Her soft Facebook diplomacy had disseminated information about Transnistria, wrapped in an attractive package, winning her thousands of friends – a significant achievement given that the unrecognised state has no embassies and only scant resources to promote itself abroad.
Back at the ministry table, Shtanski had criticised ‘black myths’ spread by the West, portraying Transnistria as a source of arms and drugs smuggling as well as a conduit for human trafficking. She’d emphasised that Transnistria’s people were ‘bound together by a shared Soviet identity’. Over coffee she recalled a story about her daughter. One day her primary school teacher had begun a discussion about ethnic diversity, explaining to the class that Russians, Ukrainians and Moldovans lived together in harmony and in equal numbers in the republic. The teacher then asked the children to stand up and state their ethnicity. One by one the children announced with pride: ‘I am Pridnestrovian.’
‘Our children are like a mirror,’ Shtanski had told me. ‘This is national identity over ethnicity, and this fact will help us to solve common problems. Together we can build a common place.’
But her and President Shevchuk’s golden age did not last. Their ‘common place’ was doomed to fail because they’d turned against Sheriff. One year into his term, Shevchuk accused the company of squirrelling billions of dollars away in foreign tax havens. Sheriff denied the allegation, yet as if in retaliation to it – and with the support of the vengeful ‘father of the republic’ Smirnov – packed the Supreme Soviet with its supporters. It wanted the fabricated homeland to remain a profitable contrivance, kept in a state of suspended animation. Shevchuk was accused of high treason and the misappropriation of $100 million. He (and his new bride Shtanski) were forced to flee the country.
Sheriff ‘tells people about my millions so as to conceal information about their billions’, Shevchuk complained from his new luxury apartment over the border in Chişinău. The Supreme Council had used ‘blackmail, pressure and arrests to force out testimonies’ against him. ‘This is a well-planned scenario with a goal to retain power,’ he said.
At the end of our first meeting, when she and her lover-president were still in office, I had asked Nina Shtanski about her duty – and that of her then young and sincere colleagues – towards a people who were at once fearful and hopeful, who watched their words while befriending her and the new president on Facebook.
‘We feel the weight of expectation,’ she had replied with a smile at once beautiful and sad. ‘And we feel that the people’s expectations are too high.’
What then is Transnistria? To nail down an answer I returned to a last old haunt. At the edge of the Ministry of Justice compound, in a central Tiraspol office building, was GUIN, the State Service for the Execution of Punishment. In its dismal entrance hall – above the portraits of fifteen stone-faced officers – were inscribed words attributed to Peter the Great: ‘Prison is a Hell for which we need tough professionals who work with good heart and joy.’
After the foundation of the sliver-thin republic, few of its superannuated Heroes of the Soviet Union had chosen to busy themselves improving their golf swing. Instead the retired brass hats set about commandeering government ministries, forming private security firms and – in one case – building a zoo.
General Nikolai Goncharenko was a recipient of the Order of the Red Banner. In 1968 he had ridden a Red Army tank into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. In 1991 his OMON Special Purpose Mobile Unit had rounded up Latvian freedom fighters in Riga. When the Baltic states had proclaimed their independence, he had taken shelter in Transnistria.
In the terra incognita, Goncharenko had taken charge of the prison service, organising it along military lines. He’d renovated Colony No. 1 in Glinoe where the cells had reputedly provided as little as one square metre of living space per prisoner. He’d reduced the incidence of tuberculosis at both Colony No. 2 and Colony No. 3. He’d believed in a world where ‘every action against Order was an offence against the State’. Yet it wasn’t humans who most benefited in a daring dictatorship.
For Goncharenko loved animals and soon, visiting delegations from Abkhazia, Artsakh, South Ossetia and other fraternal non-nations caught wind of his passion. They begun to indulge it with a turtle dove here, an anaconda there. In time he had dozens, and then hundreds, of creatures. In his enthusiasm for selfless collectivism, he ordered the construction of cages and corrals in GUIN’s central courtyard. Beneath the ubiquitous portrait of Dzerzhinsky, Goncharenko enjoyed nothing more than petting a dove or discussing his ostrich’s vitamin supplements. One bitter Transnistrian winter he even housed the Pogona desert dragon lizards in his dacha sauna, to save the poor beasts from freezing to death.
On my last day I stepped into his bestial courtyard and the rip-roaring hubbub. Around me screamed peacocks and honking Mandarin ducks. Swans hissed and pigeons cooed. Prison officers in battle fatigues used riot shields to shovel back the fallen snow and a rasp of guinea fowl. In the ring of enclosures pranced neighing Highland ponies, a barking prairie dog and Emma the ostrich, pecking at the frozen mud. A brood of chickens clucked in contentment, unaware that they existed only to be fed to the hissing, four-metre python that slithered along the ministry’s long hallways when the keeper cleaned its cage. Goncharenko’s zoo was their earthly paradise, or the closest they’d get to it in the nowhereland. Together in equality – if not harmony – the tamed and unthinking proletariat chirped, piped, roared and hee-hawed for the joy of living in the only place in the world never to accept the collapse of the USSR.
UKRAINE
23
Theatre of Bad Dreams
Shadows twisted and turned on the bleached surface. Deformed figures reached out, cried out, trapped in the maze. Arms wove above bent heads, kinked around white corners, felt their way forward beneath the blazing lights. The audience, as lost and as blind as the victims, wailed with them at the start of the haunted night.
Dnipro, the world’s fastest-shrinking city, felt like the end of things. It was a place on the edge, a hundred miles from the Donbas battlefield, an outpost for one million souls, infamous for its missiles, maniacs and murders. Plus its edgy art scene.
In an abandoned circus building, a red-brick roundhouse buried under decades of graffiti, the performers struggled on, pushed on, still trying to escape captivity. On crutches, in wheelchairs, balanced on unsteady feet, they tested the passageways, fell into loops and closed circuits, cried out again and again for ten excruciating minutes. To make the maze, hundreds of old bed sheets had been stretched between metal poles, suspended by wires, lit from above so the scant, mixed audience could look down from their ringside seats. Around me sat students in thick sheepskin coats, shivering Israeli tourists, two New York art majors who’d taken a wrong turn in Lviv, as well as a handful of out-of-work engineers and out-of-luck veterans. In front of us one actress appeared to discover the secret of the maze. She pressed herself against its undulating right wall, sliding her hand around every turn. But her plan failed for the maze was far from perfect. The installation was nothing but dead ends.
Once Dnipro’s flat and fertile steppe had been the Wild Fields at the edge of Kievan Rus’, the thirteenth-century kingdom that stretched from the Carpathians to the Volga. Its history, like that of all of Ukraine, was one of heroic effort and mortifying tragedy. Turks, Tartars, Poles, Tsars and Soviets had subjugated the borderland for almost a thousand years. Seven million Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s genocidal famine. Another seven million perished during two world wars. In 1787 Catherine the Great had named Dnipro – then called Ekaterinoslav – the administrative centre of Novorossiya. She’d chosen it as her empire’s third capital city, after Moscow and St Petersburg, so as to subject it, taking its grain, making it her buffer zone. ‘Ukraina’ can be translated as ‘on the edge’.