Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Yesterday, I posted what I thought would've been mildly interesting to those of my followers who follow soccer, but, as is the case with many of my threads about my Soviet life, it has gone viral.
Folks around the globe are asking about Transnistria...

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1430939451069509639

So, let's talk about Transnistria, shall we? The country so mysterious that even the great @KenJennings got some of the facts wrong in his and @johnroderick's wonderful podcast, "The Omnibus."
Transnistria is where I was born and raised. Or not. It depends on how you define it...

See, nothing about Transnistria is definite. Or even real. It's a narrow strip of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester River. At its widest part, it can't take even the slowest driver to cross it in any more than half an hour. And yes, it is functionally independent...

The problem here is what happened in 1940. No, wait, in 1918. Or was it in 1812? Fuck!
Anyway, in 1812, Russia annexed the region called Bessarabia (everything between the Prut and Dniester Rivers) from the Ottoman Empire...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessarabia

The inhabitants were mostly ethnic Romanians, with a bunch of Bulgarians, Jews, Christian Turks (yes, it's a thing) and Slavs mixed in. Then, 100 years later, after World War I, Bessarabia was absorbed into Romania. This lasted until 1940, when the USSR took it back...

After WWII, the USSR decided to make Bessarabia one of its constituent Republics. But Stalin didn't just take the whole region, called it Bessarabian SSR and called it a day. The dude LOVED redrawing maps and relocating people. So what he did was chop off Bessarabia's north...

... and south ends (Bukovyna and Bugeac) and gave them to Ukraine because why the hell not? But, to compensate, he gave Bessarabia this strip of land along the Dniester, taking it from Ukraine. The resulting Frankencountry was called the Moldavian SSR...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldavian…

However, even though Ukrainians immediately flooded into Bukovyna and Bugeac and they got easily absorbed into Ukraine, the strip of land Bessarabia got never fully integrated. Most people of the left bank of the Dniester remained Slavic in culture and language...

... and exhibited very hostile, colonial attitudes to the ethnic Romanians across the river, in Bessarabia (now Moldavia) proper. Jokes about "stupid Moldavians" were a favorite form of folklore among the ethnic Russians and Ukrainians...

So, what happened in 1991, as the USSR began to disintegrate, and Moldavia (now calling itself Moldova... bear with me, the names get confusing) declared independence, the citizens of the left bank wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. They wanted to stay in the USSR...

... and remain the dominant cultural and linguistic force in the region. So, they broke apart and called themselves... nope, not Transnistria. That word is actually taboo in the region. Transnistria is Romanian for "beyond the Dniester", and this is what Moldovans call it...

The natives prefer the Russian word Pridnestrovye, which means "along the Dniester." The new "country" immediately refused to recognize the dissolution of the USSR. All of their state symbols are pointedly Soviet. Lenin statues are everywhere. The currency is the ruble...

It feature the mounted stature of the Russian general ASuvorov who had once conquered the region, prior to annexation. A very unsubtle message about whom the region should belong to. On Easter, the locals often paint the horse's balls (this bodypart is called "eggs" in Russian).

It wasn't a peaceful divorce. Moldovans and Transnistrians went to war over this in the early 1990s. It ended with Russia getting involved and since then, Transnistria has been quasi-independent Russian puppet regime, subsiding on gun trafficking and other shady business..

The city I was born in, Bender, was an old Ottoman fortress on the Moldovan side of the river. But since, by 1991, two thirds of its population was Russian-speaking, it was absorbed into Transnistria, even though it was always historically a part of Bessarabia. It's complicated..

Anyway, the country officially boasts 3 national languages, even though absolutely everyone speaks Russian absolutely all the time for any official business. The languages are Russian, Ukrainian and "Moldavian." The latter is just Romanian written in Cyrillic. Because fuck you...

This is Transnistria's 1st president, Igor Smirnov, not at all looking like a product of a wild orgy between every single Marvel villain ever.
Smirnov is originally from Siberia and his biography is so murky and full of omissions, he can only be a KGB agent. I mean, look at him!

I actually participated in Smirnov's first "presidential election" and voted for him, even though I was 16 years old, but who cared at that point? Anyway, the options on the ballot were "Igor Smirnov" and "You get shot now", so there was that...

Smirnov proceeded to get "elected" for 20 years, building what my former neighbors had described "his pocket state", which on the outside was the last outpost of the USSR, but on the inside a giant money-laundering apparatus for Smirnov's criminal empire...

Interestingly, he managed to lose the 2011 election, most likely because Russia stopped supporting him. His successor was a dude named Yevgeni Shevchuk, from my father's hometown of Ribnita, which is basically built a round a giant Soviet cement plant.
Shevchuk was a bit rapey.

His "cabinet" was usually described as "Shevchuk's harem." Here are some of the officials: the Pension Fund Director, the National Bank Director, the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Finance.
The bank director birthed him a daughter. But he married the Foreign Minister.

Shevchuk's love for the perks of the office didn't agree with the mafia families who actually run the state, so he "lost" the next "election" and, while most males in his cabinet got arrested, he and his wife put her foreign relations expertise to good use and absconded to Russia

Anyway, two days ago, Transnistria celebrated its 30th anniversary, while also celebrating Sheriff Tiraspol's entry into the Champions League. The nation is impoverished, extremely backward and living in the past. Most of its population, though, is staunchly behind the government

The fear of Moldova's reintegration into Romania runs deep, the disdain for Romanian language is even deeper (even though most Russians and Ukrainians in the region have absorbed many part of Moldova's culture, especially the cuisine), but most of all they want the USSR back...

Like the last pitiful remnant of the Roman Empire, still waiting for Augustus to roll in and rebuild all that was lost, Transnistria is dreaming of once again being a part of a huge superpower. To that end, they are endlessly begging Russia to get annexed...

As it is, they are still an unrecognized pseudo-state attempting to assert their independence in any way they can. There are border guards and customs officers (my childhood friend is one) fleecing visitors to supplement their meager income. All the structures are Soviet-built...

Everything is depressing and crumbling, but every once in a while, the officials will put up red banners and decorations and roll some tanks around in a military parade to celebrate The Glorious Victory of the Battle of Bender Or Something. It's like the ghost of the USSR...

... but with actual mafia running an international gun-trafficking ring in charge. Even the staunchest patriots of Transnistria realize this can't go on. The nation is getting depopulated, the poverty is crushing, Putin isn't particularly interested in annexation...

It's a country stuck between the eras, unable to extract itself from its imperial ideology, unwilling to stoop to cooperating with the despised Moldovans, unable to let go and unable to proceed. It's a terribly tragic story of forgotten people who hold themselves prisoners.

But hey, the gun money have built the stadium and brought a bunch of Latin American footballers in! Let's go, Sheriff! Bring on Real and Inter!
Life goes on.