“Good production values and native-level English make the message easier to swallow.”

The TT publishes Averko, unedited, complete with his idiosyncratic English. This is not “good production values.”

“O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

God that’s achingly beautiful. Mike, are you listening? That’s how writing is meant to be done! And look, he didn’t even use punctuation, albeit without any employment of “there’re.” That’s shorthand for you!

There’s one discovered every minute. I never knew Amy Winehouse was a non-Court Appointed Russia Friendly. What with you being a Cheerleader for the CARFs Chris, how does that make you feel? Can you actually be attracted to a non-CARF?:-)

Lyndon I’d just like to say congratulations on your recent graduation, well done!! You’re due a lot of credit -family, bills, blog, defending the world against Mike Averko and his spin, and yet you still manage to find time to get your law degree from GEORGETOWN NO LESS!! Brilliant!:-)

Any chance, you know, if any of us ‘contributors’ here ever get busted, that you could, maybe (cough cough) em, give us free legal aid?:-) Times are tough for ordinary guys visiting Russia blogs too you know!

But, realistically, lets not get too excited. You only speak Russian and Romanian fluently, have spent years in the USSR/Russia and then loads of time in Moldova and the PMR.

How would you know anything about the FSU?:-)?

Chris, actually just about all of the online signs of life I’ve seen from the PMR (official, of course, but unofficial as well) are in Russian. It’s just speculation, but I would guess that folks who are young and educated enough to be online and who want to use Romanian will gravitate toward the right bank of the Dnestr and move there if possible.

Anyway, the nerve center (IMHO) of Russophone online user-generated content is Livejournal, and sure enough there is a Tiraspol-oriented forum on that system, which had one none too flattering mention of TTT back in Dec. 2006 when it had just appeared. There don’t seem to be any other mentions of TTT on LiveJournal.

Incidentally, there used to be a LJ community called Foto_PMR (I reposted one cool photo from that forum here), but within a couple of months after I discovered it that forum disappeared, replaced by a LJ error message which reads “This journal has been deleted and purged.”

I checked out a couple of other online forums to see what locals online are saying about the Tiraspol Times. Here is a rather dismissive remark suggesting it’s a “PR project of [Dmitry] Soin” (a top PMR polittechnologist and youth movement organizer who also holds a position in the state security services). Here is an online discussion of one of TTT’s sillier articles (comparing Transdniester’s supposed liberal attitude toward gay pride parades with Moldova’s attitude), a discussion titled “PROPAGANDA: who spreads it and why?” in which TTT features prominently and another discussion of TTT’s merits from the same forum.

It’s impossible to tell who the participants are in such online discussions; one of them in some of the threads linked above is a woman named Marisha who organizes tours in Moldova and Transdniester. She also has her own English-language online forum, in which she made the following observation:

I never seen a printed copy of Tiraspol Times neither in Moldova, nor in Tiraspol. I think its main target group is the western reader and not the one in Chisinau or Tiraspol.

On that forum, there’s also a comment from a guy who once ran a column in TTT but a little over a year later wrote:

…when reading Tiraspol Times its hard to believe what I can read there, according to their opinion PMR is a rosegarden and on the other side of the Nistru there is hell.

So thanks, Chris, I appreciated the excuse to root around on the internet for a bit.

Ger:

But people who know nothing about the place may actually be conned by this stuff.

This has been what bothered me about TTT from the very beginning. Good production values and native-level English make the message easier to swallow.

Anyway hope you’re keeping well Lyndon and not too hot in heatwave USA:-)

Thanks, one gets used to 90-something degrees and 90-something per cent humidity in DC (though not usually this early in the summer), so it’s not the end of the world for me. I felt bad, though, for a couple of friends we had visiting from Moscow last week who were walking around downtown on some of the sweatiest days of the year!

Thats it alright. Reading TTT one is left with the impression that this is quite a good place to live and is struggling to escape the shackles of The Empire of Moldova and burst onto the world stage. And they want to compete with the French Riveria for tourists.

This would be all very well, and we can all laugh away because we all have some knowledge of the place or at least the circumstances there (and quite clearly Lyndon has actually been on-site and speaks the lingos, for which there is no substitute, in spite of protestations from Long Island). But people who know nothing about the place may actually be conned by this stuff. Only yesterday I got into a row at work with some women over the Lisbon Treaty and by the time the conversation ended, they were onto how the USA wants to colonise the world, Roswell and Freemasons controlling banking from behind the curtains in Brussels. You’d be AMAZED what even educated people believe – and bearing that in mind I have no doubt that TTT has fooled some people, which is its obvious aim.

Anyway hope you’re keeping well Lyndon and not too hot in heatwave USA:-)

That’s a good question, but I think it has a simple answer, which Ger alluded to: the TT’s target audience is not people in Transdniester or in any other discrete geographic area (which is what a print edition would be best at reaching).

As an online-only “newspaper,” it serves pretty much all of the functions needed – it looks legit to the casual observer who might arrive there based on a Google search or a context-placed Google Ad (TT definitely pays to advertise on Gmail, for example) and allows astroturfed blogs like “Deciphering Transdniestria” to link back to it and increase their own credibility. The entire project – including websites like VisitPMR and pridnestrovie.net – has been memorably and probably correctly described as “a circle-jerk of English-language disinformatsiya.”

Perhaps more importantly, given that there seems to have been a concerted effort to influence Wikipedia entries, an online “newspaper” such as TT provides a source to cite as “authority” when editing Wikipedia articles (apologies for all the scare-quotes, but in this context I think they are appropriate). I am not a Wiki-expert, but from looking at some of the discussion pages I gather this is important and people who disagree with the TT team’s point of view might remove their edits in the absence of citations to external websites.

Given that an online presence accomplishes so much in terms of PR, why bother with a print edition? Since TT’s mission in simplest terms seems to be influencing English-speaking internet users worldwide, a print edition would add little value.

But who knows, I agree with Chris that there is a vanishingly minuscule possibility this is all organized by some true believer in the PMR’s cause. One would expect such an individual to not shy away from publicity, since someone is clearly spending some cash to keep these websites going and for any private individual (as opposed to a government or corporation) the expense might be substantial. I’m going to be visiting Moldova this summer and will see whether it’s possible to arrange a meeting with “Jason Cooper” or anyone else at TT – i.e., whether they actually have anyone in Tiraspol at all.

Girls, Chris, girls. I will do anything for girls!:-)

”Why wouldn’t they just shill out the extra cash and get an actual print version and staff?”

I have no doubt they’re paying MAA and others. But who is going to be reading an English language paper like that in the PMR? Surely they get enough propoganda in Russian.