I think I’m one of very few to experience walking through a European capital city as the only foreign tourist.

Few visitors make it to Moldova, the small country nestled between Romania and Ukraine that holds the honor of being Europe’s least visited UN country.1 Fewer make it to Transnistria, the fascinating de facto independent state on Moldova’s eastern border. Even fewer stay overnight in Transnistria, rather than just taking a day trip to it from a niche organized tour company. And even fewer do so in the dead of winter, at perhaps the exact antipode of the country’s already stagnant tourist season.

So, a picture from Transnistria at night in the wintertime would be the holy grail of obscure European country tourism for a western blog.

A picture from Transnistria at night in the wintertime, on a western blog.

My decision to visit in January in particular, possibly the worst time, was not some deliberate chase for obscurity, or an excuse to narcissistically look down on other travellers who choose more conventional trips. I’m actually a firm believer in the opposite: the most common and least common paths are equally as valid, and the most important thing is the happiness you personally derive from the trip. Instead, the timing was based on an arguably even worse reason: bad planning. While implementing my usual strategy of “show up at a place and figure out the specifics later”, I forgot that snow makes it hard to walk around. My first act in Chișinău (pronounced KEESH-ee-now), the capital of Moldova, was to duck into the first shop I saw and buy a better coat, in order to bear the 14°F (-10°C) weather. I’m not the smartest.

The icy conditions that awaited me in Chișinău, Moldova.

Transnistria has nearly everything typically characteristic of a country. Its government functions completely independently from its neighbors, controlling a continuous area with well-defined borders. It has its own laws, police, military, flag, passports, currency, stamps, and license plates, not to mention a population of almost half a million. It also has a different language and culture from the other nations it borders. It just lacks one extremely important thing: recognition. The rest of the world pretends it doesn’t exist.

Moldova and Transnistria’s position in Europe. Moldova is in yellow-beige, while that thin strip of red to the east is Transnistria. To the west of them is Romania, and to the east is Ukraine.

Here’s a close-up. This image is open source, so it’s totally okay that I stole it from Wikipedia.

To oversimplify a somewhat complex piece of history, civil war broke out in Moldova at the collapse of the USSR. In the union’s last years, Moldova was increasingly allying itself with its western neighbor Romania, adopting a similar flag and declaring Romanian to be its new national language. However, the far east of Moldova was different culturally and politically, in that its inhabitants were largely Russian speaking and held great sympathy for the USSR. Romania declared independence from the Soviet Union in late 1989, and it became clear that Moldovan independence was also inevitable, and merging with Romania was a distinct possibility. Those in the east feared the forcible erasure of their culture, and on 2 September 1990, they declared independence from the rest of Moldova, designating themselves as Transnistria. They adopted their own flag with the hammer and sickle motif, hoping to remain in the Soviet Union.

The total dissolution of the USSR by late 1991 dashed Transnistria’s hopes of becoming an official Soviet republic, but not their hopes of independence. Transnistria’s declared sovereignty was initially completely ignored by Moldova, but as time went on, the new state slowly came into existence as it wrested more power from the government to the west, and the conflict escalated. Romania began supporting Moldova, and Russia began supporting Transnistria. The new country formed a military in January 1992,2 and full war broke out by March, leading to a four month conflict known as the Transnistrian War. Almost all western accounts of the war mention the 500 to 1,000 deaths, but somehow completely fail to mention the up to 100,000 refugees.3

A Soviet tank, proudly on display in Transnistria’s capital.

A ceasefire was negotiated on 21 July, 1992. Moldova, still refusing to recognize Transnistria, signed the treaty with Russia instead. An apparently permanent compromise was reached: Transnistria would get its independence, on the condition that everyone else involved would quietly pretend it didn’t. Even Russia agreed not to officially recognize them, while simultaneously continuing to provide economic and military support to them behind closed doors. And that is how the situation has remained to this day. The official stance of every single UN member is that Transnistria is still a part of Moldova. Empirically, there is nothing to justify this; one can argue that Transnistria shouldn’t be independent from Moldova, but it makes little sense to argue it isn’t. And yet, that is the current state of affairs. The way modern international relations work, a recognition of existence would be inseparable from and tantamount to an endorsement, and this is an argument that nobody, not even Russia, wants to dive into. Thus Transnistrians live within a culture and country that is invisible and ostensibly nonexistent if you are not Transnistrian.

Transnistria was a somewhat dangerous place through the 1990s and the 2000s. Some called it a “black hole” economy,4 a lawless safe haven for smuggling, arms trafficking, and the drug trade. Arguably, Transnistria didn’t have a choice: when the world declares your very existence illegal, only other criminals are willing to make deals with you. Of course, many inexcusable human rights abuses occurred too. Arbitrary arrests, restrictions on press and religious freedom, and even torture were apparent. The government did little or nothing to prevent human trafficking. Even five or ten years ago, a western tourist to Transnistria would have been regarded with extreme suspicion, and most likely would have been detained for a good while.

The view from my place in Transnistria. The blocky Soviet design is apparent both here and in Moldova.

Things are a bit different today. The longer the strange status quo has persisted, the more that stability has set in. Stability being the key word—not fairness or justice. One of the very few western political experts on the region wrote in 2012 that, to those who run the country, “the people are a resource to be exploited for gain.”5 But Transnistria is now a more peaceful place, and besides a lack of consular assistance should you run into trouble, a visitor has little to fear. With this newfound safety, the outside world is finally starting to pay it a bit of attention. Three months after my visit, a travel Youtuber filmed his explorations of the place and received two million views. A few months after that, in what I can only hope isn’t a further stain to Transnistria’s reputation, the same guy was outed as a sexual predator who purposefully goes to obscure impoverished eastern European destinations to exploit women.

Transnistria deserves better. And I believe that, very very slowly, it is starting to get it. But we’re sadly a long way off before you can expect to ever see a brochure for it at your local travel agency.

Transnistria also has some beautiful Eastern Orthodox buildings reminiscent of an earlier Russian era.

Today, Transnistria stands as a wonderfully interesting geopolitical oddity. It is the only remaining country—if one dares to call it a country—with communist insignia on its flag. Some see it is the last spiritual bastion of the Soviet Union; it even still has a statue of Lenin in front of its parliament. It’s also one of only two countries in the world, the other being Bolivia, with two different legal flags (which we’ll talk about later). It has the lowest GDP per capita of any European country.6 Over 35% of its population is retirees,7 quite probably the highest of any nation on Earth. It is the largest country you could easily walk across: although it is some 130 miles (210 kilometers) from north to south, it is just 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) at its narrowest point west to east, and around 15 miles (24 kilometers) at its widest. By some definitions, this makes it the skinniest country in the world, more so than Chile.8 It is the world’s first nation to issue legal tender coins made out of plastic.9 It’s such an interesting place that it’s almost amazing we never hear about it.

Transnistrian Parliament, complete with Lenin statue. You can also see a heart that someone made on the ground with rose petals. There are many pictures of this building online, but almost none of them are from wintertime.

Transnistria also lacks another thing that most (but not all) countries have: an airport. Or, rather, it does have an airport, but no plane has landed there in the 21st century, because Moldova refuses to allow Transnistria the use of its airspace. The Transnistrian government keeps the runway in good condition, hoping to be able to use it again one day, but has seen no such luck thus far. So to get there, overland it is. The easiest way is to take a bus from Chișinău’s main bus station. ‘Station’ is a bit of a misnomer, of course: it’s mostly just a few streets where all the buses park. ‘Bus’ is also a misnomer: they’re really just vans. Such is the most realistic expectation one learns to have from Moldova. And yet there is also something to be said about Moldovan prices, since my ticket cost the equivalent of $2.35 (€2.10).

The “bus” to Tiraspol (the capital of Transnistria) is distinctly red.

Being the only foreigner on the bus, everyone else is forced to wait as border guards take me off and into a room to approve my entry. I take a picture of the border station, and I’m immediately stopped and forced to delete it. Then the officer makes me go through my photos and delete anything taken within proximity of the border. Thankfully, I’ve never met an official who understands how easy it is to recover photos.

My illegal border picture. To the west (left), undisputed Moldovan territory. To the east (right), a geopolitical quagmire.

Crossing this, the Moldova-Transnistria border, is easier and quicker than crossing the Ukraine-Transnistria border on the other side. Because Moldova does not recognize the border as legally valid, only Transnistrian officials set up shop here. On the other hand, when crossing from the other side, you are subject to duplicate border checks, first by Ukraine and then by Transnistria. You go through the same process twice because, unlike other borders, the two sides there do not cooperate with one another. Here though, it’s only a few minutes before I’m issued a visa for three days—and not a second more. My slip of paper says I have until exactly 2:13 PM and 28 seconds. I’m not brave enough to test out how strict the bureaucracy is in practice.

It’s another half hour drive to Tiraspol (pronounced tier-AZ-pole), the country’s capital. Today the city is home to about 135,000 people, significantly down from the 200,000 it hosted back in the early 1990s (turns out, having an unrecognized government with heavy control over the economy is bad for growth). Upon reaching the city’s main bus station, I enter a taxi to get to where I’m staying, and immediately have my first unique Transnistrian experience. The taxi driver, an elderly man, pulls out a few broken, worn, tearing scraps of paper with maps on them, and puts them literally an inch from his eye with a magnifying lens in between to see what’s on them. He drives in circles, and twice stops to ask random people the way. By the time we finally arrive, I’m grateful that payment is a flat negotiated amount, rather than by distance like I’m used to.

Tiraspol’s main bus station, the first site that most visitors experience.

Transnistria does not yet receive enough tourism to justify any hotels catering to foreigners. In 2016, it was estimated that tourism made up a paltry 0.02% of GDP.10 Of the 170 countries the World Bank has statistics on, this is lower than 168 of them—the only two worse off countries being Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.11

So, where did I stay? Hostel At The Center of Tiraspol. This place is actually just a single apartment that has maybe four beds in it, located in a larger apartment building. This is, of course, pretty nice by Transnistrian standards, and if you make it this far into eastern Europe, you’re probably comfortable forgoing luxury anyway. It is located on Karl Marx Street, a couple blocks away from the intersection with Lenin Street—and no, that’s not a joke. When I arrive, the only other person staying there at the same time happens to be a Russian who speaks no English (and whom I never see leave the apartment), no doubt there to check up on his country’s neocolonialist holdings.

The apartment building that I stayed in. In an odd way, I genuinely think it’s pretty.

The apartment is owned by a man named Evgheni, a uniquely Moldovan name. To English speakers, he introduces himself as Eugene. He is a wonderful person and someone I absolutely recommend as your guide. He shows me around town and invites me out with his friends completely unprompted, and it absolutely improves my experience in his homeland. Eugene tells me about a group of seven or so friends who meet every Sunday night at a restaurant and bar to practice their English skills, and by a fortunate coincidence, it was Sunday afternoon when I arrived.

The English Speaking Club is somewhat amazed at my presence. I get playfully but honestly asked what I’m even doing here. Someone jokes, “are you lost?”. I get asked if I’ve been to a ton of countries, presumably on the assumption that I’d only come here because I’ve visited most of the other countries and I’m completing my collection. In fact, Transnistria was ‘just’ my 13th country.

The main road into the heart of Tiraspol. The Transnistrian emblem, complete with hammer and sickle, can be seen on the sign to the left. Although the sign says 2018, this picture was taken two weeks into 2019.

It’s here in this group that I meet the only Canadian living in Transnistria. Years ago, he met a Transnistrian woman on a dating site, and ended up learning Russian and moving here to be with her. He asks me if I know any words of Russian. My first reaction is no, not at all. But then I think back to my history class and offer up ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, the words for openness and restructuring, programs that the USSR undertook in the 1980s to try and save itself. “Ah, none of that here,” he says.

I’m told that corruption is far from eradicated in the world’s last Soviet republic. When a police officer pulls you over, you are expected to bribe them. Protocol states you ask, ‘is there any way we could settle this now?’, to which the officer says ‘of course’. But, you never hand the bribe directly to them. You set the money down in front of the officer and allow them to pick it up. It’s like a moral loophole a child would think of: ‘nuh uh, I didn’t bribe them! I just set down money and they happened to pick it up. Nothing illegal here.’

Both old and new cars are a common sight on Tiraspol’s streets. You can also see here that Transnistria does, indeed, have their own license plates, just like any other country.

It’s mid-January, but the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 7, which helps explain why the holiday celebrations are still in full swing here in Tiraspol. A gigantic fake Christmas tree along the main road helps light up the night. Several horses and donkeys are dressed for the occasion underneath it, and a couple vendors are selling wares from tents. While walking down an alleyway with Eugene, an explosion goes off somewhere very close by, and a car alarm right next to us is triggered in response. I ask what happened, and Eugene immediately says “the war is starting again.” It was actually festive fireworks, but in hindsight, I deeply appreciate the distinctly Eastern European sense of humor.

I got to pet the horse. It was a good time. Horses are good.

The next morning, January 14, I venture out into the streets of Tiraspol by myself. I step into the Tiraspol Tourist Center, probably the only place in the entire country to purchase the kind of cheap geographical trinkets that major cities thrive on. Possible gifts to bring home include postcards that say “Keep Calm and Recognize Pridnestrovie” (the Russian name for Transnistria) and stickers that say “this sticker is from the country that doesn’t exist.” An employee sits behind the desk overlooking the center’s singular room and two sets of shelves. She speaks very good English, a rarity in the country. While making conversation with her, I ask casually, “do you get many tourists?” She says, “you are the first one this year.”

I get a couple coins made out of plastic back in my change from my purchases.

What is probably one-third of the country’s entire stock of souvenirs in one photo.

Transnistria’s most prominent company is Sheriff. Spelled the same way as the English word ‘sheriff’, and with a sheriff’s star as the logo, but inexplicably pronounced like sher-EEF. It’s a supermarket chain. It’s also a chain of gas stations. And a construction company. And an advertisement agency, and a car dealership, and a distillery. And a bank, and a power company, and a textile manufacturer, and a bakery, and a sturgeon farmer, and a sports club. Not to mention they control the country’s entire mobile phone and landline network, all internet service, several television and radio stations, and the country’s sole publishing house. They’re an incredibly powerful monopolist, and nothing better illustrates the political corruption within the country. One casual observer estimated about 70% of the country’s economy belongs to them,12 while a more academic source simply says they own “most if not all of the [Transnistrian] economy.”13

Sheriff was started in 1993, and was principally at first a cigarette smuggling scheme. In the late 1990s, the company paid the Transnistrian government millions to shut down their government-run Soviet-style markets, in order to let their own private markets reign supreme. As Transnistria slowly became more market-oriented, most industry that was privatized went into Sheriff’s hands. Through continued government favors, and aided by the country’s forced isolationism, Sheriff ended up controlling a gigantic portion of the economy. Sheriff has created major political parties to win elections, patrolled the Ukrainian border to prevent competition in the form of imports, and almost surely committed many murders in the 1990s in order to gain and maintain power.14 In 2014, about 25% of Transnistria’s government revenues came from the taxes paid by Sheriff,15 ensuring the government’s continued reliance on bending to their whims. Their very existence blurs the line between private and public entities, and many have referred to Transnistria only somewhat jokingly as the “Republic of Sheriff.”

A typical Sheriff supermarket.

The 2010s brought gradual stability to Transnistria, and some of the direct collusion between Sheriff and the government has supposedly ended. Of course, this has not undone all of the power the company already forcefully gained. Because it exists in a secretive twilight zone between public and private, and between legal and illegal, it’s hard to know exactly how much Sheriff controls. It’s even hard or impossible to track down who the real owners are.

All I know is, when I accidentally broke a glass Pepsi bottle inside a Sheriff supermarket, I was not sent to the Gulag. They just politely made me pay for it and leave. And say what you want about Sheriff, but I defy you to find a single other European supermarket chain selling half a liter of vodka for $0.94 (€0.85).

Tiraspol city hall has yet another Lenin statue in front of it, albeit one less grand.

Alongside Transnistria’s signature Soviet flag, Russian flags can be seen flying everywhere, including over the Transnistrian Parliament and the country’s main university. At least, they look like Russian flags. You’d have to be a Russian national or a hardcore vexillologist to notice the difference. The colors and design are exactly the same, but this one is 33% longer, with an aspect ratio of 1:2 instead of Russia’s 2:3.

This is Transnistria’s second flag, officially adopted in 2017. And the fact it is nearly the same as Russia’s is a purposefully heavy-handed political statement.

While I was taking this image, a man walking by looked up to the sky in confusion, as if he couldn’t imagine what was so interesting that I could be taking a picture of it.

This went over poorly when the president of Transnistria, the self-described monarchist16 who recently threatened to sue Moldova for war crimes,17 Vadim Krasnoselsky, was interviewed by Ukrainian media in late January 2019, just a week after my visit. The media’s first three questions were about the “Russian” flag behind him. To Ukrainians, this is the flag of an aggressive invader, the military force that stole Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk from them in 2014. As a local later told me in Odessa (in Ukraine), “they [Russians] are still trying to take over the world, but they are too stupid.” However, to Krasnoselsky, this was simply the flag of Transnistria, and if by coincidence it happens to resemble another country’s, “then so be it.” At one point, he directly and aggressively tells them, “calm down about the flag.”18

Transnistria’s president is undoubtedly a bit off. But on some level, one must have sympathy for those desperately trying to legitimize the state they believe represents their culture and livelihood, the one the rest of the world denies them. To the UN, it is territory occupied by an invading force, but to the vast majority of its citizenry, it is their land, despite how the rest of the world would take it from them if they could. Even the Ukrainian media outlet interviewing Krasnoselsky went out of their way to emphasize how they refuse to call him President, on the grounds that his country is apparently fake.

A completely blind Transnistrian plays the accordion on the street for change. You might notice the lack of snow in this particular picture; this is because, unlike all the other ones, this photo was taken on a second, shorter trip of mine to Transnistria in October 2019. I just felt it was too good not to include.

Sitting on a bench amidst the snow in Transnistria, a stray black cat willingly jumps into my lap unprompted. She’s one of many that lives underneath the apartment building I’m staying in, within the cracks at the base. I try feeding her some shrimp-flavored chips I bought at Sheriff, but she doesn’t care for them. It’s okay. I don’t either. Two elderly Russian-speaking men pass me by and make a comment to me, one I’m sure has to do with the cat I’m cuddling on a public bench in the cold. I awkwardly respond in English, and instantly they seem to become fascinated with me. They attempt to communicate with the weird foreigner and his cat by speaking Russian for 20 minutes straight, and I make out an average of one word every two minutes. “…coat? …strong? …dancing?”

Three cats share a box fragment on the icy streets, together for warmth. That last sentence was a haiku.

So, what is it like to walk through a European capital city as the only tourist? In a word, I’d say it’s peaceful. Because there was no expectation of any foreign visitors being there, I blended in perfectly as long as I kept my mouth shut.

A wonderful but highly touristic city like Rome has high reward, but high effort. There’s an extremely good chance that you’ll return home and someone will say, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t see/do [thing] there’ or ‘you just went to all the tourist traps and not the real Italy.’ So there’s pressure to experience it ‘right’: you worry about getting to all the must-see sites in the limited time you have, not falling for typical tourist scams, and having an experience that other visitors to the region would approve of.

Tiraspol, on the other hand, is a dream for the adventurous yet highly introverted. You can’t mess it up by going to the wrong attractions, because there aren’t really other people to define what the right attractions are; just existing in the country itself IS the attraction. For me, it was an opportunity to get immersed in a completely different and unique culture, with nothing expected from me.

This is far from being the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, but I did have it all to myself.

I won’t try to convince you to visit Transnistria. I could try to entice you by saying it’s the closest you’ll ever get in the modern era to visiting the USSR, or talk about how fascinating it is to walk around in a nation that exists in real life but not on maps, or even tell you about the quail’s egg pizza at Andy’s Pizza. But the truth is, Transnistria isn’t for everyone. By reading this, you’ve probably already figured out for yourself if it’s the kind of place you’d care to go. If it’s not, nobody could possibly blame you. But if it is: go. You won’t be disappointed.

On my bus back to Moldova, when authorities at the border checked everyone’s identity, I noticed another person with an American passport. A man in his 50s or so. I struck up a conversation with him. Turns out he was a native Transnistrian, but left 20 or 30 years ago for a better life, and came here to briefly visit home again. I said I’m just a tourist. He gave me a look that was equal parts bewilderment, amusement, and pity, like he was encountering some rare and fascinating species of total moron in the wild, and sincerely asked me: “…why?”

1Per capita, Moldova is the hands down winner in Europe’s least tourists contest. By total number, Liechtenstein and San Marino are lower on paper, but this is only because official statistics just count overnight stays. The majority of tourist visits to these two microstates are day trips that are smaller portions of larger, longer trips. If these were all properly counted, I am confident Moldova would still be last. Indeed, walking through Vaduz, Liechtenstein reveals a huge concentration of tourist shops and attractions, a density that is nowhere near approached in Chișinău, Moldova.





2O’Loughlin, John, Vladimir Kolossov, and Andrei Tchepalyga. “National construction, territorial separatism, and post-soviet geopolitics in the Transdniester Moldovan Republic.” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39, no. 6 (1998): 347.





3Bobick, Michael Stephen. “Performative sovereignty: State formation in the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2012), 86-7, 139.





4Buttin, Félix. “A human security perspective on Transnistria: reassessing the situation within the “Black Hole of Europe”.” Human Security Journal 3 (2007): 13-28.





5Bobick 2012, 42.





6According to the city of Tiraspol’s website here, GDP per capita in 2018 was 29,338.4 Transnistrian rubles, which is somewhere around $1,800 (or €1,630). This is noticeably lower than the country in second place, which is Moldova, naturally. As a sidenote, although the official exchange rate is 16.1 Transnistrian rubles to one US dollar, the functional exchange rate I saw on the street was between 16.3 and 16.35 as of October 2019. This was pretty stable throughout 2019.





7Bobick 2012, 164. The next highest nation for number of retirees is, as far as I can tell, Japan at about 28%.





8Without justification, this is a dubious claim. Transnistria is obviously not the smallest country from coast-to-coast (this is Vatican City). Instead, it is the skinniest (just barely beating out Chile), if we define this as: which country has the highest ratio of length to width-at-narrowest-point? If we instead define skinniest as highest ratio of length to width-at-widest-point, then Chile certainly wins. Both of these would be valid arguable definitions. Of course, as we try to more rigorously define coasts and east-west length, things get harder.





9The key phrase that makes this true is ‘legal tender.’ The obscure Briefmarkenkapselgeld (encased postage coins) of late 1800s and early 1900s Germany had a layer of clear plastic holding a stamp inside, but these were a form of Notgeld (emergency money), issued by actors other than the federal government specifically to counteract a shortage of official money. The US government in 1942 had a few plastic pattern coins with the Colombian two centavo design created, but these were just to test the viability of the material as a possible substitute for copper, and were never legal tender. But anyway, this is an obscure geography blog, not an obscure numismatics blog.





10Novosti Pridnestrovya. “Development of tourism in Pridnestrovie was discussed with representatives of international organizations in Tiraspol.” Novostipmr.com, August 16, 2016. Read here. Also keep in mind that government estimates can be unreliable, and this figure may have been exaggerated downwards.





11World Bank data for tourism’s direct contribution to GDP in 170 countries and 7 territories can be seen here. At first glance, they all appear higher than Transnistria, but this is because the figures count both foreign and domestic tourism. To get the share of only foreign, download the data, and observe the fields for Domestic Tourism Spending and Visitor Exports (Foreign spending). Divide the latter by both added together, and multiply this resulting fraction with the original percentage of GDP.

It is also useful, and maybe more accurate, to compare total foreign tourist spending per capita. According to an archived version of the city of Tiraspol’s website here, total GDP in 2016 was 11,418,300,000 Transnistrian rubles. Divide by the official 2016 exchange rate of 11.3 rubles to 1 USD to get about $1,010,500,000. Divide this by the population estimate of 400,000 in Bobick 2012, then multiply by 0.0002 to get $0.50 (€0.45) of foreign tourist spending per capita. Calculate the values for other countries using World Bank data for 2016 GDP in 2010 US dollars here, adjust to 2016 dollars using the dollar’s inflation rate here (approximately a 10.067% increase), and divide by population data here. Of the 167 countries with adequate data, we find Transnistria lower than 162. The five with lower values than Transnistria are Bangladesh, Guinea, Burundi, Papua New Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, it should also be noted that $0.50 is a liberally high estimate for Transnistria, given that we used the official exchange rate of 11.3 instead of a likelier market rate of between 11.3 and 15, and we used a very conservative population estimate. The first issue alone means that Bangladesh most likely received more per capita tourist spending than Transnistria, leaving just 4 countries out of 167 lower than Transnistria in 2016.

It’s also worth noting that the set of countries with sufficient data does not include a handful that are almost surely lower than Transnistria, such as Somalia or South Sudan. It also does not include other de facto independent but unrecognized states; South Ossetia, for example, is extremely likely to be lower than Transnistria. Also, wow, this is a long endnote. I can’t believe you’re even bothering to read this. Hi though! I like you.





12Коллонтай, Орест. “Республика Шериф.” Redstar.ru, Красная Эвзеда, December 7, 2001. Read here. I had to dig really deep for this citation, so I hope you appreciate it.





13Bobick 2012, 156. It’s worth noting that Sheriff employs almost 4% of Transnistria’s population. By comparison, the United States’ biggest employers, the federal government and Walmart, employ about 0.8% and 0.45% of America’s population respectively. This isn’t even a fair analogy, given Transnistria’s previously mentioned incredibly high concentration of retirees: it’s actually around 10% of Transnistrians in the workforce who work for Sheriff, compared to less than 2% for the US government. And of course, just like the US government’s total economic and political influence goes much further than 2%, Sheriff’s goes much further than 10%.





14In 2010, Michael Bobbick wrote an article in which he said that Sheriff was “allegedly racking up dozens of economically motivated killings” in the 1990s (Bobick, Michael Stephen. “In Transdniester, One Company Is a Law Unto Itself.” Transitions Online, 2010). He does not explicitly make this claim in his PhD thesis (Bobbick 2012) two years later, but he does mention “the many corpses that turned up in the [Dniestr] river during the 1990s” (168) in the context of a dissenting worker being threatened.





15More precisely 24.21% for the first half of 2014, according to the numbers on the official website of the Transnistrian Supreme Council here. As of this writing, the Russian Wikipedia incorrectly gives a much higher value of 52%, and this false figure has subsequently snuck into published literature at least once: Кочурков, Д. П., and В. Г. Фоменко. “Приднестровская экономика в поиске альтернативных путей развития.” In Донецкие чтения 2017: Русский мир как цивилизационная основа научно-образовательного и культурного развития Донбасса (2017): 240.





16Челноков, Алексей. “Осада Приднестровья.” Sovsekretno.ru, Совершенно секретно, March 9, 2016. Read here.





17Necsutu, Madalin. “Breakaway Transnistria Threatens to Sue Moldova for ‘War Crimes’.” Balkan Insight, May 29, 2019. Read here.





18Сидоренко, Сергій. “”Даю гарантію, від нас не буде нападу РФ на Україну”: інтерв’ю лідера невизнаного Придністров’я.” Eurointegration.com.ua, Європейська Правда, January 21, 2019. Read here.