‘Da gde zhe on, tvoyu mat’!’ he shouted, speaking Russian now, abandoning his cowboy affectation. ‘Where is it? Give me some light. What the fuck…?’
In the dark tunnel – or at least along a ledge on its wall – Lev had sensed movement. He had swatted at it, swearing in sudden fear. We heard another splash, a high-pitched hiss and then a tight, terrified figure bowled out of the hole towards us.
‘C’est un chat,’ cried the woman. ‘A cat.’
The cat was a kitten: small, sodden and malnourished. God knows how it had found its way into the ruined tunnel, except through another unknown entrance. The woman swept it up in her arms and howled, perhaps in part because the poor animal stank of sewage.
‘Lev, let’s get out of here,’ I called.
He appeared in the hole, cursing our faint-heartedness, damning our failure to go ‘the last few metres’. He stank too.
I led the way back through the Soviet passageways, following my imaginary line of thread, praying that the torch batteries didn’t give out before we reached the surface. Lev brought up the rear, comforting the others, talking up the adventure, telling us ‘I’m a midnight cowboy’ until we could only laugh.
Outside in the cold blue dawn the air smelt again of burnt toast. We slipped back through the metal hoarding and cut across Moscow Prospect to reach the Ibis. Lev found a taxi to take us back to our hotel. The French couple sank into a corner of its back seat, their arms wrapped around the stinking animal.
I left Kaliningrad later that morning, well aware that pipiska putina still coursed through my veins.
TRANSNISTRIA
21
Back in the USSR
Sunlight sparkled off the broad Dniester River. Smugglers’ tracks wound across the virgin snow. Patriotic oligarchs in Adidas tracksuits hunted wild boar with AK-47s. Snowflakes settled on the broad shoulders of Russian ‘peacekeepers’, guarding yet more old Soviet munitions dumps.
It wasn’t my first trip to Transnistria, a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic of the old Soviet Union. A decade ago I spent a month in the banana-shaped, sliver-thin nowhereland. In its capital, Tiraspol, I’d watched young activists train for ‘spontaneous actions’ at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. I’d met geriatric KGB colonels and retired Red Army generals. I’d drunk coffee with the president’s lover, who also served as the country’s foreign minister. I’d even come to know the fate of the ‘father of the republic’ after he’d bought a couple too many S-Class Mercedes.
‘If you get into trouble, we can’t get you out,’ a British diplomat had warned me at the time. Nevertheless I flew back across the continent to return to a place recognised by no country in the world.
I started as I’d begun my first visit, at 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 chairman Oleg Khorzhan, embracing me like a long-lost brother in arms. Things seemed to be looking up since our last meeting, a new silver Breitling Chronomat sparkling on his wrist. ‘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.’
Since time immemorial (that is, about 200 years) little Transnistria had been part of Greater Russia. But during the Second World War, Stalin had reached west across the Dniester to seize neighbouring Romanian Moldova. He’d tacked it on to Slav Transnistria, creating the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Thousands of retiring Red Army officers then transformed it into a Bolshevik Costa del Sol, building their dachas along its riverbanks, savouring the balmy southern climate and – as old soldiers everywhere – dreaming of further glories.
Their chance came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As the Soviet Union splintered, Western-looking Moldova turned its back on its Slavic side. It declared Romanian to be its official language and joined both NATO’s Partnership for Peace and the Council of Europe. In response the Kremlin stepped in ‘to protect Russian minorities’ on the Dniester’s eastern bank, ensuring that the nostalgic military men (and a few wily oligarchs) could retain their links with Moscow.
‘In the upheaval, I saw ordinary civilians shot on the Dubăsari Bridge,’ Khorzhan told me with feeling, naming the river crossing where three ‘rebel’ Transnistrians had been killed by Moldovan troops, thereby inflaming the so-called War of Independence. ‘I was fourteen years old at the time. I saw how nationalistic feeling was being cultivated in Moldova, and how Moldovans turned against their brothers. 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 to the breakaway territory, hoping that party membership would wipe away his real sense of rootlessness. In those tumultuous days he didn’t dwell on communism’s flaws or fragility. 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 socialist republics united in fraternal brotherhood. Since the Union’s dissolution, splintered parts – like Transnistria, and Kaliningrad – have been used to jab the West.
‘People with such strong historical and economic connections are meant to live together for eternity,’ he declared, striking his chest with his fist, condemning the ‘nonsense of the fascists in Ukraine’ (that is, democratic protesters). He added, ‘I rejoice in President Putin’s desire to unite Russian soil.’
Then, not for the last time, he began to wax lyrical about the Russian soul. ‘As a Westerner you will not understand the importance of the land, of the soul to us. 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 unfolded his podgy fingers and rose from both his soliloquy and his melamine desk to open a cupboard. With great ceremony, he presented me with 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 also gave me a party pen, noting with pride, ‘It’s made in Germany.’
His passion struck me, as did his commitment to a political fiction, and it brought on a potent sense of unreality. It wasn’t simply a reaction to his incoherent doublethink, although that was part of it, rather it was an awareness of the seductiveness of nonsense over verifiable truth.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘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 explained, emotion rising in his voice as he mingled Marxist–Leninism with anti-globalisation Newspeak. ‘Soviet leaders understood the importance of selflessness,’ he shouted, spit flying in my face. ‘Did Stalin lead an independent Georgia or the united Soviet Union? Was Nikita Khrushchev a Ukrainian politician or a great Soviet leader?’