by Simon Reeve
We went to visit the President of Moldova. You can do that when you’re a BBC TV crew making a documentary about Transnistria. Along with the poverty, unemployment and migration, the breakaway state was perhaps the biggest issue affecting the nation. Liliana explained that President Vladimir Voronin’s mother lived in Transnistria and for the past two years he had been unable to visit her because of the border dispute with the breakaway territory.
I feared my time with the President would involve a formal chat. But as we drove through a set of iron gates, arrived at the palatial presidential property and discovered that President Voronin wanted to take me fishing on his very own well-stocked lake. My only other memory of fishing was when I was twelve, and I slipped off a bank, fell into the River Piddle up to my neck, and then had to walk through the local village while people lined pavements to laugh at me. President Voronin helped exorcise my demons. A couple of ornate, gilded state chairs were set up on the bank by the lake for us to relax in, slices of watermelon were brought out, and the President tried to show me how to cast a line.
A lifelong Communist, Voronin was white-haired, in his sixties, and had been the head of a bread factory in a small Moldovan town before he entered politics. He still had the air of someone involved in provincial middle-management. I asked him what he thought about Transnistria and whether anything was going on there that the rest of Europe should be concerned about.
‘It’s a hole,’ he said. ‘I cannot go there. I cannot see my mother; the place is nothing more than a black hole of corruption and trafficking.’ He was angry, but it was an oft-repeated speech.
‘Moldova has a 480-kilometre border with the Ukraine and the section in Transnistria is not controlled, and via this there’s uncontrolled migration, contraband, arms trafficking, the trafficking of human beings and drugs. These operations are being legitimised by the separatist regime. There are thirteen enterprises in Transnistria that are producing arms non-stop.’
At that moment the President broke off from the chat because his aide announced he had caught a fish. Then he asked me to join him on a tour of his wine cellar. It must have been a quiet day for the President, because he decided we needed to celebrate Moldovan national independence day, and went straight for vodka and his favourite cognac. He insisted we weren’t about to get drunk.
‘I’m just very proud of Moldovan cognac and I want to promote it,’ he said.
We were all finishing a second bottle when his wife came in from the shops, complete with plastic carrier bags, told him to stop teasing and playing with the foreign film crew, and we staggered out.
You don’t have to travel far to discover the exotic appeal of an unrecognised state. It is only around an hour by bus or car from the leafy Moldovan capital Chisinau to the border with Transnistria. Officially it was still part of Moldova and the border did not exist. But the reality on the ground was tanks, armed guards, bunkers, fortified positions, and reams of razor wire. I was surprised at how tense the situation was. We were visiting years after actual fighting had stopped, but each side feared it might erupt again at any moment. Just before we arrived Transnistria had upped the stakes by banning the teaching of Moldovan in schools, allowing only Russian. Moldova had responded with an economic blockade. If you looked at the situation on paper it would seem that tiny Transnistria could not survive the siege, but still they held out.
We showed our passports to surly guards and soldiers, then drove and walked through what was essentially a demilitarised zone before crossing into Transnistria. I had arrived in my second breakaway state and felt a gentle sense of elation.
Transnistria was quite the experience. I thought I had gone through a time warp. It was like visiting a Soviet-themed adventure park. In the capital Tiraspol the hammer-and-sickle emblem of the Soviet Union had pride of place outside many buildings, and a statue of Lenin dominated the street outside the House of Soviets.
My new guide Larissa, a teacher with a kindly soul, met us at the crossing. I asked whether the Soviet symbols meant people looked back fondly on the past.
‘No, we just do not carry out war with monuments,’ she said with a grin.
Moldovans had warned me hungry armed men roam the streets of Transnistria, but although the border was tense, the leafy streets of Tiraspol were full of cafés and restaurants. People sat outside on cheap plastic chairs as old cars chugged past. Fighting talk was limited to thoughts on political strife in neighbouring Ukraine and the impact on the price of salo, pig fat, a major Ukrainian export. Transnistrians were eating it covered with chocolate, partly as a joke, and partly I think to show how hard they were. I had to try it, just for research purposes. Sweet on the outside and extra salty on the inside, after a moment of chewing it just tasted like raw bacon rind. It was unappetising, but not quite as bad as it sounds.
Larissa spoke English well and was thoughtful, with well-considered views. She said she had no doubt that breaking away from Moldova and keeping ties with Russia was the right decision. She talked optimistically about the future. ‘We are young,’ she said, ‘but there is work here for the people, and you can’t say that about Moldova.’
Then she showed me her Transnistrian passport. It looked more convincing than my Somali diplomatic offering. I asked her who recognised it as a legitimate travel document.
‘We do,’ she said, and she laughed.
‘Does anyone else?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
Transnistrians celebrated their National Independence Day while we visited, an event which bore a striking resemblance to old Soviet May Day parades. Small children in uniforms sang ‘our army is the best army’ with evident pride, and the army goose-stepped along the main road past a platform of officers awarded medals by the kilo. Having always wanted to visit Red Russia, I watched goggle-eyed.
But I also felt sorry for them. Years since they split, the ongoing tension between Moldova and Transnistria ensured both states were economically depressed and continued to suffer.
The President of Transnistria, Igor Smirnov, was happy to explain why independence was so important. ‘It means the protection of all the generations that live here regardless of their nationality,’ he told me. But then, realising that he had set himself up for a tricky follow-up question, he added that there were forty-six different nationalities in Transnistria and begged: ‘Please don’t ask me to list them all.’
There was a party atmosphere in Transnistria the day they celebrated independence. Cafés served great flagons of beer and we ate heartily. The rest of the time Transnistrian cafés were some of the trickiest places to eat on the planet.
Each one had a menu the length of a telephone directory, as if they were listing all the food available on the Eurasian land mass. We would request something, and the waiter would go to the kitchen and ask if it was available. Then they would return, shake their head almost imperceptibly, and say simply in Russian: ‘Nyet.’ I like the people of the former Soviet Union and I missed them during the past few years while I was travelling in the tropics. I missed their hard shells and inner warmth. I missed their culture, their language, their resigned shrugs, and their ability to talk without moving their lips or using facial muscles. But ordering a meal in Transnistria became a right saga. After a couple of requests for meals were rejected we thought it best for the waiter to simply tell us what was available. He went off again, returning five minutes later.
‘Chicken. And potatoes.’
The first time we ate a meal in Transnistria we saw our food being chased around the yard outside. We knew it was fresh but then we waited two hours for it to be served. Cafés in Transnistria, I can say with absolute certainty, are the slowest on Planet Earth. So the next day we tried to ring ahead. Despite assurances to the contrary, nothing was cooked until we arrived, and we waited another hour. The next day Dimitri went ahead to order, pay and browbeat them into cooking, but the chef walked out in a huff. Apparently, it was the custom for everyone to be sitting, waiting,
before anyone would even start boiling water. The long, long waits gave time for repeated karaoke rehearsals of the uplifting Transnistrian anthem. In dark moments I can still hear it rattling around in my head.
Bulgaria and Romania were both waiting to join the European Union when I visited Transnistria. After they entered the bloc in 2007 that put the breakaway state right on the eastern edge of Europe. The EU is supposed to be a gathering of nations committed to improving life for all, but critics say it has failed to adequately press for reform and change in Transnistria and other post-Soviet ‘frozen conflict’ zones.
When I visited, Transnistria was thought to be a haven for smuggling. It certainly had a Wild West feel. Time and again we discovered that a business, stadium, restaurant or factory was run by a single mysterious firm controlled by former Red Army officers who seemed to have bottomless pockets and a penchant for flashy, top-of-the range vehicles.
International investigators claimed they were unsure what was going on, hardly surprising when there were no foreign embassies and few foreigners visiting the extraordinary little state. Rumours and undercover reports suggest it was a major producer of illegal arms, and the border with Ukraine was said to leak like a sieve. We drove to the south-east of Transnistria and I crossed the unguarded border on foot. I could see for myself how easy it would be for smugglers to traffic arms to the Black Sea port of Odessa and from there to anywhere on the planet.
One of the main reasons for making the series was to highlight the risks of leaving unrecognised countries isolated, and Transnistria was a classic example. Guns from Transnistria have turned up in conflicts around the world.
Russia was said to be calling the shots in Transnistria, so we drove north for a few hours and then crept through bushes to try and get shots of a secret Russian military base that was roughly half a mile away.
‘They’ll never see us over here,’ I was blithely saying to Will Daws, who was filming behind the camera, when there was a squeal of tyres, a couple of old Ladas screeched up and four KGB heavies in trench coats jumped out. It was like a scene from a 1950s spy movie.
The KGB had never been disbanded in Transnistria, and we were detained, marched away, and trucked off to cells in the secret police headquarters. Perhaps I had seen too many Cold War thrillers, but I had visions of being held for years and having to write escape plans in blood using my toenails for nibs. We were taken from the cells individually and questioned. Over and over they asked in halting English what we were doing in Transnistria and why we were trying to film the base.
‘Are we being arrested?’ I asked the officer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are being . . .’ he searched for the word, ‘detained.’
The way he said it left me feeling nervous. ‘Arrest’ was a procedure. ‘Detained’ was more open-ended.
Fortunately for the team and me, I’d been gassing away to my guide Larissa about how my family’s solitary claim to fame was a distant link to the man who rebuilt much of London after the Great Fire.
‘Not Sir Christopher Wren?’ Her eyes had lit up.
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘We studied London as a module in Soviet times: Bucking-ham Palace, Regent’s Park, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.’ Larissa was supremely impressed. My local stock had risen dramatically.
Larissa heard we’d been detained and turned up at the KGB headquarters in the middle of the night, literally banging on the door and demanding to see the officer in charge.
‘You cannot arrest these people,’ she wailed at him. ‘One of them is related to the Queen of England. You will bring terrible shame on Transnistria.’
There was a great banging of doors and clanking of keys. We all thought something awful was going to happen. Then a senior KGB officer appeared and apologised for the misunderstanding. ‘Perhaps we can go for a drink to smooth this over,’ he suggested. We were all released into the night and agents gave each of us KGB cap badges as souvenirs.
We left Transnistria in a hurry fearing the KGB would change their minds and seize our tapes. We separated them out between us, hid them in our bags and in our clothing, and left the territory in taxis, buses and cars, just to reduce the risk if one of us was stopped and detained. Again I was disappointed to leave. It was a crazy place, but edgy and fascinating. We escaped with a precious travel experience to share with viewers and I had a tale to bore my son with for years to come.
We headed east, across the Black Sea and Turkey towards the Caucasus, never the most stable part of the world, and Georgia, which had no less than three regions which broke away when the Soviet Union collapsed: Ajaria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the ensuing conflicts thousands were killed and the whole region has suffered ever since.
Yet initially Georgia felt safe and impressive. For a couple of days we set the scene by exploring and filming ancient monasteries, old sulphur baths, trendy new bars in the capital Tbilisi, and ate meals with a population that delighted in drinking endless toasts to family, country, friends and football teams. Georgia gave the world a Golden Fleece and Stalin, who they commemorate with a museum. When our local guide vanished I was able to sit on Stalin’s personal toilet and strike my own small blow against the veneration of a murdering madman. Then we drove back to the capital, and a meeting with the young Georgian President ‘Misha’ Saakashvili, who was trying to re-unify the whole country and drag it into the twenty-first century.
We were waiting for the President in his offices when someone said he was dashing outside to talk to a crowd of demonstrators, so we jumped into the same small lift. He was completely unfazed.
‘Mr President, Simon from the BBC,’ I said.
‘Hi, how are you?’ he responded, in American-accented English.
I asked him what was going on with South Ossetia, the main breakaway state in Georgia. ‘It looks like Russia wants to stir up trouble on the border,’ he said, ‘but we are trying to keep things calm. We don’t need any other bloody clash there.’
I asked him how difficult the situation was at that moment.
‘It’s a very small piece of territory,’ he said, striding out of the lift and across the ground floor of the presidential offices, ‘but it looks like for Russians it’s kind of a Maginot line of defence, but God knows for what interest. There is a chance there will be a clash, but we hope it won’t happen.’
With two bodyguards, wearing obligatory sunglasses, he dived into the crowd and told them he was praying for peace every single night.
Emotions were running high on the border between Georgia and the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which had its own government and army. Just a day before we arrived there fifty Georgian soldiers had been taken captive by South Ossetian forces, who were being trained, backed and encouraged by the might of Russia. We tried to cross into South Ossetia but became trapped in a no-man’s-land by Georgian soldiers who said we were not allowed to go forwards or backwards because of the risk of kidnap or detention by South Ossetian and Russian forces.
Moscow had placed ‘peace-keepers’ along the border. Georgians viewed them as ‘piece-keepers’ – desperately trying to keep the old Soviet Union alive. It was one of President Putin’s early and successful attempts at meddling in a former Soviet state that wanted closer ties to the West.
We were only released from the no-man’s-land when a Russian general, who said his forces were preventing fighting, agreed to chaperone us into the breakaway region. We crossed into South Ossetia, the land of the Ossetes, who told me they speak a different language to Georgians and are determined to remain independent.
President Putin was a hero in Ossetia. His poster was everywhere, looking down on the leafy streets of a tiny territory that seemed stuck in another 1970s Soviet past. Old Lada cars spluttered along on potholed roads, and gaunt, elderly civilians with hollow cheeks sold vegetables from baskets on overgrown pavements. Russia was not gifting them a marvellous alternative to rule by Georgia. The place was desperately po
or.
The Ossetes were hugely suspicious of foreigners, partly because our minder kept telling people I was from London in America. After I explained London was on the edge of Europe, young soldiers shared a drunken birthday toast and vowed to fight and die rather than rejoin Georgia.
‘We will never allow the Georgians to rule us, because throughout Ossetian history they have always tried to push us around,’ said one young soldier, idly twirling a dagger around in his hands. ‘We’ve never submitted to that, and we never will.’
The soldiers were drinking, but they were friendly and engaging, and they invited us to sit with them in an outdoor area behind a restaurant and let us film. I swapped tales from my travels for their stories of life on the front line, and then the youngster offered his dagger as a gift. I refused, but he insisted. I was genuinely touched and gave him my watch in return. I still use his knife as a letter opener.
Even after years of conflict with Georgia, the Ossetes were noticeably edgy. People were scared about the prospect of renewed fighting with Georgia. With some rudimentary Russian I nearly caused a riot in a local fruit market by accidentally insulting a female fruit seller while I was trying to buy some apples. Years of travel should have made me a paragon of diplomatic virtue, the very embodiment of the culturally sensitive adventurer. But my inadequate grasp of languages has repeatedly tripped me up. Sometimes a broad smile has got me out of trouble, and sometimes a rapid exit is the only available option. Employing a translator is no guarantee of social safety. ‘I’m here to grasp your private parts,’ was how an interpreter translated President Jimmy Carter’s opening comment when visiting Poland.
The Ossetian market seller was livid. She was throwing apples at me and shouting to other stall-holders. Someone claimed I had asked if she had a penis. I had to be rescued by our furious Ossetian government minder, and I swore to stick to the most basic local phrases. It was an uncomfortable visit, and we were shadowed everywhere by the secret police.