Transnistria: The META-SPIEL Deep Dive

Transnistria is suddenly in the world news. There have been a couple of explosions at a ministry in Tiraspol, and what is being reported as a grenade attack against two radio towers in Mayak, towers which were allegedly blasted pro-Russian propaganda across Ukraine. And a Russian military commander has openly spoken of conquering Ukrainian territory so as to link up to Transnistria where, he alleges, ethnic Russians are mistreated.

These are heady times for a place that does not exist.

Two months ago I wrote some about Transnistria, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, though, it seems like a time to expand upon all that. Talking heads are trying to explain what the deal is with Transnistria. Well, I suppose it’s my turn.

I don’t see the point in rewriting what you can find if you just visit a couple Wikipedia pages. And, let’s face it, I’m not in Eastern Europe, I haven’t exactly visited the place. But I think I can provide an angle on what’s going on which doesn’t quite come across in explainer articles or videos.

My credentials? I maintain the ridiculous Transnistria-Based Page on Facebook. Over time I have read a lot of articles. I am fascinated by the concept of Transnistria, and the history of how it got to be there. Yeah, you can probably find some Eastern European political scientists with much stronger credentials. But here we are! So here we go:

The red area here is Transnistria:

Along the right of the box, there’s an inlet off the Black Sea. That’s the mouth of the Dniester River. Follow that line up north by northwest, and you’re in the country of Moldova. The part of Moldova east, or across, the Dniester is trans-Dniester: Transnistria.

The historic region of Moldavia includes parts of what are today Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, and Transnistria. The boundaries between Romania and Russia / Soviet Union changed numerous times after Romania became fully independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1877. Notably, after World War I, Romanian included what today is Moldova, and also that part of Ukraine which is today between Moldova and the Black Sea. But what is today Transnistria had been part of the Russian Empire, and with the formation of the Soviet Union, became incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR.

In simpler terms, while Transnistria has historically been under Russian / Soviet control, it has also traditionally been substantially Moldovan / Romanian in ethnicity. Today it is about equivalent Moldovan and Russian, with Ukrainian a little bit behind.

While ethnic minorities are common across many countries of Eastern Europe, they are not as common as they once were. In the aftermath of World War II, many lands which had traditionally been extremely heterogenous became increasingly homogeneous. (Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent explores a lot of this in depth.) Romania, for example, is about 89% Romanian, and this number is low compared to some others. Poland is 98% Polish. Hungary is 98% Hungarian. (It is not coincidence that Poland and Hungary have turned increasingly ethnonationalist.)

Two places which did not become sharply homogenous after World War II were the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and then within those countries there were and still are places which are very ethnically diverse. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a prime example: roughly 50% Bosniak, 30% Serb, 15% Croat. Places like these have proven to be powder kegs over time. A cynical view is that maybe people just can’t get along, but I’ll offer a slightly different cynical view: maybe it’s frequently been in the interests of others (often outsiders) to stoke animosity between ethnic and racial groups.

Moldova - Transnistria excluded - identifies as about 75% Moldovan. The distinction between ethnic Moldovans and ethnic Romanians is historically minimal though., though historically, the distinction between Moldovan and Romanian depends on who you ask. It is a small country, though, about 2.6 million people. If you factor in the roughly 400,000 people in Transnistria, who identify as about 29% each Russian and Moldovan and 22% Ukrainian, the contour of Moldova changes quite a bit.

Moldova formally became independent in August 1991. Transnistria declared independence later that year, though this claim remains unrecognized by any nation, including Russia. Moldova, being a small country, a former Soviet republic, and not one blessed with a lot of economic resources like domestic energy sources, is not an especially wealthy nation. Transnistria, in turn, is much worse off. Not only is it cut off from established trade markets, freedoms are limited, and the consumer economy is dominated by a single monopolistic firm, Sheriff.

(Sheriff itself is completely fascinating: it is as if a Walmart type company had almost complete control of an area including 400,000 people, but then leveraged its monopolistic profit into building a world-class soccer team. Sheriff Tiraspol not only made it to the group stages of the FIFA Champions League this past year, they actually won a match at Real Madrid. In American sports terms, imagine if the Panamian equivalent of Walmart decided to make a baseball team out of thin air, and then they went and beat the New York Yankees… except that Panama is 10 times bigger than Transnistria. You’d be thinking, well, they must have gotten their money some other way than selling groceries. And you’d be right.)

Okay, you’re thinking, what does all this have to do with anything?

When Transnistria broke off from Moldova, nobody recognized it as an independent country. But the Russian government did send in “peacekeepers”. Today, there are 1,500 Russian troops stationed there.

Look at the map again:

Just off the map to to the east is the Ukrainian port of Odesa. Tiraspol, the nominal capital of Transnistria, is only 100km from Odesa. Even if no direct attacks are being launched from Transnistria against eastern Ukraine, you can see how Russia would be able to leverage its position to observe Ukrainian military forces.

It is perhaps too much of a stretch to imagine that anyone was foresighted enough in 1991 to imagine a Russian invasion of Ukraine 30 years later.

A more sensible read is that, at a point in time when Russian influence was collapsing, Transnistria provided a small opportunity to maintain a foothold. It would keep Moldova destabilized and closer to the Russian orbit, and you just never know when having 1,500 troops in what seems like an irrelevant place militarily might come in handy.

Over time, though, what exactly has been the point of Transnistria? Why keep a place in a permanent state of instability, especially when the main country it’s destabilizing isn’t any kind of threat?

The key to understanding this is in remembering that Transnistria doesn’t really have a coherent economy. The local currency is the Transnistrian ruble, which is not accepted anywhere else. What is the point in having a currency that you can’t use?

Right: because the economy isn’t supposed to be coherent.

Transnistria has a well-earned reputation as an epicenter of smuggling. Traditionally the Ukraine - Transnistria border has been extremely porous. Remember how close Tiraspol is to Odesa? Weapons have originated in Transnistria to be smuggled out to places like Kosovo and Chechnya. Cigarettes and alcohol have easily hit black markets. The fundamental illegitimacy of the economic system has long been ideal for would-be oligarchs to use a backdoor.

But something changed. This 2019 article in Foreign Policy explains the situation well: as Ukraine has increasingly moved to the West, it has directly and indirectly led Transnistria increasingly into a more legitimate economic status. Recall that Moldova as a whole is landlocked, and that Transnistria is a breakaway region. It’s the Transnistria - Ukraine border which has facilitated so much, let’s say, interesting economic activity. But Ukraine moved to shut that down, in the aftermath of the Crimean annexation and the separatist actions in the Donbas region. After all, there were literally Russian military personnel moving across Ukrainian territory to get into Transnistria. (Interestingly, the FP piece predicted that the soccer club, FC Sheriff, had entered a state of decline. It seems that Sheriff had other ideas. And, maybe, other sources of revenue. Perhaps there’s more money to be made above the table than below it, if you have new friends.)

And so it may be that Transnistria is actually providing a lens through which we can better understand some of the current thinking in Moscow. If access to EU money has become increasingly possible even in Transnistria, and this has coincided with some level of crackdown of illicit or at least questionable economic activity, whatever exactly it is that Transnistria has been for the last 30 years might be at the precipice of collapse. Not saying that this is what’s happening, but: What if Sheriff expanded west? Plenty of oligarchs have been afforded the opportunity to go more or less clean. Who, in Russia, would be squeezed out in the process?

The true power center of Russia is widely understood to be the oligarchs, the 21st century spin on the mob, with Vladimir Putin playing the dual role of statesman but also, in essence, syndicate figurehead. For many of them, there may have been tremendous opportunities at hand in recent years. Consider just the example of multibillionaire Roman Abramovich, whose primary fame in the West is associated with his ownership of Chelsea FC, arguably the most successful English soccer club of the 21st century. Abramovich’s ties to Putin seem to be hurting him now, but if anything this is perhaps ironic, as it seems like he transcended Putin a few billion dollars ago.

If it is not only Ukraine, but even an outright Soviet holdover like Transnistria, increasingly moving to the West, might this not represent an even graver existential crisis for the current Russian idea, which is built on a certain type of official corruption? What about Russian soft power writ larger, which on the one hand seemed to have been in decent shape given the scope of Russian oil and gas exports, but which more realistically has been in a deeper overall state of decline?

If the Ukrainian invasion has represented an extreme attempt to reverse course, where then does the current state of affairs leave Moscow, Kyiv, and Tiraspol?

And why have there been explosions this week in Transnistria?

Almost immediately after reports of the initial explosions in Tiraspol, the spectre of false flag operations was raised. Nobody seems to be able to believe that anything which happens in Transnistria can be taken at face value.

Recent reports have suggested that the number of Ukrainian refugees which have entered Transnistria number around 25,000. This is essentially the delta between the number of ethnic Russians and the number of ethnic Ukrainians who live in the region. The extant state of affairs has not exactly been doing a lot of favors for the majority of people in Transnistria. The peculiar perspective they have overall is now, along with that of the rest of the world, trained on what’s happening in Ukraine. While the power structure may be holding, it’s likely that the true public sentiment lies with Ukraine, not Russia.

What if, through a series of events perhaps inconceivable just months ago, there are suddenly no Russian “peacekeepers” in Transnistria?

Moldova formally applied for European Union membership a week after the Ukrainian invasion began. What if they join, and the majority of people in Transnistria want comparable levels of EU access?

The power structure must perceive a major existential threat to its perpetuity. How could they not?

That’s not to say I have any kind of special insight into who fired a grenade at a radio tower. Rather, it’s to say that at moments of strange destabilization, we should be able to believe that a lot of crazy things could be going on across the Dniester. And beyond.

Moldovan independence came 46 years after the end of World War II. Why should we expect or assume that the current irregular state of affairs in Transnistria would persist for as long?

By extension, why should we expect or assume that any state of affairs might persist for so long? There’s been a slow progression in Europe over the past couple of decades whereby countries formerly ignored as backward post Soviet states have increasingly come to be incorporated into the broader European idea. Montenegro is part of NATO! Meanwhile, the country which outright bailed on the EU is the UK! These are all very strange developments, even if they might make localized sense.

As weird as the current formation of Transnistria is, rather than understanding it as some kind of aberrant creation, it might make more sense to understand it as a bellwether for changes we aren’t going to fully understand for some time. Its weirdness, rather than making it indecipherable, may actually make what’s happening to Europe as a while easier to understand overall, because a lot of the surrounding pretense is scraped away and the economic reality of the situation is starker.

Even while some countries adopt an increasingly ethnonationalist bent, there is nevertheless something about the EU model that keeps bringing nations in. Perhaps it is as simple as the alternatives becoming increasingly unstable. Of course, nothing is that simple… until it is.

So much of the world is trying to come to grips right now with what Russia is doing, and why they are going about it the way they are going about it. What, exactly, has the utter destruction of Mariupol accomplished? How did the Russians seriously expect this war to play out? Is the Ukrainian defense one of the greatest military stories in centuries, or is it portending an unprecedented collapse of a once great power? Or will they even hold out much longer?

Can it be taken at all seriously that one of Russia’s military objectives is a linkage to Transnistria, with an eye on annexation? Well, how could anyone not take it seriously, given what’s transpired so far? And so if it is to be taken seriously after all, what exactly is the point? Is it about destabilizing the flow of the Soviet sphere of influence to the EU? Is it about the hundred thousand or so ethnic Russians? Or, maybe, did some oligarch’s smuggling operation get shut down, and this is the opportunity to get it rolling again? This is Transnistria. Don’t we have to believe anything and everything?

I’ll admit that my fascination with Transnistria over time has often been something of a lark. To American eyes, the idea of a trapped-in-time Soviet fake country is too bizarre to ignore. (Admittedly, this particular American has a graduate degree in history, and a long-standing multi-faceted fascination with the changing borders of Europe. Most Americans have… other fascinations.)

How, in the year 2022, can we take this flag seriously?

The thing is, while Transnistria might be comically absurd in a lot of ways, it’s neither a joke nor a whim at this point. The current state of affairs, more or less, has been in place for 30 years, and that doesn’t happen unless powerful interests are being served. The absurdity itself could perhaps best be understood as a front. Maybe that’s not how it was initially intended, but what more or less could it be now? Meanwhile there are actual people trying to lead actual lives, and in the process of doing that, they have slowly but surely been part of a much larger wave of change.

Wading through the Transnistrian phantasmagoria, even if it can’t answer all of our questions about Russia and Ukraine and the EU and where we all collectively might be headed, should at least give us a powerful way of thinking about collective identity, and better coming to terms with what what’s really happening in modern power relations. Transnistria might just be a side hustle to a handful of oligarchs, but then again, the entire Russian state might just be a Mahjong board of increasingly larger hustles at this point.

Still, in the end, it is not the flag, not the map, not the statues of Lenin, not FC Sheriff. It is the Transnistrian people who are, both in spite of and because of being so obscured, the most fascinating element of all. History itself may yet assign these people one of its most astonishing collective roles.