Growing Up in a Country that Doesn’t Exist

Two decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union left one coastal corner of Europe in legal limbo, a child of Transnistria reflects on life in an unusually disputed homeland.

Photos by Anton Polyakov

I was born in the USSR in 1990, in the city of Tiraspol, then part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. As the Soviet Union broke up, Moldova became an independent state, but the small section known as Transnistria, where Russian is the dominant language and pro-Russian sentiment prevails, sought to break away. A military conflict followed, ended by a ceasefire. For the past twenty-four years — all of my life — the people of Transnistria, a region spanning approximately 125 by twenty miles, have lived in a frozen state, members of a country that, for the rest of the world, does not exist.