Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  “Is that Bashkirov’s base?” I asked

  “Yes, and 70 percent of the servicemen on the base just swore the oath of allegiance to Ukraine,” she said. “This is serious stuff. It’s the first strategic forces division to swear allegiance.”

  I had been surprised, like so many other people, when news first broke that Bashkirov, a major general in command of the Ukrainian Uzyn base, had disobeyed an order from Moscow to land his plane in Russia and instead flew back to his base in Ukraine. When Bashkirov arrived safely in Uzyn, he swore an oath of loyalty to Ukraine and now nearly his whole base stood behind him. We all wondered if Russia would retaliate. There had already been so much tension between Russia and Ukraine over who would control the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea and now, this. Of course I wanted to go. It would be an opportunity to assess whether Russia and Ukraine might actually go to war over division of their military assets and their states.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get my car and pick you up in an hour.”

  On the way to the stoyanka, I remembered one problem. My headlights had burned out and I had not been able to find replacement bulbs. If only Evgenyi left those as presents instead of dried-up fish. When I returned to pick up Mary, others stood with her on the sidewalk—Toronto Marta, Stephen and Sasha, who interpreted for Stephen and me.

  “We’re all going,” Mary said cheerfully. As everyone squeezed in and buckled up, I mentioned the problem with my headlights.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be back long before dark,” Mary said.

  When we arrived at the base, Mary spoke to the guard and mentioned the name of the general who was supposed to have called with permission for us to visit. The guard raised the barrier and waved us through. There could be no better sign. We had entered a nuclear bomber base, a place strictly off limits weeks ago. I saw planes in the distance and tried to move closer. Before I got far, a minder appeared. Once in the main building, he shooed us down a corridor and into a room.

  “Please wait here,” our minder said. He locked the door behind him. We waited patiently. Our trip was spontaneous. Base personnel must need time to find us a guide.

  One hour passed, then a second hour. Stephen tried the door.

  “Still locked,” he said.

  “Do you think we’re under arrest, or detention?” I asked. We waited longer. Another hour passed. Stephen and I practised our Ukrainian. Sasha, ever dapper and patient, coached us.

  Every half-hour or so our minder, a lieutenant colonel, kept appearing with new excuses as to why we should remain locked in the room. He told us at different times that Major General Bashkirov was not on the base, then that he was on the base but could not meet us, and finally, that he had left.

  “Pictures?” Toronto Marta suggested. “At least we can record our trip.” We perched on a windowsill and posed. Then we waited quietly as more time passed. I thought of Vadym. In his case, just like this one, we sensed there was something important to discover just beyond our reach but we were so easily shut out.

  Evening fell. Eventually our minder came back again.

  “I have to go the bathroom,” Marta said to him. He unlocked the door and allowed her out. Within seconds she came racing back.

  “Bashkirov, he’s here,” she shouted. We ran out of the room and down the hallway toward a group of military men a short distance away. The general was polite. We asked questions, but he provided no answers of real news value. Then we were escorted off the base.

  It was dark now. With no headlights, I drove slowly down a pitch-black country highway. I could not see where the road ended and the ditch began. Mary hung out the passenger window, trying to prevent me from driving off the road.

  “Left,” she shouted. “Left again.” Eventually we flagged down a truck and paid the driver to go slowly so we could piggyback on his tail lights.

  When I arrived home, tired from the strain of the drive, I listened to the messages on my answering machine. Mr. Smith had called again. He’d already tried a few times. I did not want to speak to him. More days passed. My conscience nagged. Eventually I returned his call. We met at his hotel. I sat in the same armchair as before.

  “Vadym investigated the telecommunications deal,” he said. I felt a shiver of alarm, but only a shiver. So many rumours surrounded Vadym’s death already. I did not know what to believe.

  “I’m sure they killed him because of this and you need to be careful,” Mr. Smith said. “I saw Vadym not long before he died. He told me that he had all the evidence and would publicize the facts.”

  I left the hotel more confused than ever, unnerved, a little ashamed too. Vadym followed up on Mr. Smith’s story while I merely toyed with it and uncovered little of substance. A better journalist would find proof that either substantiated Mr. Smith’s claim or disproved it – would add one more piece of evidence to Vadym’s case or eliminate one rumoured reason for his death. I did neither.

  Around this time, I received a call from the procurator’s office. The office wanted to interview me as part of an investigation into Vadym’s case. My bitter feelings had subsided; I felt hopeful now.

  On the day of the appointment, I walked up to the procurator’s office and told the authorities all that I knew. I gave a statement but received little information in exchange. In fact, I left with the impression that no investigation would ensue. I felt a wave of paranoia as I had during my early days in Kiev and wondered if the purpose of the interview was simply to ensure that I did not know too much, which I did not. That sense of unease intensified on my walk home. I understood so little of what really occurred in Ukraine. The best we could hope for with Vadym’s case, I thought, was that someday someone would feel the need to confess.

  8

  MOLDOVA

  “Susie bear, do you have a funnel?” Bill asked. We stood in March sunshine on the road outside his apartment, just around the corner from mine.

  I did. I also had several extra canisters for gasoline. Bill and I had phoned our gasoline contacts (I now purchased mine from the trunk of a local taxi driver) and pooled our resources. We knew that it would be hard to find fuel along the way, so we carried enough with us for our return trip. We were going to Moldova, which bordered Ukraine. I thought of Moldova as my turf. I had been there before, staked a claim, and would now return to cover a story that I considered mine.

  “I hope we see a big hairy Cossack,” Bill said.

  “I’m sure we will. I read that at least 150 are already there,” I replied. “A lot of the Russian Cossacks seem to be Afghan vets.”

  “It’s Cossacks and Transdniestrians against the Moldovans. I guess the Russian army based in Trans-Dniester will be the deciding factor,” Bill said. We discussed possible outcomes for this conflict in Moldova that pitted ethnic Russians in Trans-Dniester (a region of Moldova) against the Moldovan majority. The two sides were separated by a river, the Dniester. Reports that Russian Cossacks had snuck into Moldova to support the Transdniestrians intrigued us.

  “Last time I was there, the Transdniestrians thought the Moldovans were getting ready to unite with Romania,” I said. “They called the Moldovans Romanians.” Distracted, Bill said, “just a sec.” He rushed into his apartment.

  “We’d better bring this,” he insisted as he came running back out. He waved a long, floppy rubber tube, a siphon.

  “Oh no,” I groaned. Whoever used the siphon would end up with a mouthful of gas.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll do it if we need to,” Bill said.

  We packed vodka – no better currency for barter – and some food, but canisters of gasoline took up most of the room in the trunk. I thought briefly about the possibility that if rear-ended, we might blow up like a bomb on four wheels. Once we had finished loading the car, we set off. We travelled southwest toward the Moldovan border. I enjoyed the company, the scenery and the sense of freedom I always felt on long trips by car. I did not enjoy the road conditions, especially once we veered off the main highway and travelled along incr
easingly potholed tracks that could barely be called roads.

  “I wanted to be a race car driver,” Bill shouted as he zigzagged at top speed past potholes, several of which were large enough to swallow us and the car. The odd time he accidentally dipped into one, my teeth clacked and my body banged against the door. I wondered if my Lada would shed parts along the way. We reached the Moldovan border and sailed through on our final leg of the trip to Tiraspol, the capital of Transdniestria.

  “Look up there. What’s he got on?” Bill asked as we approached a driving school just outside Tiraspol. I looked at a man who stood by the school. He wore a faded military jacket that was different from any I’d seen before and baggy pantaloons. He held a long whip.

  “That must be a Cossack,” said Bill, excited now. He pulled into the school parking lot. Once inside the building, we realized the Cossacks had turned the school into their headquarters.

  A busy barber was cutting men’s hair in the hallway. I stopped in front of a small shrine set up in memory of a twenty-one-year-old Russian Cossack, who had recently been killed. His black and white photograph formed the centrepiece. A black funeral sash was stretched diagonally across the frame. This Cossack looked too robust and young for death. I wondered what had motivated him to come here and risk dying so far away from home.

  I moved away from the shrine, struck by the raucous force of life that permeated other parts of the headquarters. Most Cossacks, shaggy-headed and needing a trim, lounged around and opened beer bottles with the bayonets on the end of their rifles. Several taped syringes to their rifles and stuffed their pockets with bandages so that they would have first aid supplies at hand if they were wounded.

  A large man in a mismatched uniform approached me. He said that he came from Irkutsk. Siberia was so far away.

  “Why are you here?” I asked him.

  “To defend our brother Slavs. They’re under attack. We’ll protect them,” he said.

  “But we’re not in Russia. This is Moldova,” I said.

  “These are our people and this is our land. They won’t take it from us,” he angrily insisted. I pointed to the shrine set up for the young Cossack and asked how he had died.

  “We had no guns when we arrived,” the Siberian Cossack said. “We armed ourselves with planks of wood.” I thought of the square in Grozny where men without guns had done the same. I felt disturbed that an item I associated with carpentry, maybe a board for a bookshelf, could so easily become a weapon.

  “We captured guns from the Moldovans,” the Siberian Cossack explained. “The Transdniestrians gave us more.” I asked if by Transdniestrians he meant the Russian army stationed here but could extract no information from him on this point. Officially, the army remained neutral.

  I felt insecure in this driving school turned Cossack headquarters. The disorderliness that bordered on chaos unnerved me, as did the abundance of weapons and alcohol. I did not think that vodka, beer and guns should ever mix.

  I went to find Bill. I wanted to leave. He spoke with Mikhail, the Cossack whom we had seen standing outside.

  “Don’t worry,” Mikhail said. “Any Cossack who shows up drunk for battle gets ten lashes from this,” he said and cracked his whip. Bill finished the interview. Then we left and drove into Tiraspol. We saw Lenin statues and hammers and sickles everywhere.

  “It’s a Soviet theme park,” Bill said. “Didn’t anyone tell them the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore?” I felt a pang of nostalgia as we approached Parliament. A tall red granite statue of Lenin still stood on a plinth in front of the building.

  “Doesn’t that remind you of the Lenin in October Revolution Square?”

  “Kiev’s is way bigger. I researched it for a feature. Kiev’s Lenin weighs a thousand tons. City councillors thought they might blow it up but found out that the monument was connected to the subway station below,” Bill told me. “They also considered firing acid pellets to dissolve it.

  “Seriously?” Bill nodded.

  I lived close by what had been October Revolution Square and was now Independence Square. Workers had chipped away at Lenin with pneumatic drills for months. They had also dismantled metal figures at his base. A crane poked up from beside the base. Some nights sparks had cascaded down the front of the monument, orange fireflies against an indigo sky, as workers sawed Lenin and his comrades apart. One by one, they were carted away.

  We stopped at Igor Smirnov’s office. I’d been there before when he was a Communist official in the Soviet Union. Now Transdniestrians considered him their president. No one in the office would acknowledge Moldovan independence, Moscow loyalties were still strong. Lenin’s portrait hung on the walls. Most rooms were still festooned with Soviet symbols.

  “I’m not sure if this is possible, but I think it’s even more Soviet in there than before,” I said to Bill as we left.

  “I sense Russia is trying to make this place one of their outposts. Maybe Russians are reconciled to losing the rest of Moldova but want Trans-Dniester as a military base on the Western Front,” he said.

  “And they’re getting the Cossacks to fight and die for them,” I added. “Not that they need much encouragement. Did you hear Mikhail say, ‘This is our holy land,’ just before we left?” Bill nodded that he had.

  We took a bridge over the Dniester River and drove to Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, for interviews on the other side. I looked forward to checking into our hotel after such a long day. As I lay on my bed and flipped through my notes, I heard people in the hallway who spoke with English accents. I stepped out of my room and met three English journalists in the corridor. Two were based in Romania. The third, a pretty young woman with long blonde hair, fine features and the voice of a British royal, was their friend who was visiting from England.

  “Charlotte,” she said by way of introduction. “Have you met the Cossacks yet?”

  “Yes, we’ve just spent the afternoon with them. Have you been here long?”

  I really wanted to ask, Why are you here? Don’t you know that stories in former Soviet republics belong to journalists based in the former Soviet Union? But I minded my manners and kept my mouth shut.

  “Just arrived,” Charlotte replied. “I’m working on a feature now. A lot of these Cossacks trace their history back to the sixteenth century, to the Don Cossack state. They defended Russia from Mongol and Tatar raids.” I felt embarrassed that she had better information than me. The Siberian Cossack I interviewed told me that he had inherited his uniform, but I hadn’t probed him on his family history. Charlotte clearly had.

  Bill came into the corridor to discuss dinner plans.

  “You’re already dressed for it I see,” Bill noted and complimented Charlotte on her skirt.

  “These are my work clothes.” Charlotte said. “Think of the British Empire. Skirts were good enough for women explorers back then, so why not now?” I stared down at my wrinkled shirt and black jeans. She had made an interesting point. I liked Charlotte and set aside territorial concerns. I learned more about Charlotte that night over dinner. She had worked for the Daily Mail but now studied at Oxford and was in Moldova on holiday before returning to Oxford to write her final exams.

  The next day Charlotte, a male companion and I decided to return to Tiraspol for more interviews. When we reached the bridge over the Dniester River that Bill and I had crossed freely by car, we saw a barricade and checkpoints – a low wall of concrete blocks guarded by eight soldiers with automatic rifles. We pulled over and approached the soldiers on foot.

  “May we cross?” I asked one.

  “Papers,” he said. We handed the soldiers our accreditation papers and waited. He examined each stamp carefully. “We can’t guarantee how they’ll respond,” the soldier said as he gestured at the checkpoint on the opposite end of the bridge. “You should walk. They might shoot at a car.” We passed through the checkpoint and stepped onto the bridge. Charlotte and I led the way. Our male companion walked behind us.

  “A so
ldier won’t fire at women,” he said. I hoped the sentries on the other side weren’t drunken Cossacks. As we approached the mid-point of the bridge, I could see that one was watching us through his field glasses. I felt exposed and vulnerable.

  I thought of a trip I had made with Sallie from Hungary to Romania just after the Romanian revolution in January 1990. Curfew rules forbade road traffic after dark. We misjudged the time and raced back at dusk. A light swayed ahead on the road. We thought it was a lantern on a donkey cart. We realized our mistake as we flew past a guard at a checkpoint. He waved a flashlight. Sallie, who drove, slammed on the brakes. She reversed. The guard had already raised his gun.

  “I would have shot you if you hadn’t stopped,” he shouted. We made peace with leftover gifts that we carried – cigarettes from Sallie, Coca-Cola from me.

  As we walked slowly across the bridge, I thought it must be so easy to be killed by accident in war. This time I watched carefully for gestures made by the sentry, especially any sign that he might raise his gun.

  When we actually heard gunshot, Charlotte reacted, not me. We were interviewing a Transdniestrian official in his Tiraspol office. Nothing bad had happened in Grozny, so I paid no attention to the pop of a gun in the street. Charlotte, who knew better, ducked to the floor.

  “Ours,” the official said. We finished the interview and crossed back over the bridge that divided “us” from “them.”

  It had been three months since the Soviet Union had officially dissolved. Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and the other Soviet republics were all independent, but people still probed boundaries. The Chechens and Transdniestrians went the furthest. Chechnya tried to secede from Russia and Trans-Dniester wanted to break away from Moldova. Friends and I tested borders too. We travelled as far and as quickly as possible. The Soviet visa regime no longer existed. We suspected that newly independent states would soon enforce their own rules, but there was flexibility for now. I invited Charlotte to join friends and me on a trip to Central Asia.