Please join us to celebrate the Club's 50th Anniversary. We start the evening with an hour long talk by best selling travel writer Rory Maclean, illustrated by award winning photographer Nick Danziger. This will be followed by plenty of time to mingle with other members, helped along with wine, soft drinks and canapés. Our president and vice-president will be attending and there will be information chronicling the Club's history.

Please note that this is a ticketed event – free to members. More details will be announced nearer the time.

Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set a thriller: an upstart mini-state on the edge of Europe, Transnistria is a nowhereland, a Soviet museum occupied by Russian peace-keepers near the Black Sea. Its oligarchs in Adidas tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. Its young people train for revolution at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. Its secret factories have supplied arms to Chechnya and electrical cable to Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. Its isolation and tiny size belie the real threat it poses to the West. To many observers, Transnistria is the North Korea of Europe.

Yet its new president has launched a cunning coup of political marketing, appointing as his top ministers personable young women like the Facebook-savvy Cheryl Cole lookalike Foreign Minister, sexing-up the republic's image abroad, and using their glitter to obscure this internationally unrecognised non-state's shadowy past. Now Western ambassadors and foreign ministers are queuing up to meet them.

We will find themselves truly back in the USSR… with a difference!

Rory MacLean’s nine non-fiction books include the UK best-sellers Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India. His works – according to the late John Fowles – are among those that 'marvellously explain why literature still lives'. 

Nick Danziger is one of Europe’s finest photojournalists having spent a life documenting what he sees in best-selling books, and in award-winning documentaries and photography. His photographic work is held in museum collections worldwide.

Rory MacLean (on the right) and Oleg Horjan who is the last Communist Deputy in (almost) the last Supreme Soviet.  He believes that all the former Soviet republics will soon reunite in an economic union.  Local businessmen consider him and his views to be ‘dust’

Tashlyk Compulsory Educational School sits at the top of the village, next to the tired Palace of Culture and a Soviet war memorial.  Its water comes from a well.  There is no sports field, only a muddy patch of ground behind the partially-built canteen building which has been under construction for the last twenty years

The Kamenka sanitorium is renowned for its special grape juice and wine cure, as well as its spa water.  Today it accepts only dollar-paying guests

Central Tiraspol, with the national emblem in the central reservation and in the background a statue of Lenin

A ballroom dancer chats with friends before going on stage at Tashlyk’s Soviet-era Palace of Culture

In the last twenty years the population of Transnistria has shrunk by one half – on average one working person supports seven relatives, and a third of its citizens are now pensioners. Moscow supplements their tiny pensions with a monthly $15 ‘gift’ but many still cannot make ends meet without other work.  This pensioners sells onions and eggs from a pram near the Vienna Café in central Tiraspol.