people's history of Russia,
Pechory,
border,
frontier region
Abstract
This article discusses a border town of Pechory in Pskov Oblast and its surroundings. During the fieldwork for the project “People's History of Russia: Crossroads of Local Civilizations” local residents were interviewed about significant periods in the history of the city and the uniqueness of the area. The focus of the article is on how the residents comprehend the border as a phenomenon (in spatial, geopolitical, intergroup, and other senses) and conceptualize the frontier as a local specificity. The paper reviews the particularities of the aforementioned fieldwork, which took place in the autumn of 2020, the toponymy and microtoponymy of the town where three ethnic identities interact, the conceptual frameworks of the state border, city branding through food and architecture, and the coexistence of two main conceptual frameworks: the primary one, “for our own and for others”, and the hidden one, “mostly, for our own”.
