TALLINN, Estonia -- Estonians always had trouble speaking Russian. Four years after breaking from the Soviet Union, Estonians not only speak it badly, many can't speak it at all.


Ask someone in this Baltic nation to try and they're liable to stammer and choke on the Russian words -- then shrug their shoulders and switch to English.


Slowly but surely, Estonians are losing their Russian. So are Latvians and Lithuanians in the other two Baltic republics that won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.


Kristi Kiitsak, a 20-year-old Tallinn business student, ekes out a few sentences in Russian and grinds to a stop.


"I can't do it," she says with a smile. "The words just won't come out."


It's not just that Estonians hold a grudge against Russians. Estonians, whose native tongue is related to Finnish and Hungarian, say Russian just isn't of any use in the new world order.


Most Estonians have either turned westward or are trying to.


"We don't need Russian and never use it," explained Kiitsak, who studies at a Danish-run business school, where lectures are in English. "We don't use it, so we're forgetting it."


Anxious to sharpen their skills in a new capitalist economy, professionals have been especially quick to turn from Russian to English.


Even the Baltic leaders are trying to learn English. Estonian Prime Minister Tiit Vahi recently flew to London for a week's worth of English lessons. Lithuanian President Algirdas Brazauskas, the nation's ex-Communist Party chief, also takes English lessons.


Tiia Tamm, a Tallinn business consultant, says the best professional literature comes from the West and is in English. She said she would be happy to keep up her Russian if Russia generated ideas worth learning.


"What does Russia have to teach us today?" said Tamm. "What's coming from Russia? Economic chaos, Zhirinovsky and a war in Chechnya. Why then maintain the language?"


Popular culture, too, has turned westward. TV stations are full of English-language programs. Cinemas that once showed old American B-movies poorly dubbed into Russian, now run the latest Hollywood blockbusters in the original English with Estonian subtitles.


It's not just that Estonians don't speak or read Russian anymore. They don't see it, either. Thanks to laws banning public signs in anything but Estonian, street signs that used to be bilingual are now only in the Latin letters of Estonian. The Russian words have been scratched out.


While the demise of Russian doesn't seem to be causing Estonians concern, it has thrown the country's 500,000-strong Russian minority into a tizzy.


Most Russians immigrated to Estonia after the Soviet occupation, and the vast majority speak neither Estonian nor English. Confident they'd always be able to get by with Russian, many Russians laughed off Estonian and barely learned to say hello in the local language.


They're not laughing any more. These days, Russians, many of whom need to pass Estonian-language exams to get Estonian citizenship, are tripping over themselves to learn the language.


"Their livelihood depends on it," explained Natalia Zurakovskaya, who heads a Tallinn language school.