Transnistrian Time-Slip

Transnistrian Time-Slip - NYTimes.com

May 22, 2012, 12:30 pm

By FRANK JACOBS

Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

Earlier this month, Catherine Ashton, the European Union high representative for foreign affairs [1], applauded the resumption of freight rail traffic through eastern Moldova as “a crucial step forward for restoring confidence between the sides to the Transnistrian issue.” For many this may have been the first time they became aware of something called the “Transnistrian issue,” let alone Transnistria itself [2].
You’ll find Moldova on a map — it’s right there, a pork shoulder of land between Romania and Ukraine — but not Transnistria, an unrecognized breakaway republic in the east of Moldova. And if Transnistria were on a map, it would be easy to mistake it for a misprint, a river inked too wide (to continue the porcine metaphor, if Moldova is a pork shoulder, Transnistria is a sliver of bacon). Located mainly on the eastern bank of the Dniester [3], Transnistria stretches for about 250 miles north to south, averaging no more than 15 miles across. It thus patently lacks what military experts call ‘strategic depth’ — the ability to retreat without automatically suffering defeat.

But Transnistria has one strategic advantage over Moldova, which proved crucial enough to win its de facto independence exactly 20 years ago: the support of Russia — or to be more precise, of the Russian 14th Army [4], then stationed in and around Transnistria’s capital, Tiraspol (a smaller Russian force remains today). When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, independence was thrust upon all its constituent republics, including Moldova, the only Soviet republic with a Romance-language majority [5]. The consequent resurgence of Moldovan nationalism, which included laws promoting the national language to the detriment of Russian, grated on the russophone majority in eastern Moldova, on the heavily industrialized left bank of the Dniester.

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

More important for the region’s future than its steel and electricity plants [6] was the identity that had been forged for its inhabitants: industrialized areas like these, attracting workers from all over the Soviet Union, were a proletarian version of the American melting pot. It was in places like this that Homo sovieticus would be produced. And here, at least, the experiment succeeded. But instead of precursors to the future, the Soviet breakup turned these New Men and Women into relics of the past.
And so, the rebellion that established the independence of Transnistria [7] was not motivated by Russian nationalism, but by Soviet nostalgia — or, rather, by the inability to imagine a future other than a communist one. For many years after independence, Transnistria tried to re-establish that ineffective mainstay of communism, so eagerly rejected elsewhere: a centrally planned economy.
In many ways, it’s still 1990 in Tiraspol, the republic’s capital. Lenin’s likeness may have been toppled across the rest of the former Sovietosphere, but his statue still stands atop a pedestal in front of the Parliament building on Tiraspol’s main square, flanked by angrily flapping concrete flags that make him look like the Militant Angel of Egalitarianism. Streets are still named after communist luminaries like Karl Liebknecht and proletarian high holidays like October 25 [8]. The most telling example of the Transnistrian time-slip is the unrecognized nation’s flag: the only one anywhere in the old U.S.S.R. still to sport the hammer-and-sickle emblem of Communism [9].
But Tiraspol in no Soviet Pompeii. A visitor from the Soviet past would be puzzled by the abundance of sheriff’s badges on all buildings. The badges refer, indeed, to Sheriff, a conglomerate that dominates the entire economy of Transnistria, owning (among many other things) a chain of gas stations, a TV channel, a mobile phone network, a car dealership, a building company and the country’s foremost football club, FC Sheriff Tiraspol.
In a way, Sheriff symbolizes Transnistria’s parallel path to Russia on its course from state socialism to state capitalism. Its name reflects the previous occupation of its two founders — former KGB agents. And Transnistria’s economy is not just monolithic and oligopolous; it has specialized in some of the handful of activities open to rogue statelets: money-laundering, people-smuggling and weapons-manufacturing, among other black-market industries.
It remains a black hole of legality on the doorstep of the European Union, and it’s a pressing problem. Moldova is said to be on an “irreversible” course to membership, but only if it resolves the Transnistrian issue [10]. Obviously, reintegration in Moldova is the last thing Transnistria’s present leadership wants. They’d rather be absorbed by Russia — which is a bit of a stretch, as Tiraspol is about 350 miles removed from the nearest Russian border, with Ukraine between them. For its part, Russia prefers to keep the republic at arm’s length, supporting its autonomy but not recognizing its independence.
So, until the slow erosion of local demography [11] dramatically alters the political force field, things stay as they are. In its desperate and largely fruitless search for allies, Transnistria has joined forces with other forgotten flashpoints of the former Soviet Union. It is one of the four member states of the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations, the others being Abkhazia, South Ossetia [[12] and Nagorno-Karabakh [13]. The main aim of the organization, also dubbed the Commonwealth of Unrecognized States, or the Axis of De Facto, seems to be to at least recognize one another’s independence.
All four statelets are in effect Russian pawns on the chessboard of its “near abroad,” but they seem stuck in a quadruple stalemate. They are unable to survive without Russian support, but Russia is unsure whether these forward-positioned pieces are assets or liabilities. The lack of international recognition [14] compounds the sense of limbo and hinders economic development — except of the criminal, smuggling-based kind.

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What a difference legality makes. The contrast is particularly stark with Kaliningrad, a bona fide Russian exclave on the Baltic coast. When the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union went the way of the American Confederacy, one could have postulated a disastrous future for this bit of Russia jammed in between Poland and Lithuania. In the early 1990s, Russia even discreetly sounded out the option of selling the region back to Germany [15]. But the oblast has gone from basket case to powerhouse: it is now one of Russia’s best-performing regions, attracting western investment and increasingly benefiting from its proximity to the European Union instead of being hindered by its isolation from Russia.
Maybe someday the same can be said of Transnistria. But only if the Dniester loses the doubtful distinction as one of Europe’s last unrecognized borders.
Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

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[1] Baroness Ashton had been European commissioner for trade before assuming her present role in 2009. In true European Union style, it would be too easy — not to mention controversial, and untrue — to call her Europe’s foreign minister. Though her relative obscurity is commensurate with her job’s inconsequentiality (see also Herman Van Rompuy, Europe’s “president”), she has been called the “best paid female politician in the world” by The Daily Telegraph. Her basic monthly salary is just over 23,000 euros.
[2] Or of Catherine Ashton, vide [1].
[3] “Nistru” in Romanian/Moldovan. Not to be confused with the Dnieper (Dnipro), which flows a few hundred miles to the east, through Kiev. Both names are of Sarmatian origin, the former meaning “the close river,” the latter “the far river.” The Dniester has something of a history as a border river, in previous centuries also having been the boundary between the Polish and Turkish empires.
[4] The Russian military presence, now no more than 1,500 strong, is designated as the Operational Group of Russian Forces in Moldova, and is under direct command of the Ministry of Defense in Moscow.
[5] Like French, Italian or Romanian, Moldovan derives from Latin. The question of how different Moldovan is from Romanian is a political one. In Soviet times, Moldovan was heavily “russified” to distance it from Romanian. The tug-of-war between Moldova and Transnistria is partly over whether education east of the river should be in “western” (Latin) or “eastern” (Cyrillic) script.
[6] Before its self-declared independence, Transnistria generated 40 percent of Moldova’s total G.D.P.
[7] Officially known in Russian as the Pridnestrovskaia Moldovskaia Respublika, the shadow republic’s name is often shortened to Pridnestrovye or PMR. Under the country’s first president, that acronym was also jokingly said to mean “Papina i Moia Respublika” (“Daddy’s and My Republic”), as President Igor Smirnov’s sons Vladimir and Oleg were reputedly deeply involved in a Russia-style entanglement of business, politics and crime. The official Moldovan designation is “Stînga Nistrului” (“Left bank of the Dniestr”). Because of the different spellings of the river name in Romanian/Moldovan and Russian, the region is known in the west as Transnistria or Transdniestria.
[8] The date of the October Revolution of 1917, but only according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. The Gregorian date would have been Nov. 7, 1917. The Soviets adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, bringing Russia in line with the rest of the world.
[9] Transnistria’s national flag is the old Soviet one with a horizontal green stripe across the middle third. See this page at Flags of the World for an image.
[10] Hence Baroness Ashton’s interest in the matter.
[11] Transnistria is roughly 30 percent Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan; low Russian birth rates and emigration towards an economically better-off Russia could make a future Transnistria less intransigent towards Moldova.
[12] Both areas are situated in Georgia, but controlled by secessionist movements supported by Russia.
[13] For more on Nagorno-Karabakh, see this previous episode of Borderlines.
[14] Russia recognizes the independence of all CDRN states except Transnistria. Abkhazia and South Ossetia have secured recognition by Nicaragua, Venezuela and a handful of other real-world states.
[15] Before World War II, Kaliningrad was Königsberg, the capital of the German region of East Prussia, which was divided between and annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945.