Sunlight sparkles off the broad Dniester River. Smugglers’ tracks wind across the snow and into silent woods. Patriotic oligarchs in Gucci tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. In 2013 when photographer Nick Danziger and I made the trip that would become Back in the USSR, Transnistria seemed like a bad joke. Communism was dead and Mother Russia had crashed out of the super power league. Yet this landlocked enclave, unrecognised by any legitimate state, continued to embrace the disgraced ideology; celebrating hero workers, parading its tanks in May Day parades, balancing the books by supplying arms to African insurgents and electrical generators for Iran’s nuclear power station.

But then the joke turned on the West.

One year after our visit, Russia seized Crimea and in 2022 invaded Ukraine, driven by a man haunted by redemptive purpose. Vladimir Putin considered the collapse of the Soviet Union – with its history of state terror, death-camp gulags and the forced starvation of millions – to be ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’. By hook and by crook, he rose to become president and launched an endless war against Western democracy while growing vindictive, grudging and obsessed with respect.

Transnistria – or Pridnestrovie as it now insists on calling itself – has remained part of his vengeful plan. Sandwiched between EU candidate Moldova and Ukraine, Russian ‘peacekeepers’ have long occupied the enclave as a forward operating base. When their comrades stormed across Ukraine’s eastern border for utterly fabricated reasons, hundreds of thousands died on the Donetsk and Luhansk battlefields. Yet the bloodshed ensured that aggression pays as Putin takes possession of Ukrainian ‘assets’. History – as spun in Russian and Transnistrian schools – is being rewritten to deify him as the leader who restored Catherine the Great’s ‘Novorossiya’.

In a timely reissue as an ebook, Back in the USSR – presented as a dark, social realist satire – is a chilling reminder of the fate that awaits Ukrainians if their country is conquered. In 2013 at the end of our first journey to the nowhereland, our host – a local-boy-made-good oligarch who asked to remain anonymous – called himself a New Soviet Man, a Stalinist concept of the ideal citizen. Such a paragon was expected to be selfless, embodying the values of socialism and focusing on collective well-being over personal gain. But survival in Russia and Transnistria’s brutal reality had come to demand a different way of being.
‘We know our people and how to treat them,’ I recall him saying in our last conversation. ‘And I tell you that the only way to get them to act or to change their ways is to point a gun at their heads, and threaten to shoot.’
‘And if they still don’t change?’ I asked, shocked by his arrogant candour.
‘Then one pulls the trigger.’