LENIN LIVES ON IN MOLDAVIA
Noel Malcolm reports from the last Soviet part of the Union
Tiraspol WE DROVE eastwards across ex-Soviet Moldavia with a police escort, all flashing lights and ululating sirens. It seemed a rather theatrical way to travel, out of pro- portion either to the danger of the occasion or to the importance of our small group of human rights observers from the West.
Just before we reached the river Dni- ester, however, the mood changed. The police car switched off its siren and dropped back to a safe distance behind us. One might have thought that we were entering a war zone, or even a foreign country, but the strip of territory which lies on the other side of the Dniester is neither of those things — at least, not yet. Instead, it is something much more extraordinary. It is the last outpost of Soviet power in the former Soviet Union, Here, in the self-styled 'Transnistrian Republic' (a thin slice of land on the east- ern side of the Republic of Moldavia. run- ning along the Ukrainian border). Lenin remains the master, metaphorically, of all he surveys. He is still surveying it with his dead bronze eyes from concrete plinth after concrete plinth; there are probably more undamaged statues of Lenin here than in all the other parts of the former Soviet empire put together. A particularly fine one stands in front of the 'House of Soviets' in the centre of Tiraspol, the main Transnistrian city. And inside the House of Soviets sits Mr Igor Smirnov, leader of this breakaway mini-republic, who, by a startling coincidence, bears a distinct physi- cal resemblance to Lenin himself.
Lenin can take some of the blame for the crisis which is now threatening Moldavia, but the lion's share must he Stalin's. Soviet treatment of this corner of the empire followed the familiar procedures of Bolshevik and Stalinist nationality policy depopulation and deportation, artificial changes of borders, the distortion of cul- tures, the suppression of history — and present-day Moldavia has to cope with the consequences. Most of what is now Mol- davia was seized by Stalin from Rumania under the Molotov-Rihhentrop pact. (As one deputy of the Moldavian parliament put it to me, with historical rather than geographical accuracy, 'we are the fourth Baltic state.') But the territory which was taken from Rumania, the province of Bessarabia, stopped at the Dniester river. When Bessarabia fell into Stalin's hands in 1940, he tacked on a strip of land on the eastern side of the river and called the whole thing Moldavia.
That strip of land, the present-day Transnistria, seemed to belong with the rest of Moldavia because its population was predominantly Rumanian; but that was nothing that a few decades of Soviet rule could not change. Heavy industries, includ- ing all the power stations, were built up in Transnistria, as if to ensure that if ever the land grabbed by the Molotov-Rihhentrop pact had to he handed back, it would still be dependent economically on the territory that would stay in Soviet hands. And with the industry came a huge influx of Russian workers and settlers. Almost every aspect of life was Russianised. Even the language of the majority population in the republic — Rumanian — was printed in Cyrillic and re-named 'Moldavian', rather as if the peo- ple of East Germany had been told that they must write in Cyrillic, and that their language was not German but a Slav-relat- ed language called 'Saxon' or 'Thuringian'.
These changes took place throughout the Soviet republic of Moldavia (from which, in the early years of Soviet power, 600,000 ethnic Rumanians either fled or were deported). But their effect was strongest in
the Transnistrian strip, where, in the city of Tiraspol, for example, the Rumanian- speakers have shrunk to a mere 18 per cent of the population. And so it is that the Lenin lookalike, Mr Smirnov, himself a Russian immigrant from Siberia, can now sit in this provincial Moldavian city and cock an almighty snook at the Moldavian government. When the first demonstra- tions for independence and against com- munist rule swept through the Moldavian capital in 1989, Mr Smirnov described the demonstrators as suffering from 'moral Aids'. After the new government of Mol- davia declared sovereignty and restored the Rumanian tricolour flag in the summer of 1990, Mr Smirnov arranged a referendum of his own in Transnistria a few months later, and on the strength of this dubiously organised ballot declared the 'Transnistrian Republic' independent. And when the coup leaders made their cack-handed grab for power in Moscow this August, Mr Smirnov was one of the first to proclaim his unwa- vering support.
Hence the circumspection with which our police escort trundled into Tiraspol. The independence of this fragment of Mol- davia is still largely fictitious; the Molda- vian police, like many other functions of the state, continue to operate here. But Mr Smirnov has something rather better than a police force: he has the largest Red Army base in the whole of Moldavia, containing more than 20,000 soldiers, and he is now busy developing a military force of his own with the army's help.
Inevitably, the thoughts of a visitor to Tiraspol start turning to Yugoslavia. Stranded in a newly independent Moldavia, the Russians of Transnistria resemble in some ways the Serbs of Croatia. Moldavia seemed on the brink of civil war in Novem- ber last year, when the government sent detachments of volunteers to confront another separatist minority, the Turkish- speaking Gagauz. That conflict has cooled now, and the government is unlikely to go to war against Tiraspol, not least because Mr Smirnov has all the guns. Whether Mr Smirnov will go to war against the govern- ment remains to be seen; this may depend on whether he shares the views of one of his senior local pciliticians. Mr Porojan, who has said that 'if a single drop of Rus- sian blood is spilt, we shall drive all the Rumanians from Moldavia back into Rumania'.
But the big difference between the Transnistrian Russians and the Croatian Serbs is that Russia herself has no hope of joining her territory to this distant enclave: the independence of the Ukraine, which separates them on the map, will see to that. One day Moscow will want her guns back; and that day may come sooner than Mr Smirnov thinks. Meanwhile, visitors to Transnistria can relish the chance to observe old-style Soviet communism in an almost perfect state of preservation. Hurry while stocks last,
Previous page
