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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 dominant 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 the award-winning photojournalist Nick Danziger and best-selling
author Rory MacLean on a journey into the beating heart of the new age Russian
Revolution. Gaze in awe at the audacity of its creation, the slickness of
its business elite and its personable, drop-dead-gorgeous government ministers.
Learn how to sustaining 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.
‘Back in the USSR: Heroic
Adventures in Transnistria’ is launched today by the crowd-funded publisher
Unbound — and will be published with your help. Depending on the level of
a pledge, you can get a copy of the book, a signed, limited-edition original
print, even join us in London for a Transnistrian bbq, with pickled watermelon,
marinated slabs of pork, ‘ukha’ fish soup which ostensibly prevents hangovers
and plenty of vodka. When you do pledge — and even heaven forbid if you
don’t — please spread the word via Facebook, Twitter or email. You may
have missed the Russian Revolution, but today you can be part of a revolution
in publishing (with your name printed in the book alongside those of Putin,
Lenin and Stalin).
Friends! Comrades! Come
and join us in a revolution by pledging for a copy of ‘Back in the USSR’ today,
or as they say in that part of the world, с наилучшими пожеланиями из Тирасполя
Nick Danziger
