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From Our Own Correspondent
Are the Russians coming?
00:24:36
Correspondents' stories. In this edition, Humphrey Hawksley's in a part of Europe an...
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Hello from the from our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme
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broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, are the Russians coming? We hear from a corner of Europe where they'd be far from unwelcome. Meanwhile, a quarter of a century after communism in Romania, the secrets are still emerging. There's horror at an old tea planters club in Assam as our man confesses he doesn't know how to play bridge. And in the heart of high tech digital California, we find a place where they still revere the old fashioned printed word. President Obama's been talking on the phone to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It's the first direct contact between the two men since the west imposed sanctions after Russia's annexation of Crimea. American experts meanwhile, have been poring over maps, trying to work out where the Russians might march next. The small breakaway state of Transnistria, technically part of Europe's poorest nation, Moldova, is considered by some to be at risk. The territory became separated from the rest of Moldova in a brief war in 1992, and today its 300,000 people are governed by a regime backed by Moscow. Humphrey Hawksley has been to one Moldovan village that ended up as an enclave within Transnistria. Are villagers there worried about their future?
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As it flows down from the mountains, the Nistru river twists and turns through Europe's poorest country, Moldova. Just north of the run down village of Concieri, it creates a horseshoe shape across the bottom of which is an old ceasefire line marked now by a checkpoint and and a bored Russian soldier. The drab, flat agricultural land that runs from the checkpoint to the riverbanks is controlled by the Moldovan government. On the other side is Transnistria, a strip of territory torn away in a 1992 war that came with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It's now essentially Russian controlled. We'd only lived here a year before it happened, says Lyudmila Agartia, looking across her small yard where piles of logs and hay are covered with blue plastic tarpaulins. A cat stretches its back and runs towards the field, her dog bark setting, chickens scampering. He strains on a chain bolted to the wall of her house. It was in the very first days, she says. My husband was down by the river and killed by a sniper. Valentin was a 30 year old civilian lorry driver, a veteran though of the war in Afghanistan, who along with the rest of the village, fought doggedly to keep out Advancing Russian troops. Lyudmila, now in early middle age, zips up her purple anorak against the wind and puts on a grim smile. We didn't fight so hard for it to be like this. As things are now. She shakes her head sadly. I don't think it was worth it. The Crimean crisis has focused minds in Concieri, where national sovereignty is a moot issue. In the past hundred years or so it's been part of Ukraine, Romania, the Soviet Union, Moldova now, and by a hair's breadth. The checkpoint could have been in another place and the villagers would be citizens of Transnistria, where a statue of Lenin and the Soviet hammer and sickle remain symbols of government. The river would have been a natural boundary, but the ceasefire was declared along a line that pretty much ran through wherever the fighters positions were at the time. So Concieri has become a horseshoe shaped enclave within an enclave, its people feeling very much the presence of Russian troops, technically peacekeepers who man border checkpoints. And they feel abandoned by their own Moldovan government, its beacon of European Union membership mustering not much enthusiasm. The badly paved roads, crooked electricity poles and basic housing are pretty much unchanged from when people here were citizens of the Soviet Union. For many, the causes for which they fought have come to nothing. Modern Europe is seen as a place of unpredictable chaos, while in the lost territory of Transnistria, people say they have higher wages and pensions and political stability. This is where the popularity of New Russia competes face to face with that of democratic Europe. Lyudmila says there's a photograph of her husband, Valentin, in the village museum, but she doesn't want to come with us to the museum because she says it makes her too upset. Instead, we go with Vasily nerke, who's now 53, with a weathered face and faded blue eyes. The whole village fought against the Russians, he says proudly as we walk, pointing to walls pockmarked with shrapnel and bullets. It was close at times, but by God did we hold the line. It's late afternoon and the sun is trying to pierce through leaden rain clouds that have yet to break. We stop at the village square, a patch of dirt with a small Orthodox church and a memorial inscribed with the names of villagers who died. So what now? I ask. After Crimea, in Washington and Brussels, the talk is that Transnistria could be Vladimir Putin's next target, while in the Moldovan capital, Kisenau, analysts say that voters don't care that much. A patch of occupied land from another era is far less important than jobs and the economy. Concierge's museum is a room in the primary school, one wall given over to the war. Valentin's black and white photograph shows a smartly dressed young man in uniform. Vasily points to another, of a prim, stern woman who was the village school teacher. They came to a house one night and just shot her dead, he says. His hand moves up to a faded photograph of a fighter who looks no more than a boy. He stepped on a landmine, he explains slowly. He died in my arms. He tightens his lips, trying to keep his composure. All this sacrifice, he says. You ask about Crimea for sure. Well be next. And would you fight again? I ask. He's quiet for a moment, his eyes moving carefully along the wall of pictures and tributes. Who would fight? He answers. Not us. It's wrong. The people in Transnistria, their lives are better than ours. The Russians, they could just walk in here now, and who would stop them?
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And that was Humphrey Hawkesley. Events in Crimea this month only serve to underline the fact that the fall of communism has left so much business unfinish. Next door to Moldova, that chain of events led to the downfall and death in 1989 of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Gradually, some of those who'd fled his brutal regime then started to make their way home to see if life would improve in the post Communist era. Monica Whitlock's been talking to Romanians about the future and about the past.
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Imagine Mr. Stoica, his big craggy face lined from the corners of his eyes to his chin, his quiet voice, his neat sitting room, iced cakes and plum brandy, an old fashioned globe on top of the wardrobe. Mr. Stoica and his wife are retired schoolteachers in their village of Dragonesht, on the eastern borderland where Romania drifts into the old Soviet Union. They've taught every village child here since 1953. The Stoikas were good Communist Party members, of course they were. You had to be. We can talk about that now, can't we? Mr. Stoiker asked. A horse and cart rattled past the window, one Carter calling to the other. We'd come to visit with an old friend of theirs, Nelu Bougan, a neighbour who had left Roumania for America years before. Now Nelu was back in his Texan cowboy hat. And so these two old men sat side by side, laughing and opening up the past, born at the same time when Romania still had a king. Then came fascism, then Communism. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in 1965. But for Mr. Stoica, that was the year he lost his only child. One of them was the schoolmaster, the other the radio repair man, both the sort of fellow a working man might tip his cap to public figures. They also shared a private life, a secret, of course. We were not allowed to travel, said Mr. Stoicker. But I studied. I learned about the richness, the beauty, the poverty of every country. I could dream myself to Italy, or even to Australia. The two of them could imagine how marvellous it would be to get to that other world, how just and decent life would be there. They even slipped off to Bucharest and bought a typewriter to type anti communist leaflets. They didn't even tell Mrs. Stoiker and Mrs. Bugan at first, because of the snoops and spies who were everywhere in those days. Then, said Mr. Stoicher, how to distribute our leaflets? We bought some balloons, Christmas tree decorations. I bought a sheet of zinc and a bottle of hydrochloric acid. We cut up the zinc with scissors and mixed it with acid in a bottle. The bottle would fill with gas and inflate the balloon. We tested to see how many leaflets we could attach without dragging it down. It worked fine in the garage. And so they made ready for the big outdoor test. We rode our bicycles to the vineyards in Corozal Valley. It was a misty morning. I remember as if it were yesterday, said Mr. Stoicher. We attached eight or 10 leaflets and the first balloon took off. It floated away in the mist. So we did another and another. And then we saw them, the leaflets fluttering down. We said, that's it. We'll go to Bucharest on the night train. We'll go to the top of that tall building with 10 floors. Remember it. But Nello will be caught. Come on, he said, well, well, go up the fire escape. It's worth a shot. So Nelu put on his good suit and he did go to Bucharest. Not that night, but soon after, in his car. He did stage a protest. And he did get caught. He went to prison, leaving his family hounded by the state, taunted and outcast by most of the village. And Mr. Stoica. I couldn't go for myself, I could bear prison, but for my wife, my family, I couldn't. We'd just adopted a baby and I couldn't do it to them. And so Mr. Stoiker kept his silence. He became the headmaster, then vice president of the town council. He took a position in the Communist Youth League and another in the cadre of propagandists and when I saw Mrs. Bogan, Nelu's wife, alone, walking past with her little boy, I would nod, but I'm sorry, I couldn't talk. I couldn't help them. One day Mr. Stoiker happened to look under the table, that table of iced cakes and brandy around which we were sitting, and he found a tiny recording device planted by the secret police. And so the Stoichas never again spoke of important things, even to each other. When Nelu came home from prison five years later, he and his whole family made it to America as political refugees. He expected there'd be crowds waiting, cheering for him, but there was just an airport. His kids in time became Americans. Nelu's son serves in the National Guard. Mr. Stoicker and Mrs. Stoicker continued to teach, and their son is now the headmaster of the village school. Still, Mr. Stoika dreams Dallas, Washington, Japan. I can imagine them all. I have never left home. But in my mind I am everywhere. And if you look in the Stoica's shed, there's still an old bottle of hydrochloric acid.
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Monica Whitlock on the secrets still emerging A quarter century after communism in Romania, India's northeast is in many ways an area cut off from the rest of the country, a backwater generally excluded from the country's economic growth of recent years. Land access is through a narrow corridor round the north of Banglade. Visiting some parts of the region is restricted due to ongoing struggles against various breakaway groups and inter tribal conflicts. There are few tourists. Some politicians from New Delhi have made the trek out to the north east in recent days. It is election time after all. Our Kieran Cook has been in Assam, one of seven states that make up the area. It's a place of tea plantations as well as of remnants of a bygone colonial era.
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Laced doilies cover the jam and marmalade. The cup and saucer of the most delicate china. The tea is poured through a strainer, hot milk added from a battered jug. A troop of small monkeys lollops across the lawn, playing hide and seek between the carefully tended lines of marigolds and luxuriously coloured dahlias. I'm staying at a tea plantation. Bungalow. The word bungalow derives from the local term bungla, a cottage built for the old colonial settlers. It's a large two story wooden dwelling with open verandas and rattan blinds. Spread round are the tea plantations. The sea of green leaves is interspersed with tall trees, their white lime trunks standing out like guards gaiters. Assam and much of the northeast was at the time of India's independence in 1947, one of the wealthiest parts of India, its fertile lands fed by the mighty Brahmaputra river, it was a rich agricultural area with jungles full of valuable wood. There was also coal and oil. And there was tea, lots of it. Life on the plantation for a colonial tea manager might have been grand, but it was often lonely. That's where the idea of the club came in. A place to congregate and have a bit of fun. I take a ride in a three wheeled taxi to the local club. Along a track with more potholes than level ground. A lone caretaker, starved of company, excitedly shows me round. Swimming pool he points to proudly. It's empty tennis courts. The grass is parched. There are no nets. The large ballroom with its stationary fans looks as though it had its last dance long ago. The baize on the billiard table is being eaten by termites. Bar stools polished by a thousand backsides line the empty echoing bar. The decline of India's northeast has multiple causes. It's been almost cut off geographically by what was East Pakistan then, Bangladesh. People in the region refer to the rest of India as as the mainland, emphasising just how remote from the mainstream they feel. Massive immigration over the years from what were the poorer parts of India put a big strain on the northeast's agricultural resources. Deforestation is a serious problem. The rising waters of the Brahmaputra river, which is six miles wide in places, result in widespread floods and frequent loss of life. The region is home to a collection of ethnic groups and tribes, many with their origins in the east, in Myanmar and Thailand. For years, the area has been riddled with tribal rebellions. The Indian army maintains a big presence, particularly along the border with China. The government in New Delhi has tried to keep the area quiet by creating a large and suffocating bureaucracy, but has done little to encourage industry or improve infrastructure. I drop in at another club in the small oil town of Digboy. In the mid 19th century, elephants trudging through the jungle appeared with oil deposits on their feet. Excited colonial engineers then pleaded with locals to Dig Boy dig, and hence the name. Or that's the story. Fierce fighting between allied forces and the Japanese took place here in the Second World War. Outside the town, there's an immaculately kept cemetery for the war dead. The Dig Boy Planters Club appears to be thriving, full of both planters and oil engineers. There are liveried staff and blazing fires. Preparations are being made for a fancy dress evening. There's talk of a competition at the Nearby golf course, the first to open in Assam. During the war, its main fairway was turned into a makeshift airstrip. We love our clubs in these parts, says an older club member, an Assamese tea plantation manager. He wobbles slightly on his bar stool. We like being cut off from the mainstream. There are people in remote communities here who have no idea of being part of a country called India. Another club regular appears. He's Bengali, but introduces himself as Bunty. Or was it Pongo? Care for a game at bridge? There's a look of horror when I admit to not knowing how to play. Nor do I have a plantation to look after. And no tie or jacket. Back at the bungalow, supper is ready. Baked beans on toast with a few chilies added. American GIs brought baked beans here at the end of the war and we spiced them up a bit, says my host. Just the ticket after a few cold
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beers at the Club Kieran Cook in Assam. Now, where's the most interesting bookshop in the world? It's a bit like curry houses. Everyone thinks they know where to find the best one. We've run at least two dispatches on the subject in this programme. Those contenders I remember were Paris and Delhi. Another store in Dubai has half a million books in English to choose from. But Andrew Whitehead, on assignment recently in the United States, suggests the real answer might be San Francisco. There, in the heart of high tech digital California, he discovered there are places still dedicated to the old fashioned printed word.
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City Lights is not just a bookstore, it's a church, one literary San Franciscan said to me, describing the spiritual headquarters of the Beat poets. More godless than God fearing in religious terms is the sort of discordant note that you might get in, well, Beat poetry perhaps, but the comment was intended as praise, recognition of the store as a public space as well as a place of reverence. City Lights is a fair claim to be the world's best known independent bookshop. It was set up more than 60 years ago close to San Francisco's lively bohemian north beach locality by, among others, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still around and occasionally in attendance. Back then it was postage stamp size, a beacon of the counterculture which made its name publishing Allen Ginsberg's long poem Howl, for which was prosecuted for obscenity and acquitted and championing the Beat movement. Also associated with Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and William Burrows, it's now taken over the entire block, open to midnight every day of the week. The wonderful sort of bookshop that has easy chairs dotted around and Signs inviting you to sit and read. Its stock is Catholic, as befits a good bookshop. And if it's now a church, then the small room upstairs is the shrine, the shelves devoted to the Beats and to the poetry City Lights itself has published. And the Beats, well, some would say that alongside rock and roll, they were about the most inventive aspect of America in the 50s and early 60s. Rebellious, distinctly disconcertingly masculine, tinged with booze, jazz, pills and dope, given to free, willing prose, iconoclastic verse and road tr. Jack Kerouac's on the Road is the Beat Generation's best known work, a novel I read as a teenager and which so captivated me I've never dared to revisit it in case I find the magic has faded. So for me, browsing at City Lights is. Oh dear, another religious term, a bit of a pilgrimage. While the store and its rigorously organized shelves still flies the standard, it's a measured, late middle aged radicalism rather than the red hot rage of youth. So that fits too. The Beats began as an east coast phenomenon. Ginsburg and Ferlinghetti were both from New York, and it found an enduring home on the other side of the country. San Francisco is America's alternative capital. It has been for decades. Following in the Beats footsteps came Haight, Ashbury and the hippie era. You know the song, if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair. More about music and performance than literature, more overtly political than the Beat movement, and leaving, as far as I can tell, a less pronounced cultural mark on the city. That 1967 Summer of Love embraced gay love. One consequence of the flower power influx was that San Francisco developed the liveliest gay scene in the country. Refugees from censorious parents and disapproving communities, those in search of anonymity or a new start congregated here. The Castro, once a working class district, is now a gay village. And as with so much of counterculture, San Francisco, now distinctly middle aged, this tolerant, laid back city has found its literary representation in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and its sequels. San Francisco, not simply as venue, but presiding genius, so one of the world's most digitally minded cities, where so many of the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley have made their homes, is also among the most literate. And it still offers sanctuary to the printed word, printed not just in books, but on badges, leaflets, posters and pamphlets as well, for collectors of old political pamphlets and ephemera. Okay, so There aren't all that many of us, but this is a place for minorities of all sorts. San Francisco is paradise. In the shape of a cavernous upstairs second hand bookshop in the almost up and coming Mission District. The shop specializes in what it calls social movements, politics, civil rights, green issues, feminism, lifestyle. 60,000 items in all the best selling lines. I asked Gay pulp fiction and American Trotskyism. I assume there's not much overlap, but this being San Francisco, you can't be sure. There are tracts and leaflets from all over the world. Regency radical squibs, high Tory manifestos, left wing song sheets, right wing election handouts. It's amazing that such fragile items survive. Amazing the prices the choicer items can now attract. You might wonder who'd pay enough for a slap up meal and a good bottle of wine to buy a Spanish Civil War era anarchist handbill from the streets of Barcelona? Well, here's the answer.
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Andrew Whitehead with a lighter wallet perhaps, but culturally refreshed after his visit to San Francisco. That's it. There'll be more dispatches from correspondents around the world next Saturday morning at half past eleven. Until then, goodbye.