Back in the USSR: Heroic Adventures in Transnistria

by Rory MacLean

Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set his latest thriller: an upstart mini-state at the edge of Europe which looks to Lenin and Stalin for leadership, with a Facebook-savvy Cheryl Cole-lookalike foreign minister, a breathtakingly wealthy football club founded by KGB officers that’s determined to dominate the European Champions League, and a retired general with private zoo and free-roaming anaconda. Is this wild and wacky Cold War fiction? No, it’s real, modern day Transnistria.

Transnistria is a nowhereland hugging a narrow valley near the Black Sea. No bigger than Cornwall or Rhode Island, this unrecognised country is a Soviet museum occupied by Russian 'peace-keepers'. Its oligarchs in Adidas track suits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. Its young people train for revolution at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. Its secret factories have supplied arms to Chechnya and electrical cable for Iran’s nuclear power programme. Yet its supporters champion it as a peace-loving exemplar of cyber-age democracy.

Friends! Comrades! Come and join us on a journey into the heart of the new age Russian Revolution. Venture to this terra incognita with award-winning photojournalist Nick Danziger and best-selling author Rory MacLean as they lift the veil on Europe's most secret state. Gaze in awe at the audacity of its creation, the slickness of its business elite and its personable, drop-dead-gorgeous government ministers. Visit a Red Army retirement home. Learn how to sustain the half lotus yoga position with a KGB colonel.

Stand together with heroic citizens on the factory floors and knee-deep in the fallow fields of collective farms and celebrate Transnistria’s uniqueness as the only country in the world not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union. Let the balalaikas ring out as the Great Game is played on, and find yourself back in the USSR... with a difference.

Genres: Russia, The World, Nonfiction, Travel, Politics

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

Canadian Rory MacLean is one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous travel writers. His twelve books include the UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Berlin: Imagine a City, a book of the year and 'the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read' according to the Washington Post. He has won awards from the Canada Council and Arts Council of England and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. His works – according to the late John Fowles – are among those that 'marvellously explain why literature still lives'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he divides his time between the UK, Berlin and Toronto.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

At the kindest one could describe this as a cut and paste job of a collection of newspaper articles written for a broadsheet and rehashed as a book. If one unkind, but also honest, it reads like the sort of drunken idea that can only be excused by youthful exuberance and ignorance:

'Have you heard there is this mad country called Transnistra that nobody recognises and still thinks Stalin and the Soviet system is the best in all possible worlds? Crazy! Wouldn't it be mad to go and write a book about it?! We could be so patronising to all those funny foreigners and even if we made it all up whose to know?!'

I don't find it funny, I didn't think it was any good and as a joke it left me cold.

[Cynthia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t like the photo captions nor the lack of kindness towards the ppl he talked about. I wouldn’t have finished it if I had another book available.

Interesting region though, I’d like to know more about it

[Kriegslok · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nicely laid out and printed book. I really liked the atmospheric photography (although a few summer shots might have been nice but I suppose the visit was limited to a single and more atmospheric season). There isn't much by way of text. It's more a long journalistic piece probably not amounting to much more than The Guardian "long read" in length and I felt it was missing quite a lot. Rory MacLean also produced "Stalin's Nose" which worked for me in a way this doesn't. If I'd read the piece in a magazine or newspaper perhaps I'd be more sympathetic towards it but as a semi-humerous book on life in Transnistria I was disappointed.

[Robin Petty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The format is less of a travelogue and more like a punchy series of insightful, engaging, almost standalone, interviews for a broadsheet. I say that so as not to give the impression it's a travel guide or a volume that's intended to give insights on geography, topography and nature of the region. You would need to get that from another source.
I wasn't crazy about the slogan-y captions under the pictures in the Kindle version I read. The text sufficed and didn't lay on 'that tone' anywhere near so thickly.

[Leah Horlick]

The tone of the writing in this book was so distracting. Wildly sexist commentary throughout and a general sense that the writer was superior to and making fun of the people he was interviewing. The work also framed wealth disparity and hypocrisy as exclusive to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, and Transnistria's history as a site of concentration camps was reduced to one or two footnotes.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

the text could probably makes up less than a third of this book, and the images are ridiculously dark and grainy.

I was hoping for part travelogue part history of what sounds like a very interesting non-country, or at least some commentary on russia's covert expansionism in eastern europe (particularly given the authors claimed to have included some last minute updates after the events in crimea) but there wasn't any of that, just a bunch of poor faux-communism attempts at humour.

disappointed I sponsored this book at unbounders, glad I used a free voucher to do it rather than using my own money