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Paldiski, Estonia — The beach-going teenagers taunt and tease each other at high volume as a volleyball floats back and forth over the net that separates them. The sand is clean, the waters of the Baltic Sea are blue.

There's nothing visible on this unusually warm afternoon to suggest that less than seven years ago, this spot was contaminated with radioactive runoff from a nearby nuclear submarine base.

HELL ON EARTH
Sunday: Welcome to hell
Monday: In the shadow of nuclear catastrophe
Tuesday: New battles loom over Russia's great lake
Wednesday: Baltic states cleaning up to impress EU

Like the rest of the former Soviet Union, Estonia and Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania were left an atrocious legacy of cities polluted by enormous outdated factories and towering smokestacks, as well as a countryside littered with Red Army relics.

But a decade on, the Baltic states have put their resources and reputation into cleaning up the mess, even as neighbours such as Russia continue to let their worst environmental problems slide.

In Estonia, the government says that, per capita, it is spending more money on the environment than any other former Soviet republic. And it is not because of an effective environmental movement. Estonia is being pushed toward higher standards by globalization — the force that is often the target of environmentalists.

"Estonia and the other Baltics have been moving faster because they want to be seen as European countries," said Anto Raukas, a geologist at Estonia's Tallinn Technical University who heads the program to clean up the Soviet military mess.

To become a full member in the European Union, which the Baltic states would like to be in the next few years, they must harmonize their laws with those of other member states, modernize aging refineries, tackle zones of excessive air pollution, and meet continental standards for drinking water and forest management.

'There was not a radioactive waste storage, there was a radioactive waste dump'
Henno Putnik, whose small firm, Alara, has been leading the Paldiski cleanup

The lure of Europe's open market appeals to Estonia and its neighbours, as does the aid they are eligible to receive to meet some of the world's toughest environmental standards. With the help of EU money, Lithuania is closing a giant Soviet-era landfill near its northern border with Latvia and building a modern one in a more secure location. Latvia is renovating its water-purification and sewage facilities, a move that will reduce pollution flowing into the Baltic.

And in Estonia, the number of waste sites has fallen to 50 from 350 during the past two years. All old-style dumps are to be closed by 2009 when the country will be served by 20 modern facilities that meet EU standards.

But Estonia's boldest moves may be the ones taken near the beaches at Paldiski. For years, this area — Russia's last redoubt in the Baltics — was a training centre for submariners and so secret it didn't appear on maps.

When the Russians finally pulled out in 1995, four years after Estonia declared independence, curious Estonians flocked here to have a look at a part of their country they had been banned from visiting for so long.

They found a massive training complex, disguised as a regular factory but complete with two indoor full-scale models of nuclear submarines, functioning reactors and all.

What they discovered inside shocked them. Piles of scrap metal littered the base. Nuclear material was carelessly disposed of in insecure places. And radioactive waste remained in liquid form, against all modern conventions of storing it in solid form.

A massive, and immediate, cleanup was needed but there was no one in Estonia trained to do the job. Unlike Russia, which has often been too proud to acknowledge it needs outside scientific help, the fledgling Estonian states had no hangups.

They appealed to the international community, and scientists and money came flooding in from the United States, Germany, Sweden and Finland. Estonia's own people watched and learned until they were ready to take over the efforts.

"At the start, we didn't have any expertise but we've grown up a little bit," said Henno Putnik, whose small firm, Alara, has been leading the Paldiski cleanup with a dozen full-time staff.

The task is enormous.

"There was not a radioactive waste storage, there was a radioactive waste dump," Mr. Putnik said. "Everything radioactive was just thrown in the same spot, with no segregation, no packaging."

As a result, the base cleanup is still a work in progress, years away from being finished. But already the liquid nuclear waste has been transformed into solid material in more secure containers. A massive oil spill has been cleaned.

And the Paldiski beaches have been mopped up and are now a popular weekend getaway for residents of Tallinn, the scenic, medieval-style capital that is a 30-minute drive away.

The submariners' barracks, an imposing structure that dominates the centre of town, has become a popular concert venue.

But the twin reactors, which functioned continuously from the early 1970s through to 1989, remain in place. For the time being, there isn't anywhere else to put them.

'This place is a gift of the big Russian nation to the people of little Estonia'
Anto Raukas, a geologist at Estonia's Tallinn Technical University

The potential for disaster remains uncomfortably high. The reactors are encased in an orange concrete sarcophagus, but the departing Russian navy did not bother to instal monitors that could tell the Estonians the temperature and humidity inside the reactor.

"We have no idea what's going on inside there," Mr. Putnik said. What is known is that the material inside is still highly radioactive. In 1994, a civilian died after coming across radioactive waste near the base.

And Paldiski is far from the only environmental problem left to Estonia when the Soviet Union crumbled. Though smaller than Nova Scotia, the country is dotted with more than 1,500 military sites, about 200 of them in and around Tallinn.

"The [Soviet] army was not controlled, and isn't up to now, in Russia," Mr. Raukas said as he toured a site where dozens of tunnels were carved into artificial hills to hide mobile missile launchers, whose nuclear warheads were once pointed at Western Europe.

The site near Tallinn is both an outdoor Cold War museum and a blight that stretches across several square kilometres that might have otherwise made an attractive camping area. Only from a close angle can you see that the hills are made of a uniform shape and have garage doors. Heaps of garbage and old uniforms of soldiers still litter the ground between launch sites, along with empty vodka bottles and spent bullets.

"This place is a gift of the big Russian nation to the people of little Estonia," Mr. Raukas said wryly, kicking at a piece of metal.

Though the base was handed over peacefully, the insides of most buildings, even the cafeteria and main guard house, are riddled with bullet holes. At another base, an Estonian cleanup crew found a 16-square-kilometre area covered with a layer of petroleum one centimetre thick.

At a cost of millions of dollars, Estonia has cleaned up or at least removed the most dangerous waste from all the army bases and several old military airports. Unlike many post-Soviet states, it could afford to do so. "Estonia has more money than Central Asian states like Kazakhstan and less corruption than Russia," Mr. Raukas said.

The same applies for Latvia and Lithuania. Almost alone among the 14 former Soviet republics, the three have seen consistent rises in their national wealth and standards of living since their independence in the 1990s.

"They're doing so much better economically than, say, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, and they also get more aid from the international community," said Vera Pisareva, an adviser to Sergei Mitrokhin, who heads the liberal Yabloko Party in the Russian parliament. "And their Soviet legacy was not so horrible as in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics."

Some people, however, aren't impressed. The head of Green Cross International, a sustainable-development organization founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, believes Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have been playing a shell game, making cosmetic changes and moving the mess around to impress the European Union.

"They have the Soviet legacy too and they're unable to handle it," Vladimir Leonov said. "They pretend they can because they're trying to look their best in front of the West and because they so badly want to join the EU."

And, bad as the Soviet scars are, the Baltic states never had a Chernobyl to deal with, unlike Ukraine and Belarus. The truly monstrous industrial and nuclear sites that have made such a mess of the land around the former Soviet Union are largely within Russia proper or, in the case of some of the worst nuclear testing, in barren parts of Kazakhstan.

There also may be a difference in mindset, though, between the Baltics and the rest. While Russians and their government are focused almost solely on economic issues — President Vladimir Putin is constantly asking his economists to find new ways to increase the gross domestic product — Ms. Pisareva believes the Baltic states are "more European" in outlook, and have been trying to develop their economy without sacrificing their environment.

This approach allows them to attend, with their heads held high, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The summit, running from Aug. 26 to Sept. 6, marks the 10th anniversary of the bigger Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. While the entire ex-Soviet bloc was fingered as a problem area in Rio in 1992, of the 14 former republics, only Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia can claim to have made significant progress cleaning up the mess.

"If we want to be part of Europe — and we do — we know we've got to clean this up," said Mr. Raukas, gesturing at a landscape dotted with Soviet military relics. "Besides, nobody wants to live like this any more."