As I wrestled with the subtleties of his argument, he puckered his lips and calmed himself to recall how after Transnistria’s War of Independence – which had claimed to be preserving communism – the communists had been elbowed out of power.
‘They stole our property,’ he grumbled, a frown now troubling his boyish looks. ‘My comrades and I were arrested for organising a meeting and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. But communist parties from around the world – even from Great Britain – sent telegrams of support and the sentence was commuted.’
The Communist Party’s office had once occupied the biggest building in the land. Every state employee had been a party member. Marxism–Leninism had been the most powerful ideological weapon in the struggle against imperialism. But now Khorzhan’s HQ had been relocated at the end of an alley.
‘It wasn’t fair,’ he sighed.
Nonetheless since his release from prison (he was locked up for only thirty-six hours), he and the authorities had found a way to work together, to square fantasy and reality if you like, or so it seemed judging from his weight gain (and new watch).
‘We modern communists have left behind the old stereotypes,’ he told me. ‘We have accepted the market economy and the ownership of private property. At the same time, we have kept our historical symbols alive. Lenin still stands in most of our town squares. Tiraspol’s main street is named after the October Revolution.’
In the years since my first visit communism had remained ‘the pride and future’, he assured me. He called it ‘the glue of the people’. The hammer and sickle still ‘rose like the sun in the republic’s crest and flag’.
‘These symbols enable us to respect history, and to avoid repeating errors, and so will help our Motherland to find its way towards the future.’
With those stirring words the last communist deputy in the last Supreme Soviet smiled sweetly, offered me his plump hand, then opened the door to usher me back into the real world.
In truth, Transnistria was no joke. On the cold next morning, snow flurries danced in the air, caught the slipstream of a shivering trolley bus, whipped into the faces of the flat-capped men towing wooden carts towards the market. At a bus stop thick-set commuters waited in battle fatigues. Young women, their faces haloed in deep, fur-lined hoods, stamped the winter out of their high-heeled boots. The ancient trolley shuddered to a halt, its contacts sparking and crackling on the iced overhead wires. The driver swung down from his cab, hoisted himself up onto the roof and – with raw hands soon blackened with grease – hacked the ice off the contacts with a broken bayonet. He eased the arms back onto the lines, ignored the passengers and continued on his way, past babushkas selling tangerines frozen as hard as orange rocks and billboards celebrating the victory of the latest president. Beyond the billboards a graphite Porsche with tinted windscreen jumped the traffic lights. Two militiamen – there are no police in Transnistria – looked the other way.
On that bitter morning Vladimir Nikoluk wasn’t working. It was his fifty-eighth birthday and he and his pretty, petite third wife, Alexandra, had invited me to join the celebrations.
‘Welcome, comrade,’ Nikoluk roared, pouring tumblers of Ukrainian Khlebnaya Sleza. On the tongue the cool, clean vodka tasted of freshly baked white bread. ‘In my house your glass will never be empty.’
News of my return had spread quickly among Tiraspol’s in-crowd. As the daft dreamland had lost half its population in a decade, even the most popular host was hard-pressed to find fresh blood for parties, or so I guessed from the number of invitations on my voicemail.
Nikoluk was a big, generous man with salt-and-pepper goatee beard, fist-flattened nose and immense hands. He called himself a ‘maximalist’: buying the best food, cooking the largest quantities, snatching the most beautiful women in the country (and – when necessary – marrying them). ‘No one calls me a minimalist,’ he warned in a voice loud enough to shake snow off the roof. He was an engineer, head of the Union of Builders, and surely the least cautious man in Transnistria.
In an icy parking lot, he loaded an oil drum barbecue with charcoal and set it alight with a blowtorch.
‘We will eat kostitza,’ he declared, flourishing two platters of home-cured pork cut as thick as his thumbs. When he threw them on the grill one could almost hear the pig squeal. ‘No T-bone steak ever tasted as good.’
Nikoluk was born near the source of the Dniester in the western Ukraine. The region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the First World War, then Polish until the start of the Second, then German, Soviet and finally an independent state. Despite the changes, its people had retained characteristic Polish (and German) industriousness. At technical college in Lviv, Nikoluk and his classmates were taught that they would become the best engineers in the USSR.
‘“You are the leaders, the Jews of the Jews,”[13] they told us. “Nothing can stand in your way.” That wasn’t the usual communist approach,’ he assured me, rubbing the last lustre off the old Soviet archetypes.
On graduation Nikoluk had been posted downriver in Soviet Moldova. The young crane mechanic liked the republic with its southern women and heady local wine. At the first Builders’ Day festival he drank too much of it and told the factory boss that he’d take his job within two years. And he did.
‘Success was the religion of the Lviv Technical Institute,’ he said, lighting a Cuban cigar. As its smoke mingled with the aroma of scorched meat he added, ‘I buy them on the Uruguayan market. They are cheaper that way.’
In 1990 Nikoluk directed similar ambition into the War of Independence, becoming vice-director of the Strike Committee for an Independent Transnistria.
‘In Moldova people chanted “Moldova for ethnic Moldovans” and called me an incomer,’ he recalled, refilling my glass, lobbing the first empty bottle into the snow. ‘Where could I go? I joined the comrades who wanted to maintain links with Russia. I rang Gorbachev himself and met Deputy Premier Ryzhkov. I told them, “The Soviet Union is falling apart.” They assured me that it would never happen. But it did.’
He sucked on his cigar.
‘For the next half a year I wore a flak jacket. I carried a gun. I had my special missions. I fought to preserve our Motherland.’
As Nikoluk raised his glass to Motherlands, his wife Alexandra emerged from their ground-floor apartment, tottering on her heels between the snowdrifts, carrying plates of pickled watermelon and salo, salt-cured slabs of fatback pork. Nikoluk wiped away his tears to fetch a steaming jug of ukha fish broth, concocted from freshwater perch and vodka and reputed to prevent hangovers (it didn’t).
Behind them the patched, five-storey block was criss-crossed by gas and drain pipes, its balconies boxed in and curtained against the cold. At an upper window a housewife had broken off from her morning chores. She leaned out of her window to smoke a cigarette, tapping the ash onto the frozen garden below.
‘Vodka is best drunk in threes,’ cheered Nikoluk, turning back to me as he cracked open another bottle. ‘If you drink alone, you are an alcoholic. If two people drink, a man and a woman for example, they are interested in something else. But with three drinkers, you have the perfect number of companions.’ He refilled the glasses and added, ‘Try the blood sausage.’
With independence Nikoluk became a big fish in a very small pond. He grasped the chance to rebuild Transnistria’s war-damaged infrastructure, winning the contracts to repair the Dniester bridges. He went on to supply the steel for all of the republic’s petrol stations.
13
Meaning hard-working and ambitious; a paradox, as the Jews of Lviv – which until 1939 had been a city of ‘blurred borders’ and clashing colours, the ‘red-white, blue-yellow and a touch of black-gold’ of Poland, Ukraine and Austria, according to the writer Joseph Roth – were wiped out in the war.