“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 soldier 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.
“I don’t have visas for any of those countries,” she said.
“Well, let’s just see what happens,” I replied.
I bought Charlotte a ticket to Uzbekistan with no request from the agent to see a visa. Booking into Central Asian hotels was just as easy. Woohooo! That’s what I felt as we journeyed thousands of miles across several time zones for mere dollars and with no trouble. I had never felt so free. When we arrived back in Kiev, Charlotte did not want to leave but had to return home for university exams. She would travel to Bucharest (via Chisinau), where she would catch her flight for London. We discussed her travel plans in my kitchen.
“I’ll accompany you as far as Chisinau,” I told her.
“Really,” she shouted from the top of a stepladder. “That would be lovely.” She wore a brightly coloured stripy silk nightgown and draped reams of the same material over curtain rods mounted over the balcony door. The material was a souvenir from our Central Asia trip.
“Much better,” she said as she climbed down the ladder and eyed her makeshift drapes. I no longer thought of Charlotte as competition from Romania. She was one of us and I wanted to help her get home to England.