Executive Summary:
- Given Russian history, memories of some in the West asking in the 1990s, “Who will die for Narva?,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to keep the West off balance, Moscow has unsurprisingly sponsored an internet provocation about a supposed Narva People’s Republic.
- That hoax has now been exposed, but it has already attracted enough attention to help Russian President Vladimir Putin do what he wants—sparking fears in the West that Moscow is about to make a military move against Estonia, and then relaxing once they decide the threat has passed.
- The Narva People’s Republic project highlights a longstanding but often ignored feature of such Russian intelligence operations—they are designed to succeed in important ways even when they appear to have failed when initially exposed as frauds.
Estonian journalists have exposed a Kremlin-sponsored internet provocation, the so-called Narva People’s Republic, as a hoax. The creation of this hoax comes as no surprise, given Russian history. It is informed by Russian history at least to the early Soviet period, and by the notorious Trust operation, as well as the legacy of the 1990s, when some in the West who were opposed to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion into the Baltic region asked, “Who will die for Narva?” Now, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current desire is to keep the West off balance as he continues his aggression in Ukraine. It is no surprise Moscow has resorted to this kind of provocation. Putin’s effort has already attracted enough attention to help him achieve much of what he hopes for. He aims to spark fears that Moscow is about to make a military move against Estonia and NATO. Once exposed, he will discredit those who raised the alarm, while ignoring the underlying threat that caused Moscow to create it in the first place. The Narva People’s Republic is the latest example of a longstanding feature of Russian intelligence operations, designed to succeed even when exposed and seemingly to have failed.
Over the last several months, Western media have reported with increasing frequency about the supposed existence of a hitherto unknown organization, the Narva People’s Republic. The organization is allegedly mobilizing to help Moscow invade Estonia and thus NATO (Propastop, March 11; CEPA, March 19; Euronews, March 19). The scale and often alarmist nature of such stories have been strengthened and even legitimized by ever more commentaries reviving the 1990s trope against NATO through again asking whether the West will defend Estonia by “dying for Narva,” a predominantly ethnic Russian city in Estonia’s northeastern corner near the Russian border (Fakti, April 22, 2025; Glavred, March 20).
Most of the stories about the Narva People’s Republic rely either on the group’s own internet posts or on stories by others drawing on the same sources. Anastasiya Tido and Anita Avakova of Tallinn’s Postimees newspaper recently went undercover to investigate the supposed republic (Postimees, March 18). They found a propaganda hoax that likely had no members beyond the two or three organizers texting one another, no money beyond what was needed to keep their Internet access and their own Telegram channel, and no organization capable of doing anything beyond posting invented claims online.
Tido and Avakova’s findings should be sufficient to dispel any further speculation about this organization, which exists only in virtual space, and to put an end to continuing comparisons with Moscow’s actions in Ukraine before 2014 and 2022. If the stories stop, many would conclude that this would be a defeat for Moscow. That would be a mistake arising from a lack of familiarity with a feature of Russian intelligence operations of this kind and how Moscow plans to make use of what looks like a failure to others to advance its interests. If the Narva People’s Republic is no longer the subject of discussion, two consequences that are both useful to Moscow will follow. On the one hand, those who treated the Narva People’s Republic as the harbinger of a Russian threat will be discredited. On the other hand, their discrediting will cast doubt in the minds of many on the very idea of a Russian threat. If a few stories do appear in the future about the Narva People’s Republic, that will only help Moscow to achieve both these goals.
Those conclusions are indisputable if one remembers the Soviet intelligence operation at the dawn of Bolshevik rule, which served as the model for Moscow’s activities in this area—the Trust (see EDM, September 30, 2025). While that operation may not be familiar to many in the West, it was certainly at the center of Moscow’s instruction of Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) officers like Putin. In simplest terms, Moscow created a false organization within the Soviet Union to convince Russian émigrés that they had friends on the inside and that they had to defer to them in planning any operations against the Soviet state. This operation lasted from 1920 to 1927, and when it was exposed as a fraud, most likely by the Soviets themselves, it discredited those Russian émigrés, such as V.V. Shulgin, who believed in it and caused other émigrés to conclude that the Soviet threat was less than they had thought (Simpkins and Dyer, The Trust, 1989; Brook-Shepherd, Iron Maze: The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, 1998; Voyteskhovsky, Trest, 1974). [1] [2] [3] Putin has regularly drawn on this Soviet heritage (see EDM, September 15, 2022; Window on Eurasia, February 11, 2009; October 26, 2018; July 2, 2020).
The Narva People’s Republic hoax is unsurprising now that Postimees has unmasked it. No one, however, should relax either. The Russian threat to Estonia and the Baltic countries is real, and the fact that one operation has failed in one sense but not another is no reason to assume that the danger from Russia has dissipated (see EDM, January 16). If the history of the Trust’s operations is any guide, its exposure may signal that the threat has increased rather than decreased. That is what happened in 1927, and it could certainly happen again if Russian policy is directed by someone trained as a KGB officer. As Captain Aleksandr Nikitin of the Bellona organization once famously observed, after all, “there are no ex-KGB officers just as there are no ex-German shepherds.”
Estonia has made a major contribution to the security of the West by exposing the Narva People’s Republic group as a Kremlin hoax. Choosing to see that exposure as an indication that the Russian threat is not real or perhaps even greater than it was before that happened earlier this month—or that Moscow will use this exposure for its own ends—would be tragic.
Notes:
[1] Simpkins, Pamela K., and K. Leigh Dyer. The Trust. Washington, D.C.: Security and Intelligence Foundation, 1989.
[2] Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Iron Maze: The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks. London: Macmillan, 1998.
[3] Voyteskhovsky, Sergey. Trest. London, Ontario: Zaria, 1974.
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