by Gideon Defoe
By 1938, Britain and France were fully committed to their brilliant ‘let’s appease the fascists’ strategy. They agreed that it would be fine if Hitler goose-stepped into Czechoslovakia, so long as he absolutely promised to call it a day and stop at that. At 5 a.m. on 15 March 1939, the Nazis seized the area that’s now the Czech Republic, leaving the other big chunk of the country, Slovakia, to declare independence.
This put Ruthenia in a bind. They were cut off from Prague. They didn’t much like the look of the Nazis. Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t strike them as a fantastic option either. So, that same afternoon they decided to copy Slovakia and go it alone. A former maths teacher headed up the new government. In a remarkably efficient bit of country-building they’d already settled on an anthem and a flag before nightfall. Everyone went to bed a citizen of the new independent Ruthenian Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine. That’s not where they woke up. In the early hours, the Hungarians invaded, spying the opportunity for a land grab (with a nod and a wink from an approving Hitler). The population had managed to find themselves under the rule of three different countries in 24 hours. One observer at the time recorded the slight farce of living through all this: ‘As soon as the troops had passed, a lawyer in the house opposite darted out and put a Hungarian name plate on his door. It was the fifth time he had changed it in the last twenty years, he said.’
Even countries that only exist for a day leave a legacy. Today, some Ruthenians are once again pressing for independence – though to what extent this is a genuine desire for self-determination and to what extent it’s Putin up to his old tricks, quietly stirring the nationalism pot to destabilise Ukraine, is anyone’s guess (but yes, it’s definitely at least partly Putin).
The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva
1921–44
Population: 95,000
Capital: Kyzyl
Languages: Tuvan, Russian, Mongolian
Currency: Tuvan aksa
Cause of death: Stalin
Today: part of Russia
///sneezed.pilots.shower
For Nobel Prize-winning physicist/amateur bongo player Richard Feynman, Tuva represented the platonic ideal of a Mysterious Lost Nation. A blob in the middle of Asia only found on old globes, with distinctive triangular and diamond-shaped stamps only found in old stamp albums, a pervasive lack of information about the ex-country had intrigued him since he was a kid. He resolved to pay it a visit.
To add to its appeal, Tuva was near impossible to get to, partly because of the remote location – it’s not really on the way to anywhere – and partly because the Cold War was in full swing. You couldn’t simply hop on a plane and turn up. But the main thing that attracted Feynman was the fact that the name of the capital, Kyzyl, didn’t contain any vowels, which is a good enough reason to want to visit a place.* Though in case the lack of vowels wasn’t enough of a tourist draw, the city also claimed to lie at the exact geographical centre of Asia, which it marked with a monument. There are a lot of ways you can mathematically argue to be the centre of an irregularly shaped landmass, so China has also staked a claim – 700 miles to the southwest. Their monument is slightly taller.†
The other thing Tuva has going for it is throat singing, which is either an attraction (the effect of one person singing in two distinctive ‘voices’ simultaneously is genuinely incredible) or a great reason not to visit (it does sound a lot like bagpipes). Anthropologists suggest the practice arose because of the geography: the deep persistent drone of throat singing travels for miles over vast open plains. Aside from yurts and yaks, there isn’t anything much to interrupt it.
Tuva had been part of Mongolia before the Russians arrived in 1912. The Bolshevik revolution saw it occupied first by the Red Army, then the Chinese army. By 1921 a new government had proclaimed the independent Tuvan People’s Republic. The increasingly Soviet-influenced rulers tried to stamp out Buddhism, with some success, and also the nomadic lifestyle, with almost no success at all. When Tuva was later swallowed by the USSR, officially it was because the Tuvan people voluntarily requested to join the glorious union – and absolutely not because the huge load of uranium deposited in the mountains suddenly looked a lot more interesting to Stalin in 1944.‡
Feynman and the society he set up – the Friends of Tuva – spent years trying to arrange a visit, battling impenetrable Soviet bureaucracy. In the end, the letter from the Russian tourist department granting Feynman permission finally arrived … two days after he had died.
* Bit Anglocentric though (Turkish speakers would know that Kyzyl means ‘red’, it’s not that exotic).
† There was already a village located at the rival Chinese centre-of-Asia geographical point, so the government knocked it down and moved it less than a mile away in order to build its monument.
‡ Partly thanks to Feynman’s youthful work on the Manhattan Project, irony fans.
The Republic of Salò
1943–45
Capital: Salò (though officially Rome)
Currency: Italian lira
Cause of death: puppet of a 1,000-year Reich that didn’t last a decade
Today: northern Italy
///rebuilt.fluorine.hypocrite
On 25 July 1943, Benito Mussolini turned up for a meeting with the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III. Usually the king would listen politely as the journalist-turned-fascist-strongman gave his pompous report. This time, Mussolini found himself interrupted. The king informed him that the war was lost, morale had collapsed, and he was now the most hated man in Italy. The police bundled Il Duce into an ambulance and put him under house arrest.
Reaction in the country was instant: some rejoiced, some screamed betrayal. Most were just tired of a terrible war and hopeful that this would see the end of it. But the government dithered, fearful of both sides. When Italy finally announced an armistice, the new prime minister succinctly summed up the situation at a meeting of his cabinet. ‘Siamo fottuti,’ he declared. We are screwed.
The already-shattered army waited for orders, and none came. In the south, in places like Naples – always up for a fight – a fierce resistance drove the Nazis out. But, in the north, it was a different story: here the Germans swept through the country, taking prisoner a million Italians in the process. They dug in across the Apennine mountain range, cutting Italy in two. SS commandos busted Mussolini out of the ski resort where he was being held captive. Benito was unexpectedly back in charge of a new ‘republic’.
All countries rely on belief, or at least a suspension of disbelief. They need a reason to exist based on a common history or people or language or adversary – or, most usually, some poorly thought-out mix of all of those. Italy had spent the last two decades taking itself much too seriously, not the first or last nation to come unstuck getting high on its own mythology. Mussolini had been an expert at invoking the glories of Garibaldi and the Roman Empire to stoke nationalist pride. Which is what he half-heartedly attempted again with the Republic of Salò. But it’s hard to convince yourself or anyone else that you’re a squat reincarnation of Caesar in a nice felt hat, when you take all your orders from a shouty Austrian a few hundred miles away.
The puppet state would have been embarrassing if it weren’t also so grim. There was a daily shortage of rations. Gas and electricity supplies were near non-existent. Kids plaintively scrawled the Italian word for ‘bread’ on walls, and all the cats ominously disappeared. Mussolini grew bitter and depressed. On meeting him, one conscript reported in his diary: ‘He is ugly: his face is spotted with the purple blotches of someone with liver disorder. He is deflated, thin.’* The man who invented topless machismo-based photo ops was long gone.
When the Allies broke through the fortified defensive line of the Apennines, huge numbers tried to escape north. The Germans were allowed to leave, but not the Italians. Mussolini wrote a touching letter to his wife and then tried to do a runner with his mistress. Partisans
found him hiding under a blanket in the corner of a lorry, dressed in a German soldier’s coat. This is not enough of a disguise if you’ve had your face stuck up on gigantic banners for a couple of decades. They shot him with a sub-machine gun and hung his corpse from a petrol station. Which makes Mussolini one of the rare monsters in this book who actually received a comeuppance.†
Today, Mussolini’s tomb gets around a hundred thousand adoring visitors a year.
* As recounted in Fascist Voices – Christopher Duggan.
† Alessandra Mussolini, a member of the European Parliament, recently threated to sue anyone writing disrespectful comments about her disastrous, possibly syphilitic grandfather.
The German Democratic Republic
1949–90
Population: 16 million (in 1990)
Capital: East Berlin
Language: German
Currency: East German mark
Cause of death: not a pop concert
Today: part of Germany
///animated.cage.kite
Even today, two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable belief systems keep butting up against each other: those that think it was David Bowie who brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall, and those who swear it was David Hasselhoff. It’s fair to say that neither of these points of view tell the entire story.
On the night of 12 August 1961, soldiers built what was officially known as an ‘anti-fascist protection rampart’, and Berlin woke up to find itself cut in two. The non-democratic, non-republic German Democratic Republic (GDR) had come into being 12 years before, but it had been bleeding at a catastrophic rate: by the time the wall went up, 3.5 million people – a full 20 per cent of the population – had fled to the West.
The wall didn’t stop East Berliners trying to get out, but it staunched the flow. In one of the bureaucratic nonsenses that would become commonplace in the GDR, applying to leave was still considered legal, but you’d automatically be suspected of a Hetzschrift – thinking ill of the republic – and that was definitely a crime. The Germans soon got used to this type of doublethink. Everything in the East fell under the watchful eyes of the Stasi, and with 97,000 employees – plus a network of almost 200,000 informers – they had a lot of eyes.* They’d censor your books and listen to your phone calls and check the direction of your TV aerial to make sure you were watching wholesome shows like Treffpunkt Flughafen (a drama set on the GDR’s state airline, Interflug) rather than decadent Western efforts (Dallas became super-popular after the authorities loosened up a little).
Escape might have been tricky, but there was another – officially sanctioned – way out, which is partly how the GDR managed to survive. A system developed in which the East would voluntarily send dissidents to the West. The benefit was twofold: it earned the regime hard cash (West Germany would pay a set amount for each citizen), and it acted as a release valve to keep political pressure from building up – those most likely to ferment unrest could simply be exported to where they’d do no harm.
When Mikhail Gorbachev embarked upon glasnost in the 1980s and it became apparent that the Stasi could no longer rely on the threat of Russian tanks as a backup, the German Democratic Republic’s days were numbered, regardless of whether the lyrics to either ‘Heroes’ (Bowie) or ‘Looking for Freedom’ (Hasselhoff) were wafting across from the other side of the wall. The end was a confused mess: East Germany’s Politbüro announced a relaxation of the travel ban. Asked when this would take effect, hapless schmuck Günter Schabowski (charged with telling the press but not present at the meeting the plan had been thrashed out in) scratched his head, shrugged, and said: ‘Immediately?’ The people swarmed over the wall. Caught off guard by this, the Stasi desperately ran out to buy some Western shredders, because their crappy Soviet ones had already broken down, and they realised they had the mother of all cover-up jobs to try to get through.
Today, Ostalgie (combining the German words for ‘east’ and ‘nostalgia’) has become the term for the semi-wistful attachment people have for their former lives in the GDR. The East was pervasive alcoholism, queues round the block for bananas, the legal requirement for pop music to be sung in German, 3 million unreliable Trabants, desperate adverts urging people to ‘eat another egg’ (after an overproduction of poultry), but it was also a completely socialised public healthcare system and an arguably more progressive view of women than you’d find in West Germany at the time.† Plus, there were all those rules to follow, and a lot of people find comfort in having rules, even if the rules are stupid and sometimes evil.
* Old GDR joke: why do Stasi work together in groups of three? You need one who can read, one who can write and one to keep an eye on two intellectuals.
† The country developed its own covert slang, as in ‘Vitamin B’ – B for Beziehungen, meaning ‘connections’ – the term for smuggled goods from the West. A large percentage of the GDR’s population made their own clothes rather than rely on the very lumpen official offerings.
Bophuthatswana
1977–94
Population: circa 1.5 million
Capital: Mmabatho
Languages: Tswana, English, Afrikaans
Currency: South African rand. Two ‘Bophuthatswanan’ coins, the Lowe and the Nkwe, were made for publicity purposes and never got past the proof stage
Cause of death: it wasn’t fooling anybody
Today: part of South Africa
///cucumber.blend.quite
If you are looking at this map and thinking ‘that’s a funny shape for a country, nation states don’t tend to be a load of random separate blobs’, you would have a good point. Bophuthatswana was one of the Bantustans, a racist 1970s sequel to Maryland in Africa.
Maryland had been an attempt to dump an unwanted black population on another continent, something South Africa’s white apartheid government couldn’t do. For a start, there wasn’t much of the globe still up for grabs. But also: the economy depended on the very people they wanted rid of.
So South Africa came up with a weasel solution, one that would disenfranchise all those citizens they didn’t want to give the vote to, but without messing up their ability to do hard labour. It was evil and ingenious: the ‘repatriation’ of the people to their ‘original’ tribal homelands. Who could object to this generous offer of self-determination?*
The shapes ended up as weird as they were from simple greed: the government wasn’t about to let these new ‘countries’ have any land that might actually be good for something, because the whole point was that the inhabitants would be forced to commute back to South Africa to earn a wage. When a load of titanium was discovered after the map of ‘self-governing entity’ KwaZulu had already been drawn, a narrow strip was simply lopped off it and declared ‘development land’. As a result of this geographical gerrymandering, if you wanted to travel through Bophuthatswana (the second Bantustan declared independent) you’d have to go through passport control a ridiculous dozen times. Nobody wants that many Toblerones. (Note: there were no Toblerones, or money to buy Toblerones with.)
A bonus for the whites: the under-resourced new ‘nations’ could argue with each other over their crappy territories rather than target the real problem. Double bonus: once issued with an ID card informing them of their new nationalities, the populace lost their pension rights and the ‘unproductive’ members of society (mostly women and children) were suddenly off the government’s books.†
In Bophuthatswana, a new capital city was built. It included a parliament building, a luxury hotel, a garage selling ‘farm fresh petrol’, a half-finished stadium and virtually nothing else. The authorities had put the bare minimum of effort into making it seem like a real place. To celebrate ‘independence’, field guns fired a presidential salute, causing all the nearby cows to charge away in a panic, and a gymnastics team – boycotted by all the good gymnasts – gave a clumsy performance. Later, in a political pantomime designe
d to confer legitimacy, one of the Bantustans cut off diplomatic relations with South Africa. ‘We can’t be a South African puppet if we’re angry with them, can we?’ went the extremely see-through ruse.‡
With the exceptions of Barclays Bank and a bunch of English cricketers, the rest of the world wasn’t swallowing it. Despite plenty of wining and dining from ambassadors, nobody agreed to recognise the Bantustans diplomatically. South Africa’s isolation grew and when a triumphant Nelson Mandela finally swept to victory in 1994, the fake countries were once again wiped from the map. Nobody mourned their passing.
* The Nazis came up with a similar scheme when they were drawing up plans for the future conquest of Africa, though semi-inevitably it was the British who first mooted the idea.
† Another neat trick: when an awkward question was asked in the South African parliament about an issue like healthcare in one of the poorer areas, the minister in charge could now say, ‘Ah, that is a matter for the national government of X, not something I can answer.’
‡ There were ten Bantustans in total, six ‘self-governing entities’ and four ‘fully independent states’.
The Republic of Crimea
17–18 March 2014
Population: circa 2 million
Capital: Simferopol
