The words of Tyrone Shaw, author of Bastard Republic: Encounters Along the Tattered Edge of Fallen Empire, during an interview with Michael Hilliard for The Red Line podcast can of course be equally applied to Georgia and Ukraine. And they need to be kept firmly in mind when discussing the role of Tiraspol (Moldova’s second-largest city) as a tourist destination.
The premise here is simple: firstly that it’s important to try to understand Moldova, secondly that a good way to try to understand Moldova is to plan a visit, to think in terms of potential tourist destinations. Whether or not one actually visits subsequently is really neither here nor there.
And so, we can say that in getting there we might plan to fly and that in planning to fly, we see that Chișinău International Airport (served by LOT from Warsaw-Chopin) has seen an impressive rise in passenger numbers over the years, from 250,000 passengers a year in 2000 to nearly 3,000,000 today. This is of course, on the one hand, a sad indictment of the fact that many hundreds of thousands of young Moldovans have emigrated to places like Moscow, Bucharest, Istanbul, London, Vienna, Frankfurt, Rome, Paris, Milan and Venice – at least these are the cities most flown to. But it also represents an opportunity to attract investors from different parts of Europe and Asia. Moldova is increasingly connected to the rest of the world.
(wikimedia.org)
The airport is on the south-side of Chișinău so, from here, let’s go directly to Bender (50 km away), or ‘Tighina’ as it’s known in Romanian. ‘Bender’ is the Ottoman name given to the city when they conquered Moldavia and Bessarabia in 1538. The Ottomans also took advantage of its riverside location on the banks of the Dniester and built a huge fortress, which remains in good condition today.
The Russians troops conquered Bender in 1789 under the leadership of Grigory Potemkim during the Seventh Russo-Turkish War (1787-1792) and converted the fortress mosques into churches. It was Potemkin who, as governor-general of Russia’s southern provinces, is said to have come up with the concept of the ‘Potemkin village’ – designed to impress Catherine the Great on her visit to newly-conquered ‘Novorossiya’. Whether or not such villages were ever actually built (or ‘used’), the term has entered the lexicon and remains a useful tool for understanding the way appearances are sometimes intended to deceive.
(wikipedia.org)
Bessarabia was properly annexed by Russia in 1812 after the Eight Russo-Turkish War (1806-1812) and over the years that followed Bender became an increasingly Russian-speaking fortress city. The golden-domed Alexander Nevsky Church (housed within the outer walls of the fortress) is the oldest in the Transnistria region (which styles itself and functions effectively as a breakaway republic from Moldova), built between 1828 and 1833. Emperor Nicholas I visited in 1828. Emperor Nicholas II visited in 1916. This was clearly a strategically important site for the rulers Russian Empire, guarding the Bessarabian Gap. Little has changed since then.
The website bendery-fortress.com/en refers to the period 1918-1940 as one of “Romanian occupation” and the period 1941-1944 (rather less controversially) as one of “fascist occupation”. The church was renovated extensively between 2008 and 2011 after many years of decline – and we can see just from looking at the photographs that no expense was spared.
Bender Fortress Church (wikimedia.org)
There is a “border crossing” at the bridge over the Dniester that connects Bender with Tiraspol. A four-month war was fought in the spring and early summer of 1992 between secessionist rebels from the Transnistria region and the newly-established Republic of Moldova (which at this point had not yet established an army). Russian peacekeepers have been stationed in the region ever since, although it’s worth noting that this was always a major stronghold of Soviet Ground Forces, who – in essence – simply never left.
The region has its own “currency”, the Transnistrian Ruble, and Russian is spoken everywhere in public. A wide boulevard leads into and through the heart of the city of Tiraspol. The distance from Bender Fortress is just over 10 km, passing the modern 12,750-capacity stadium and sports complex of FC Sheriff Tiraspol on the left hand side. The football club is part of a monopoly holding company set up by former KGB operatives in 1993, which also runs supermarkets, petrol stations and a TV channel. Its squad currently includes players from Malawi, Slovenia, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Liberia, Colombia, Finland, Brazil, Croatia, Albania, Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal. Its general director is (Georgian-born) Vazha Tarkhnishvili, who played a record-setting 360 games for the club between 1999 and 2012.
(wikimedia.org)
There is a “border crossing” at the bridge over the Dniester that connects Bender with Tiraspol. A four-month war was fought in the spring and early summer of 1992 between secessionist rebels from the Transnistria region and the newly-established Republic of Moldova (which at this point had not yet established an army). Russian peacekeepers have been stationed in the region ever since, although it’s worth noting that this was always a major stronghold of Soviet Ground Forces, who – in essence – simply never left.
The region has its own “currency”, the Transnistrian Ruble, and Russian is spoken everywhere in public. A wide boulevard leads into and through the heart of the city of Tiraspol. The distance from Bender Fortress is just over 10 km, passing the modern 12,750-capacity stadium and sports complex of FC Sheriff Tiraspol on the left hand side. The football club is part of a monopoly holding company set up by former KGB operatives in 1993, which also runs supermarkets, petrol stations and a TV channel. Its squad currently includes players from Malawi, Slovenia, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Liberia, Colombia, Finland, Brazil, Croatia, Albania, Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal. Its general director is (Georgian-born) Vazha Tarkhnishvili, who played a record-setting 360 games for the club between 1999 and 2012.
(pixabay.com)
And so to my centre-piece, the walking tour of Tiraspol, which really won’t take very long. Highlights include the Lenin statue outside the government building (surely one of only a handful remaining on the European peninsula), the T-34 tank monument and the horseback statue of Russian generalissimo Alexander Suvorov (said to have founded the city in 1792). It seems a strangely upbeat place and it’s easy to see why many YouTubers have been attracted to “the country that doesn’t exist” although in reality it should be called out more often as a modern-day Potemkin village. Few if any venture further than the main strip of Tiraspol, which itself is considered far off the beaten track. But this is a post-USSR theme park at best or, if you will, a real-life Russian-speaking version of the Truman Show.
Two hours north of Tiraspol (behind the facade) is the unvisited village of Cobasna which was in Soviet times and probably still is home to one of the largest ammunition depots in Europe. 1,000 soldiers from the Operational Group of Russian Forces guard the site, occasionally (and controversially) taking part in Victory Day parades along the main boulevard in Tiraspol. They also conduct live-fire exercises, here in the blurry borderlands of Ukraine and Moldova. Their continued presence, as the quote above argues, is viewed as a way for Russia to permanently destabilise and perhaps – if called upon – to really heighten tensions in the region.
And so we return to Chișinău, back through the looking-glass as it were, to the main part of a small sun-drenched country with rivers running either side of it, perhaps destined to remain on the sharp edge of the EU – and to a city that (subsequently) has huge economic potential. Filmmaker Gerald Knaus’ 50-minute documentary “Lost in Transition” (2013) remains an excellent introduction to the struggles Moldova has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the challenges that lie ahead. One of the interviewees is a journalist and mother-of-four living in Transnistria, who sometimes visits Chișinău for work. When talking about the situation, she says that there are no tensions and that they are living in peace. “The only thing that perhaps is unusual for Transnistrians who go to Chișinău,” she says, “is the difference between how Chișinău used to be and the way it is now. It used to be a Soviet city. But today, Chișinău is becoming a European capital.” The best (or worst) symbol of this change is probably Malldova (opened in 2008), with its 25,000 square metres of retail space and its several hundred parking spaces. And, as we’ve seen, the airport.
Moldova returned to a system of directly-electing its President in 2016. 41-year-old Igor Dodon was elected President in the same year, having previously served for five years as chairman of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova. In a video interview with Euronews this year, he said: “I believe in a big Europe, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It was Charles de Gaulle who came up with this idea and it’s repeated often by various world leaders. I think this is the only solution to make Europe stronger.” We know this rhetoric from its use by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019. De Gaulle talked only about Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. It was actually Vladimir Putin who as Russian prime minister in 2011 proposed “setting up a harmonized community of economies stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.
“I’m pro-Moldovan,” Dodon continues, when asked if it is true that he is pro-Russian. “I don’t think it is correct to define a politician based on his political views. Indeed, I have a very good personal relationship with the leadership of the Russian Federation. I have had numerous meetings with Mr Putin over the first three years of my mandate but that was due to the fact that under the previous government the relationship between the Russian Federation was almost frozen. In Moldova it is almost impossible to be only pro-Russian or only pro-European. The overwhelming majority of our citizens want to be friends, both with the Russian Federation and the EU.”
Eternity Memorial Complex (wikipedia.org)
With its 20,000 (mostly pro-European) students, Moldova State University in Chișinău plays a crucial role in the economic future of a country that relies more and more on services than industry and agriculture. However, Moldova is on the periphery of the periphery and then some. Whilst Belarus and Serbia have a GDP per capita very similar to that of China, Moldova’s is similar to (actually lower than) that of India.
A short walk away from the university (in one of the city’s many green spaces), the Eternity Memorial Complex is a strikingly abstract symbol of the country’s fragile balancing act. Built in 1975, it contains five 25-metre-tall stone rifles stacked against one another to form a pyramid, beneath which is a five-pointed star. The monument recalls the Liberation of Moldova by Soviet troops in 1944 (from “German-Romanian occupation”) and is protected by an honour guard from the Moldovan Army.
“In Transnistria we have stockpiles from Soviet times,” says Dodon. “About 20,000 tons of old munitions, that need to be safeguarded by 1,000 Russian soldiers. Mostly with so-called Transnistrian passports. This is not a military base as it has been described very often in Western circles. It is not an occupation. It is obvious that these stockpiles and the soldiers should be evacuated from our territory of Transnistria and in this context we welcome the initiative of the Russian Federation pronounced by Defence Minister Shoygu last August, who said Russia was ready to initiate the process of evacuation or destruction of those stockpiles.”
Dodon has the unruffled air of a man who doesn’t get easily fazed by the PR challenges of political life at the top level. His relatively frequent meetings with President Putin may have contributed towards this image of confidence, also the fact that prior to being elected President of Moldova he spent such a long time leading his own political party. And he is young, still at 45. There is a two-term limit for the Presidency in Moldova, meaning that if re-elected next year and serving a full term, he would be 51 at around the time the Russian political elite are looking for a suitably “neutral” candidate to facilitate negotiations between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union over setting up the actual Lisbon-to-Vladivostok free trade area that’s long been talked about. Solving the (artificial) Transnistrian “problem” would create the appearance of a capable statesman, called to great-ness. We should watch carefully (and sceptically) to see how these events unfold.
Autor
Thomas Riley
Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.
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