INTRODUCTION

It was a sub-zero, snowy winter afternoon in Rybnitsa. For twenty minutes I was waiting next to the bustling Transnistrian border crossing for the number-eleven “international” marshrutka (mini-bus) to neighbouring Rezina. As I paced in circles to keep warm, I ran into Natal’ia Pavlovna,^[1] a secretary at a Rybnitsa factory where I had conducted research. She was coming from the nearby market, balancing heavy shopping bags in hand. We exchanged pleasantries. Noticing that I was at the number-eleven bus stop, Natal’ia’s demeanour suddenly changed. She abruptly inquired: “Are you going to Rezina?” I innocently replied, “yes, I have friends (druz’ia) there.” Moving closer to me, she lowered her voice, privately warning with all seriousness and conviction, “they are a different people (drugoi narod) over there,” referring to persons just 0.3 kilometers across the river in right-bank Moldova.
On another occasion in Rybnitsa, I turned on the radio in the middle of a question-and-answer contest for young people on the state-run Radio Pridnestrov’e station. A female broadcaster was interviewing a primary school aged boy over the telephone, quizzing him on civic-minded questions like, “what is a state (gosudarstvo)?” and “what are a people (narod)?” One exchange went as follows:

BROADCASTER: What is a country (Chto eto – strana)?
YOUNG CONTESTANT: It is where a people (narod) live.
BROADCASTER: Good, that is correct… but a strana does not have to be big (bol’shoi); it can be small (malen’kii) too, right?

The broadcaster asked this last question rhetorically, making the point that a sparsely populated, narrow sliver of land, like Transnistria, can also be considered a strana.^[2]
Nowhere are ideas of “the state,” nation and citizenship more important and contested than in a country that does not exist. The “Transnistrian Moldovan Republic” (TMR)^[3] is not found on world maps, but exists as a de facto independent state,^[4] eager for international recognition. Since its declaration of independence in 1990, and its war with Moldova in 1991-1992, the TMR has been busy at the work of national-identity and statehood building. Authorities insist “we have all the attributes of a normal state”^[5] and possess a distinct Transnistrian identity and citizen spirit. The pridnestrovskii narod (Transnistrian people) are characterized as industrious, proud and loyal to the gosudarstvo (state), traits opposite of those projected onto the Moldovans across the Nistru River.^[6] A number of scholars in Moldova and Euro-America corroborate the existence of a discrete Transnistrian people group.^[7] Even the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, one of the five mediators in the Transnistrian stalemate, believes “…there is a distinct feeling of ‘Transdniestrian’ identity going beyond ethnic lines, justifying a special status for the area.”^[8] However, the TMR’s history is marked by events that suggest not all people feel enduringly “Transnistrian” and consent to the TMR’s authority.^[9] During my lengthy period of field research in northern Transnistria, I encountered an array of identities and opinions, sometimes opposing and sometimes championing the idea of a loyal Transnistrian citizenry. This essay explores the legitimacy of a so-called “Transnistrian people.”^[10] It does so by focusing not on nation building and the pridnestrovskii narod per se,^[11] but on people’s other salient identifications (e.g. rural/urban, labor, ethnic identity) as they intersect with stateness and citizen belonging. The research aims to give voice to a multiplicity of local perspectives. It is a study into how different people experience “the state” and construct a sense of belonging in relation to it. Through a combination of informal and semi-structured interviews, and participant-observation in state spectacles, schools and factories, I look at the way social actors in Transnistria talk about and act on practices and ideas of the state (gosudarstvo and statul) and citizenship (grazhdanstvo and cetăţenie).^[12] This essay attempts to link literature on citizenship more closely with anthropological thinking on the state.

CITIZENSHIP BELONGING AND THE STATE

Citizenship at its heart is about the relationship between persons and the state.^[13] Scholars agree that this relationship is not just juridical, about static rights and responsibilities, but a dynamic process about loyalty and belonging.^[14] It is a relationship constituted through people’s changing experiences and ideologies of the state,^[15] in relation to everyday material entitlements (e.g., civic, political, social, cultural) and learned obligations.^[16]
Citizenship studies devote considerable attention to the tension between citizenship as belonging and exclusion,^[17] deriving from the paradox that some citizen entitlements equalize (e.g., voting rights), while most others discriminate and differentiate persons (e.g., pensions, minority language rights). Scholars show how these differentiated entitlements can translate into differentiated belongings to the state, and hence differentiated citizenries.^[18] While a good starting point, I find these studies give less notice to the “thing” individuals feel, or do not feel, a sense of belonging to – the state. Attention is given to allegiance to the “national-political community,”^[19] while the state as an object and idea of belonging fades from view.
There are several explanations for the state not figuring prominently into citizenship studies. Firstly, scholars point to a globalizing world of increased mobility where not all state residents are citizens, and not all persons are members of nation-states (e.g., refugees, migrants).^[20] Secondly, anthropologists stress that non-political identifications (e.g., kinship, tribal and religious affiliations) often play as important of a role as the state in constituting and mediating citizenship.^[21] Thirdly, similar scholars emphasize the blurred boundary between state and society,^[22] and the intertwining of “civic-state” and “ethnic-national” identities.^[23] While all valid points, I believe none invalidate the relevance of “the state” to citizenship, especially in contexts where the state once carried heavy ideological weight, as in the former Soviet Union,^[24] and in contemporary places where “the sovereign state” is almost a fetish and “nationality” is about state loyalty, as in the unrecognized Transnistrian Moldovan Republic.^[25]
Even when the state does figure strongly in writings on citizenship,^[26] the state is often depicted as a Hobbesian, top-down architect of citizenship, when in reality the state and citizenship are also constituted from the ground up.^[27] In other cases, the state assumes an unproblematic, loosely defined place, when in fact “the state” is a complex and loaded concept.^[28] It is either described as a unitary “thing” separate from society,^[29] or it co-exists uncomfortably alongside Foucauldian non-state notions like governmentality.^[30] A careful rendering of the state, of its multiple layers and ideologies can aid the study of citizenship. It can show how people’s imagination of the state as a tangible authority, capable of governing powerfully and benevolently, is central to how people reckon their own citizenship. For if citizenship has to do partly with rights and responsibilities, as anthropologists like Bйnйп acknowledge, the state must be real, powerful and benevolent in people’s minds in order for them to be compelled to fulfill certain duties, and in order for people to believe they will receive certain entitlements from the state.^[31] This is relevant to the TMR, which is not considered a “real” state by international powers. In order for Transnistria to be real to those who inhabit its space, and in order to secure subjects’ loyalty, it must convince people of its ideological and material “stateness.”

LANGUAGES OF STATENESS

The state is an ambiguous concept. It is illusory and distant, as well as a set of localized institutions. It is mythically sacred and profane, while concretely benevolent and violent. The paradoxical nature of the state – being both a “material force and [an] ideological construct,”^[32] to use Timothy Mitchell’s words – is what makes the state so challenging to conceptualize and difficult to study. In their volume, States of Imagination, anthropologists Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat lay out what I believe is one of the clearest blueprints for ethnographically studying the state. They identify widespread, historically specific ideas of governance and authority, which they call “languages of stateness.” They propose that anthropologists examine how these ideas of governance and authority are manifested, understood and imbued with ideological qualities in varying cultural contexts.^[33] These “languages” are meant to help the ethnographer see how the state appears in everyday, localized forms, and how the state tries to make itself real and tangible, while remaining mythical and sacrosanct.^[34]
To paraphrase Hansen and Stepputat’s model of stateness,^[35] the three languages of governance a modern state invokes are: (1) territorial sovereignty by monopolization of violence, through visible military and police force, (2) knowledge of the population of the territory (e.g., census), and (3) resources that ensure the reproduction and well-being of the population.^[36] These practical languages reproduce the idea that the state exists in a set of localized institutions. The three languages of authority a state invokes are: (1) law and legal discourse; (2) embodiment of the state in buildings, road signs, monuments, uniforms, rituals, etcetera; and (3) nationalisation of property and institutions (e.g., schools, factories) and the dissemination of a shared history and community. These symbolic languages reproduce the idea that the state is at the center of society, a distant but powerful regulator of social life. Hansen and Stepputat end by stressing: “The essential thing is, however, that a state exists only when these ‘languages’ of governance and authority combine and co-exist.”^[37]
Transnistrian leaders invoke languages of governance and authority in the construction of their state. The Pridnestrovskaya Moldavskaya Respublika has its own flag, army, police, passport, currency, money mint, national bank, statistics bureau, constitution, welfare system and national anthem – the chief hallmarks of statehood. Mundane government activities like road building, customs control and welfare distribution reinforce Transnistria’s sense of stateness. What is of interest to me in this paper is how different social actors interact with state practices and state imagery. My focus is not simply a top-down analysis of Transnistrian state building,^[38] but a bottom-up view of people’s engagement with Transnistrian stateness and negotiation of citizenship belonging. My departing point is that ordinary people play a role in constituting the state and citizenship. Taking hints from Akhil Gupta, David Nugent and Aihwa Ong, I pay attention to the relationship between actors’ social positioning and cultural assumptions of the state and citizenship.

IMAGINING THE STATE, IMAGINING CITIZENSHIP IN THE POST-SOCIALIST CONTEXT

In formerly socialist countries, social entitlements were key to how people imagined the state. Katherine Verdery describes how in Romania the communist party-state was officially represented as “fatherly” and paternalist, making wise, important decisions in the best interest of “the whole family,” the Romanian nation.^[39] People were taught to express material needs that the “the Benevolent Father Party-State” could satisfy.^[40] So long as the communist state generally fulfilled these needs in handing out social entitlements, it secured popular, mass support (Verdery calls this “socialist paternalism”).^[41]
History has shown that “socialist paternalism” only won a partial positive backing. Still, it left an indelible mark on individuals.^[42] In post-socialist Russia, David Anderson shows how people associate social entitlements with words like grazhdanin (citizen) and kul’tura (culture, civilization),^[43] evincing an important link between social rights and citizenship. The people of ex-socialist countries learned to imagine citizenship through social entitlements, probably because citizenship under communism only really conferred social rights (e.g., the right to work, education and health care versus contentious political and civil rights).^[44] However, social entitlements were not given out equally to all people.
Both Anderson and Caiazza point out that in the Soviet Union a person received a different set of social entitlements and had a different obligation to the party-state, depending on the person’s ethnicity, gender and work role (e.g., metalworker versus fisherman)^[45] – a practice that continues today. Amy Caiazza explains that this inequality of citizen rights is embedded in Soviet and Russian ideologies of gender, and the state and citizenship (and labor, I would add), which justify and rationalize citizen disparity. Its upshot is that it effectively creates multiple citizenries – such as “mothers,” “soldiers” and ethnic groups (like Anderson’s “Evenki”) – each having a different type of relationship with and sense of belonging to the state.^[46] The lesson to be learned from Anderson and Caiazza is that although the party-state and its proletarian citizenship proclaimed to be civic, non-ethnic and equal, they were in fact expressed and experienced ethnically and hierarchically.^[47]

TRANSNISTRIAN IMAGININGS OF “THE STATE”

I lived in the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic for thirteen months (between November 2004 and March 2006), as part of multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork for the doctoral dissertation, Identity and Industrial Change on a Contested Borderland, Moldova-Transnistria.^[48] The research in this essay represents only a small portion of the wider study. Most of my fieldwork in Transnistria took place in Rybnitsa/Râbniţa, the TMR’s most industrialized city, with regular visits to villages in the Rybnitsa raion (district). Many local people refer to Rybnitsa (population 32,000) as a ruskii gorod or oraşul rus (Russian city). Almost one-third of the population, though, is ethnic Moldovan. The majority of villages in the raion are ethnic Moldovan while others are Ukrainian.^[49] This makes Rybnitsa and the raion representative of other industrialized, ethnically mixed regions, such as Tiraspol and Bendery. I chose Rybnitsa (approximately 150 kilometers from Tiraspol), a less known city, to test how TMR stateness is felt and citizenship belonging is created away from the TMR’s charismatic capital, Tiraspol.^[50]

URBAN ENCOUNTERS OF THE STATE – FROM THE SPECTACULAR TO MUNDANE

“Happy birthday, my republic” (S dnёm rozhdeniia, moia respublika) reads a fire red, Soviet-like banner strung across the roadway into Rybnitsa. It is 2 September 2005. Towns all over Transnistria celebrate fifteen years of TMR “statehood.” An overcast, cool morning in Rybnitsa, people turned out in throngs to watch the independence-day parade in Victory Square. I myself arrived one hour early only to be relegated to a mediocre viewing position. Eager crowds waited patiently, listening to ballads of “Our Transnistria” blaring over loudspeakers. The parade started promptly at ten with a lengthy military demonstration. Afterwards the mayor, standing on a raised plinth with state dignitaries, made a speech boasting of Rybnitsa’s economic success and sacrifice to the TMR. Youth dances followed. Then suddenly the celebratory mood changed with the sound of machine guns and bomb blasts. The noise was part of a well-choreographed interpretative dance depicting Transnistria’s 1992 war with Moldova. A moment of silence was commemorated while a solemn procession of thirty-some people carried large framed photos of loved ones lost in the conflict. I glimpsed one spectator in front of me wiping tears from her eyes. Next marched somber, yet proud “freedom fighters” from the 1992 war, spatially allied with medal-clad veterans of the Second World War. The arrangement of veterans suggested a moral link between the TMR’s war against “Moldovan nationalism” and the Soviet Union’s moral victory over fascism in the Second World War. The parade – and the very image of “the state” – regained its triumphant tone. Festive folk dances followed, including a multi-ethnic ensemble themed druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples), celebrating Transnistria’s inter-ethnic harmony. The second half of the parade was devoted to presentations from local schools, sporting clubs and pioneer-like youth organizations. The parade ended emphasizing the TMR’s economic strength. A procession of patriotically decorated floats representing local factories, businesses and collective farms made their way down Victory Street, led by the town’s famed MMZ Steel Plant (from which 50 percent of the TMR’s GDP comes). Proud workers of each enterprise carried banners and balloons and gleefully waved Transnistrian flags. Spectators like myself walked away from the parade feeling they had encountered a convincing display of Transnistrian stateness.
Public parades are a classic way persons experience the state. Their effect is to reproduce the idea that the state is the hegemonic centre of society.^[51] Participants and spectators respond to a state idea (e.g., “the protector state” in war-time) and state attributes (e.g., military troops) by crying, waving flags and clapping hands in its honor. In the Rybnitsa parade, these sorts of gestures suggest that rybnichany (Rybnitsa folk) believe in the TMR state and see themselves as dutiful citizens. But do they? In order to answer this question, we need to move from the spectacular to the mundane. Here in people’s everyday experience of the state we can get at enduring ideas of TMR stateness and ways of belonging to an unrecognized state.
The line between factory and state is a blurred one in Transnistria. Most major private enterprises are owned or operated by a state or municipal politician. In all three of the heavy industrial plants and one food processing factory I toured in Rybnitsa, the state’s symbolic or practical presence could be felt: at the MMZ Steel Plant (Moldavskii metallurgicheskii zavod) it was the TMR army guarding the prized factory, in the Rybnitsa Cement Works (Rybnitskii tsementnyi kombinat) it was a hanging portrait of President Smirnov, in the Rybnitsa Milk Plant (Rybnitskii molochnyi kombinat) it was crates of a state-loyal, speciality cheese pridnestrovskii syr (“Transnistrian cheese”), and in the Rybnitsa Pump Plant (Rybnitskii nasosnyi zavod) it was a patriotic Transnistrian war memorial.^[52] Such images implant the Transnistrian state in workers’ lives and re-generate a state-citizen link, which happens to be strongest among the predominantly Russian and Ukrainian, well-paid “aristocracy of labor.”^[53]

METAL, MYSTIQUE AND STATEHOOD

The MMZ Steel Plant (or “Metallurg,” as locals call it), located on the tallest point in Rybnitsa, is the most famous factory in Transnistria. Its employees receive the highest salaries in the region.^[54] The successful, state-of-the-art plant exports steel products to North America and other Western destinations.^[55] It is the TMR’s “kommercheskaya taina” (commercial secret or mystery). Its high profits are represented by media and the rybnichany I know as “moral,” “communal” and “sacrificial,” as the plant dutifully pays taxes and monies to the TMR state budget (21 million dollars in 2005), proudly ensuring the state’s “…timely payment of pensions to pensioners… [and] other social protections,” according to the MMZ economic director.^[56] The plant is also known for providing social assistance to veterans of the Second World War and to families “of deceased [1992 war] defenders of Transnistria.” The whole of Rybnitsa is in some way linked to the plant, whether via kin networks, business clientele, or commercial job contracts.^[57] The Metallurg as such lies at the TMR’s social and economic heart, buttressing its ideology of a socialist-like paternalistic state.^[58]
MMZ employees, depicted in media as “model citizens,” donate their time and skills, installing factory-financed holiday lights in Victory Square and aiding the construction of Rybnitsa’s first cathedral (Mikhailo-Arhangel’skii Sobor). Beyond extramural activities, workers enact and narrate values of the TMR state through shop-floor production.^[59] A number of rank-and-file workers I interviewed, mostly from the steel forge shop, commonly stressed pride in their job savoir-faire, reciting work qualifications and illustrating hard-working commitment to kachestvo (“quality”). All employees mentioned their work-collectives’ sociality (e.g., summer barbeques, bar outings) usually being multi-ethnic and Russian speaking. Such narrations echo core “Transnistrian” values like multi-ethnicity, statehood allegiance, an eastern Orthodox and Russian orientation, and hardworking sacrifice that “loyal TMR citizens” are expected to embody.^[60] It can be said that every time a worker in the steel forge shop meticulously finishes off a quality wire rod or steel billet, meeting the plant’s high ISO standards,^[61] he in a way validates the quality and worth of the TMR. As the head of the MMZ’s electrical steel melting shop floor asserts: “Our plant creates authority (avtoritet) for all of the republic.”^[62] In other words, while the international community may not recognize the TMR, the international market does recognize the MMZ, with its worldwide reputation for quality products. Thus, the MMZ is able to gain a “world hearing,” advocating through its production and sales that quality goods come from a “quality country,” deserving international recognition.
MMZ employees are key to manufacturing both goods and state legitimacy. These “heroes of labour” turned “heroes of the state” blockaded bridges and railways in Rybnitsa in 1992,^[63] defending “nasha rodina” (our homeland) from what was perceived as Moldovan nationalist aggression. Such russophones had everything to lose in an indigenous-run Moldova, and everything to gain in a russophonic self-styled state. For them, an independent state symbolized the preservation of Russian language rights and continuity with a Soviet-style way of life. It is not surprising that in my encounters with industrial workers of Russian and Ukrainian origin, I find they and their kin most frequently refer to “nashe gosudarstvo” (our state) and “nash narod” (our [Transnistrian] people).^[64]
However, this seemingly durable, loyal relationship between the state and aristocracy of labor is in fact fickle and fragile. For there is an upshot to MMZ employees imagining their labor as “statecraft duty,” and their factory as upholding a “paternalist state.” Firstly, I believe there is great pressure on the factory and regime (i.e., Smirnov) to fulfill an ideology of paternalism, on which bottom-up state legitimacy rests. Secondly, employees fulfilling their obligation to labor for the state expect something tangible in return from the state. A “touchable state” is expected to redistribute MMZ taxes as welfare to wider society, as well as to maintain real authority over its borders and customs control and influence over neighboring states’ pogranichniki (frontier guards), ensuring the swift export and sale of steel. When “the state” fails to do this (note that the regime is not blamed), the state-factory-person relationship is breached. I believe this is what happened from March through June 2006, when the MMZ laid-off workers and decreased salaries amid serious production stoppages and halted sales (due to not being registered with right-bank Moldovan customs authorities for import and export).^[65] With the TMR powerless to stop Moldova and Ukraine’s “economic blockade” (as people in Transnistria called it), 120 of the plant’s most skilled employees (with money and mobility, mostly of Russian and Ukrainian origin) permanently emigrated from the TMR, taking up jobs in steel plants in the Ukraine and Russia (including the famed Magnitogorsk plant).^[66] Many other less-skilled employees migrated temporarily to Moscow and St. Petersburg for seasonal work.^[67] It is nonetheless surprising that these once faithful attendees at TMR commemorative ceremonies and concerts, arguably some of the most loyal TMR citizens, were the first to leave the TMR when the going got tough.

STATENESS IN PERSONAL NARRATIVE

My closest informants during my fieldwork were two stable working “russified” ethnic Moldovans, both of whom are post-1989 newcomers to Transnistria. Neither was involved in the war. Both are married to Russian/Ukrainian wives. Sasha is a certified electrician for the respected Transnistrian State Electrical Company, while Sergei is a petty entrepreneur. In the lengthy life history I took of Sasha I found it interesting that he emphasized most his job satisfaction and pride in Transnistrian living standards. “It is life here” (este viaţă aici), is how Sasha describes Transnistria. “We have regular running water, electricity, gas, factories and jobs, …whereas Rezina [Rybnitsa’s twin city across the Nistru] does not…. People live better in Transnistria than in Moldova.” In car rides with he and his wife, Sasha liked to illustrate by pointing to the wide, smoothly paved roadways of Transnistria, and in Moldova to its dilapidated, pot-holed highways, tossing us car passengers to and fro. Sergei would do the same. At the gas station, he would proudly speak of gas being cheaper and social assistance higher in Transnistria than Moldova. This is why Sergei votes in favor of Transnistrian independence in referendums, he explains: “The state is good to me, and so I am good to the state.” Both Sergei and Sasha identify highly with Transnistria.^[68] Sasha, whose family roots are on the right-bank, swears: “I’m not interested at all [de loc] in Moldova.”
Sasha and Sergei’s conviction that their quality of life is better plays an important role in how they constitute a sense of difference in statehood and citizenship between two congruent lands.^[69] For them, the Transnistrian state is a real, tangible entity embodied in visible roads and welfare checks, as well as a powerful, regulating authority – to which they attribute a better quality of life. Recalling Hansen and Stepputat, a state has little chance for survival without perceived authority and tangibility.^[70] The Republic of Moldova is imagined as everything Transnistria is not: unorganized, underdeveloped and lacking stateness. Rybnitsa folk, in the ordinary practice of driving on and talking about “good Transnistrian roads” (or “bad Moldovan roads”), are in a way constituting a sense of citizenship – a social bond with the TMR – and simultaneously reinforcing the material reality of the Transnistrian state. However, not all urban folk feel the same.
Even within families there exist differences of opinion about Transnistria. Sasha’s mother, Valeria, describes Transnistrian statehood with a mix of cynicism and excitement. On some days the state is “superficial,” while other days almost personal.^[71] Around the time of Transnistria’s fifteenth anniversary, referring to all of the festive decorations and road repairs, Valeria remarked coldly, “this is only at the surface (numai de suprafaţă).” She went on to describe the poor conditions of the Russian public kindergarten where she works as a cook. Not only does she get paid irregularly (a salary of forty dollars per month), but also, as of late, she has had to provide her own washing soap and kitchen gear. According to Valeria, the problem is was not the school, but statul (the state).^[72] I toured Valeria’s school and had conversations with teachers and staff. It was just as Valeria depicted: few toys, sparse paper, little medicine and no hot water – conditions that existed in Soviet days. I was told the culprit is gosudarstvo (the state). Among the school’s largely russophone staff, for whom the TMR normally wins their language affections, the state was failing as “provider.”
Several months later, in the wake of the widely publicized December 2005 TMR parliamentary elections,^[73] the state transformed from intangible to personal, at least for a time. While eating borscht after-hours with Valeria in a corner of the kindergarten kitchen, she excitedly recounted how the okrug’s (voting district) new parliamentary deputy – a young, wealthy Rybnitsa businessman (an owner of two factories) – visited the kindergarten during his election campaign. Valeria proudly told me that he bought the school a much-needed photocopier. In return, teachers and staff (the “colectivul” in Valeria’s words) decided unanimously to vote for him on election day. Listening to Valeria’s story, it became apparent to me that staff did not see the politician’s ploy to win votes through gift-giving as manipulative, but rather as an opportunity for staff to “personalize” the abstract state by voting into parliament a person who could potentially act as a helpful, powerful patron for them and their kindergarten.^[74] This was their way of moralizing and domesticating gosudarstvo for their purposes.^[75]
Schools are usually privileged sites for manufacturing dutiful, loyal citizens – but in another school a wide chasm exists between staff, students and state.^[76] Since 1989 a “Romanian-language” school for Moldovans has operated in Rybnitsa. The 480-student lyceum operates in the Latin script (considered contentious in the TMR), and is subordinate to Moldova’s Ministry of Education (not Transnistria’s). Refusing to submit to Tiraspol’s authority, in August 2004 the lyceum was briefly shut down by force, and teachers and parents arrested by TMR militia. In the face of opposition, the director tells me she sustains the school out of simţământ (a feeling) of belonging to the Romanian people and culture. Parents tell me they send their children to the school to be oriented toward a better future, as perceived to be in Chişinău, Romania or westwards. Of all the people I met in Rybnitsa, the Moldovans of the Eurika Lyceum identify least with being “Transnistrian” and are the most critical of TMR authority.

RURAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE STATE

It was a sunny, brisk day in Krasnoe and Slobodka,^[77] two adjoining ethnic Moldovan villages alongside the left bank of the Nistru River. It was Orthodox Christmas. I stayed the long weekend with acquaintances. Christmas day was spent in traditional Moldovan fashion – going from door to door of the homes of kin and friends singing colinde (carols) and enjoying a customary masă (meal). That day I visited five homes, traveling by horse-drawn cart from one end of Krasnoe to the other end of Slobodka. The home visits were a good opportunity to get to know the lives of villagers. Sometimes over a dozen people would be gathered around a table. Normal topics of conversation among săteni (villagers) ranged from shopping at markets to planting walnut trees. I was told village-folk do not talk politics, unless in the safety of their homes or in the company of trusted compatriots. So I made a point in not instigating sensitive topics. To my surprise, though, my informants spoke with gust about political matters, as if no one had ever before listened to them.
In every home, people brought up recurring themes related to work and state. Lena tells me “life is tough in the village.” Most able-bodied men and women in Krasnoe and Slobodka work on the state-run kolkhoz (collective farm). Villagers labor from sunrise to sunset in the summer. In the winter there is no work and little income. “[Life] is about survival,” Igor exclaims, with three people next to him nodding in agreement. Lena angrily recounts how she picked twenty-four tons of tomatoes last summer on the kolkhoz, but was not paid a penny: “The state [my emphasis] records the number of hours each person works and promises to pay – but it never does.” When I asked if villagers can do anything about not getting paid, Igor hastily retorted: “the state has no head; it’s not organized…. There’s no rule in the land.” Lena believes there will be conflict again in Transnistria, but not between Moldova and Transnistria. This time the conflict will be internal: “People are sick of the sheriffs [referring to the wealthy Smirnov family behind the ubiquitous Sheriff enterprise] in this country.”^[78] Villagers are aware that the rich get richer while the work of săteni goes unpaid.
The primary place where adult villagers experience the state is in the kolkhoz. People’s view of the state is shaped by encounters with kolkhoz officials who record work hours and guarantee salaries. These officials are considered the very embodiment of the state (recall Lena’s earlier reference to the state). In villagers’ imagination, the state (via the nationalized institution of the kolkhoz) has the moral responsibility to secure a minimum standard of living for its people, as the Soviet state once did. Not getting their due from the state, săteni have a poor impression of it. They call the state “lawless” and “not organized.” They angrily compare the TMR to its “superior” Soviet predecessor and to West European countries and urban Russia,^[79] where they have worked as migrants. Unlike many rybnichany, the villagers with whom I talked do not think they live better than people in Moldova. Lena and other săteni send their grown children to jobs and to colleges in Chişinău, not Tiraspol, for a better future.^[80] “Life is difficult” (viaţa e grea) is the dominant village trope, not “it is life here” (este viaţă aici) as urbanites claim. Săteni keep mum about their discontent, whether out of fear or despair. Meanwhile, their negative views of the state impact their commitment to it. The most disgruntled of villagers in Krasnoe and Slobodka are the few people I met in Transnistria who say they would not mind if Transnistria and Moldova joined.
In another ethnic Moldovan village, I encountered villagers altogether uninterested in the state. At the end of a dirt-two-track road running into the Ukrainian border, sits the Moldovan village of Komarova. There is no sign of the Transnistrian state anywhere – no kolkhoz, no mayoralty, no school, no post office, no cultural house. It is a place where villagers and livestock daily traverse unmarked state boundaries. Ideas of “state borders” and “republican fidelity” are intrusive and unwanted. Pointing to Komarova’s little two-track road, I asked Dima, my informant’s father, if state agents ever visit his remote village, or plan to invest in it. His response was: “Nobody’s been here to visit us since Hitler.” He paused, adding, “and I don’t want to see them (Nici nu vreau să-i văd). …It’s peaceful here without them.” Dima had unpleasant encounters with TMR state officials. He recently abandoned the neighboring-village kolkhoz after not being paid for three years. Dima is an example of TMR languages of stateness failing to penetrate and win-over those at its margins.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND BELONGING TO THE STATE

It is clear from my conversations with villagers and urbanites that the Transnistrian state has become implicated in their everyday lives. My interlocutors frequently talk about gosudarstvo and statul (the state) in public and private, and freely offer opinions of it.^[81] Their range of sentiments toward statul bears witness to different state imaginings and intensities of belonging: there are diehard patriots, enthusiasts, partial cynics, apathetics, outright nonbelievers and even deserters. The works of Akhil Gupta and Aihwa Ong remind us that how people reckon the state and citizenship, respectively, depends on their social-economic position within the nation-state. As Gupta explains: “Constructions of the state clearly vary according to the manner in which different actors are positioned.”^[82]
In Soviet Moldova, society was generally stratified according to ethnicity, profession and residency – with Russians at the geographical, political and economic center and Moldovans at the margins.^[83] This social stratification continues in post-Soviet Transnistria, where a person’s social standing is weighed against his ethnic, rural or urban, and labor identity. In the Rybnitsa raion, Moldovans are associated with the rural, agricultural periphery and Russians with the urban, industrial center.^[84] In the city, Moldovans tend to occupy inferior, low-skilled work positions as cooks, cleaners and construction workers, while Russians and Slavs dominate well-paid, skilled jobs as electricians, engineers and bureaucrats. This ethnic division of labor translates into differing urban residency patterns. Although most peoples are inter-dispersed in Rybnitsa, a high proportion of ethnic Moldovans live on the outskirts of the city, in the affordable Vershigory neighborhood,^[85] whereas Slav steelworkers and other aristocracy of labor tend to live in the upscale Val’chenko neighbourhood near the river-border. Inter-ethnic marriage is high; in fact, it is the norm in Rybnitsa. Many women in the highest status group (those of Russian ethnicity) have married “hypogamously” (that is, with “lower status” Ukrainian or Moldovan men). The proportion of lower status Moldovan women who have married “hypergamously” with mid-status Ukrainian men is sizeable, but marriages with high-status Russian men are rare. Given that ethnicity is generally passed on to offspring via the father^[86] – and that the male is often either of lower, or only slightly higher status than the female – inter-marriage does not seem to allow for considerable upward mobility among offspring. As such, inter-marriage in the TMR does not permit future generations of ethnic Moldovans and Slavs easily to transcend well-established ethnic boundaries and hierarchies.^[87]
Reviewing patterns of social stratification in Transnistria, it may be no coincidence that the most zealous Transnistrian “patriots” and “enthusiasts” are Slavs, and a small number of privileged, russified Moldovans, like my informant Sasha, who are incorporated into the state industrial-bureaucratic apparatus. Partial “cynics” tend to be lowly paid Moldovans and Slavs, like the staff at Valeria’s kindergarten; while “apathetics” and outright “nonbelievers” are usually marginalized, rural Moldovans, as in Komarova, or ethnic nonconformists, like at Eurika Lyceum. “Deserters” tend to be privileged Slav specialists seeking greener pastures.
The degree to which a person identifies with Transnistria, it seems is contingent upon his or her ethnicity, line of work, and urban or rural locale.^[88] This can be explained by the fact that persons of different identity and social standing encounter different “languages of stateness.” Their dissimilar encounters fashion diverse state imaginings, which in turn condition various degrees of belonging. Transnistrian villagers, for instance, do not have central running water and nicely paved roads to visibly see the state’s presence in the same way urbanites do. Rural kolkhoz farmers receive notably different social entitlements from the state (e.g., lower pensions) from the urban aristocracy of labor.^[89] It just so happens that villagers are some of the most unsympathetic and unattached people to the state.^[90] In the case of Sasha and his mother Valeria, they both work in Rybnitsa for the state, but receive significantly different salaries from it. Sasha has a well-paid, state-enterprise job. He associates little with his ethnic and village roots: “I am Moldovan, but I have little to do with the Moldovans.” Valeria, on the other hand, works a low-status public job and relies on visits to right-bank Moldova village kin for foodstuffs. Valeria is critical of the Transnistrian state, while her son is enthusiastic about it. Their difference of opinion seems dependent on their positions in the labor market and senses of ethnic identity. The lesson to be learned from such examples is that any study of the Transnistrian state must look at its heterogeneity and hierarchy of actors and multiple expressions of state belonging.

CONCLUSION

The paper has explored how the heterogeneous population of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic identifies with an unrecognized state. Its underlying aim has been to interrogate whether a collective Transnistrian citizenry exists. Empirical data show that the TMR has attractive languages of stateness. However, this means little for TMR legitimacy if only select people within its borders encounter this stateness.^[91] As my interviews with urban and rural folk reveal, different people of differing identifications and statuses experience TMR stateness differently. A high-salaried, urban Russian steelworker and an unpaid Moldovan kolkhoz farmer encounter the state’s governance and authority in unequal ways. Their dissimilar experiences, I believe, account for their different imaginings of the state as “provider” or “lawless.” Their different state imaginings also explain their varied degrees of loyalty and attachment to the state. I believe these findings have two important implications: one, for the study of citizenship; and two, for understanding Transnistrian identity.
First, the findings suggest social actors’ perceptions of the state matter in the construction of their citizenship. Or put differently, citizenship is fundamentally connected to a person’s imagination of the state. Thus, citizenship can be fruitfully studied by making empirical stateness the starting point.^[92] It is for this reason, I would argue, we need to bring “the state,” in all of its lived complexity, back into citizenship studies.^[93]
As for Transnistrian identity, different reckonings of the state and citizenship have a bearing on the TMR’s aim of making a unitary national-political community. There are scholars and inter-governmental organizations that believe a Transnistrian demos exists.^[94] They are right for a segment of the population, mainly the aristocracy of labor – like Natal’ia Pavlovna, the secretary from the factory in Rybnitsa – but not for all people.^[95] To speak of a homogenous Transnistrian identity ignores hierarchical schemes of cultural difference inherent in society. It discounts internal labor, ethnic, and rural and urban stratifications that impinge on national-political belonging. It overlooks the way in which state ideologies (or “master state narratives,” as Borneman 1997 prefers) only loosely hold together a diverse populace and struggle to make coherent people’s differential experiences of citizen belonging. In light of increasing international pressure, growing emigration and migration, and a changing, hard-pressed economy in Transnistria, I do not think the category “Transnistrian” can pretend to give yet, in Corrigan and Sayer’s words, a “…unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential experiences of groups in society.”^[96] In my opinion, the production of a unified, supra-ethnic, lasting, loyal Transnistrian people is not likely for some time.