Shortly after the financial meltdown of August 1998, life in the Russian town of Ivangorod got got so bad that its citizens asked Moscow for permission to secede to Estonia, to the formerly twinned town of Narva across the Narva river.

Anyone who has been to both places will understand why: Narva has jobs, proper roads, cars less than ten years old, decent housing, goods in the shops and relatively honest police. Ivangorod, on the other hand, languishes in a dilapidated postSoviet nightmare.

As a Westerner living in St Petersburg, a day-trip to Narva was occasionally necessary to renew one’s visa. It was always a surreal journey: the two towns, repeatedly united and separated throughout history, glower at each other across the river. The crossing, in the shadow of Narva’s medieval fortress, was a le Carré-esque passage from one world to another.

Until 1991, Narva and Ivangorod were to all intents and purposes one place, albeit in different Soviet republics. Many residents of one town worked in the other, and some families lived in both.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the border gates came down. Visitors to Narva’s Russian Consulate in the 1990s would encounter the bizarre sight of ethnic Russians queueing for Russian visas to make a half-mile trip to visit Russian relatives. I was once questioned by a group of some Russian-speaking young Estonians about to go to St Petersburg for the first time. Were the roads as bad as they had heard? Did you have to queue twice in the shops? And they’re talking about St Petersburg, I thought, stuffed full of palaces, new Russians, extravagant nightclubs and some of the world’s finest museums. What will they think of their brief glimpse of Ivangorod?

The idea of siphoning 6,000 litres of dodgy vodka through a hose under a reservoir might be considered amusing. In Ivangorod, they are probably just shrugging: when bad vodka is one thing in plentiful supply, well, you’ve got to make your money somehow.

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