Paldiski and Tapa, Estonia 2001

You hear stories about the environmental destruction in Eastern Europe left over from Soviet times. It is really shocking when you see it firsthand though. While I was in Estonia I visited the ruins of two Soviet military bases, a nuclear submarine base in Paldiski, and a fighter base at Tapa. Paldiski In the Northwest corner of Estonia, Paldiski was an important port city before WWII. It was the first place in Estonia to be occupied by Soviet forces in 1940, and the last place for the Russians to pull out of (which they did in 1994). It was the worse of the two sites in terms of environmental damage, since it was polluted by radioactive materials as well as chemicals. However, it has also received lots of financial assistance from the West. Besides the smashed remains of the old Soviet facilities, the site is now more or less "clean." This is the main part of the town of Paldiski, shot from the northern edge of the city at the beginning of the wastelands. The town is almost entirely made of a dozen or so of these giant apartment constructs. When the Soviets ran Estonia, Paldiski was a "closed city," meaning it was illegal to go to there unless one lived in the town or was stationed at the base. Almost four thousand people still live here. The railway leading from Paldiski back to the rest of Estonia. The railway terminates at a part of the harbour which is still forbidden to enter. An abandoned building in the northern part of the town- Measure the size of the ant grafitto against the size of the doorway next to it. I was told there was more ruins in the wastes further north. Until 1994, Paldiski was the largest training centre for submariners in the Soviet Union (later, Russia). These two large buildings are the remains of the training facility. There were two small nuclear reactors inside these buildings, which the cadets would use for training. When the Russians left in 1994, they took the reactors with them and destroyed the buildings. Note: This information about the facility was passed on by some members of the Estonian Defence Force. I have no way of verifying whether the information is actually true. I recently received an e-mail from a reader which disputes that account: I think this used to be the officers hotel, it was not the Russians who blew up the interior, it was the Estonian government that did so in 1996. I once heard a man say, he stood in front of the building with rocks flying at him from the blast, and he cried, as it hurts to see a place where you once lived being so needlesly destroyed. Closer view of the second of the two buildings. I'm not sure how the whole front of the building was blown out, but the destruction of the interior is pretty complete. This section of the building was the most badly damaged. It looked as if it had exploded from within. Perhaps this was where the reactors were. In 1994, a civilian died after wandering near a pile of radioactive debris in a waste dump in Tallinn. Supposedly the debris came from here in Paldiski. A lot of effort has gone into cleaning up the site since then, though, and it is said to be perfectly safe now. More views of the destroyed part of the building.   A guard tower in front of the submarine school. There is no longer anything to guard, or anyone to guard it from. North of town the landscape becomes amazing, almost alien. This photo doesn't really give a sense of proper scale to the scene, but the wall to the right of the picture is a naturally formed granite wall, about three meters high. On the left, in the bowl formed by the ridge, is the remains of a huge circular structure. The circular structure was too large to be framed by the photo, but this is the eastern edge of it. The walls were made of reinforced concrete about half a meter thick, and were burst outward radially from what looked like it must have been a huge explosion. There was some kind of complex internal structure, but it was torn apart. I couldn't figure out what this building must have been for. Someone put an awful lot of trouble into building it, and then went through a lot of trouble to make sure it was blown to pieces. Closer view of one of the walls. The top of this bit of the wall is chest high from the ground. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some former republics were luckier than others, in what kind of equipment and facilities they were allowed to keep. Ukraine and Kazakhstan were allowed to hang on to a pretty substantial part of the war machine, even including nuclear weapons. In the Baltics though, the last act of the Russian troops (according to the Estonians) was to destroy everything they could before they left. About two kilometres north of town, there were abandoned ruins of some more buildings. These were more or less intact.   The gutted insides of one of the more intact buildings. The landscape of the Paldiski coastline is stark and beautiful. The path north of the city becomes a ridge, between a 30-meter cliff on the left and an ice plain to the right. The sky was an incredible colour blue, contrasted against the grey Baltic Sea. The only sounds were breakers crashing against the rocks at the base of the cliff, and the bitterly cold wind off the Baltic(it was about -10°C this day). Ahead, the ice plain became a frozen lake, and the ridge became so narrow that I had to crawl on my palms and feet to avoid being blown off of it. A few kilometres distant is a lighthouse marking the Northwest corner of land. I never did make it all the way to the lighthouse. A fishing trawler which ran aground and was abandoned where it lay. Spray from the waves has turned to ice on the rocks at the base of the cliff. Further north, looking backwards from the top of the cliff. North of the ice lake, there were more strange, small, blockhouse-type buildings. These looked older than the ones nearer the town. Even further north, there were a series of large, perfectly circular depressions in the ground. I couldn't figure out what these were until I saw a couple of ruins like these. These were the walls of lines of trenches which led towards some of the depressions. The depressions must have held the turntables of big coast defence guns, and these were probably ammunition or communications trenches. This is clearly older than the Soviet era and must have been from WWII, which worried me a bit. The thing is, I was specifically told not to go anywhere near such places because there are still lots of land mines and unexploded bombs lying around. The Russians and Germans fought like hell for Estonia in both world wars and left a lot of gifts behind. I kept walking north for about another two kilometres, then had to turn back because I was starting to go hypothermic. I'll never forget Paldiski and its empty, cold beauty. Tapa The town of Tapa was built on an important railway crossroads in the late 1800s. After WWII, the Soviets built a huge base for air defence fighters just outside the town- one of the largest airbases in the Baltics. According to Tapa's mayor, the way the Soviet Voyska-PVO (the "Troops of Air Defence") worked, pilots would be judged on how many hours they flew by how much fuel they spent. Rather than fly the hours though, the troops at the base dug pipes into the ground and just poured the kerosene fuel for their fighters down into the water table. Town residents soon found their water was undrinkable. So much kerosene went into the drinking water over the years in fact, that after the Russians pulled out, the town was able to pump up the groundwater and burn it in their power plant to heat the town. Tapa has not received as much cleanup assistance as Paldiski, and as of early 2001 was still having difficulties. Tapa is much more tiny, and much less wealthy than Tallinn. There are no shiny bars or clubs here. Somehow though, the town seems to be surviving pretty well. There is a new library (with Internet connections), and the locals say that year by year things are getting better. Unspoiled drinking water is being pumped from a deeper aquifer, though not all residents have access to it yet. For a contrast between Tallinn and Tapa, read "Estonia dot-com." The road leading to the edge of the Tapa fighter base. Voldemar Nellis, mayor of Tapa, in front of one of the storage bunkers on the airbase. Nellis in front of one of the large nuclear-resistant revetments which were built to protect the interceptors that were based here. The taxiway of the fighter base, leading to a line of revetments. There were forty revetments on the base. Each would have held one or two interceptors. The Americans would probably have thrown several nuclear weapons at Tapa if the Cold War had turned hot. These revetments are protected by several meters of concrete and dirt. Some of the fighters may have survived. Presumably the runways would have been turned into huge craters though. The doors on each revetment were made of layered steel more than a meter thick. Back to the index page