The aim of the article is to show how the border between Estonia and Russia became the key factor in the formation of Setus as an ethnic community. The border actualized the ethnic identity of Setus and played the major role in the formation of the ethnic group.

These findings are based on the field work conducted in eight villages of Setomaa on the Russian side of the border. This study was initiated by the NGO "Lake Peipsi Project" and was undertaken in 1995-1996. The main methods of the study were participant observation, standardized interviews and in-depth interviews.

One of the implications of the "Soviet type" of modernization was the tremendous gap between urban and rural settlements and the formation of two different cultures. The countryside has not been the subject of consideration and discussion. Very little sociological research of the countryside has been done. Therefore, the theme of countryside is not represented in the public discourse: the discussions take place within the urban society, they are dedicated to the problems of the urban society and are lead by scholars who are town-dwellers themselves who use urban notions in their research. In the sphere of "border studies" this gap is particularly evident. There are numerous studies of divided cities; possibilities of crossborder cooperation in Euroregions. However, very little is known about the transformation of the social space due to the establishment of political border.

The rural settlements in the today borderland between Estonia and Russia are very interesting. For several centuries Petchory area has been a zone of ethnic -contacts of the Finno-Ugric peoples and the Slavs. This has led to ethnic diversity of the region. Previously, the social space here was organized perpendicular to the contemporary state border; the boundaries between the ethnic groups were blurred; the population - regardless of its ethnic origin - benefited from the administrative border between Estonia and Russia using differences in prices and supplies. The transformation of political space changed the social boundaries of rural communities.

Also, for the fist time in the life of rural people the border raised the question of belonging to the nation-state. Because of this, there is another problem to consider: how the space of rural communities' identities has been changed with the appearance of the border as the embodiment of the state, how the hierarchy of rural people's identities is being formed in a new context.

Even the word "Setu" appeared in the public discourse of Estonia and Russia only in the beginning of 90s. Before that, only a little group of ethnologists knew about this ethnic group neighboring Russians on the territory of Petchory district in Pskov region. The "borderness" of the area of Setu settlements and also some specific features of their culture caused the discussion of their ethnic belonging. Initially, the Setu identity was the subject of scientific discussions. But then, in the beginning of 90-s, when the political context changed it became the subject of public debates. Unlike Estonians, who are Lutherans, the Setus profess Orthodoxy, like their Russian neighbors. However, they speak a Southern dialect of the Estonian language which has a number of loan-words from Russian. "Setus are more communicable than Estonians, this is the influence of Slavic blood, Slavic environment" (from the interview with a Setu woman, village Yachmenevo). Since Setus have maintained some pre-Christian habits and rituals, their Russian neigbours have nick-named them "Half-Believers". They often use this name for self-reference. The Petchory Orthodox Monastery played the major role in the forming of Setu culture. The town Pechory which has been "the capital" of Setumaa before the establishment of the border is still a sacred place for the elderly Setus.

The number of Setus was gradually decreasing. According to recent data, there are no more than 1500 Setus left. The ethnic boundaries were blurring "naturally" because of the population migration from the countryside to towns of Estonia and Russia. Towns leveled differences very quickly as migrants were integrating into the urban community. The religion as an important marker of Setu identity had no meaning in town; their knowledge of the dialect of Estonian as a mother tongue and their fluent Russian allowed young Setus to adopt quiet easily both in Estonia and Russia. Tartu and Tallinn in Estonia were the obvious leaders in receiving migrants from the Setu villages situated on the Russian side of the contemporary border (their Russian neighbors were also quite eager to migrate to Estonia). Two other big centres in the region, Petchory and Pskov, were not so popular for a number of reasons. Estonia was close to home places, had a higher level of life and a prestigious status of a "domestic foreign land" in the USSR. It should be also noted, that the state considered Setus to be Estonians which could be an additional stimulus for the migration to Estonia.

In Estonia "to be" Setu and to speak the Setu language was "not prestigious". It would not be an exaggeration to say that in public consciousness the word "Setu" was perceived as a synonym to "provincial", "backward", "not modern". The understandable desire to get rid of this stigma as well as the unfavorable external conditions (Setus did not exist in public discourse, there was no official ethnonym and education on the Setu language etc.) accelerated the process of Setu dissolving in the Estonian environment.

However, by the end of the 80s the political context changed. Setus did not stay aside from overwhelming processes of ethnic mobilization. In the end of the 80s - beginning of the 90-s, on the wave of the national-political movements, two organisations emerged at once on the both sides of the still symbolic border between two republics. The Setu Congress was restored in the Estonian SSR, the ethno-cultural Setu association was established in Petchory (RSFSR). Thus, the formation of the ethnic community started (the restoration of the language and folklore, creating the ABC book and popularization of the national heroes). There appeared leaders and activists, the movement ideology was forming. The Setu movement was characterized by nostalgic attitudes towards the local traditional rural culture and idealization of the "rural" past (Jaats, 1998).

For many activists - mostly urban settlers educated in humanities - this "folklorized" Setu ethnicity became a rich resource for accumulating social capital. They had to stress the uniqueness of the Setu culture to refute a widespread image of Setus as of backward uneducated people, the Estonian analog of Russian folklore "Chukchis" (cf. the joke told by a Setu in Varska: "Police reports: two people and three Setus died today in a car accident").

However, most probably, the Setus would have remained an ethnographic category and Setumaa would have become a museum in the open air, if the border had not emerged. The border had divided the area of Setu settlements into two parts. One part was attributed to Petchory district (Pskov region, Russia), the other – to the Varska vald (Estonia). Unexpectedly, the territorial dispute between Estonia and Russia on the matter of Pechory district brought the Setus to the centre of the political game. Newspapers reacted with a number of publications about "the divided people" to be rejoined within the political borders of either Estonia or Russia. Thus, the question of the Setu national identity acquired a certain position in the Estonian political discourse. Who are Setus? Are they more Estonians or Russians? It was the question of defining the priority criterion among the markers of ethnic identification.

The Soviet ethnography and national politics paid a special attention to ethnic and cultural differences. The analysis of ethnicity was based on the assumption of the a priori existence of deep cultural oppositions between "Us" and "The Others" (Tishkov, 1997:54). The establishment of a rigid state border has institutionalized the myth of a cultural border and has demanded to define the place of the Setus in the new system of coordinates, taking as a starting point the traditional understanding of ethnicity as an inborn and unchangeable characteristic. The politization of the Setu problem has brought a new political capital to the movement ideologists. These, initially local, cultural leaders got involved into the top circles of Estonian politics. The theme of the divided people had started to be discussed by politicians and eventually had settled down in the ideological discourse. This is how the Setu community was constructed "from above".

In the village everyone is Russian, and nobody cares about a national question. All this rubbish is invented in towns; earlier, there was no discord with the Estonians, either - if you need something, just take a boat and go to the other coast, they had a better supply (from the interview on the Pskov lake coast). Proceeding from the constructivist assumption that ethnicity is an identity which gets actualized and looses its importance depending on the context, let us consider the ethnic identity of Setus and try to define its place in the specter of identities of the borderland rural population. In other words, we will attempt to answer the question if there was a movement from "the bottom" towards the formation of the ethnic community or it was only an urban construct.

The Setu culture is a typical rural culture. Therefore, a few words have to be said about the typical characteristics of the rural community and the organization of the social space in a village, about a very special role and significance of the border which according to the local rural population has come out of the blue. For the everyday mentality this border has appeared "for some unknown reason".

In spite of the radical changes which reached even the most distant parts of Russia, the rural community might still be identified as a stable society with a pre-given course of life. Distributing resources and making plans, a countryman still relies on the cultural category of a time circle (Baily, 1992:226), based on the notion than next year will be repeating the current one with very little deviations. The appearance of the border was "a bolt from the blue" for rural inhabitants. It has destroyed their usual everyday life space and marked the new reality and new concepts, which had not existed in the rural language before.

What had been there before the border "has come"? Russians and Setus have been working in the same kolkhoz, there was a common parish with a church and cemetery in Estonia in Saatse (the Russian name is Zacheren'e), the majority of parishioners - Setus and Russians - lived on the territories which now belong to Russia. "We used to go dancing to Zacheren'e and they used to come to us too. Half-Believers, Russians... We go to same church; on the graveyard our graves and Estonian ones - they all are mixed. Half-Believers are sitting on the graveyard, we are sitting there too. The elder people speak their language, treat each other" (from the interview).

The organization of the rural social space is directly dependent on the roads. It is the study of "the history of roads" that helped us to reconstruct the boundaries of the social space of the borderland inhabitants, to define where their everyday life world ended then and where it ends now and to understand the correspondence between the social boundaries and the ethnic ones.

Roads in a countryside are "the means of communication". On the Russian side the telephone communication is virtually missing, first, because of the poor technical facilities, and second, because it is out of habit: It is the "face-to-face" communication that is traditionally important for country people. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize the role of roads in structuring the space of communication. For a long time the group of Setu and Russian villages which we consider here had been rather isolated from the Russian "mainland". These villages communicated with Russian settlements by water, while all land roads ran through Estonia. The contemporary road which now links Krupp (a Russian village, the centre of a locality) and coastal Russian villages Kulie and Lisie and also goes through the Setu's Yachmenevo, did not exist. It emerged with the border. Before the border was established, all the social connections were arranged through Estonia by the route Petchory - Varska - Kulie. This route would cross the contemporary border four times (!).

"Ours" are there where the road leads to, where is no road - there are "the Others". The Setu notion of the "their world" included the neighboring Russian village: "Recently we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the club in Gorodizche. We were friends with everyone down there, it was like our village. We worked together, had fun together, got on very well (from the interview with a Setu woman, v. Pyrste).

The village community, "our village" has an absolute priority for the self-identification of a country person. According to A. Mendra, the rural society is "the society of universal acquaintance", the notion of the Motherland for a villager consists of the village, community and the landscape which he can observe and can directly contact (Mendra, 1999:171).

Despite the mass media, constantly reminding a villager that he/she and other inhabitants of their village are a part of a much larger social community - a nation, the identification with a nation-state has the least significance for a country person. The state is "not visible", it is too far and too abstract, therefore, the national identity becomes significant only in the extraordinary situations (for instance, in the case of war). The unexpected appearance of the state, embodied in the border and its institutions, actualized the issue of belonging to the ethnic community existing within the borders of political unity. However, for a villager the citizenship does not mean more than the tool for overcoming the border: "Citizenship is important from the practical point of view, and how it is realized - there is no attention paid. Previously it was written in a passport - Estonians, and now there is this citizenship. We have two of them now! (two citizenships, that of Russia and of Estonia - E.N.). In the beginning we were afraid to take Estonian passports, we were threatened that there would be some punishments, that we would be evicted. And now it is quieter, we show both passports on the border. On the Russian border - the Russian passport, on the Estonian - the Estonian one (from the interview with a Setu woman, v. Pyrste).

As the interviews have shown, a villager has no civil patriotism – his/her passport is perceived only as an instrument in the everyday practices. Passport, citizenship for a borderland's inhabitant is nothing more than the categories called to "sew together" the torn space of a daily life. Many locals have three passports: Russian internal, Russian external and Estonian. The border, becoming the part of a daily life, is forming new practices and also the rituals connected with them. The rituals of crossing the border include, among all, the new everyday knowledge - where and which passport to demonstrate (it is a rather common situation on the border, when an elderly lady gives all three passports to a borderguard with the words: "Which one do you need, my dear?").

In traditional societies the rituals of crossing (rites de passage) often lead to a complete change of identity. In our case, there are the reasons to assume that, on contrary, for a Setu (or a Russian person from the borderland) crossing the border does not rise the question of his/her identity. The familiar territory does not end with the border, the social space of everyday life stretches to the nearest settlements in Estonia, many significant biographical events took place on the Estonian side ("I studied in Varska, my parents are buried in Saatse, my sister lives in Polva").

After the establishment of the border, the rural people made attempts to restore the previous social order. There was the "ordinary resistance" of country people – the hidden but persistent struggle with the state (Scott, 1996:32) which can be very well illustrated with the quotation from the explanatory note given to borderguards by a trespasser: "These are my places, I used to come here and I will be coming here. I am warned of criminal responsibility". This memo was written in 1995. Such an active resistance was specific for the period of adopting to a new border. If we apply the concept of a "life cycle" to this situation, the Russian-Estonian border is at the "adolescent" stage of border development (Baud, van Schendel, 1997:223), the period when the process of old relations' transformation has already begun, but the tightest transborderline connections still exist.

Now, the social space is being gradually restructured according to the contours of the border. The political border has become a part of the daily life. On both sides of the border the rules and practices get more and more different what strengthens the symbolic meaning of the border. Will the Setu community, constructed in the public discourse, gain the "supraborderness"? Will two different ethnic groups of Setu appear on two sides of the border? Will the Setus be assimilated by the dominant cultures? These are the questions for further research.

Скотт, Дж. (1996) Оружие слабых: обыденные формы сопротивления крестьян. В: Данилов, В., Шанин, Т. (ред.) Крестьяноведение. Теория, история, современность. Москва: Аспект Пресс, с. 26-59