Thirty-five-year old Marina Samsonova was born in Estonia but started to learn Estonian only seven years ago.
In December, Marina hopes to pass language and constitution exams and to join the more than 100,000 Russians who have gained Estonian citizenship in the last 13 years.
Her story is far from unique. Marina is one of 157,035 non-Estonians who have been living without any citizenship since the Baltic state regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
"I was born and grew up in a small town (in eastern Estonia near the Russian border), Sillamae, that during Soviet times had a huge military factory and was mainly inhabited by Russians. At my school we had no lessons of Estonian at all," Marina, who works in a Tallinn bar, told AFP.
As in Latvia, where Russian youth have been protesting against educational reform, Estonia plans to implement a huge reform in Russian schools that will see 60 percent of lessons in Russian secondary schools in Estonian from 2007.
"Those who attack Estonia as well as Latvia for the school reform are very hypocritical," says Lilia Sokolinskaja, a Russian journalist who has worked 44 years in Estonia for the main local Russian-language radio.
"The aim of the changes is to end the current dead circle that thousands of young Russians entering the labour market can compete only for jobs at the lowest level because they are unable to enter Estonian universities or to become otherwise part of the Estonian community due to the lack of knowledge of the language," she adds.
Marina, who has a boyfriend living in Moscow but has chosen to stay in Estonia, which became a member of the European Union this year, also believes that Russians must make more effort to integrate.
"I too support the educational reform in Russian schools. No-one has ever insulted me for being Russian but I have always known that I can't compete with Estonians on the labour market. This is why I finally started to study the language and applied for citizenship," she says.
Nearly one third of Estonia's 1.4 million population is ethnic Russian, mostly the legacy of the Soviet Union's Russification policy after World War II.
Both Marina and Lilia said that while thousands of Russians have made more efforts in the last few years to learn Estonian, Estonians are still too reserved to accept Russians as a full part of their society. "One of our aims is to change the attitude of ordinary Estonians," concedes Mati Luik, director of the Integration Foundation, which handles dozens of integration programs, financed by the state, Nordic countries and EU.
In addition to over 100,000 Russians who have already become Estonian citizens and 157,035 people - also mainly Russians - who live in Estonia without any citizenship, Estonia has 88,507 Russians who have citizenship of Russia and live in Estonia with a residence permit.
Estonia denies accusations by Moscow that it is violating the human rights of the Russian minority, saying it has cut in half the time for the citizenship application process and supports the costs of studying Estonian.
"The process to apply for citizenship has been made easier for all of them," said Mari Pedak, director of the Citizenship and Migration Board.
Among other means to promote integration is a highly popular program that aims to send Russian children to stay some weeks and learn the language with Estonian families.
"Estonia is the only country in Europe that has had such a vast naturalisation process," Paul-Eerik Rummo, minister of population affairs, told AFP.
"The best way to reply to criticism is to look at the facts. The share of people living in Estonia without any citizenship has decreased in the last 13 years from 32 percent to 11 percent," he said.
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