Filthy and freezing on the Moldovan campaign trail

I'd only been in Moldova for two days and I was already reaching the end of my rope. Getting a visa was a hellish waste of time, and I'd been crudely followed by two feckless cops since landing in the capital, Chisinau. My distinctly Soviet hotel was a circus of phone-in whores, dweebish Peace Corps missionaries and aging American perverts cashing their Social Security checks on desperate Moldovan ladies before Bush kills the program off for good, leaving them stuck forever in the sexual desert of America.

After a bad night's sleep and an early wake-up call, it took us nearly two hours to drive just 40 kilometers from Chisinau to Getlova. The roads were flooded with mud, pocked with holes and designed to take the most roundabout possible route between two points. Geometry apparently is not one of Moldova's strengths. The fog was thick over the hilly countryside, a brown, terminal landscape of lifeless grapevines and mud.

Throughout the 1990s, Moldova was one of the CIS darlings of international lending institutions like the IMF and World Bank, rewarded for pretending to follow correct macroeconomic policies -- meaning, of course, privatization, strict budgets and lowered trade barriers. The IMF lauded Moldova for slashing credits to state enterprises and for stabilizing its currency.

Between 1992 and 1997 alone, Moldova received over a half billion dollars in aid from the IMF and World Bank, a massive sum for a tiny country with a GDP less than Ksenia Sobchak's annual wardrobe expenditure.

The results were predictable: Moldova is now the poorest nation in Europe, its industry totally destroyed, its population in catastrophic decline, its bureaucracy riddled with corruption. Its only function is to make other poor European countries feel good about themselves. Moldovans are at the bottom of the East European heap. Ukrainians laugh at them in order to feel better about their own wretchedness, like crackers picking on niggers. Even Albanians are grateful that they aren't Moldovans.

Moldova is not only the poorest nation in Europe--it is the most miserable place I have ever visited. The country survives on remittance, corruption, and the sale of human flesh. 1 million of Moldova's roughly 4 million citizens live abroad to earn money. Entire villages are emptied of 16-to-35 year-olds. The women are famous for stocking the West's and Russia's brothels and highway tochkas, as well as the striptease bars and "adult entertainment centers" in Turkey and Cyprus. Moldovan men provide cheap manual labor in Portugal, Spain and Italy, competing with Albanians and North Africans.

In Moscow, Moldovans under-bid even Ukrainian gasterbeiter slaves. We've had a few Moldovans working remont around our office building on behalf of one of the large tenants. They tend to do an awful job, but you can get away with paying them just a fraction of the pittance that was promised, or not paying them at all, because Moldovans are used to not getting paid. Their government made a habit of not paying workers and pensioners throughout the 1990s.

Moldova's doom is largely due to its miserable, bloodsoaked history. Historically, the territory between the left bank of the Dniestr river and the Romanian border was called "Bessarabia," and was alternately controlled by Romania, the Ottomans, and the Russians, who annexed it in 1812, losing it back to Romania between WWI and WWII. The right bank of the Dniestr was taken by Suvorov in 1792 and has been essentially Russian territory up through today, in the form of the breakaway Transdniestr Republic. The area on the left bank is overwhelmingly ethnic Romanian, while the Transdniestr region is a mix of Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians and others.

Sadly for the Moldovans, Transdniestr is the only area with some viable industrial muscle. Moldova itself has no resources except enormous amounts of mud and desperate people -- who have resorted to some gruesome strategies to earn a buck. In many villages, a significant number of Moldovan men have taken up offers to sell one of their kidneys for roughly 2,000 dollars. The kidney traders fly their Moldovan podlings into Istanbul, put them up in a nice hotel, slice their kidneys out, then throw them out on the streets with two grand in their pockets, leaving them to fend for themselves. These one-kidneyed Moldovans return to their villages, blow the two grand on home electronics or a used Lada, then quickly wither away, aging faster than a fruit fly, complaining that they had no idea they needed two kidneys to stay healthy.

In this context it's not hard to see why the Communist Party won by a landslide in the 2001 elections, defeating several "centrist" parties composed of ex-Communist bureaucrats and siloviki-turned-oligarchs. The unreformed Communists promised to move away from the corrupt, failed IMF model to a more socialistic one, and to repair ties with Russia, perhaps joining the mighty Russia-Belarus "Union."

Since their victory, the Moldovan Communists have behaved pretty much like one would expect provincial Communists to behave: like idiots, repressive in a crude, petty way. State television is crudely controlled; opposition candidates are crudely threatened with arrest, while opposition NGOs are crudely harassed by police and tax officials. They've managed to alienate everybody: Putin's Russia is openly hostile, while the EU and the Bushites are conniving to overthrow them.

In spite of this, the Communists aren't behaving like cornered beasts. Instead, they're playing both sides of the fence -- and trying to burn it down at the same time. On the one hand, Communist President Vladimir Voronin lauds Ukraine's Orange Revolution. On the other hand, he publicly denounces the idea of an Orange Revolution in Moldova, and has already accused the American ambassador of trying to foment one.

My first night in the National Hotel, I got a phone call in my room at about 9pm. "Khello," the woman's voice said. "Vood you like to spend time vis a pretty girl?"

I was too busy and too exhausted, so she kindly asked if it was okay for her to call me the next evening.

"Sure," I said.

Out of curiosity, I asked her how much her whores cost.

"Fifty dollars for one hour, 100 dollars for entire night," she said. I let out a sigh that may have been interpreted as dissatisfaction, so she added, "Of course, we can discuss this price."

I went downstairs to the 24-hour internet cafe. There, I sat next to a gray-haired American in a suit and overcoat. Next to him was a Moldovan woman in her late 20s with badly-dyed blond hair and a somewhat attractive face with a pained expression.

The American man was typing emails to friends, speaking each word out loud as he typed. "Hello. I'm in Moldova now with Irena. The women here are amazingly beautiful, but the place is so poor and depressing it really makes me appreciate what I have in America. I miss you all."

And then, he asked his Irena how to spell out "do svidanie." It took him literally 10 minutes to spell out the letters. He couldn't understand her when she dictated it letter-by-letter, so he finally took a booklet and typed it out. She looked over to me several times with a distressed expression -- sort of like, "Yes, this is what I've been reduced to. Thanks, God!"

The man signed his name "Nordy."

Later, in the lobby, while waiting for a friend, I sat behind another American -- a withered old pensioner with thin gray hair and thick glasses. "I want to thank you for everything," he said into his cell phone. "You're a wonderful family, and I had a wonderful time with your daughter." The old lecher had a thick, beige foam hearing aid hooked behind his earlobe as he spoke to his girlfriend's mother. He tried using a few Romanian words, but kept switching back to English. It didn't matter if he knew Romanian. They would come, even to him, no matter what he spoke.

In a country as congenitally adrift as Moldova, everything is explained in analogies: comparisons to their neighbors, comparisons to the Soviet Union, and how Moldova either cannot live up to them, or is persecuted by them.

My taxi driver from the airport claimed that during Soviet times, Moldova was "paradise." He said that people flocked there from all over the Soviet Union due to the weather.

It was cold, raw and rainy that day, as it has been every day I've ever spent in Moldova.

Mark Ames is the editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based alternative weekly from where this article was excerpted. For more alternative news from the English speaking community in the former Soviet Union, visit www.exile.ru