Transnistria, the Soviet Theme Park
- Aaron Schorr
- Aug 19, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 20, 2021
We woke up and caught a cab to Chisinau’s central market. Past vegetable vendors and people having a breakfast of sausage and kvass (a fermented bread drink; more on that later), was the avtovoghzal (bus station), a critical fixture of every post-Soviet city. We found our marshrutka (the shared vans that serve as unofficial public transport anywhere behind the former Iron Curtain) and paid for two seats at the ticket office, which was an unusual level of sophistication for this kind of operation. The parked vehicle was stifling, but it made its 10:00 departure right on time, with jolly Romanian folk music playing from speakers above my head. Yotam had moved up front and was sitting next to a middle-aged woman in a bright pink Amnesty International hat, which was about to assume a previously-unlocked level of irony.
A Brief History Lesson
Our destination was Tiraspol, capital of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, or PMR for short in Russian. Faced with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Moscow created a buffer zone on a thin strip of land between Ukraine and Moldova to ensure it retained a toehold in the region should both states become independent. When this indeed happened the following year, a short conflict erupted between the new Moldovan state and the Russian-backed Transnistria authorities, and since 1992, the area has been subjected to a ceasefire agreement. According to this, much of the border is demilitarized and patrolled by Russian “peacekeepers”, and Moldova retains a limited degree of sovereignty over the territory’s eastern border to Ukraine (our barber in Chisinau described the situation as “like Gaza but it doesn’t make problems for Moldova"). The tiny territory, with a population of under half a million and an area smaller than Delaware, is run as a de facto state with Russian support, with its own flag, anthem, government, and currency, and serves as a perpetual reminder of Russia’s presence in the region should Moldova attempt to upset the status quo - for example, by uniting with Romania or joining the EU or NATO as a full member. Only three entities recognize its independence: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Republic of Artsakh - all Russian pseudo-states designed to pressure their neighbors, the first of which I had visited in 2018.
I was hesitant about visiting Transnistria for security reasons, but after hearing that it was safe from multiple sources (including Marc from Chisinau, who had visited the day before us), we decided to go for it. The road to the border was awful, really just a series of potholes strung together with asphalt, and the scenery bright green. We passed a Moldovan customs checkpoint and got a look of our first Russian “peacekeepers” in khaki uniforms and assault rifles. A Transnistrian official in a green uniform and a Soviet-style wide-brimmed hat checked the van’s trunk, and a soldier boarded to check the passengers’ IDs. Since Yotam and I were traveling on foreign passports, we were referred to the registration office, where we were asked very simple questions and handed a slip of paper that served as our transit visa, valid for 12 hours.
The Sheriff of Tiraspol
I was greeted by a “shalom” from a fellow passenger as the van passed the border, and the road surprisingly got much better as the cars around us got much older. In contrast to bilingual Moldova, everything was only in Russian, and we spotted more “peacekeepers” on the bridge across the Dniester River, linking the territory’s two main cities of Bender and Tiraspol. This stretch of road was particularly amusing, with big “Sheriff”-brand supermarkets nearly next to Russian military bases, surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wore. This “Sheriff” was an empire in the little republic, owning gas stations and supermarkets all over town.
I had forgotten to download an offline map of the city before leaving and Yotam’s Moldovan SIM card didn’t work in Transnistria, so we were literally heading in blind with only the vaguest idea of where we were. Nevertheless, we made it to the train station, a classically Soviet building which looked abandoned on the inside until we managed to find the small касса (ticket office). The woman at the desk spoke no English, but she explained to us that the last marshrutka to Odessa - our next destination - was at 2:10 pm, less than 3 hours away, after which we could catch a marshrutka to the border and a Ukrainian one on the other side to Odessa. She also kindly agreed to store our luggage in her office, which definitely would not have happened if she were a generation older.
Our next challenge was the currency. Transnistria uses its own ruble, but the ATMs in town dispense Russian rubles and no merchant will accept foreign cards. The only way to get the elusive local currency, which is illegal to transport out of the country, is to exchange it at one of the many обмен валют (currency exchanges) in town, whose rates are fortunately tightly regulated by the local central bank. I traded in what few Moldovan lei I had left, plus a $20 bill, for a thin wad of Transnistrian rubles with nostalgic socialist themes.
We walked into a minimarket lit only by its small windows to buy some water; the shopkeeper materialized from an inner room in the darkness to ring us up. In a stroke of luck, the train station had had WiFi, which had allowed us to download a map of the city and navigate to its center. The only issue was that Google Maps used Romanian for place names, while the city itself used Russian or occasionally Romanian in Cyrillic characters, which occasionally made for misunderstandings. We walked down Lenin St to October 25th Ave (commemorating the October Revolution), the main boulevard in the center of town. Everything seemed remarkably normal - it was extremely Eastern European, but there were the restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets you would expect to find in the center of a small city. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that there were no souvenirs for sell anywhere, very much unlike Abkhazia which had shops selling countless Abkhaz-themed products. My dorm room wall would just have to be covered with something else.
Trasnistria's Only Anarchist
Speaking of Abkhazia, I found a banner celebrating the friendship between Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. Never expecting to see the Abkhaz flag again, I was taking a picture when a man at the café below the banner started speaking to me. It turned out both he and his companion were named Alexander, and he offered to come walk with us. He was wearing a Che Guevara hat and camouflage shorts and Crocs, and spoke in a comically gravelly Russian accent. As we started walking, he told me he was an anarchist and asked me whether I had gotten the COVID vaccine. I said I had, and he wasn’t happy: “I’m a biker and a musician, I don't want a vaccine to change my mind.”
We reached De Wollant Park, surprisingly named after a Dutch engineer who had constructed a series of military fortifications for Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, and found a statue of the Tsarina herself. I remarked that I thought she was German, to which I got the following response: “she was a whore, she loved gangbangs.” The park overlooked the river Dniester - the city’s namesake - and Alexander offered to take us to his apartment, where we could get bathing suits and swim in the river, but we declined. I noticed that he had two distinct bruises on the backs of his hands, which sported anarchist tattoos on the knuckles, and asked him what had happened. “I woke up like this one day,” he said, “just like Jesus Christ. I am not a Christian but now I believe in God.” At least he made sure to sanitize them well when we entered a supermarket.
We visited the city’s war memorial, which contained a tank and names from the Great Patriotic War, the Chernobyl disaster (highly unusual both in content and style, covered with Orthodox icons), and the Transnistrian War of 1991-2. Alexander creatively blamed the deaths on “politics” and gave some rambling explanation I couldn't follow. Across the street was Suvorov Park, named after Alexander Suvorov, Russian aristocrat extraordinaire and military genius of the latter half of the 18th century. Alongside maintaining Transnistria’s pseudo-independence, the Russians were careful to suppress any spirit of Transnistrian nationalism (which would presumably tie the inhabitants to their Moldovan brethren), and a result the city’s monuments were dedicated after personalities from the glory days of the Russian Empire, with the 20th century and anyone with a Romanian name entirely absent. Past a bronze monument of the general on his horse, there were several fountains, and Alexander and I took the opportunity to refresh ourselves in the cool water.
Further down the boulevard was the Museum of Local History, which was tragically closed, and a large Lenin monument, a rarity in this part of Europe. It was positioned in front of the headquarters News of the Supreme Council of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, the government’s official mouthpiece, which you should totally check out (in English) here. I asked Alexander how he spoke English so well, and he responded that he had learned it in order to understand rock music. As if to illustrate the point, he started singing Iron Maiden’s The Prisoner at the top of his lungs:
I'm not a number, I'm a free man!
Not a prisoner, I'm a free man!
Saved by 30 Rubles
We sat in front of the city’s brutalist cinema and parted ways with one of the strangest characters I can remember meeting, as he had to go to work. The research I had done before visiting said there were two restaurants worth eating at - one Ukrainian and the other Romanian - and the Ukrainian one turned out to be closed. Walking to the Romanian one, we passed the Hotel Russia - the nicest in town - the ExImBank, several government buildings (all flying both Transnistrian and Russian flags), and the House of Soviets to reach the restaurant at the end of the avenue. This was probably as close to walking through a Soviet city as you could get in 2021, down to the soldiers milling about in ancient boxy green vans and the babushkas going about their errands.
Lunch was good and left us with around 70 rubles in cash (roughly $4.5). We next visited Park Pobeda (Victory Park), another well-kept Soviet fixture full of old ladies and somewhat subdued glorious monuments. Past the park was mainly post-industrial blight, military buildings, and the Kvint distillery, Transnistria’s (relatively) famous brandy exporter, which I would have made sure to visit had I not been on a strict no-alcohol diet.
On the way back to the train station, I tried to find an ATM to get some more cash, but none of them seemed to be working. We passed a branch of the ExImBank which looked promising, but after getting my temperature taken at the door, I discovered that the single ATM in the building was out of commission as well. Like a scene out of a movie, there were four tellers sitting in a long hall with no customers, and I approached them with my Visa card. I said it was American and they looked at it curiously, only to frown and say that “Виза не работает. Вы можете пойти в Кишинев” (Visa doesn’t work. You can try going to Chisinau). This was starting to become worrying, but I still had US dollars to exchange if all else failed.
We returned to the station only to discover that the change place was closed. We picked up our luggage and discovered that we had enough cash to get two tickets to the Ukrainian border with about 30 rubles ($2) to spare, so I decided not to return to town and exchange another $20, which would give me lots of useless Transnistrian rubles. Finding the marshrutka to the border was somewhat confusing, as Google Maps called the town Limanskoye and the locals seemed to call it Первомайское (Pervomaiskoye), but it magically appeared as we walked out of the station and left immediately after we boarded. There wasn’t a single seat belt in sight, the parking brake was stripped down to bare metal, and the door was somehow jury-rigged to open with a metal rod connected to a gearshift knob near the driver. We made the 35 km trip to the border on an arrow-straight road flanked by rows of white-painted trees on either side, picking up more passengers and packages along the way - sometimes literally from between fields of wheat and sunflowers.
At the border, we handed in our receipt visas to an official and walked between fences to a bridge across the River Dniester to a sign welcoming us to Ukraine. To be honest, Transnistria had not been as impressive as I had expected it to be, and Tiraspol not nearly grand enough for the capital of a phony state. Sure, there were lots of Soviet relics in everyday life there, but it was mostly just a poorer, more Russian version of Moldova. The sunny summer heat and hammers and sickles belied it a little, but it was fundamentally a depressing place, the people there serving as pawns in a strategic game few people outside the Kremlin cared much about. With the “Sheriff” supermarkets and “Хайтек” (High-Tech) electronics stores, it wasn’t even all that authentic anymore, a powerful testament to the far-reaching pervasiveness of Western capitalism. At the end of the day, I had enjoyed Abkhazia much more, even if it was more dangerous.
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