On the hill above stands the school. Its water is drawn from a well, not the mains. An outside toilet block serves its 357 students and 43 teachers. Work stopped on its canteen building two decades ago. The reason for its poverty is not hard to understand despite Tashlyk being represented in the Supreme Soviet by Sheriff’s co-founder Ilya Kazmaly, the republic’s richest man.
‘We teach by the National Education Plan as prescribed by the Ministry: maths, history, science and languages,’ explained the school’s headmistress, who had gathered her fellow teachers in the staff room to meet me. ‘We work as prescribed, as ordered. If we disagree with the curriculum what, in truth, can we do about it? We hope for radical change in the system.’
‘Change?’ I said, wondering who were the true heroes – and victims – in Transnistria. ‘Look around you. You don’t have running water or a canteen.’
The staff stayed silent.
‘What about history?’ I asked them. ‘How do you teach your… glorious history?’
‘Please bear in mind that this is a Moldovan school, and the majority of people in Tashlyk are Moldovan. So we are in the minority in Transnistria,’ said another teacher, who also asked not to be named. ‘We use Soviet-era textbooks translated into Moldovan which, for example, talk about the Great 1917 Russian Revolution. I try to update them by presenting another point of view, moving from the old utopian ideals to so-called developed socialism. But I have no material for this, only my own experience.’
‘And Stalin?’ I questioned.
‘The accepted view is that Joseph Stalin brought Soviet victory in the Second World War. Our textbooks – or “manuals” – do not mention the deportations, the gulags, the loss of the brightest minds.’ She took a deep breath, her voice full of emotion. ‘I am only entitled to teach the unilateral presentation of the historical process.’ She paused to consider her words. ‘Anyway, I know most children will move away from Tashlyk after graduation.’
In the newest Russian-language history textbook, commissioned by Putin himself, Russia’s tsars and communist leaders alike are presented as ‘enlightened autocrats’. Stalin’s famines, purges and mass deportations are explained away as the ‘unavoidable cost of modernisation’.
In a classroom, students worked in pairs at pale blue desks beneath the words ‘Science is the torch of truth’. Most girls wore their hair long, plaited or secured with plastic clips and simple bows. Many hung silver crosses around their necks. The boys sported white shirts without logos or branding. Their heroes were footballers and actors: Ronaldo, Andrey Arshavin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Vladimir, aged fourteen, told me that when he grew up he wanted to be a businessman ‘selling clothes and furniture’. The girls dreamed of being lawyers, designers or – in one case – a police officer.
‘I want to join the police when I graduate,’ said fifteen-year-old Varvara.
‘But there is only a militia in Transnistria.’
‘In Russia,’ she replied, as if it was obvious. ‘This is my home but what could I do here? There is no work. I have to go away.’
Non-stop emigration had reduced Tashlyk to a small community of children and babushkas. Most of these pupils lived either with their grandparents or alone in the family house, the neighbours keeping a watch on them while their parents laboured abroad. Even the headmistress’s husband had moved to Moscow, in 1995. ‘We don’t know where all the time has gone,’ she told me.
‘You know, this is like a village school. The children are by nature accepting and patient. Few of them are rebellious.’
‘And you?’ I asked the teachers. ‘Why haven’t you moved away?’
‘I’ve been trying for the last twenty years,’ answered their soft-spoken colleague. ‘I’m still trying.’
I felt a pang of despair for the failing village and its forgotten people. Beyond the school’s dirt playground, the fields that had once belonged to the collective farm lay fallow, and neat ranks of beech trees marched alongside the Dniester, tilting towards the setting sun.
In the decade since my first visit it wasn’t only teachers and students who had moved abroad. Back then I’d met Nina Shtanski, the newly appointed foreign minister under the newly elected President Yevgeny Shevchuk. Within hours of Shevchuk’s victory, dozens of craggy bureaucrats and hoary nomenklatura had been replaced by ‘Shev’s chicks’. His new Minister of Justice Maria Melnik had just marked her thirtieth birthday. Alena Shulga, Minister for Economic Development, was then thirty-two. Both the new Minister of Health and the new director of national television were rosy-cheeked 28-year-olds. Apart from utilising these impeccable young women’s bright vitality and expertise, the new president’s intention had been to ‘sex up’ the republic’s image abroad, letting their sheen obscure the shadows of the past.
Of course fear – not gaiety – had been the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. Generations of its citizens had grown up in terror of the pre-dawn knock on the door, of exile, of the gulag. In 1989 I’d thought that fear had been buried beneath the rubble of the Berlin Wall. But when I sat together with Shtanski in her office, she had disabused me of my fantasy.
‘Over the last years fear has become again a habit in Pridnestrovie,’ she’d admitted, forming her response with care, using her preferred name for the republic. ‘Today our people are waiting for some sort of settlement, for a system of international guarantees.’ The fullness of her lips and eyes had been emphasised by her dark, chestnut fringe. Her tailored blazer and stylishly short skirt had accentuated her height. She’d folded her hands together and ventured that the only way to break the habit of fear was ‘to find a solution to my country’s unrecognised status’. She’d added, ‘It is a frozen conflict but still it is a conflict with accumulating conflict potential. It is dangerous.’
In those weeks following her appointment, 34-year-old Shtanski’s beauty had transformed Transnistria’s image abroad. Male diplomats from Brussels, Geneva and London had queued up to stare at her across the ministry’s broad boardroom table. At the same time she’d launched her personal PR campaign, on Facebook.
‘Good morning, friends, countries, continents! Wishing you a great week! May the news only be good, the winter frosts only kind, and meetings warm!’ she’d written soon after her appointment. Another of her daily posts had read: ‘Watching Eurovision. Those Swedes have really bowled me over!!!!! Cool!’ Once she’d even ventured: ‘People of Tiraspol! Tell me please where is a good place to roller skate?’
Her candid, snappy posts about her love of fashion, home baking and Irish cider – alongside astute comments on trade and political negotiations – had seemed to reverse the outmoded Cold War stereotypes, making the republic appear trendily modern. She’d shared with the world her enthusiasm for Morgan Freeman, Joe Cocker, Portishead. She’d raved about Christmas trees during a Foreign Office-sponsored trip to Northern Ireland. After the Munich Security Conference she’d revealed a passion for German marzipan. Her likes had included Chanel, Esquire Russia and Vladimir Putin. She’d even posted a favourite joke about a couple’s conversation after a night of lovemaking, ‘She: My darling, shall we get married? He: Let’s stay in touch.’