Jonathan Steele is senior foreign correspondent and a columnist for British daily The Guardian,
where he has worked for several decades. Mr. Steele was a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union
in the 1970s, as a Guardian reporter. He became the paper’s Washington correspondent in the
second half of the 1970s, and headed The Guardian’s Moscow office between 1988 and 1994.
Mr. Steele was therefore able to witness the perestroika in the Soviet Union and the subsequent
appearance of post-Soviet states as the U.S.S.R. crumbled. He has written aand
continues to report on conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iraq
(which he has visited nine times since the beginning of the American military intervention).
Mr. Steele has been to Moldova three times: during the perestroika, when the Popular Front
appeared; at the time Transnistria declared independence from Moldova; and most recently, as
part of a program by the Chisinau-based Independent Journalism Center, to teach writing to
Moldovan journalists.
– Mr. Steele, what is the perception of Moldova in the United Kingdom?
– One has to recognize, unfortunately, that only quite a small proportion of people in
Britain really know where Moldova is or anything about it at all. It is a small country, it’s
very little in the headlines, and people just don’t get very much news about it on
television or in the popular press. I think it’s only the so-called quality newspapers that
cover Moldova at all, and then very spasmodically.
Not much is known, but I think people who do think about it at all, and have heard a little
bit about it, they think of it as a rather poor country, perhaps one of the poorest in Europe,
they think of crime, trafficking of women, and they think a bit of wine. They can’t quite
get into their heads how you balance the contradiction between this small, sleepy
agricultural country that produces wine and then this other part of the stereotype, which is
trafficking of women and crime, and so on. It doesn’t normally go together, there are two
different images.
– This rather insignificant Western attention to Moldova stands in stark contrast
with the Kremlin’s concern for the country și the Russian President and Prime
Minister tend to meet Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin often, sometimes
several times a year. Why do you think Moscow cares so much about this small
country that is relatively far away from Russia?
– I think there are two main explanations. First, Moldova was the first country, maybe the
only one in the former Soviet space, which brought Communists back to power in an
election. In the other parts of the former Soviet Union people from the old Soviet
nomenklatura, of course, are still running many of these republics, particularly in Central Asia,
in Azerbaijan, and Belarus, and so on, but they no longer call themselves
communist and they often come up with anti-communist rhetoric quite a lot.
This country is unusual because it does actually have a party that calls itself communist, I
see on the streets its election slogans, showing unashamedly the hammer and sickle, and
there seems a good chance it’s going to be reelected. So it’s popular, and people I’ve
talked to don’t think that the elections are cheated, they’re not fraudulent as they are, to
some extent, in places like Azerbaijan and Central Asia. So I think that Russia, which, of
course, has also moved in the direction of every other country in the former Soviet space,
of having the nomenklatura in power but not the Communist Party, nevertheless sees
these people running Moldova now as part of their own group, and they want to protect
that somehow. So I think that they [Imedia: Russian leaders] still see Moldova as a place
that can still be protected from what they would see as bad Western influence.
And the second thing is obviously NATO. The Kremlin is very concerned to try and stop
any further extension of NATO in the former Soviet space, and Moldova has a
constitution which talks of neutrality. I think the Russians are doing everything they can
to support those forces in Moldova, which appear to be, according to the polls, the
majority anyway. On many of their borders they already now have NATO countries or
countries that want to join NATO, but Moldova is one of the few former Soviet republics,
at least in Europe, that is not moving towards NATO.
– You’ve just come back from visiting Transnistria. It has been almost 20 years since
you’ve last seen Tiraspol. What are your impressions?
– I was surprised how empty the streets were in Tiraspol. People explained to me that it’s
because so many young people are forced to leave the country for economic reasons, to
try to look for work elsewhere și mainly in Russia. I was in Tiraspol on a Sunday, on a
lovely sunny, spring day, when you might expect people in the street and going to the
shops and the market and so on, and it was nearly dead. So that was quite a shock, I felt it
was rather a sad place in that sense. I didn’t talk to anybody who was in power, but I did
talk to two members of the opposition, and that also gave me a sense of a rather weird
spectrum. I talked to Nadejda Bondarenko, the top person in the Communist Party there.
She was so viciously opposed to Mr. Smirnov, I was really quite surprised. She accused
him of following a capitalist route. So she was really an unreformed communist, but it
was interesting that she was there and that she functions, and that she feels free to say the
strong things she said about the leadership.
I also met somebody from a different side of the spectrum, I’m not even sure where you
would put him in the spectrum, Dimitry Soin, who runs this organization called Proriv
(Breakthrough). This seems to me an attempt encouraged by the leadership to try to
prevent any attempt at a colored revolution” in Transnistria. It seems to be trying to
mobilize young people, to get them out into the street in marches, protests, and
demonstrations, that would be very useful if there were a genuine threat against the
leadership from democratic forces to try and change the system. So that was interesting,
although even Mr. Soin was certainly in his words not praising Mr. Smirnov. He was
accusing him of not doing properly on the economic front and the rest of it. So that was
pretty fascinating.
– Let’s come back to this side of the Nistru, where authorities have a pro-European
rhetoric. You’ve seen Chisinau for the last five or six days și how European do you
think Moldova is?
– I think it’s in a sort of transitional period, it’s in a kind of limbo. There are lots of Soviet
legacies still here. Part of them, of course, include architecture. The buildings are all from
the Soviet period, and they all look like it, and there are few very big new buildings that
have gone up. It’s only in the back streets that really you see some reconstructed villas
and mansions that have been turned into offices, banks, and restaurants and things like
that. But you have to get off the main street.
When you’re in the main street, beyond a little bit more neon that there is now, and
slightly brighter lights, you could easily be in a Soviet city 20 years ago. And I must say
even the lights are sort of dim, at night it’s really quite gloomy walking down the street.
There are far more pot-holes in the main roads than I would have expected in a modern
European city. Pavement is very uneven and when it rains you get puddles that remain for
another 24 or 48 hours. So it’s quite run down and uncared for, and I think that’s a pity.
And if this is the capital city, one suspects that it may be worse in other places.
I think people are looking very much to Europe, younger people particularly. The polls
show that a majority of people would like to join the European Union if that was possible.
So I think that there is a drive to join Europe and to meet European standards, but I don’t
think that the politics or the economy of the country at this stage is going to make that
possible.
