I wondered how such a costly sports complex could be afforded in a country with an average monthly income of $150, so I asked Lyalyuk where the money came from.
‘Business,’ he replied smoothly with a charming smile, before inviting me to his private dining room for cake and coffee. ‘Or perhaps you’d prefer champagne?’
Sheriff had been founded by Viktor Gushan and Ilya Kazmaly, two former KGB officers who had been Smirnov’s ‘sheriffs’ during the so-called independence war. But unlike Wild West lawmen, these sheriffs’ primary intention had not been to fight crime. As well as the football teams and sports complex, their company had come to own two banks, a chain of petrol stations, the state’s mobile phone network and a couple of radio and television channels, as well as the Mercedes-Benz franchise. Its dozen supermarkets offered a huge selection – fresh mangos and raspberries in the depths of winter, salted Russian salmon, black caviar from the company farm at $1,500 per kilo – despite the moans of local people that they could find nothing affordable on its shelves.
Of course Sheriff wasn’t the only party to have benefited from Transnistria’s non-existence. As Nikoluk had suggested, alcohol, cigarettes and humans had been slipped across its porous borders. So many trailer loads of chicken had been imported duty-free, then smuggled in secret to Ukraine, that on paper every Transnistrian appeared to eat sixty kilos of the meat per year. Profit was also squeezed from the vast Cuciurgan power plant that supplies Transnistria as well as Moldova and much of Odessa. One year after its surprise sale to a Belgian shell company for a knock-down price, the plant was bought by Russia’s state electricity producer RAO UES, netting the managers (some of whom were on the boards of both companies) about $100 million.
Arms traders had also been welcomed in the nowhereland. First, about half of the 40,000 tonnes of ‘decommissioned’ Soviet weapons and ammunition stored near Cobasna – a small town near the Ukrainian border – had turned up in the Balkans, Chechnya and the Congo. Allegations then began to circulate about secret weapons factories that manufactured mines, grenade launchers and parts for Grad missiles (not dissimilar to those fired from the SA-11 Buk that brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17).
To find out more I headed to Bendery, an industrial city that straddles the Dniester. The town’s main employer is Moldavcabel, one of the companies alleged to be a secret weapons maker. Like many of Transnistria’s enterprises, Moldavcabel’s buildings looked grey and rusted, and often appeared to be abandoned, until one noticed the new surveillance cameras and busy employees’ car parks.
‘Here in Bendery we have worked, we are working and we will work,’ Yunis Ragimov assured me when we met in his office. ‘No financial crisis, no currency collapse, no raw-material inflation will stop us.’
Ragimov, fifty-five, was Moldavcabel’s general director. A dynamic and genial man, he had been born in Armenia, educated in Azerbaijan and could crack jokes in five languages.
‘Before we begin let me tell you that I served in Afghanistan,’ he said with mock seriousness. He knew why I had come to Bendery. ‘So be aware that the KGB may be listening to our every word,’ he jested, bringing to mind Stalin’s diktat that gaiety had been the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
His factory had been founded in 1958. At its peak it had employed 2,500 people and supplied the electrical windings for many of the USSR’s small motors: washing machines, television tubes, T-62 battle-tank starter engines. Later it began producing cable conductors for generators.
Ragimov became its director when a St Petersburg conglomerate bought the vast plant for $1.7 million, about the cost of a single Tomahawk cruise missile. He was brought in to slash employee numbers and double productivity.
‘Sevcabel’s acquisition has enabled us to be part of a big family, bringing us access to more markets,’ he said. He had curly black hair, a wide moustache and lashes so dark that his eyes appeared to be rimmed with kohl. ‘Now we need new investment. We’re operating almost at zero revenue, bled white by competition and the lack of recognition. The United States and the EU want to keep us down. They want to weaken us.’ He added, ‘For this reason I am sure Transnistria will be reunified in ten years.’
‘With Moldova?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘With Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.’ He gestured towards the western border. ‘Moldova is our neighbour. If you live in a block of flats and have bad neighbours you can move. We don’t have that option.’
Outside it had begun to snow again, the flakes settling on backs and hats, hiding the horizon beneath a white blanket. An industrial graveyard of disused rail lines and dismembered gantry cranes loomed out of the pallid air. Idle loading areas were knee-deep in pale drifts.
Ragimov took me to see one of the three accessible warehouses. Inside it pot plants drooped around ‘heritage equipment’ that dated from Soviet times. A stout worker tended the machine that had produced the cable for Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power station. At a wooden desk another woman in a pink woolly hat monitored quality control in a cloth-bound ledger. Next door serpents of cable snaked across the floor, around humming machines, beneath a portrait of Lenin.
At Moldavcabel I saw no sign of landmines, missile launchers or Kalashnikov ammunition production lines. Nothing apart from draniki potato pancakes seemed to be hidden in the staff canteen. Nor did I spot any sign of Aerocom or Jet Line, the freight airlines that had landed regularly for ‘technical reasons’ at nearby Tiraspol on their way to Africa. Both carriers had been controlled by Viktor Bout, the enterprising arms smuggler and convicted ‘merchant of death’.
‘You see, we have no secret weapons plant here,’ joked Ragimov.
In recent years other enterprising Transnistrians have been arrested in Chişinău, capital of Moldova, while attempting to flog military items including weapons-grade Uranium-235. Elsewhere, Georgian black-marketeers offered ISIS, for $2.5 million, a couple of kilos of Caesium-137, the isotope of choice for dirty bombs due to its rapid absorption in the lungs. (The jihadists themselves had snatched forty kilograms of low-enriched uranium when they took Mosul University.) And Al-Qaeda once looked into buying fuel cells from dismantled Soviet nuclear submarines on the Kola Peninsula, just up the road from where Sami and I had parted. These are only four of 3,500 incidents of the theft, loss and trafficking of radioactive material since the fall of the Wall, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.[14] Add in a conventional arms trade worth $400 billion per year, with Russia as the world’s second largest weapons producer (and its mafia’s sophisticated smuggling networks), and any intrepid entrepreneur can be part of a sure-fire money-making venture, if untroubled by morality or the sanctity of human life.
22
Fear is a Habit
Beyond the offices of the rich and powerful, fear remains a habit in Transnistria. In dirt-poor Dzerzhinsky, a village named after the founder of the KGB, collective farm workers count their $15 ‘Putin pension’, praise the Kremlin and keep their complaints to themselves. At the Noul Neamț monastery in Chitcani, Abbot Father Pasii lowered his voice to tell me, ‘It will take time to change the old ways of thinking.’ And at Tashlyk Compulsory Educational School, teachers simply follow orders.
Tashlyk is half an hour’s drive north of Tiraspol. Its name means ‘rocky place’ in Turkish, so called by the fifteenth-century settlers whose houses still squat on a low embankment above the Dniester. But the Turks are long gone, along with thousands of other villagers who’ve left to find work in Moscow, Odessa and Verona. Along its muddy main street a thin line of smoke rose from a single chimney. Every other building seemed deserted with windows broken and doors closed by a twist of rusty wire or twine. Two wooden planks, set at right angles to each other, overlooked the river’s flood plain. Once a seat for friends, they too were now unoccupied.
14
As the former CIA director George Tenet observed, ‘In the current market place if you have a hundred million dollars, you can be your own nuclear power.’ A frugal terrorist shopping for Armageddon can put together a dirty bomb for substantially less outlay.