MAY 12TH–18TH 2018 page 33阅读————2020-02-26

nians ever thought it was a good idea to move the border, the carnage in eastern Ukraine dispelled【驱散】 that fantasy.

But Narva has felt ignored and econom- ically deprived, something which might now be changing. Estonia’s cheeky cre- ative scene has co-opted the media cliché and declared “Narva is next”. Not as a po- litical flashpoint, but as a cultural hotspot. Narva’s local government is using the phrase as part of its bid to be Estonia’s European Capital of Culture in 2024, which would bring in EU money and in- vestment from Tallinn. With the help of funds from central government, a theatre and gallery complex is being built in a dis- used factory. A residency programme al- lows artists to live and work in the crumbling 19th-century splendour【辉煌】 of the former Kreenholm textile【纺织业】 works, which a century ago employed 10,000 people and was the largest factory in the Tsarist Russian em- pire. Ms Sildna calls it the “East Berlin ef- fect”. The idea, she means, is to make the place cool by attracting artists and the avant-garde, create a buzz that pulls in or- dinary people and thus, perhaps, lure priv- ate investment.
That is sorely【急需地】 needed. Narva has an age- ing and shrinking population and high un- employment, making it one of the poorest regions of Estonia. Years of headlines pre- dicting an imminent【迫近】 invasion have hardly helped. So it is often impossible for local entrepreneurs to get finance. In the city centre there are few cafés, bars or restau- rants; and there have been no commercial- ly funded new buildings for 25 years.
Within Estonia the region is also isolat- ed linguistically. Some 95% of its people speak Russian as their first language, so it is rare to hear Estonian on the streets. This makes it difficult for Narva’s residents to learn Estonian. Many struggle with the ba- sics. According to government figures, around 20% of them speak no Estonian at all. For Estonians from elsewhere in the country, many of whom don’t speak Rus- sian, Narva can feel alien.
But Estonia is changing. A new globally- minded generation born in the 1980s and 1990s is coming of age. With no memory of the Soviet Union, young people from both communities are often more interested in the future than the grudges of the past. Es- tonia’s government is also changing its ap- proach. “In the past we didn’t talk with Russian-speakers, but just told them what they have to do: that they have to learn Es- tonian, that they have to integrate,” says Pi- ret Hartman, undersecretary for cultural diversity. Ethnic Estonians have now real- ised that they need to become more open to Russian-speakers, she says. With ten- sions between Russia and the West rising, Narva might also serve as a reminder to the rest of the EU that speaking Russian as a mother tongue and supporting Mr Putin are not necessarily the same thing.

Zlotys for tots

POLITICIANS elsewhere kiss babies. Polish ones subsidise them. In a new re- port by the OECD, a club of mostly wealthy

countries, Poland was the only one of its 35 members where families receive more in state handouts than they pay in tax. For a single-income Polish family on an average wage with two children, the average net personal tax rate is minus 4.8%, compared with an OECD average of 14%. While the rate has crept【逐渐发展】 up in most of the countries surveyed, in Poland it has dipped by five percentage points since 2016.
Since coming to power in 2015, the so- cially conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) has championed families, albeit【尽管】 only of the traditional heterosexual sort. Its flag- ship 500Plus programme offers families a monthly handout of 500 zloty ($139) per child, from the second child onwards (and from the first in poor households). Since the launch in 2016, the government has splurged【挥霍】 a total of 42.6bn zloty【波兰货币单位】 to 3.7m chil- dren from 2.4m families. Recently it pro- posed new measures focusing on mother- hood, including a bonus for having a second child within two years of the first. Meanwhile, PiS politicians have sympathised with church-backed proposals to tighten restrictions on abortion【流产】, already among the tightest in Europe.
Poland needs children. The country has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, at around 1.4. (The EU average is 1.6.) Already employers are struggling to fill jobs, de- spite a stream of workers from neighbour- ing Ukraine. At a PiS convention on April 14th, Beata Szydlo, who was demoted【降级】 to deputy prime minister in December, said that “our biggest challenge” was to in-crease the birth rate. A video clip released by the health ministry in November urges Poles literally to multiply like rabbits.
For the time being PiS’s efforts may be working. Over 400,000 children were born in Poland in 2017, around 20,000 more than the previous year, buoyed【浮标】 by low unemployment and rising wages. Ex- treme child poverty has fallen, too. Yet the baby boom could prove short-lived. Mean- while, PiS’s natalist push has angered some women, who resent being treated like incubators. Same-sex couples, who are not recognised by the state, feel slighted by the government’s traditional attitudes.
There are economic risks, too. Apart from its cost, critics warn that 500Plus en- courages parents to drop out of work to qualify for the subsidy for the first child. In Poland, the inactivity trap—the disincen- tive to return to employment after inactivity—is one of the highest in the EU, accord- ing to a simulation by the European Commission. Since 2015, it has risen sharp- ly to double the EU average. Already there are signs that mothers are quitting paid work. According to an estimate by the Insti- tute for Structural Research in Warsaw, some 100,000 women were absent from the labour market in the first half of 2017 because of the 500Plus benefit; the effect was strongest among low-educated wom- en and in medium-sized towns. 500Plus has been a political boon for PiS, which continues to lead in opinion polls, ahead of the centrist opposition. But it could make Poland poorer.

Writing the history of terror

LAGUN, a bookshop in San Sebastián, opened 50 years ago in March, just weeks before ETA, a Basque terrorist group,carried out its first killing, of a policeman. Lagun’s owners were socialists and were fined for closing their shop during a strike against General Franco, Spain’s dictator from 1939 to 1975. But it was ETA that made their venture almost impossible. The shop, in the city’s old quarter, suffered years of politically inspired vandalism【破坏行为】 culminating【告终】 in the public burning of the stock by ETA sympathisers. After the husband of one of the owners was gravely wounded in a ter- rorist attack, the shop moved to a safer site in the city centre. ETA’s hostility was for the same reason as Franco’s, says Ignacio La- tierro, its surviving owner. “We weren’t prepared to do what they wanted.”
Over the past decade, Mr Latierro has