Putin's 'successor' picks fight with Estonia

One of the two men tipped to succeed Vladimir Putin as Russian president next year has played the patriotic card by calling for a punitive economic boycott of neighbouring Estonia as retribution for what he has described as "state-sponsored vandalism".

Sergei Ivanov, a former defence minister and now a First Deputy Prime Minister, said a boycott of Estonia was necessary to punish it for controversial plans to remove the country's main Second World War memorial to the Red Army from the centre of Tallinn.

Mr Ivanov, who has styled himself as a more hawkish version of Mr Putin, urged ordinary Russians to stop buying Estonian-made goods and to stop taking their holidays there. "Do not buy Estonian food, do not spend your holidays in Estonia but go to Kaliningrad (Russia's Baltic enclave) instead," he told a meeting of Second World War veterans to rousing applause.

He added that the boycott was not official Kremlin policy but a "manifestation of a patriotic position". Mr Ivanov said he was reacting to Estonian plans to relocate the war memorial, known as the Bronze Soldier, along with the remains of 13 Soviet soldiers buried under a bus stop nearby, to a military cemetery on the city's outskirts.

The row cuts to the heart of an emotive dispute about how the two countries view their own history. Although the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of Estonia in 1944, many Estonians argue that it paved the way for what "46 years of Soviet occupation" and that they do not want to be reminded of it.

But in Russian eyes, the Red Army, which was made up of soldiers from across the Soviet empire, was an army of liberation not occupation and deserves to be honoured and remembered.

The issue has become the subject of a stormy debate in Russia, where Estonia's decision has been portrayed as a "blasphemous" attempt to rewrite history and erase the memory of "heroes". Nationalist-minded politicians in Russia have even suggested Estonia may be guilty of neo-fascist tendencies, recalling how some Estonians voluntarily joined the SS during the war and fought on the German side.

Mr Ivanov's intervention has generated favourable ripples in the largely state-controlled media, something he needs ahead of a presidential vote in March next year. A fluent English speaker and former KGB operative, he is locked in a daily media battle for the Kremlin with the other main pretender for Mr Putin's crown, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev.

While Mr Ivanov is viewed as a tough nationalist-minded politician who is close to Russia's powerful military industrial complex, Mr Medvedev is seen as "Putin-lite", with more Western-leaning liberal tendencies.

Anything that sets the two men apart in the public consciousness, such as Mr Ivanov's call for an informal boycott of Estonia, can only do his cause good.

But in Estonia, where nationalist politicians have also made political hay from the issue, he was accused of cynical electioneering. "It is regrettable that the election campaign causes inconveniences to citizens and influences their consumption habits," the Estonian Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, said in a statement.

"I assume that every Russian citizen knows what is good for him and his family and will not discard better options because of political appeals."

Russia's ties with Estonia account for around 10 per cent of its economy, and officials said that any boycott would therefore not be "a disaster". They also stressed that the monument at the heart of the dispute will not be destroyed but is merely being relocated.