Monday, July 31, 2006: Sovetskaya

by Ştefan Cândea and Sorin Ozon, RCJI

Camouflage uniforms and black windows. Sovietic symbols, tanks and Western limousines. We pass populated oases, across some waste land. In between towns, we drive at 100 an hour without seeing other cars, throughout sceneries resembling the ones of Arizona. We are watching a black-and-white film set, Mad Max is the first to come to mind. And still, we are not part of an SF apocalyptic movie, and what is all around us is not a movie set. It is Transnistria outside Tiraspol, behind the propaganda posters and the old Sovietic life style. There are few things standing, land that nobody works, abandoned buildings and very few people. Part of the region we are talking about is described by the Tiraspol propaganda as the “Transnistrian Switzerland”, in a book of maps issued into English by the president.

Down to Earth

After discussing about the ones benefiting from the situation existing on the left side of the Nistru, we shall linger a bit over the ones who basically have to endure all the consequences of the conflict. The citizens of the inexistent country can travel only within the CSI territory with their Transnistrian country. They are affected mostly by the lack of interest on the part of the international community than by the few sanctions which target the Transnistrian elite. They are the ones affected by the rationalized electrical power, the trolleys that don’t work but “thanks to Gazprombank”, the chaotic social security services, the centers of contagion in prisons, the pollution and the ecological disasters which are of no interest to anyone. All this happens under the careful supervision of an oppressive regime and a complex telling in network.

Leonid

During the Sovietic Era, the Transnistrian region was a terminus point for numerous army officers’ career who had previously served in other further parts of the Soviet Union. As a compensation for having served in isolated regions and under severe climatic environment, they could have retired quietly in the South Eastern part of the union, anywhere outside big cities and republic capitals. Most of them chose Tiraspol and the neighboring area for the mild weather, geographic position, and especially because of a very strong policy of russifying the area. This is the main reason why the larger part of the population is made up of retired or still working army officers. The main employers in the region are the production units of Kvint, Tirotex and MMZ, which assure 60% of the country’s public budget. This means that people living outside the capital and the town of Râbniţa are unemployed. Most of them chose to leave, which lead to a 20% decrease of the population in the last 4 years. An old man living near the Ukrainian border and still wearing his military coat tells us that “This capitalism has brought the mafia along! I am happy with my pension, I don’t know what I would have done if I had been young!” The pension he is talking about is around 50 dollars.

Traveling by Limousine around Transnistria

Sovetskaya - In fata blocului

We began wandering around Transnistria by a car we rented in the republic. The only car we could find near the railway station was an old Mercedes, almost 30 years old, the limousine type and with almost 1 million kilometers on board. Leonid, our driver, speaks “Moldavian”. He is the typical representative of a Transnistrian family: his sister lives in the Ukraine, his brother lives in Moldova, his son studies in Moscow and his daughter is a student in Chisinau. “They make politics, they fight wars and they do business on our backs. I am Moldavian, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to fight my brothers?” asks Leonid himself rhetorically. “We made 6 referendums, but all in vain. They must find a solution. Union is impossible, if we united, the armies and the police forces would have to unite as well, and people would be left without a job” The German limousine takes us 140 kilometers an hour over pits and hollows in the road to Râbniţa. Relaxing in the chairs that had been probably used by some diplomats in the past, we were watching unreal sceneries. Leonid is pretty nervous when he sees us taking pictures, but our cover relaxes him as long as we don’t get off in some town: we are just some eccentric tourists.

Sovetskaya

The limo gets us to destination, and the driver waits for us in the car, because the road to Sovetskaya is inaccessible. Sovetskaya, the neighborhood of a former Sovietic farm, lies upward the village of Ploti, near the Ukrainian border. It is a gathering of 4 floor apartment buildings, garages turned into fodder storage places or hen coops; it is a very strange place, situated on the top of a hill. The area is surrounded by plains and forests. The roads were laid with asphalt 50 years ago, but the access from Ploti can be made through the woods, on a road where only the carriages can drive on. The place is even weirder, since the larger village lying in the valley has no apartment buildings, nor asphalted streets. We have never seen a more sinister place. Our Ukrainian colleague corrects us “I have seen more sinister places, in the villages that had been evacuated around Cernobal.” The village seems not to be inhabited, the only shop is closed and the townhouse and the police show no activity whatsoever. A woman is hanging clothes to dry on a rope in front of an apartment building. She tells us that everybody is at work on the field, while children are still in school. In the back of the apartment building we can spot insulin syringes, which means heroin got even in this god forgotten place.

The school, a pretty large building, is occupied only by a handful of students. The rest of the families left the region. “All young people go to Russia nowadays, they have no chance here. No one works the land; they wouldn’t have anything to work it with. There are only 3 tractors left here out of 30 as they used to be. The rest went to Râbniţa to be melted” says an old man. One of his neighbors gets into the discussion and tells us that he is managing to survive, even if he has no pension whatsoever. “We carry people or goods to Moldova or to the Ukraine.” The village is indeed placed near the road crossing the Northern part of Transnistria from the Ukraine and towards Chisinau. Smuggling is active in the region.

Strict Control

Sovetskaya - La scoala

For half a day, we took some pictures and we walked around Sovetskaya and the village of Ploti, without having anyone asking us what we were doing there. The secret service is merged in towns where military production units are. Poor villages are of no interest to anyone, not even to the secret service. In Tiraspol things are different. Local people are looking at us suspiciously, even when we ask in Russian about addresses. Moreover, in Tiraspol we were asked to identify ourselves several times by the police, and we were asked about the purpose of our visit and about the visa. Still, foreigners are not that rare in Tiraspol. In all bars in Chisinau we could hear discussions between German and Italian tourists, who were bragging about the quality of night clubs from Tiraspol and from Bender, and of the different services available there. Prostitution, especially among under aged, and drugs, attract the ones passionate about strong sensations. The clients are Western tourists for whom prices on the local market are real bargains.

Snow Ball

Tiraspol

The first tavern we went to in Tiraspol, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, was called “Snow Ball”. Even the little sugar bags for coffee were imported from Italy; local production seemed not to exist. The speakers played Californication, people were walking quietly in the streets – for an instant we forgot where we were. And still, the tavern was empty. Very few people could afford to go to a bar. The restaurants where we went were empty any time of the day, and you could hardly see other tables taken at lunch time. The menu was poor and most of the things mentioned there were not available. Strangely enough, even if the Nistru were near by, there were no fish dishes in any menu.

Fara poze!

In on of the restaurants downtown Tiraspol, a few families were celebrating gathered around one table. It was obvious that the party people didn’t come often to a restaurant. Even if it was lunch time, the main dish was made up of several bottles of vodka. You could watch on the TV some rap hits from Belarus – “Gangsta Rap”. A shaved head well built guy, full of tattoos, was singing about life in prison. The couples at the table stood up and started dancing embraced, as for a slow blues song, with no relation whatsoever to the rhythmic songs shouting out the speakers.

The project "Transdniester - Revealing Europe's black hole" is an investigation of CRJI, financed by SCOOP in Danemark and SAS in Switzerland. The participants in this project are the following journalists: Vitalie Calugareanu (Chisinau), Vlad Lavrov (Kiev), Igor Boldyrev (Odessa), Alexander Bratersky (Moscova) and foto Robert Ghement.