Back in the USSR: Heroic Adventures in Transnistria
Back in the USSR Heroic Adventures in Transnistria
Rory MacLean
photographs by Nick Danziger
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‘Peoples of the world! Proletarians of all nations! Unite!’
Journey of a Faithful Traveller
Motherland
Heroes and Traitors
Big Brother
Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership
In Praise of Propaganda
‘To the bottom, Comrade!’
Cultural Dreamer
Earthly Paradise
True to his Word
Factory
I Believe in Miracles
Freedom from Fear
Our Glorious Future
Swan Song
Transnistrian timeline
Acknowledgments
Subscribers
‘Long live the Great October Socialist Revolution – the start of humanity’s historical journey away from capitalism and to socialism!’
1
Journey of a Faithful Traveller
Sunlight sparkles off the broad Dniester River. Grapes glisten in verdant vine terraces above Kamenka. Smugglers’ tracks wind across the snow and into silent woods. Patriotic oligarchs in Gucci tracksuits hunt wild boar with ak-47s. A springtime breeze loosens the blossoms from the apricot trees, scattering them over Russian peacekeepers guarding old Soviet munitions dumps. At the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership the party faithful learn how to launch ‘spontaneous actions’ while sustaining the half lotus yoga position. Across Tiraspol a young woman celebrates her escape from prostitution, then pays the price for freedom by recruiting other local girls to be trafficked to brothels abroad.
Comrades! Have you ever wondered what became of the socialist dream? What happened to the society of equals? Where all those Red Army generals, KGB colonels and go-getting Moscow tycoons went when they retired? It – and they – live on in Transnistria.
Sort of.
In Transnistria old Soviet symbols and slogans are retained more than 20 years after the collapse of the USSR. At the Dniester Sanatorium in Kamenka, a hand-painted mural celebrates the physical and political health of body, mind and nation.
Transnistria is a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic of the old Soviet Union: youthful yet venerable, ambitious but dreamy, dirt poor and damn profitable. No bigger in size than Devon or Rhode Island, this sliver-thin nowhereland lies both on the eastern bank of the Dniester, one of the oldest geopolitical fault lines in Europe, and at the threshold of an heroic new age. It is proud, independent-ish and recognised by no other country in the world. It’s also the home of my exclusive and elusive host.
Once he was known as New Soviet Man. He was heralded as an archetype, a master of his emotions, a ‘higher social biologic being’. He could have been born in Moscow, Kiev or Vladivostok. His name might have been Vladimir, Arkady or Yakov. His singularity was unimportant for he’d risen above the cult of individuality to be a selfless everyman dedicated to spreading the socialist revolution.
But times change and – after the fall of the Berlin Wall – my host and his kind had to learn to think outside the box. He, as a new New Soviet Man, needed to keep his eyes on the deal. He began to study profit margins instead of the Great Path of the Party. He looked after Number One. He bought a lavish pied-à-terre in London and donned a Chanel balaclava to fight for Crimean ‘independence’. He set up shell companies in Transnistria.
Today most westerners – at least those of the younger generation – have lost the dream of the possibility of creating a better world. Many imagine no change in their lives greater than updating their iPad apps. They construct a solitary existence in a void of political apathy wishing for nothing more than faster wifi. Idealism looks pretty dead west of the Dniester.
On the 17th floor of a residential apartment building in the capital Tiraspol is the headquarters of the First Republican Television Channel. In its control room, a technician volunteers, ‘Putin is a hero for us. He makes us proud again.’ The sign above the desk reads, ‘Do Not Litter’.
But on its eastern shore New Soviet Man embraces bolder dreams (which always include at least one gold Cartier wristwatch). He and his super-elite peers buy industries not apps. Their Facebook friends own airlines and oil fields. Their tweets are followed in the Kremlin. Money enables them to glide all but unseen through life, except when promenading along the Croisette in Cannes. Naive cynics assert it’s inconvenient for them that the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dumped in the trash can of history, but name another dying empire which has given its movers and shakers more golden opportunities?
They – the archetypes who got real – are united by the experience of Communism. Their quixotic and inequitable ideology lives on in the tender hearts of its proletariat (at least of those who haven’t yet emigrated; the population of Transnistria has halved over the last 20 years). On the factory floors and across the fallow fields of its collective farms, dreamers and despots alike celebrate Transnistria’s uniqueness as the only country in the world not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Dear readers, I invite you to join me and New Soviet Man on a journey into his republic’s heart, as well as its numbered Swiss bank accounts. Together we will listen to Slavonic Dixieland music, plunge into the Dniester’s frozen New Year waters, wait in awe with the head of national television for a telephone call from the great Vladimir Putin. We will meet the teenagers who dream of being sold to Chelsea or Spartak Moscow and the personable, attractive young women who – in a clever coup of political marketing – are ‘sexing up’ government ministries both online and in the flesh. We will come to understand what happens to a spunky factory manager after he wins four elections in a row and buys a couple too many S-Class Mercedes. We will see that same old leader crushed as Transnistria embraces the possibility – or at least the impression – of change. Finally we will realise that Communism no longer means Communism as such, but rather a ‘special’ relationship with Russia.
Vladimir Putin has said his country reserves the right to stand up for ethnic Russians living outside its borders. Most Transnistrians wait for the president to act, even though 500 miles of Ukrainian territory separates their isolated mini-state and Russia.
My friends, this volume is both a personal journey and an earnest exhortation. Believe me, it is time to dispel the myths about New Soviet Man’s people’s republic. The hour has come to bury the tired clichés that it is a black hole, a penniless smugglers’ haven, a criminalised terra incognita kept in a state of suspended animation specifically to facilitate illegal activities. Transnistria is not the North Korea of Europe. It is rather a land open for business, where the balalaikas ring out as the Great Game is played on, and the faithful traveller can find himself – with a little imagination plus a load of cash – back in the USSR.
Sort of.
‘Let live for centuries the name and work of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin! Fervently love the Soviet Motherland, persistently acquire knowledge and labour skills! Prepare yourselves to become active fighters for the task of Lenin, for Communism!’
2
Motherland
Communism is his pride and future. It is the glue of the people. The hammer and sickle rise like the sun in the republic’s crest. The red star crowns the bold Transnistrian flag. Long live the proletarian zeal for revolution!
According to the scientific analysis of history, Communism rips power out of the hands of the capitalist class. Workers and their allies then wrestle the economy under social control. Labour becomes both a civic duty and a source of personal fulfilment. People realise their poten
tial and – as oppressive class divisions are abolished – the state apparatus itself withers away in an ecstasy of equality. And so on. And so on.
New Soviet Man’s driver dropped us off in the Bentley. At the end of an alley behind Tiraspol No. 3 Compulsory School stood the headquarters of the Communist Party of Transnistria. A concrete Lenin surveyed the front hall of the two-up two-down conversion. ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky, first chairman of the Cheka and KGB, glowered from his portrait behind the Lavazza coffee machine.
‘The Soviet Union is the place where I was born. It is my Motherland,’ declared Oleg Khorzhan, striking his chest with his fist. His silver watch sparkled as he folded together his podgy fingers. ‘My job as Party leader is to preserve – and to carry forward – the positive attributes of the USSR: its power, its social guarantees, its absence of borders and, above all, its belief in tomorrow.’
‘Urrah!’ cheered New Soviet Man with feeling, because he’d noted that the watch was a Patek Philippe.
Since time immemorial (that is, about 200 years) Transnistria has been part of Greater Russia. But during the Second World War, Stalin reached west across the Dniester to seize neighbouring Romanian Moldova. He tacked it on to Slav Transnistria, creating the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and – with it – not a few problems.
After the war hundreds of victorious Red Army officers retired to the unified republic. They built their dachas along its riverbanks, savouring the balmy southern climate and dreaming of further glories. Their opportunity came with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the early 1990s the Republic’s expropriated, western, Moldovan half turned its back on the Slavic world. It declared Romanian to be its official language and joined both NATO’s Partnership for Peace and the Council of Europe. In response an ambitious, Russian-born factory manager on the Dniester’s eastern bank galvanised the nostalgic soldiers and eager oligarchs to retain their links with Moscow.
‘On November 2nd, 1990 – in the upheaval following the fall of the Wall – I saw ordinary civilians shot on the Dubăsari Bridge,’ Khorzhan told us with feeling, naming the river crossing where three Transnistrians were killed by Moldovan troops, thereby inflaming the ‘war of independence’. ‘I was 14 years old at the time. I saw how nationalistic feeling was being cultivated in Moldova, and how Moldovans turned against their brothers, even shooting them in the back. I realised then that I could not live in such a place. As soon as I finished high school I became a Communist.’
He signed up in Tiraspol, capital of the breakaway enclave, hoping that Party membership would wipe away the sudden sense of rootlessness. In those tumultuous days he didn’t dwell on Communism’s fragility or the dichotomy between its reality and its creators’ visions. Like millions of others in fractured eastern Europe, he simply felt lost.
‘I believed – and still believe – that all the former Soviet republics will one day join together again, not as a single state but as an economic union. This is not a dream; it’s a reality for me.’
Behind Khorzhan hung a wall map of the old USSR, its 15 repub-lics united in fraternal brotherhood. With the Union’s dissolution, all the republics had become independent. Some – like Georgia and Moldova – had disintegrated into even smaller entities.
‘People with such strong historical and economic connections are meant to live together for eternity,’ he assured us, but then pointed an accusative finger at neighbouring Ukraine. ‘I have been anxiously following the nonsense that the fascists in Ukraine have been performing. I welcome President Putin’s desire to unite Russian soil.’
‘As a westerner you will not understand the importance of the land, of the soul to us,’ New Soviet Man explained to me, adjusting the handkerchief in his Dolce & Gabbana jacket. His personal style signifier was a pochette square bought from vintage stores. He had over 500 of them, choosing a different one every day depending on his mood and wardrobe. ‘The western soul is like a fenced garden: well-nurtured, well-maintained, with a sensible structure. Our soul, our Slav duscha, is totally different. It is wild. It is open. It has no limit. It is like a vast steppe from which we get all that nourishes us, but in which we can become lost.’
Khorzhan reached across the desk to take New Soviet Man’s hand in his own. The two men looked into each other’s eyes with remarkable warmth, as if they were brothers reunited after many years. Khorzhan then rose from his melamine desk. He opened a cupboard to show off a red Communist rain shell, thousands of which had been handed out to supporters, and friends of supporters, and friends of friends of supporters who couldn’t resist freebies. He presented us each with a Party pen, noting with pride, ‘It’s made in Germany.
‘Around the world young people wear the hammer and sickle on their T-shirts. Communist symbols are graffitied on walls. This is not nostalgia. Youngsters realise what is good for the planet. They understand that selfishness guarantees them no future,’ he told us, emotion rising in his voice as he morphed Marxist–Leninism with anti-globalisation Newspeak. ‘The Soviet leaders understood the importance of selflessness,’ he shouted. ‘Did Stalin lead an independent Georgia or the united Soviet Union? Was Nikita Khrushchev a Ukrainian politician or a great Soviet leader?’
As I wrestled with the subtleties of his argument, he puckered his lips and calmed himself. For a moment I wondered if he had lost his way in my host’s limitless steppe. Khorzhan blinked away a nervous tick and explained in measured tones how after Transnistria’s war of independence – which had claimed to be preserving Communism – the Communists were elbowed out of power.
‘They stole our property,’ he grumbled, a frown troubling his boyish looks. ‘My comrades and I were arrested for organising a meeting and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. But Communist parties from around the world – even from Great Britain – sent telegrams of support and the sentence was commuted.’
The Party’s office used to occupy the biggest single building in the country. Every state employee had been a member. Marxism–Leninism was the most powerful ideological weapon in the struggle against imperialism. But now his HQ had been relocated at the end of an alley.
‘It wasn’t fair,’ sighed Khorzhan who isn’t yet 40. His peevishness brought to mind the words of French Premier Georges Clemenceau who once wrote, ‘Not to be a socialist at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.’
Yet since his release from prison (he was locked up for only 36 hours) Khorzhan and the authorities had found a way to work together, judging from his weight gain since his election to the Supreme Soviet.
‘We modern Communists have left behind the old stereotypes,’ he said with a wink to my smiling companion. ‘We have accepted the market economy, the ownership of private property. For me it’s no longer a question of everyone being equal but rather of fairness. I think that almost everyone on the planet recognises that there are only two possible courses: the dead end of selfishness or the road to fairness.’
We paused to savour his statement. In Transnistria Marx’s visionary manifesto has been adjusted for the modern, mercantile age, the central principle of equality replaced with this notion of ‘fairness’. New Soviet Man felt pleased to have tipped the peasant who polished his SUV that morning.
‘Not everything that former Transnistrian president Igor Smirnov did was wise,’ said Khorzhan, choosing his words with care, looking over his shoulder out of habit. Smirnov had been the spunky factory manager who’d led the 1990 insurgency, grabbed power and ordered Khorzhan’s arrest. ‘But at least he never turned against our monuments. He kept our historical symbols alive: Lenin still stands in most town squares; Tiraspol’s main street is named after the October Revolution. These symbols enable us to respect history, and to avoid repeating errors, and so will help our Motherland to find its way toward the future.’
Lenin keeps an eye on a party worker in the office of Transnistria’s last Communist Deputy. The fall of the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, said Vladimir Putin. His vision is to recreate Russian power, not to resurrect the failed USSR.