Smart island! In the mid 90s, the entire Russian town of Ivangarod, not far away, petitioned Moscow for permission to secede from Russia and to officially become part of Estonia. You will not be surprised to learn that Moscow did not grant permission. But as the town is populated entirely by Russians, it does make an interesting comment regarding the gross discrimination which Russians are supposedly subjected to in Nazi, apartheid etc. etc. etc. Estonia. It may be interesting to note that there is a strip of territory now on the Russian side of the border, equivalent to approximately 5% of the land mass of Estonia, which used to be part of Estonia. When Stalin occupied Estonia, he unilaterally shaved it off of the so-called “Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic” and simply gave it to Russia, as an act of revenge for Estonia defeating Russian forces in its 1918-20 War of Independence. No due process of any kind, or any relevant documentation even, was involved, much less any Estonian agreement – the territory just became part of Russia, and that was that. I guess Russia wasn’t big enough as it was. With the end of the Soviet occupation in 1991, Moscow simply continued to hang on to the territory, and eventually Estonia fully and officially ceded it to Russia, and signed a new border treaty which defined Estonia as not including that land. The delicious irony of this is that whereas Estonia has ratified the treaty in parliament, Russia, which also signed the treaty, refused to ratify it in the Duma, and eventually took the diplomatically unheard-of step of actually rescinding its signature! And why? Because Moscow claimed, of all things, that Estonia has territorial pretentions against Russia! And now some of the land is floating back anyway.