STREETS OF CROCODILES

CHIȘINĂU, Kishinev, ווענעשעק

As you approach the capital of Moldova from the airport, you face a bracing prospect. A previously featureless road up a shallow hill brings into view two enormous, symmetrical triangular apartment buildings, like great white wings closing the vista. Their mass is prodigious – thirty storeys and around sixty bays, stepping upwards towards the street. These are the Chișinău City Gates, and they’re one of the most ludicrous and impressive urban sights of the post-Soviet space, an image of Baroque city planning achieved in the early 1980s for the purpose of public housing. What this announces, or rather bellows, at the driver or bus passenger, is that you’re in a very, very modern country, and one which considers the provision of mass housing to be the most important thing worth displaying on the skyline. At night especially, this is still an exhilarating sight. If you were to get out at this point, you’d find that image tarnished somewhat. Like most Soviet apartment buildings, these were assembled from factory-made concrete panels, and these were from the last generation of Soviet “micro-districts”, when the building blocks were arranged into complex shapes and silhouettes. This hard image of monumental, concerted planning fades as soon as your feet are on the ground. In front of the “Gates” someone has placed a cross, as if to affirm that the church might be more important than housing or the glory of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic; public paths are poorly paved and scrubby. Newly built car dealerships stand in front of the ground floors of the blocks. A legless man on crutches hops along the middle of the road, between cars stuck in traffic, but doesn’t seem to be asking anyone for money. Above, giant adverts for Western goods are suspended across the lampposts and power lines. A wide street of monumental concrete apartment blocks, often pulled into similarly domineering shapes, proceeds from here; you can see, looking at them – or looking at contemporary photographs from the decade when they were built – how this could once have been a highly dramatic broadway, with the integration of shops on the ground floor and gesturing, repeated towers resembling Kalinin Prospekt in Moscow or Edgware Road in London, but the all-pervasive shabbiness and disorder to which the buildings were subjected, as the state abdicated their upkeep and businesses large and small parasited onto the low-rise pavilions, is inescapable. As a promenade, it retains some charm, with tree-lined pedestrian streets running on each side to shelter the walker from the noise and danger of the traffic. Street art, helpfully donated by Poles, takes up some of the blank spaces on the sides, with a large mural of Lech Wałęsa all the way up one, gazing out at the property ads, computer repairs, and EU Partnership billboards. Through the underpass that takes pedestrians across this boulevard, you can see a tangle of graffiti – anime characters, Masonic signs, “404 not found”, Romanian and Russian language declarations of love, and in English, “Fuck the Police”. This is Botanica, the largest micro-district of Chișinău, and to say that its monumentality provides a misleading impression of the rest of the city is only part of the story. You’ll soon find, when your bus drops you off at the city centre, that this is a capital turned inside out – apart from a handful of prestige towers for government or (more seldom) business, central Chișinău is low-rise and undemonstrative, looking every inch the Shtetl that it once was, a forgotten small town that has acquired the paraphernalia of the capital of a peripheral, deeply impoverished country. Moldova is blessed or cursed, depending on your view, with a strategically insignificant geographical position. On the week that I spent there in March 2016, the parliament – a fairly nondescript modernist municipal palace, in front of a pretty park and the more convincing classic-modern synthesis of the National Theatre – had a tent city in front of it. As in Kyiv in the winter of 2013/2014, people were protesting at a spectacularly corrupt government, seemingly bent on squandering and squirrelling away the assets of a country slipping at great speed from the “Second” World into the Third. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe (on any definition of “Europe”), and on most indicators, it is on the level of much of sub-Saharan Africa.¹ Chișinău is its richest city, but the poverty here is acute.

One half of the City Gate

Unlike in Ukraine, it could be argued that this doesn’t represent anything new – whereas the Ukrainian SSR was economically one of the USSR’s most successful republics industrially, educationally and scientifically, Moldova was relatively poor even within the Soviet Union, a largely agricultural province swiped from Romania in 1940 soon after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It has been alternately under the suzerainity of the Ottoman Empire, then annexed by the Tsars, then for twenty years in the interbellum in Romania, then for another forty-five or so years in the Soviet Empire. Its population, historically, has always been mixed – dominated by Romanian-speaking Moldovans, but always with large minorities of Yiddish-speaking Jews, Russians, Ukrainians and Gagauz, all of whom still inhabit what is still a pleasingly multicultural capital city, though those of the city’s Jews that didn’t manage to escape eastwards were massacred by the Romanian army when they re-occupied Moldova after 1941. Until recently, Chișinău was mainly in the history books for the Kishinev (the city’s Russian name) Pogrom of 1903, when over forty Jews were killed, and nearly a thousand injured, by their neighbours, an event which led to widespread migration, for instance, to East London. After 1991, the more Russophone slither of the country east of the river Dnister, which had never been part of Romania, declared independence as “Transnistria”, backed by covert and overt Russian forces. Yet apparently puzzlingly, the dominant party in Moldova from the late Nineties until recently was the Communists, who won several elections and were pivotal in orienting the country towards the EU rather than Russia, in punishment for which Russia imposed a blockade on wine exports. The current subsequent Liberal Democratic Party government is dominated by oligarchs, and widely despised; its recently elected President comes from the Socialist Party, a pro-Putin split from the Communists.

So far, it’s almost a mirror of Ukraine – Russian-backed separatism, economic collapse, corruption. But there was no international furore when Moldovans took to the streets in their largest protests since independence, no “I am a Moldovan” viral videos of pretty blonde women telling Westerners about freedom. The EU this time backed the government (who signed the sort of Association Agreement with the EU that was at issue in the first place at Maidan) rather than the protesters; Russia was indifferent, branding the protests as yet another “colour revolution”, even though many of the participants were strongly pro-Russian.

Some of the contradictions in all this can be seen in the way that the tent city is literally spatially split in two between the sort of pro-European, anti-corruption liberals whose slogans aren’t a world away from those at Maidan, and supporters of the Communists and the Socialist Party. Their symbols, red stars and red flags are unabashedly Soviet. Each part of the tent encampment can count on widespread public support. The Socialist Party, whose Putinophilia extends as far as supporting a ban on “homosexual propaganda” (not a conspicuous problem in Chișinău as far as I could see), have the greater number of stickers around town. One of them reads – in Russian, not the usually more dominant Romanian – “IT WILL BE BETTER WITH US”. The two groups actually united at various points in the protest, including on the storming of parliament a few weeks before I visited. Their positions are probably genuinely irreconcilable, and on previous form (or Ukrainian precedent), there’s no reason to assume they’d not be much the same in government as the people they’re challenging. Though very probably they wouldn’t be quite so venal as the incumbents, who managed to avail themselves and their oligarch backers of $1 billion from the state reserves, which “mysteriously” disappeared into banks in Hong Kong and London, making up an incredible one-eighth of the country’s entire GDP.

It Will Be Better With Us

The cityscape of Chișinău is a fairly acute example of the popular stereotype of a post-Soviet city, in its combination of crumbling, kitschy space-age modernity, utterly ruthless and almost comically seedy gangster capitalism, and the semi-rural remnants of a turn-ofthe-century market town on the borders of the Russian and Ottoman world. Fans of linguistic-cultural determinism will find little to support their theories in this easternmost outpost of the Romance languages. I stayed while here in the “Soviet, space-age” part of this equation, in the Hotel Cosmos. Like most of the more interesting buildings in Chișinău, its façade is a pattern of concrete panels, concave and convex, giving a rippling effect. From the upper floors you get a view of a cityscape shrouded in yellow-brown dust from construction works. An inept square, mainly consisting of wayward traffic, oscillates around an equestrian statue of the Moldovan-born Russian Civil War commander Kotovsky. Next to the hotel, a folksy mosaic shows a male and female figure in national costume in front of a stylised cityscape of Orthodox churches on one side, and rural crops and herds on the other. On the other side, the hotel has grown various new appendages, such as the Grand Hall shopping mall and the Napoleon Palace Casino with its neon-lit Ionic colonnade. Further on, another mall, “Atrium”, with a high-rise business centre on top, whose rather Soviet-modernist castellated silhouette houses a bizarre Postmodernist interior, with columns shaped like vases, flowing green neon suspended ceilings and a central pink trumpet sculpture resembling a jollier version of Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas. Here, you can get a decent panorama of the Moldovan capital, with a cliff of prefabricated high-rises encircling single-family houses, car repair and light industry.

Cosmic Horseman

Mafia Classicism

Better than the Arcelormittal Orbit

Walk up Yuri Gagarin street and turn onto Stefan the Great Boulevard, with its travel agencies (“work legally in Poland”) and dubious-looking pubs, and you soon come to another show-piece, where a monument to Victory in the Great Patriotic War stands inbetween socialist realist classical palaces and crumbling Soviet modernism, with the Hotel National gutted of its rooms, its outdoor pool drained. Opposite, the Constantin Brancusi Exhibition Centre occupies the ground floor in a cruiser of 1980s Soviet luxury flats, with allegorical metal sculptures of “the arts” represented by women in flowing drapery. Inside, an awful exhibition of the sentimental Moldovan landscapes of some 1980s hack shares space with the more interesting collages of a young artist, neither of which are quite what you expect from the main art gallery of a European capital. At this point, I turned off the main road, on the lookout for the House Museum of the Russian architect Alexey Shchusev, born in Chișinău. Shchusev replanned his hometown after the war, and Stefan the Great Boulevard became its grand boulevard, with the main government buildings concentrated here, as a Romanian provincial city became the capital of a Soviet Republic. The style used is not dissimilar to the fruity eclecticism of the 1900s City Hall, by the architect Alexander Bernardazzi, whose work appears to have been taken as a model, a distinctive style to much of the southwestern periphery of the Tsarist Empire – a bit Moorish, a bit Gothic, a bit Orthodox.

Stalinist Kishinev

But just off that street, which does indeed have quite a lot of impressive socialist realist blocks, often designed with a decorative repertoire borrowed from Byzantium, you’re in a city of one and at most two-storey villas, the somehow preserved houses of the earlytwentieth-century petit-bourgeoisie. After a little exploration off the main streets, you find that most of the centre of Chișinău is like this. Battered rows of bungalows, some with their roofs seemingly sinking, others with plasterboard roof extensions, some with no roofs at all; some, especially the nearer they get to shopping malls, have multistorey tenements of trespa and fibreglass mounted onto them. Private health clinics, the preserved house of Pushkin on his brief stay here, the glass outgrowth of the local offices of Lukoil, the big red sign of a phone repair shop spread out across a dusty shed that looks like it’d fall down in a strong wind. Fragments of high-rise schemes from the 1980s stare out at them incongruously, leftovers from a modernisation that never fully took place.

Borderland eclectic

Detail of Capitals in the Shchusev Plan

In his 1970s study of housing policy, Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism, the Hungarian sociologist Iván Szelényi found that for reasons of land ownership and constructional simplicity, Sovietstyle economies preferred to build huge estates on virgin land on the outskirts for skilled workers and bureaucrats rather than develop the often privately owned “transitional zones” in the inner city.² In, say, Prague or St Petersburg, this is one reason why you have some of the best preserved historic cityscapes in Europe, or anywhere; in Chișinău, the result is considerably less delightful. It is constantly interrupted, though, by outbreaks of sudden modernity, something in which both the Soviet and post-1991 periods seem to have specialised in without any noticeable overall plan. At the very least, the Soviet mosaics and murals still on the sides of many buildings, with their images of goofily optimistic modernity, are a little more charming than the giant adverts that drape the stone and mirrorglass façades of the handful of new office blocks, or the gimcrack Vegas classicism of the new apartment blocks that have emerged where some enterprising citizen has built on the site of one of those one-storey villas. The clearest difference is that the Soviet spaces have some modicum of unity, built around obvious squares and streets, often in ensembles of little classical tenement blocks around monuments, such as a tall, pathos-ridden monument to the Komsomol; all the 1990s and 2000s have really done with this is eat away at it: neoliberal urbanism as a parasitic growth.

The transitional zone

Walk down Strada Columna, and you’ll find a diffuse street market, extending along each side of a pavement which looks to have just suffered from an earthquake, jagged and sharply angled so as to make shopping into a balancing act. A factory alongside is covered in an elegant, op-art concrete screen, as if Oscar Niemeyer got a job designing components for the prefab factory – these experiments in panels do a lot to enliven Chișinău’s bleaker corners. With some interruptions for traffic-choked roads, this market extends all the way to the railway station. In front of its large, Shchusev-planned, tree-sheltered plaza, is a section of the market which obviously has a bit of an eye to tourists – while most of the markets sell useful goods, the usual Chinese-made consumables, this one also sells old books, postcards, cameras, and miscellaneous Soviet tat. In the middle of the square is a monument to the Moldovans who were deported to Siberia with the Russian reconquest of the city in the 1940s – they’re depicted as a collective body of huddled, hunched, headscarved figures with bundles and bags. The station itself is, maybe unexpectedly, glorious, its colourful, richly decorated arcades the most impressive example of post-war Chișinău’s Soviet-Byzantine style. Here’s where you can get the Moscow train – easily and simply – to Ukraine and Russia, and can take the more complicated route to Romania, which, although in the European Union, evidently does not have the same magnetic, this-could-be-your-future role that Poland plays for western Ukraine. Here, the “better place”, richer, more stable, possibly even less corrupt (although given the breathtaking scale of the Moldovan elite’s corruption, that’s relatively speaking), may actually be to the east. Here, it is hard to believe in the alleged civilisational battle between the freedom and democracy of the EU and the despotism and obscurantism of Eurasia. Chișinău is caught between the two yet receiving the benefits of neither.

Socialist City Mirage

The way out