is, as vlogger Bald and Bankrupt pointed out in his YouTube post on Narva, ‘probably no other border in the world, apart from the Korean peninsula, where two different ideologies clash.