Things get out off hand around half past ten. The manager of Baar Randevuu, whose frizzy hair looks a bit like that of an alpaca, throws out a female customer. The woman brushes the mud off her dress, a scanty garment so kitsch that only a Russian would wear it outside of the carnival season, and shouts back loudly. Suka! Blyat! Now, our knowledge of the Russian language is rather limited, but it doesn’t seem that she’s thanking the manager for the fine evening out. During her tirade, vodka fumes escape that could make an elephant end up in a drinking coma. Welcome to Sillamäe, the most Russian place in Estonia.
Where’s Igor?
We arrived at the Randevuu a few hours earlier to check the internet. Through booking.com, we rented an apartment for one night in one of the Khrushchyovkas on the outskirts of the city. Hotels are scarce in Sillamäe. Apparently, tourists are more interested in walks through Estonia’s endless pine forests, ending with an invigorating sauna session, than in a visit to a closed town where thousands of tons of nuclear waste are buried. Admittedly, that is not entirely surprising, but save us your judgement. Fortunately, we found a roof over our heads with a private person from Saint Petersburg, who is renting out his apartment “with sea view” through booking.com. But now I’ve been pushing the bell of Ranna 49, Beach Street, for fifteen minutes without a sign of Igor. He also does not answer his phone.
“Damn”, I curse, “That dude is probably sleeping off his hangover. We can be happy if hunger wakes him up towards the evening. Let’s hope there’s no jar of pickles in his fridge, or we will sleep in front of the door tonight. I knew we shouldn’t have rented a room from a Russian.”
“From whom else?” asks Anete. She is right. Sillamäe is a Russian bastion. 86 per cent of the city is ethnically Russian, with small groups of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Ethnic Estonians make up only four per cent of the population. That is even less than in the border town of Narva, which for many Estonians symbolises the Russification of this part of the country.
We heard the last word in Estonian a few hours earlier, when we left Toila on bicycle and bought food in a village called Voka. Whilst we picnicked on the grass in front of the village shop, we witnessed a wonderful scene: a fatso with a red face unloaded his empty bottles and cans at the taarautomat, the cabin smelling of stale beer and fermenting Coca-Cola that you can find behind every supermarket in Estonia, shuffled back to his car and started the engine. A black plume of smoke escaped and betrayed that the car would never be allowed to enter the low-emission zone of Antwerp. He then drove the five metres from the machine to the store entrance. Moments later, he came out with a shopping cart filled with alcohol and sweets. Human sloth knows no limits.
When we jumped back on the bike, we quickly swapped the golden and purple seas of the Estonian countryside for a landscape of crumbling cliffs. The warning signs left nothing to the imagination. Every year, the sea claims a bit of this land. And suddenly… industrial mastodons appeared on the horizon. No fata morgana, but the first manifestation of Sillamäe. The contrast with the lovely pastorals pictures from just before can hardly be greater.
Lyudmila’s sandwiches
Back to Beach Street, where my thumb slowly starts to cramp up from pushing the doorbell. Until blonde Lyudmila returns from the shop: “Are you still here?” Lyudmila had already noticed us when she left for the shop, but then we had haughtily refused her offer to wait in her apartment. No matter how deep Igor’s coma, so we thought, he has to wake up at one point. “Come in”, Lyudmila admonishes us, “I will make coffee.”
A moment later we are slurping instant coffee in a cramped kitchen. Lyudmila puts chocolate on the table and starts to make sandwiches. Russian hospitality is legendary. “I think Igor is in Saint Petersburg. But we can perhaps look under the doormat to see if there is a key”, she says, “Or I can ask the other Igor if his apartment is free. He sometimes rents it out as well. But then I have to be careful not to mention it to the first Igor because the two can’t stand each other.”
We explain that we have already paid through booking.com, so we must follow their procedures. The following two hours I spend on the phone with Indian-accented call centre employees. In the meantime, Lyudmila babbles away, about her childhood in Ukraine, her children and how she met her husband in the Captain Club in Sillamäe. She’s happy that she can practice her Estonian with Anete.
As I said, there are few Estonians living in Sillamäe. Question any Estonian over a certain age on his feelings about Russians and one comment stands out: “Some of them live here for fifty years and still don’t speak a damned word of Estonian.” Those cases certainly exist – something that gets stuck is sometimes difficult to pull loose – but at the same, most Russians are making an effort to learn the language of a country that they have since come to regard as their home. Young Estonian Russians are often perfectly bilingual. Because many young Estonians can hardly be encouraged to learn Russian, the Russians even have a competitive advantage for many jobs.
While Lyudmila shoves another sandwich in my direction, I hear an Indian shout in my ear:
“Sir, are you still there? We found a solution for you: we can book you a room in the spa hotel in Laagna.”
“But that’s 15 kilometres out of the city!”
“That’s the only thing we can do for you right now. Either that or reimburse you.”
Fifteen minutes later we pull open the door of the sports hostel. The smoke of old teenage sweat and poorly ventilated changing rooms wafts at us, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We are happy to have found a bed after all.
French Grimbergen
All the palaver made me thirsty. Fortunately, Baar Randevuu is nearby. I pick up the menu and notice that the prices have almost doubled since our first visit, a few hours earlier. Mm, inflation seems very extreme in Sillamäe. On Friday evening, you pay just as much for a beer here as in Soho or Manhattan. I once read that the inhabitants of no European country spend as much of their household income on alcohol as Estonians, but this seems beyond reason and convention. The average income in this part of Estonia is less than 600 euro per month, so I never believe that anyone pays five euro for a pint. You could eat out extensively for that amount of money.
Moments later, tawdry ladies and guys with T-shirts of the brand ‘brand’ flock in. They all pay big money for beer, cider and alcopops and stumble up the stairs. Upstairs, the party starts. Crappy Russian chanson blares from the upper floor. So that’s how the selections for the Russian Eurovision entry sound. In Sillamäe, Baar Randevuu seems to have a monopoly on Friday’s escapism. The café raises its prices in the evenings and gets away with it. I cough up five euro for a Grimbergen. Then I see the beer labelled as French on the menu. Asking shitloads of money to people who are looking for a bit of entertainment, okay. But attributing our proud Belgian beer to those French bastards? No, that goes too far. Come on, Anete, we’re out of here.
As we leave the party scene, I think about how things can change. Nowadays, there is so little to do in Sillamäe that inhabitants happily pay extortionate prices for beer, but that used to be completely different. Once upon a time, the Soviet authorities did everything to turn Sillamäe into the perfect city, with beautiful houses, wide streets, lush parks and no fewer than two cinemas. Sillamäe had to be so pleasant for its residents that they would not even think about turning their back on the town. Moscow was terrified that those departing – after enough shots of vodka – would talk about what was really happening in Sillamäe. And especially that such information might find American ears.
Sillamäe becomes R-6685
In the 19th century, Sillamägi was a resort town for the cultural and academic elite from Saint Petersburg who found nearby Hungerburg – the current Narva-Jõesuu – a bit too busy. The northern beaches of Estonian attracted bright minds. Tchaikovsky came to rest, and painters, poets and scientists followed his example. Ivan Pavlov had a dacha in Sillamäe. When he was not busy making dogs drool on command, he lay with his back in the sand. Even when attending a conference for physiologists in Italy, he expressed his love for Sillamäe. Yes, Italy is beautiful but nothing like his pearl of the Baltic Sea.
Little did Pavlov know that the discovery of uranium in the 40s would change the face of Sillamäe forever. After prisoners-of-war erected a factory, the Soviet Union began to enrich uranium in the utmost secrecy. Sillamäe became a code, R-6685, and disappeared from all Soviet maps. It became a closed city, demarcated by barbed wire and only accessible to visitors with a special permit. Mostly Russians, because Moscow did not trust the potentially dissident Estonians in such a precarious operation. Sillamäe, as the National Review describes, “was administered not as a part of Soviet Estonia, but as an exclave of Soviet Russia itself.”
Sillamäe produced nearly 100.000 tons of uranium and 1.000 tons of enriched uranium during the Soviet years. A fraction of that ended up in the first nuclear bomb of the Soviet Union. The first workers of the factory were the ‘orphans’, the teenagers and twenty-somethings from Saint Petersburg who had survived years of siege. But Sillamäe also attracted many fortune seekers, young Russians looking for a better life.
Because with the risk came privileges. In Sillamäe, a worker could get a well-paid job, with the long-term prospect of a private apartment or a car. In the 40s and 50s in particular, residential blocks in Stalinist neoclassical style shot up like mushrooms. And stores were a lot better equipped than in the rest of the Soviet Union. You could buy high-quality shoes, perfume, suits and fur coats that were scarce elsewhere. If there was no sugar in any of the shops in neighbouring Kothla-Järve, you could be sure there was more than enough in Sillamäe.
A sugar-coat to keep the population happy. Nobody could enter the city without a permit. At the bus stops, border guards checked whether you had the correct papers. If an Estonian wanted to splash the cash – in the unlikely case he had any – he had to get off at last but one stop. And subsequently, find a way to get in. I read in Extreme Estonia that some Estonians dress as Russian as possible in order not to stand out. That must have been quite a parade of Michelin jackets.
Palm trees
Anyone can explore Sillamäe these days. We do so in-between the showers. This wet dream of Stalin is filled with flowerbeds, wide tree-lined boulevards, parks and a statue of a man carrying an atom. We only hear Russian. A little further lies the icon of Sillamäe, the pompous stairs that lead to the Baltic Sea. Move this picture to Rome and Instagram influencers would probably trample over one another to find the best camera angle.
We almost believe we’re in Odessa, at the famous Potemkin stairs, until an icy wind reminds us that we are more than 1500 kilometres more to the north. Yet, palm trees lined the Mere Puiestee, the Sea Boulevard, in the summer. They were moved to greenhouses in the winter. We imagine how it must’ve been to be a nuclear scientist in Sillamäe, to descend the stairs of this boulevard, to marvel at the statue of Stalin and the portraits of excellent workers which had been planted here as examples.
We walk to the coast, where the view is dominated by industrial chimneys. The factories, operated by American companies, now process rare metals. The Soviet Union stopped the production of uranium in 1990, just before Estonia’s re-independence.
At that time, it had been clear for a while that the Soviets were not taking the safety regulations very seriously. They deposited their nuclear waste in a lake near the sea, closed off by a dilapidated wall, according to the National Review a “Leninist lake, toxic and vile, a uranium pond hosting some twelve million tons of a sludge containing uranium, heavy metals, acids and other chemicals.” You don’t have to study nuclear technology for five years to suspect that a bit of radioactivity seeped into the Baltic Sea. In the 90s, Estonian authorities closed the beaches between Voka and Narva regularly due to high concentrations of radioactivity.
Nowadays, the nuclear waste is safely deposited underground. The last remnant of Sillamäe as a closed city is literally buried.
Practical information about Sillamäe
Unless your idea of a great holiday is standing in front of closed doors and pushing at doorbells, I wouldn’t recommend staying in Igor’s ‘apartment with a view’. The choice is scant, but there are a few other accommodations in Sillamäe.
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