A statue of a Soviet Red Army soldier at the military cemetery in Tallinn, May 2007. Photo: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

NARVA, Estonia: Estonia's medieval fortress at Narva glowers at a corresponding fort over the border in Russia, a symbol of tensions between the two nations and, for some, of friction between Estonians and their big Russian minority.

In this town on the far northeast fringe of the European Union, surrounded by flat countryside in a region pockmarked by slags of oil shale, 85 percent of the population are Russian speakers.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they and others in the 300,000-strong Russian-speaking community of the tiny Baltic state of Estonia faced a choice: integrate and become Estonian or, in the eyes of the law, remain a noncitizen.

Their status has long been a source of contention with Russia, and relations soured overtly after April last year when Estonia moved a Soviet-era Red Army war memorial, setting off riots in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and anger in the Russian capital, Moscow.

Saying Estonia's action showed disrespect to the fighters of Fascism, Russia retaliated with steps that dampened trade flows and hurt Estonia's economy.

A year later, Mikhail Stalnukhin, head of the city council in Narva, which lies just across the river from Ivangorod, Russia, still uses charged language to describe community relations.

"After April there is a Cold War," said Stalnukhin, a member of the opposition Center Party.

A typical Russian would now think Estonians do not care about them, he said. The Russian view would be: "A year ago I thought we had different histories but a common future. Now I don't think that."

Narva's 13th-century fort may be at the sharp end of the concerns, but in all about 100,000 Russian-speaking people remain in a literal gray zone in Estonia: as noncitizens, their passports are gray, not the citizens' blue.

Some, like Olesya Zeel, a Russian speaker from Johvi, a nearby town, have opted for integration. But as Estonia's relations with Russia remain strained, thousands of others are taking Russian citizenship.

Some here fear that such a move will give Russia, which ruled Estonia during the Soviet era, a potential lever in Estonia's affairs.

Zeel, 33, decided when she was in the hospital after giving birth to her first child that her future was in this country of 1.3 million people, which joined the European Union in 2004. If she wanted to study and work, she had to make a choice.

"In the ward were two Estonian girls," said Zeel, now the mother of two. "They talked to each other and I did not understand.

"I felt ashamed that I live here - they could understand me, but I can't understand them."

In the Soviet era, Russian was the lingua franca, and many Russian speakers who came during 50 years of Soviet rule did not learn Estonian. This was particularly true in the industrial northeast.

The Russians' lack of Estonian was a source of resentment among Estonians, combined with a feeling that too many Russians lived in this small country, from which many thousands were deported to Siberia under Stalin.

Zeel opted to break through that barrier. Taking a test on the Constitution and learning the language, she became one of the roughly 147,000 Russian speakers who have achieved Estonian citizenship by naturalization.

But while she echoed a common view that it is the older generation of Russian speakers in particular who have problems adapting to the post-Soviet world, a 15-year-old Russian speaker in Tallinn, Aleksandr Dombrovsky, has already seen his future elsewhere.

"Integration? I'm not bothered about it," he said. "I'm thinking about leaving, to Russia, with my father. Estonia is not my country. I can understand Estonian very well, but I don't see Estonia as my home."

Reliable data on how many Russian speakers feel like he does are hard to come by, given that estimates vary even on how many citizens of Russia live in Estonia: there are about 95,000 according to Estonia, but Russia says there are about 147,000.

Since April 27, 2007, the tensions have been in the open. That was the day a World War II Red Army monument that many Estonians saw as a symbol of Soviet occupation was moved to a military cemetery near the city center.

There were no official reprisals, but trade flows from Russia fell, including volumes of heavy fuel oil by train from Russia through the port of Tallinn. In 2007, the amount of liquid cargo going through the port, mainly fuel oil, fell 7 percent. Coal shipments dropped by a half in 2007, to 3.7 million tons. Total cargo at the port fell to 36 million tons from 41 million.

Amid the tensions with Russia and continual debate about Russian speakers at home, some people feel that Estonia's goal of integrating Russian speakers has failed.

"The Russian-language community in Estonia is a completely independent, amorphous group of people, not active," said Sergei Stepanov, editor of The Narvskaya Gazeta, a newspaper in Narva.

He said the state had effectively discarded such people, leaving them in their own world, watching news from Russia itself, reading Russian Web sites and not engaging with Estonia.

The Integration Minister, Urve Palo, speaking in her office in the picturesque Old Town in the heart of Tallinn, is less bleak.

"People tend to think that the April crisis showed that we have failed in integration," she said, but noted that last year's protests drew only 2,000 Russian speakers, or a total of about 3,000 if Estonian youths were included.

"Not everybody lives separately," she said. "Of course there are people who are not interested in each other. But in Estonia it is very common that people work together in the private sector." She cited Hansabank, a large bank where Russian speakers work alongside Estonians.