Estonia Inherits Paldiski's Nuclear Reactors: The 1995 Handover
Autumn 1995. A small group of Estonian radiation specialists walks into the Main Technological Building of the former Soviet naval training centre at Paldiski. The Russians are gone. The last few hundred sailors and engineers left in October, a year after the fleet itself pulled out. The hangar is the size of an aircraft factory, and it is almost empty. The two submarine hulls that stood on cradles in the high bay have been cut apart with torches and shipped east in sections. The simulators are gone. The control rooms are stripped to bare cable trays. What remains, sitting on the concrete floor where the reactor compartments used to be, are two grey boxes with walls 400 millimetres thick.
The Russian delegation handed over a set of documents with the keys. The documents describe what is inside the boxes in general terms. Most of the detailed records, the Estonian Ministry of Climate would note decades later, left the country with the men who wrote them.
Paldiski is what occupation looks like after the occupier goes home. A nuclear power built one of its most sensitive military installations inside a small country that never agreed to host it, ran it for a quarter of a century behind wire, and then handed the bill to the people it had fenced out. The town was never bombed, never fought over, never the scene of a massacre. Its damage is quieter than that. It was used, emptied, and left holding waste it cannot legally touch until the middle of this century.
Paldiski Before the Soviet Navy: Peter the Great's Baltic Port
Peter the Great's Fortress at Rågervik and the Convicts Who Built It
Swedish fishermen named the bay Rågervik in the fourteenth century, and Swedish-speaking families farmed the two islands offshore for six hundred years. Peter the Great sailed into the bay in 1715, looked at the deep water and the shelter of the Pakri islands, and decided the Russian Baltic Fleet would have a base here. Work began in 1718 on a five-pointed fortress and a stone breakwater running out toward the islands. Catherine II renamed the place Baltiiskii Port in 1762. The Estonian tongue softened that to Paldiski, which became the official name in 1933.
The breakwater was built by convicts. Rogervik, as the Russians spelled it, served the empire as a penal labour colony, and among the prisoners marched here after the Pugachev rebellion was Salavat Yulaev, the Bashkir poet and cavalry commander who had ridden beside Pugachev in 1774. He arrived in chains in 1775 with his father. He hauled stone in the Baltic wind for twenty-five years and died in the fortress in September 1800, still a prisoner. The breakwater he worked on was never finished. The fortress was never finished either. Paldiski's first century as a naval base ended the way its last one would: an enormous project, abandoned by the power that ordered it, leaving the locals with the rubble.
The 1939 Bases Treaty and the Eviction of the Pakri Swedes
Estonia signed the Soviet-Estonian Mutual Assistance Treaty on 28 September 1939, under threat of invasion, one week after the Red Army entered Poland. The treaty gave the Soviet Union the right to station 25,000 troops on Estonian soil and to build naval and air bases on the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa and at the port of Paldiski. Soviet troops moved in during October. Paldiski was the first piece of mainland Estonia they occupied, nine months before they occupied the rest. The same treaty had a mirror image across the Gulf of Finland: the Soviets demanded a base at Hanko from Finland, and when Finland refused, Stalin went to war for it.
The people who paid first were the Swedes of the Pakri islands. The 1934 census counted 354 islanders in five villages, every one of them Swedish except thirteen Germans. They had two churches, two schools, windmills, and a small folk museum that opened in 1935. In 1940 the Soviet Navy ordered them off. The islands were needed for coastal batteries. Families who had farmed the same strips of limestone since the Middle Ages were given weeks to load their boats and cross to the mainland, where they were resettled among strangers. The museum closed the year it turned five. When the Red Army returned in 1944, the islanders did not wait to be moved again. Most of them crossed the Baltic to Sweden with the rest of the Estonian Swedish community and never came back.
The villages they left became targets. After the war the Soviet Air Force turned Suur-Pakri and Väike-Pakri into a bombing range. Aircraft flying from the mainland practised on the farmhouses and the churches for the next fifty years. The Estonian bomb-disposal teams who landed in 1994 are still finding what they dropped.
The Paldiski Nuclear Submarine Training Centre: Why the Soviet Navy Chose Estonia
The 1962 Decision and the Closed City of Paldiski
The Soviet Navy launched its first nuclear submarine, K-3 Leninsky Komsomol, in 1957, and by the early 1960s it was building nuclear boats faster than it could train the men to run them. A reactor at sea is not a classroom. A crew that makes its first serious mistake underwater dies with the boat, and the Soviet fleet had already lost men that way. Moscow decided it needed land-based reactors, inside real submarine hulls, where a trainee could take the plant to criticality, run it up to power, fail a pump, scram the reactor, and walk home for dinner.
Paldiski was chosen in 1962. The reasons were the same ones that had drawn Peter the Great: deep water, shelter, and a short sailing distance to the Baltic Fleet's bases. The Soviet Union built only three centres of this kind, and Paldiski's was the largest of them. In 1964 the town and the Pakri peninsula were declared a closed garrison zone. A barbed-wire fence went up across the neck of the peninsula with a checkpoint on the only road in. Paldiski disappeared from civilian maps. Estonians who did not work for the Navy could not enter. The number of people living inside the wire was itself a state secret, and the town's own residents were not told what the big building on the eastern edge of the peninsula was for.
The Soviet Union was building the same kind of place elsewhere on the Estonian coast at the same time. Sillamäe, 200 kilometres to the east, processed uranium for the bomb programme behind its own fence and its own blank spot on the map. Estonia in the 1960s held two nuclear secrets it had not been told about, at opposite ends of its northern shore.
Building the Pentagon: Two Submarines on Land
Construction of the training centre ran from 1965 to 1968. The centrepiece was the Main Technological Building, a concrete hangar with a high-bay hall large enough to hold a submarine on cradles. The sailors called it the Pentagon. Inside it, engineers assembled the propulsion and reactor sections of a first-generation Soviet nuclear submarine, hull plating and all, cut to length so that the compartments that mattered stood on the floor of the hall exactly as they would have sat in the boat. The reactor was a VM-A pressurised water unit, the same type that drove the November-class attack boats and the Hotel-class missile submarines. It went critical in 1968.
A second training unit followed. In 1983 a VM-4 reactor, the second-generation plant fitted to the Yankee and Delta ballistic missile submarines, went critical inside a second scaled hull a few metres from the first. Two live naval reactors now sat side by side in a building on dry land, 50 kilometres from Tallinn, in a republic whose own government had no idea they existed. Together with the reactors came the full apparatus of a boat: steam turbines, turbo-generators, pumps, the primary and secondary loops, control rooms with the real gauges and the real alarms. A trainee could stand a watch in the Pentagon that was indistinguishable from a watch in the Barents Sea, except that the deck did not move.
The men who came here were being prepared for the most dangerous machines the Soviet Union owned. The Hotel-class boat K-19 had suffered a reactor coolant failure in 1961, seven years before Paldiski's first reactor went live, and eight of her crew died of radiation sickness within weeks. Paldiski existed so that the next crew would know what to do.
Inside the Paldiski Reactor Hall: Training the Soviet Nuclear Fleet
Life in a Closed Soviet Garrison Town on the Estonian Coast
At its height the garrison and the town around it held around 16,000 people, in a place that had numbered a few thousand before the war. The Navy built what it built everywhere: five-storey panel apartment blocks, a House of Officers, a sailors' club, a hospital, schools where the language of instruction was Russian. The old Estonian and Baltic German town of stone houses and the Orthodox church of St George from 1787 stood in the middle of it like a fossil. Almost nobody inside the wire spoke Estonian. The postal address was a numbered box. Wives who had followed their husbands from Murmansk or Sevastopol shopped in stores stocked better than anything in Tallinn, because closed cities were fed first.
Trainees rotated through in classes. Officers and warrant officers who had qualified on the reactors of the Pentagon went on to crew boats in the Northern and Pacific fleets. The centre trained specialists for every generation of Soviet nuclear submarine from the November class to the missile boats that carried the Soviet Union's second-strike deterrent, and at the deep-water quays on the western shore, real submarines tied up so that crews could move between the classroom and the sea. Across the bay, the aircraft still bombed the Pakri islands. Life in Paldiski had a soundtrack, and it was ordnance.
The Estonians who lived in the surrounding parishes saw the town only as a fence and a gate. A farmer from Keila could drive west along the coast road until the checkpoint stopped him, and then turn round. His grandparents might have been born on the other side of the wire. The town on the map of his own country was a blank.
The 1989 Shutdown After Chernobyl
The reactors ran continuously from the early 1970s until 1989. What stopped them was not an accident in Paldiski. On 26 April 1986 Reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded, and the Soviet nuclear establishment spent the next three years reassessing every reactor it owned, including the two sitting in a hangar on the Estonian coast. The safety review found the Paldiski units wanting. Both were shut down in 1989 for modernisation.
They never came back. The Soviet Union had two years left, and Estonia was already voting for sovereignty. Training at the centre continued until 1993, but the trainees now learned the reactor on cold plant and simulators, walking through the motions on machines that would not respond. For the last four years of its life, the largest nuclear submarine school in the Soviet Union taught nuclear submarining without any nuclear power at all. On 20 August 1991 Estonia declared its independence restored, and the Navy that owned Paldiski became, overnight, a foreign force stationed inside a foreign state.
The 1994 Russian Withdrawal from Paldiski and the Concrete Sarcophagi
The July 1994 Paldiski Agreement and the Last Warship Out
Russia did not want to leave, and Estonia did not want to inherit two reactors it could not run, could not move, and could not afford. The negotiations over the base dragged through 1992 and 1993 while Russian troops remained in Paldiski, in Tallinn's Patarei Prison, at the airfields, and on the islands. The pressure that finally moved them came from Washington and Stockholm, and from an Estonian government that made the withdrawal the condition of every other conversation with Moscow. The bilateral Paldiski Agreement was signed on 30 July 1994. It set the terms: Russia would remove the nuclear fuel, dismantle and take home the classified equipment and the non-radioactive parts of the training stands, seal what it could not take, and transfer the site to Estonia by 30 September 1995.
The Russian armed forces left Estonia on 31 August 1994. The last warship sailed out of Paldiski harbour that month. The same summer the last Russian units left Latvia's naval base at Karosta, and the Baltic Fleet retreated to Kaliningrad and Kronstadt, back to the borders it had held before 1939. Paldiski's fence came down. For the first time in fifty-five years an Estonian could drive to the end of the Pakri Peninsula without stopping at a gate.
Inside the Pentagon a few hundred men stayed on to do the work the agreement required. Through August and September 1994 they lifted the spent fuel out of both reactors. On 15 October 1994 the last of it left for Russia by rail. The hulls were cut. Everything with a stamp on it went into crates. The sections that could not go anywhere, the reactor vessels with their primary coolant loops and the compartments around them, were seal-welded shut, partially filled with grout, and encased in reinforced concrete. The sarcophagi were poured in place, because there was no crane in Estonia that could lift them and no ship in the harbour licensed to carry them.
What Russia Took and What Russia Left Behind at Paldiski
The Russians handed over the site in the autumn of 1995. The Estonian company set up to take it, ALARA, walked into a building whose contaminated zones had been mapped by the people who were leaving and whose records had mostly left with them. The task was enormous and the money was not there. Sweden, Finland, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union stepped in through an international expert group convened in Stockholm in 1994, and for the next twelve years foreign engineers and Estonian technicians worked through the Pentagon room by room.
They found what closed cities always leave. Contaminated concrete. Drains that led into a liquid radioactive waste plant nobody had run in years. Storage rooms with sources in them. A 1997 survey of the wider peninsula turned up abandoned military waste dumps whose contents had never been recorded. An interim radioactive waste store was built inside the Main Technological Building in 1997, and every gram of radioactive material in Estonia, from hospital isotopes to Soviet smoke detectors, has been sent to Paldiski ever since. The EU paid for a new roof over the sarcophagi and an air-drying system to slow the corrosion inside them. The decontamination of the rest of the site was declared complete in 2012.
The two boxes are still there. Studies commissioned by the European Union between 1999 and 2001 concluded that the safest course was to leave the reactor compartments alone for fifty years and dismantle them around 2040, by which time the short-lived isotopes would have decayed and Estonia would, in theory, have somewhere to put the rest. The sarcophagi were designed to last until 2045. In 2023 an Estonian firm was paid €1.67 million to scan them with cosmic-ray muons, because after thirty years the country that owns them still does not know exactly what is inside.
Lithuania inherited its own Soviet nuclear installation the same year and turned it into a museum. Plokštinė, the underground missile base in the forests of Žemaitija, could be opened to tourists because the warheads had gone home. Paldiski's reactors cannot go anywhere, and a museum with a radiation fence is a different kind of attraction.
Paldiski After the Soviet Union: A Town That Lost Its Reason to Exist
Population Collapse and the Making of Lilya 4-Ever
The census of 1989 counted 7,690 permanent residents in Paldiski. By 2000 there were 4,045. The garrison had been the economy, the landlord and the reason for the town, and when the Navy sailed, the officers' families followed within months. What stayed were the panel blocks, half of them empty, and the people who had nowhere in Russia to go back to. Paldiski in the late 1990s was a Russian-speaking town in an Estonian state, with the boarded windows and the stripped copper wiring of a place whose owner had walked away. Narva, on the other side of the country, was living the same decade with ten times the population and a border to look across. Paldiski had only the sea.
In 2002 the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson needed a location for Lilya 4-Ever, a film about a sixteen-year-old girl abandoned by her mother in an unnamed post-Soviet town and trafficked into prostitution in Sweden. He needed a place that looked like the end of the world. He chose Paldiski. The Russian actress Oksana Akinshina, who was fifteen, spent weeks walking the rain-soaked courtyards between the Navy's apartment blocks while the crew filmed her against peeling stairwells and rusting playground frames. The town appears in the film without a name, because it did not need one. Anyone who had lived in a Soviet garrison recognised it. The film won the Guldbagge for Best Film and became the image of Paldiski that the rest of Europe carried for the next twenty years.
Somebody on the road out to the peninsula, past the last apartment block and the first abandoned bunker, painted "Welcome to Hell" across a ruined wall. Tour groups photograph it. The 2021 census counted 3,672 people.
Paldiski's Port, NATO and the Reactors Nobody Can Move
The harbour saved what the Navy had built. The deep-water quays that had berthed Soviet submarines became Paldiski South Harbour, a freight port that now handles oil, timber, wind turbine components and a car ferry to Kapellskär in Sweden. When Estonia joined NATO in 2004 the same quays started receiving Allied armour and equipment, so that a port built to project Soviet power into the Baltic now unloads the tanks intended to stop it. A wind farm turns above the cliffs. A pumped hydro energy storage project is planned for the peninsula's limestone. The Pakri lighthouse, 52 metres tall and built in 1889, stands at the tip of the peninsula above the bunkers, the tallest in Estonia.
The Pentagon stands on the eastern edge of town behind its own fence, with a radiation warning on the gate and a guard in the booth. Inside, the two sarcophagi wait. The Estonian government's radioactive waste plan commits the country to building a final disposal facility by 2040, at which point the reactor compartments can be cut open, sorted and buried, at a cost estimated in 2016 at around €89 million for the whole programme through 2050. The preliminary studies weighed three sites for the repository, and one of the candidates was the Pakri Peninsula itself. The most likely permanent home for the Soviet Navy's reactors is a hole in the ground a few hundred metres from where they have stood since 1968.
Visiting Paldiski Today: The Pentagon, the Pakri Cliffs and the Ghost Garrison
Paldiski is fifty minutes from Tallinn's Balti jaam station on the Elron commuter train, which ends at a platform beside the old naval yard. The town is open. The nuclear site is not. The Main Technological Building can be seen from the public road at the eastern edge of town, a long low concrete hangar behind a wire fence with radiation trefoils on the gate, and that is as close as a visitor gets. Photographs from outside the fence are tolerated. Climbing it is not.
Everything else is walkable in a day. Peter the Great's earthwork fortress survives as a grassed pentagon on the shore south of the harbour, with the stub of the convict breakwater running out into the bay. St George's Orthodox Church stands partly restored on Pakri Street, the best-preserved building of the pre-Soviet town. The studio of the Estonian sculptor Amandus Adamson, who spent his summers here before the Navy came, is a small museum on the street that carries his name. The road north along the peninsula passes the Navy's abandoned barracks, the Officers' House with its windows gone, and then the bunkers, gun positions and radar bases scattered across the limestone toward the lighthouse. The Pakri cliffs, 20 metres of raw grey Ordovician limestone, drop straight into the Gulf of Finland at the peninsula's tip, and they are collapsing. The edge is not fenced. Several Soviet structures built too close to it are already halfway down.
The Pakri islands can be reached by boat from the harbour in summer. Suur-Pakri church, bombed for fifty years, is being restored by the descendants of the Swedes who built it. The islands are still being cleared of unexploded ordnance, and visitors are told to keep to marked tracks. A few of the old farmhouse foundations remain among the bomb craters, with the Swedish village names on new signs where the Soviet target numbers used to be.
Stand at the fence of the Pentagon in the afternoon and the place is quiet. A gull on the roof, a car on the coast road, the wind off the Baltic through the wire. Two hundred metres away, sealed in concrete and welded steel, are the machines that trained the crews of the Soviet ballistic missile fleet, and the country that owns them has fifteen more years to work out how to take them apart. Peter the Great left a breakwater here that nobody finished. The Soviet Navy left something heavier.
Frequently Asked Questions About Paldiski
What was the Soviet nuclear submarine training centre at Paldiski?
Paldiski was the largest of only three land-based training centres the Soviet Navy built for nuclear submarine crews. Inside a hangar on the Pakri Peninsula, engineers installed the reactor and propulsion sections of two real submarine hulls, each with a live pressurised water reactor. The first, a VM-A unit, went critical in 1968; the second, a VM-4 unit, followed in 1983. Trainees could take a reactor to power, run drills and handle simulated failures on dry land before being posted to boats in the Northern and Pacific fleets. Both reactors were shut down in 1989 after post-Chernobyl safety reviews and never restarted.
Why was Paldiski a closed city?
The Soviet Navy declared Paldiski and the Pakri Peninsula a closed garrison zone in 1964, two years after choosing it for nuclear submarine training. A barbed-wire fence with a single checkpoint sealed the neck of the peninsula, the town was removed from civilian maps, and even its population was classified. Only naval personnel, their families and vetted workers could enter, which excluded most Estonians. The town remained closed until the Russian armed forces withdrew from Estonia on 31 August 1994.
Are there still nuclear reactors in Paldiski?
Yes. Under the July 1994 Paldiski Agreement, Russia removed the spent fuel and shipped it home in October 1994, dismantled the non-radioactive parts of the training stands, and encased the two reactor compartments in reinforced concrete sarcophagi with walls 400 millimetres thick. The compartments contain no fuel but remain radioactive. Estonia took ownership in September 1995. Studies concluded the safest course was to leave them in storage for around fifty years, so dismantling is planned for around 2040, once Estonia has built a final radioactive waste repository.
Can you visit the Paldiski submarine base?
The town of Paldiski is open and reachable by commuter train from Tallinn in under an hour. The former nuclear site, however, remains fenced and guarded, and visitors can only view the main building from the public road. The rest of the Soviet military landscape is accessible on foot: abandoned barracks, bunkers and gun positions across the peninsula, the Pakri cliffs and lighthouse, and Peter the Great's unfinished fortress on the shore. The Pakri islands, a former Soviet bombing range, can be visited by boat in summer but are still being cleared of unexploded ordnance.
What happened to the people of the Pakri islands?
Swedish-speaking families had lived on Suur-Pakri and Väike-Pakri since the Middle Ages, and the 1934 census counted 354 islanders in five villages. In 1940 the Soviet Navy ordered them off to make room for coastal batteries under the 1939 bases treaty. Most of the islanders fled to Sweden in 1944 with the wider Estonian Swedish community when the Red Army returned. After the war the Soviet Air Force turned the abandoned villages into a bombing range, used until the early 1990s. Descendants of the islanders are now restoring the church on Suur-Pakri.
Was Lilya 4-Ever filmed in Paldiski?
Yes. Swedish director Lukas Moodysson filmed his 2002 drama about a trafficked teenager among the abandoned Soviet apartment blocks of Paldiski, using the town as an unnamed post-Soviet setting. The choice reflected Paldiski's condition in the late 1990s, when the Russian Navy's departure had halved the population within a decade and left much of the garrison housing empty. The film won Sweden's Guldbagge Award for Best Film and shaped the town's international image for years.
Sources
Former the Paldiski Nuclear Submarine Sailor Training Center: Handing Over to Estonia and Decommission — J. Valge, M. Varvas, E. Putnik, ALARA AS (2005)
Remediation and Decommissioning of Radioactive Waste Facilities in Estonia — H. Putnik, E. Realo, IAEA (2001)
Decommissioning Plan for Paldiski Nuclear Facilities — in Nuclear Submarine Decommissioning and Related Problems, NATO ASI Series, Springer (1996)
Evaluation of Management Routes for the Paldiski Sarcophagi — WM'02 Conference Proceedings, Tucson (2002)
Preliminary Studies for the Decommissioning of the Reactor Compartments of the Former Paldiski Nuclear Site and the Establishment of a Radioactive Waste Repository — ALARA AS and Eksortus (2015)
National Action Plan for Radioactive Waste Management — Republic of Estonia, Ministry of the Environment (2018)
Seventh National Report of Estonia under the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management — Republic of Estonia / IAEA (2020)
Estonia Prepares to Build New Nuclear Waste Repository — ERR News (2016)
Study Confirms Removal of All Fuel from Decommissioned Soviet-Era Reactor — Nuclear Engineering International (2024)
The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence — Anatol Lieven (1993)
Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 — Paul Avrich (1972)
Pakri Islands: Soviet Aviation Target Range — Baltic Military Heritage Tourism project (2023)
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