A Crime So Monstrous by E. Benjamin Skinner

Author:E. Benjamin Skinner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2008-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

After a weekin Chişinău, Petrică and I drove to a point of origin for the new Middle Passage: one of the hundreds of Moldovan villages that slave traders had drained of its women.

Chişinău has scant suburbs. As Petrică careered southeast, there was a sharp transition between the gray cinder block of tenement buildings and black-soil fields of corn, sunflower, wheat, grapes, and tobacco. After two hours, we were lost. For miles, the only humans were a smattering of solitary shepherds at some distance from the road. Finally, we came upon an old couple shuffling along the side of the road. Bewildered, they gave us directions.

“Don’t go left,” said the babushka, sporting a colorful head scarf. “But, instead, I would suggest that you go right.”

We entered Carpeşti, a village of some 2,300 residents, and shrinking fast. Three old men spread piles of dried beans across the main road, and encouraged us to drive across them in order to crack the hard shells. There were few other signs of life. Stretches reminded me of Chernobyl. Weeds grew tall through upturned concrete; the only thoroughfare was buckled and broken; side roads were unpaved but still navigable by the town’s main form of transportation, horse and cart. The only persisting signs of the village’s former glory flanked a crumbling, Stalin-era cultural center: a statue of the iconic Moldavian prince Ştefan cel Mare and a faded memorial to the Great Patriotic War.

Carpeşti is a tough old town. Founded in 1469, it has survived the Black Plague and dozens of wars. It has passed from Russian to Romanian to Soviet to Moldovan hands. But the worried face of Ion Bîzu, the thirty-four-year-old mayor, betrayed his town’s death throes. “This is a very difficult moment,” he said.

Bîzu’s office was the second floor of a simple, two-story farmhouse. On his desk was a rotary phone and an early-model computer. Behind him the Moldovan flag was draped around a bikini calendar. In the Soviet era, his parents, like most people in the village, worked on a collective cattle farm. The older generations were nostalgic for that time. “We didn’t know we were poor,” said Bîzu. “We were happy.”

In 1993, large-scale farming dissolved along with state ownership of the fields. Markets for local products soon evaporated as well. While two families bought up nearly all of the land at $250 per hectare, most were reduced to subsistence farming. Real income fell by over 70 percent. The average man earned $20 per month and was dead by age sixty. “Ten percent of the people can survive here,” the mayor estimated.

Illiteracy grew as schools closed and teachers emigrated. Most who remained had no job, as all but six small businesses went bankrupt. No one read newspapers; no one had indoor plumbing.

There was one piece of technology that nearly everyone did have. In the 1990s, at a time when national polls showed nine out of ten young people wanted to emigrate, television stations replaced Communist propaganda with alluring images of life beyond Moldovan borders.

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