A large, fluffy white dog had been sloping about the terrace and sidled up to the gun-loving Brit from the previous night’s dinner. It jumped up and latched on to the man’s leg, which he began humping furiously. The man tried to remove the excited mutt, but he was a big dog and so sprung immediately back up, pinning him against the wall. The man knocked him down and tried to walk away, but the dog chased him across the terrace. People laughed and cheered. This would have been a funny scene anywhere, but at a libertarian’s conference it was somehow more comical, as if the dog had got caught up in the spirit of the event and was indulging his own sexual liberty. I’d heard the word freedom so many times that day, and this was a very visual reminder that one person’s freedom can directly inhibit someone else’s.
The conference was good, but the conference was talk. We wanted action. We wanted to go to the promised land. To squelch our feet in its soils. To be bitten by its libertarian mosquitoes. To tell people we’d visited a country that they hadn’t, a country so new they didn’t even know it (sort of) existed.
That night in the hotel, I sent Annett some pictures from the conference, which were greeted lukewarmly. I think we were both aware a relationship time bomb was ticking, but neither of us knew the length of its fuse.
The following day, a warm Sunday, thirty libertarians and I climbed into a silver double-decker bus and headed for the Croatian border. We were going to Liberland!
“Borders remind us that we’re all slaves,” said Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, the conference’s keynote speaker and creator of something called Bitnation, a tool to replace governments with the blockchain technology used by Bitcoin.
“Yeah. This will all come crashing down soon enough,” said the gun-loving Brit who’d had the romantic encounter with the large white dog.
“Right, because the state doesn’t exist. It’s a collective fiction,” said Susanne’s husband.
I looked out at the barriers, security fencing, barbed wire, and people with guns. It looked both secure and non-fictional to me. All the concerns we’d had about leaving Croatia’s collective fiction proved unfounded. We were waved through their border with a minimum of fuss. They were probably happy to get rid of us. On the other side of it, an affable border guard from the collective fiction known as Serbia got on and collected up our passports. He was a squat man with a small blond moustache. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“We’re going to the other side of the water, to the restaurant,” answered Paul, an English journalist now living in Croatia.
“Oh, it’s very nice,” the official replied. “They have a new chef. His name is Vitrovich. He’s very good. Well, enjoy,” he said, leaving the bus.
Wait, were we all still slaves?
After a quick lunch, and the arrival of Mr President himself, the big moment had arrived: it was time for our voyage to Liberland. We’d all come to the Serbian side to make our attempt so that Vit could join us, being as he was now barred from Croatia. Would we make it onto Liberlandian soil? Would we be detained en route? No one had set foot on Liberland without getting arrested for months. Unfortunately, the three boats that had been planned had become just one boat. I’m sure this shocked many people. I was not one of them. The boat we did have was large enough for just eight people. Liberland was a forty-five-minute journey upriver. We were fifty people. “It’s going to take at least three hours,” warned President Vit, and that was with a shorter route, using an off-road vehicle to take the rest as close to the land as possible.
Fortunately, I managed to wrangle a spot on that first boat. Calm, heroic, stoic Anton was at the helm, and as I watched his wild hair blow in the breeze, I was distracted from the fact that we had only three life jackets. If he could drive a drunk Gregor for thirty minutes and resist the urge to crash and kill us all, forty-five minutes in a boat with me and a few fellow libertarians would be child’s play. The engine spluttered into life, filling the boat with diesel fumes. There was a palpable excitement. The only things that could have made it better were eyepatches, a parrot, and, maybe, a few more life jackets. Sat next to me was a shabby, dreadlocked Czech man called Štefan. His T-shirt had a large hole under the armpit. He set about rigging the bright-yellow Liberland flag to a stick, which he tethered to the back of the boat. Once he’d finished, we cheered. We meant business: deregulated business. Since he looked the subversive type, I asked him if he’d ever tried to found his own country.
“No,” he said, a mad glint in his eye. “I did help create a church once, though.”
Of course you did, Štefan. Nothing surprised me with these people. They were doers. They had life by the balls.
“It was called the Cannabis Church. I was a shaman. We were small, but we had a lot of believers.” He mimicked the smoking of an imaginary spliff. “Not just believers. Practising believers. Very devout they were.” He winked. “I’m also planning to create a Procrastination Party. I just didn’t quite get around to it yet.”
About twenty-five minutes into our journey upriver, our yellow Liberland flag flapping triumphantly in the breeze, we found a Croatian police border-patrol boat waiting for us.
“Damn,” said Anton. “I guess they won’t let us pass.”
He accelerated towards them.
“Let’s wave to them,” said the Turkish girl who’d spent the evening avoiding Gregor’s advances and was obviously still high on birthday cake. We waved at them. We smiled at them. We tried to will these sad vestiges of the broken nationalist system to let us pass and approach the shores of Liberland.
The two Croatian policemen aboard did not wave back. Nor did they smile.
“The system has made their hearts cold,” said Štefan.
Their boats and cold, dead hearts drew closer to us, at speed, creating waves that rocked our little, pitiful sea vessel.
“They’re not trying to tip us over, are they?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t dare,” said the future ambassador to Liechtenstein. I think exaggerating his present importance.
Anton surveyed the scene. Inhaled. Steered us closer to them. “Maybe…” he said. I did feel like a slave in that moment.
Their boat stayed in line with ours, on our right-hand side, stopping us from turning and getting any closer to the shores of Liberland. They kept their boat in this position, flanking us all the way up the river. We stared at them, they stared back at us. They were much better at it, being professional intimidation operatives of the military industrial complex. They also had uniform, guns, and a real boat, all of which helped immensely. By comparison, we were a ramshackle group of hedonists, libertarians, a cannabis shaman, and a bald writer. We were equipped for anarcho-capitalism, not confrontation. Unless that was the same thing. I still wasn’t quite sure.
“Oh, come on,” the Turkish girl said. “Let us pass.”
They did not.
“Can you see that no-mooring sign?” Anton asked. We squinted. Ah, there it was—a small white-and-red sign, possibly hand-painted, some hundred metres ahead.
“That’s the start of Liberland,” he said, proudly.
As borders went it was inauspicious. Anton narrowed the gap between us and the police boat to just two metres. We passed parallel to the sign, our path to shore still blocked. But we’d reached Liberland. We were alongside it. Were looking at it, round the edges of a police boat, anyway. As promised, it was full of trees, marsh, and mosquitoes, but it was also clearly a handsome piece of land with a three-hundred-and-fifty-metre-long white-sand beachfront.
“I’m going to open a cafe there,” said Štefan, pointing towards the beach.
“The good kind of cafe, right?” asked the Turkish girl. Štefan didn’t need to answer; the man was a cannabis shaman. After the island, Liberland continued for another hundred metres along the shoreline that Serbia said was probably Croatian, Croatia said was definitely Croatian, President Vit said was Liberland, and I said was handsome. Then, just as subtly as it had started, it ended. We were still thirty
metres from the Liberland shore, still being blocked by the police boat. Unable to get any closer to the promised land without getting rammed by a boat, wet, arrested, and having to endure a few days in a Croatian jail, we turned around and headed back. Could we really say we’d been there? The boat’s passengers were uncertain. I decided we could, for the bragging rights alone.
At the shore, President Vit was waiting. “How do you like Liberland?” he asked.
“It’s very beautiful,” I answered, and at that moment, as just an idea, and a barren patch of land, it was.
It’s certainly easy to dismiss the whole Liberland project as ridiculous. I know I did at the beginning, and during the middle. In fact, I wasn’t sure I was totally free of ridicule for it now, at the end of my weekend in its inner circle. Yet the romance of it had me smitten. Every country that now exists began in just the same way as Liberland, with a group of radicals chasing something other people said was impossible. Creating something out of nothing. Countries might feel sacred or as if they’ve always been there and yet they’re created; divided; reunited. They change their names; have their borders drawn and redrawn; change their capitals; change currencies; and elect new governments all the time. Ask the citizens of Rhodesia, Burma, Ceylon, South Sudan, Yugoslavia, or, closer to home, the German Democratic Republic about the sanctity of borders and the longevity of regimes. The libertarians are right—countries really are collective fictions. They’re also right about the potential of new technology to change those fictions, to create better, fairer stories. It’s already happening. Look around next time you’re in a bar or restaurant or on the subway. How many people are checking out of that physical place and into a virtual one, a digital no-man’s land. Physical location is just not as important as it used to be. Long gone are the days where we are damned to grow up, work, find a partner, raise children, and then die within a hundred kilometres of where we are born. As an immigrant, I’ve experienced the benefits of free movement first-hand.
Does that mean Liberland is going to get its voluntary-taxation, anti-government, cannabis-shaman paradise any time soon? I’ve no idea. The project is in good shape and the brand is well known and attracts more followers with each passing day. Not that this project is exclusively about politics. It’s also about fun, adventure, rebellion, and spending the short time we have here on this big spinning rock being part of something bigger, chasing down an impossible dream—indulging in the romance of creating your own country. My little taster of that life convinced me it’s a good one. Superior to the one where you actually get what you wish for, and then have to try to turn a bit of marshland into a society, armed with only the free market’s invisible hand, and Gregor.
The world’s a much more interesting place because of radicals like the people behind the Liberland project. They have imagination and conviction and that’s more than most. I hope they make it, and I can place my feet on the sandy beach of a real Liberland one day. Their project also helped me understand my own a little better. I was challenging the establishment. Only the difference was that my establishment was, mostly, myself. It was the responsibilities and expectations of the life I had built in Berlin. It’s a weird thing to admit that you’ve become bored of yourself. But I knew now that I had been. That had ended in Istanbul. That was what travel was for. The unfamiliarity of being where you don’t belong frees you from any expectations about how things there are supposed to work, and, in turn, how you will react to them. A childlike naivety takes over. I enjoyed that feeling immensely. I knew that like Liberland, it might not come to anything. But waiting at Belgrade Airport, feeding my growing dictator fetish with a book about Slobodan Milošević, I realised I was enjoying my journey regardless.
After landing at Tegel Airport, I sent Annett a message letting her know I’d be home shortly. Usually she’d reply with a “nice to have you back,” or a “looking forward to seeing you.” This time I got no reply at all. Arriving at the front door, I put my key inside the lock. I tried to turn it. Nothing happened.
11
Interlude #2: Real life, real problems
After I rang the doorbell and waited impatiently with visions of heartbreak, flat-hunting, and several months spent sitting in my underwear eating Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, Annett opened the door from inside. She hadn’t changed the locks, merely left her key inside it. We had a discussion in the hallway that an observer might have described as “somewhat heated.”
In order to make peace, I agreed to attend a number of upcoming events, giving the confident impression I had some idea where I was going to be in the next months, and that that place would certainly be Berlin.
While there, I did my best to open postal mail, pay taxes, swap light bulbs, and look interested when Annett bitched about colleagues who kept, repeatedly, egregiously, unfathomably, failing to recognise her genius.
I listened, mostly. I empathised, often. I went to the shops to buy us cheer-up chocolate. I washed up. Then I washed up some more. Then I washed up again.
Daily life is kind of boring, I realised, standing at the sink, wiping soup from a bowl. It’s full of obligations to be met, bills to be paid, and washing up to be… washed(?), and if that’s not bad enough, if you do just one teeny tiny little inconsequential thing wrong—like, oh, I don’t know, forget to pay a few years of tax—they put you in prison.
It’s not to be recommended, really, any of it.
Unlike running away. Running away is great. It lets you escape from the prison of routine. So while pretending to be happy to be home, I was secretly researching a trip to Transnistria—a weird, Soviet throwback country I’d discovered while in Belgrade. There would be no washing up waiting for me there, of that I was sure.
It would also be the perfect follow-up to Liberland. Because while the Liberlandians and I were trying to change, trying to reinvent ourselves, rushing towards the new, Transnistria was doing the opposite. It was trying to go backwards.
Transnistria is a tiny, wonky, narrow strip of land squashed from either side by Moldova and the Ukraine. When the rusty Iron Curtain finally collapsed, many Eastern European countries sought to regain their previous autonomy and form new national identities. The tiny, wonky, narrow strip of land now called Transnistria found itself sitting in what was now calling itself Moldova. A Moldova that had decreed its official language would be Moldovan. A linguistic inconvenience for the mainly Russian-speaking Transnistria. As Moldova looked west, Transnistria glanced forlornly east, towards Mother Russia. A cultural tug of war ensued. The white arts of diplomacy tried to fix it. They failed. The dark arts of war stepped in. Bearing in mind that Transnistria only had a population of half a million, and is, at some points, just a few kilometres wide, it was a war that should have ended by lunchtime of that same day, with Transnistria waving white flags and issuing humble apologies for having got ideas well above its station.
That was not what happened. Instead, those half a million plucky Leninists called home to Moscow. Moscow was probably flattered. No one else wanted to play with its ideologies anymore. Russia’s former territories were all flying their own flags now, and reaching for the shiny baubles of capitalism. All except this tiny, wonky, narrow strip of land squashed from either side by Moldova and the Ukraine.
Of course Moscow would send weapons. Lots of weapons.
There were skirmishes, on and off, from November 1990, and by 1992 things really began to escalate. The war continued intensively until July of that same year, at a cost of some seven hundred lives, before Russia managed to broker a peace deal between the two, perhaps neglecting to mention that they’d been arming one of them all the way through. As part of this deal, Moldova didn’t admit that it had “lost,” nor did it accept that Transnistria was a real country. It just decided the cost of proving itself right was too high. A truce was agreed. A truce that still exists. The people of Transnistria think they have their own country; no one else does, yet no one is willing to call their bluff and try to take it from them
because… Russia.
Unlike Liberland, someone can visit Transnistria without getting arrested. Or, so I hoped. Because I’d decided to do just that.
12
Tiraspol, Transnistria: “It’s like The Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone.”
Boredom, the hammer and sickle, the sheriff, corruption
Getting to Transnistria is not particularly difficult, but understanding what you are seeing there, and having someone to discuss it with, is. I decided to join a group tour. The group was twelve people, seven of them fellow Brits, regretfully. Even more regretfully, its two guides, Chris and Jack, were Irish. The tour company they worked for specialised in unusual destinations. I’d begun by spending a few days with them in the Ukraine. Sober they were a lovely bunch; while drunk, they were awful.
They were always drunk.
They were especially inebriated as we stepped off the otherwise empty train from Odessa and onto the platform of Tiraspol’s central (and only) station. Tiraspol is the capital (and only) city in Transnistria. Depending on your definitions of capital and city.
It became clear how few tourists Transnistria receives when we found an immigration officer waiting on the platform just for us. He was a doughy, middle-aged man warming his hands in the deep pockets of his official Transnistrian immigration officer’s jacket. He held his chin at an elevated height that suggested nobility. Carbohydrates and hedonism had swollen his broad face.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 17
