My name is Olga Capatina. I was born in Moldova, in the North, on the banks of the Dniestr in 1955. My parents were also Moldavian. In fact, they were Romanians before WWII, but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Moldova became part of the USSR.
I studied at the Balti Pedagogical Institute, obtaining a degree in Moldavian language and literature in the Faculty of Philology. After that I did a degree in psychology and education. At first I worked in a kindergarten in Ocnita. Then, I worked as a journalist for the state TV and radio broadcaster, but it was very poorly paid. When I was offered a position at the military recruitment office, I said yes, because the salary was double the amount I was getting for my radio work. That’s how I ended up in the army.
Soviet – Afghan War
I was sent to Afghanistan in 1987. When I finished my philology degree, in the first and second years women had to undergo medical training. This was while the boys underwent military training alongside their studies. All male students had to do military training. Meanwhile, we girls were trained in medicine, that’s how I qualified as a nurse. I did a physiotherapy course and learnt how use all the equipment, the quartz machines and all the others that used for treatment. Massages and all the rest of it. I was then appointed head of the physiotherapy unit within the medical and sanitation battalion at the aerodrome. It was very painful for me, frightful, seeing so many young men injured everyday; that left an impression.
There were few women and many men. What surprised me about the soldiers was the insolence; they were dishonest. They wanted to have it all and to have it right there and then, because they might die in battle the very next day. They wanted to drink, to eat well. And to have their way with any woman that happened to be there. If a woman rejects you, they thought, you have to exert pressure on her, to exact revenge. If she didn’t give in, you had to do everything to make sure that she did. And if she still didn’t, you would make her life a nightmare.
I was transferred to Kabul, to outpatient clinic N° 73 of the military command. The high command of the 14th army army received treatment there; that’s where I met a commander. I then asked for permission to leave the military’s medical service, to be transferred elsewhere. I was then sent on intelligence training. For the remainder of my military service I worked for a unit that answered to GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie), the Main Intelligence Directorate. I had a job intercepting radio communications. For example, a plane is shot down. We need to find our pilots, our boys who are down. In addition, there were many soldier kidnappings.
Transnistrian War
The Republic of Transnistria split from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic after its Russian-speaking population refused to be part of the Republic of Moldova founded on 23 June 1990. Violence first broke out in November 1991 in Dubăsari/Dubossari during an operation involving pro-Moldovan forces (troops and police) and the Transnistrian Republican Guard, militia and Cossack units. The Transnistrian area is of major strategic importance to Russia: it gives it access to the Danube and the Balkans by bypassing Ukraine; 40% of the country’s industrial companies (as part of the USSR military industrial complex) were concentrated in the region during the Soviet era; and it includes a major rail hub for the transport of raw materials. After a ceasefire was negotiated in July 1992, the United Nations oversaw an agreement with Moldova to leave Transnistria as Russia’s area of influence. The ceasefire would be imposed by the peacekeeping force from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that succeeded the USSR.
I went to Tiraspol to serve, to gather information for the Ministry of State Security of Moldavia. You see, there is not a single army in the world that doesn’t have its own intelligence operatives, call them spies if you like. I volunteered to go there. I knew Romanian very well. They didn’t have any experts who could read the Latin alphabet – the Moldavian language was written using the Cyrillic alphabet back then. But then after 1992 in Moldavia they transitioned to the Latin alphabet, like the Romanian language, to the way things were before in 1944. And they didn’t have anyone specializing in that, whereas I knew all that. When they saw my file, they saw that I had served in the Main Intelligence Directorate. Thus, I served in the intelligence service, in the group for collecting and processing information, that’s the official title. I gathered all sorts of information: about the social situation, the political situation. Every day I sent all of these bulletins, and he sent them on to Moscow. I was often sent to Kishinev (Chișinău) to see what was going on, to translate the newspapers… And, of course, I met with my case manager from the Ministry of State Security.
Then in 1995 I said that I couldn’t go on, that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had been living on a knife edge. I felt that if I stayed, my cover might be blown. So, I left, I went to Kishinev. For some reason I had thought that for someone who had been working for the system for five years, risking their life, that afterwards they would be given a job, a flat. There was none of that. In fact, there was a new Minister of State Security who was very, very pro-Russian. To this day, I am very surprised that they let me live, that they didn’t kill me. That really does surprise me. But they simply waved their hand and said, oh well, it doesn’t matter.
I still have very bad pain in my spine. It’s hard to me to sit, to lie down or just to walk around. That was during the war in Transnistria, there was heavy shelling. There were trenches. There were grapevines supported by wooden poles, and these poles were used to cover the trenches where we hid. There was heavy shelling and the poles all fell on my back. I endured the pain while the war was still raging. Then, in 1995, I went to Kishinev and the pain became more acute. I had an operation on my spine.
They didn’t take me back into the army; they wouldn’t take me anywhere in fact. My friends helped me get a job at the Ministry of Justice. But then all of my injuries and wounds started hurting, I had an operation, I spent over six months in hospital. I was then made to retire. Retirement was very difficult for me because I didn’t have a flat – I had nothing. They gave me a room in student housing. Down a long corridor there was just one kitchen, one toilet and one shower for the whole floor. That’s when I decided to go into politics…
These excerpts come from an interview with Olga Capatina, conducted in Paris, France, on 25 September 2015 as part of an oral history project on Soviet and post-Soviet wars. Click here for the full transcript.
