How the War in Ukraine Made the Trafficking of Women Worse

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Mimi Chakarova

Mimi Chakarova is a filmmaker who created a groundbreaking film shining a light on vulnerable women from Eastern Europe who were manipulated and tricked into selling their bodies and trapped in a life of slavery.

Episode Summary

Filmmaker Mimi Chakarova sits down with One Decision's Julia Macfarlane to discuss what has changed in the fight against human trafficking and slavery since her groundbreaking film that shined a light on vulnerable women from Eastern Europe who were manipulated and tricked into selling their bodies, trapped in a life of slavery. From Turkey to the Middle East to Western Europe, she chronicled the lives of women who managed to escape, but also revealed the men and women who worked to uphold the criminal structures that exploited them - even police officers. As waves of refugees flood Europe from Ukraine, Mimi warns that there are similar conditions today where people fleeing war are at risk of the same dangers as the women who left the Iron Curtain to seek better lives. And Sir Richard Dearlove gives the context of Eastern Europe's political progress since the fall of the Soviet Union, and why some states are more vulnerable to corruption and organized crime.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision, the podcast that looks at the choices made that shape our world. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. Back in 2011, as a journalism student in London, I was shown a new documentary by my tutor. It was a film painstakingly made and self funded by a single filmmaker, a woman on a mission. Mimi Shakarova, a photojournalist from Bulgaria, was haunted by questions over why so many women in Eastern Europe had fallen victim to sex trafficking. Where were the women who survived, and why had they stayed silent?

Shelandia: The story of the trafficked girls has one recurring theme, no opportunity to have a decent life back home. Once you see where they come from and the living conditions they face, you begin to understand why young women are desperate to leave. Jenny is from Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe. She couldn't resist a job offer as a cleaning lady abroad.

Jenny: I was locked inside without a passport. I was inside all the time. I wasn't allowed out. Even the windows were shut. We were always working. Sometimes 50 clients a day. I have the same thoughts now that I did then. I wish I'd never been born. I'd be better off dead. I'm living like this.

Mcfarlane: Over the course of a decade, Mimi put together one of the most powerful and upsetting things I have ever watched. The Price of Sex tells the story of young women from Moldova who were tricked into leaving their homes for work overseas as cleaning ladies. This during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when mass migration out from the Iron Curtain exploded. These women were poor, vulnerable, desperate for a way to make a decent living and support their families. They were deceived and lied to about the countries they were going, not Paris or London, but places like Turkey, Dubai. They hadn't been recruited as cleaners, but as prostitutes. And once overseas, they were threatened, blackmailed, and forced to pay back their debts.

Shelandia: Trafficked women have been nameless and faceless for decades. Fear of retaliation keeps them quiet, and their silence perpetuates the vicious cycle. Over time, I found women who survived. These girls want the world to see what they've endured.

Mcfarlane: What was so extraordinary about Mimi's film was not only had she, over the course of a very long time, managed to persuade women who had escaped this barbaric cruelty to go on camera and tell their stories, but she also managed to persuade some of the enablers and enforcers of these hideous networks to talk to her as well. She spoke to pimps, female recruiters, and, incredibly, police officers who worked to keep these criminal rings beyond the reach of the law for a price. I've thought about this film ever since I first saw it more than a decade ago, and I'm so pleased that Mimi was happy to join us on One Decision to talk about her film and how little things have changed ever since.

INTERVIEW WITH MIMI SHAKAROVA

Mcfarlane: Take us back to where The Price of Sex all started and how the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe paved the way for Eastern Europe to be a real hotbed for this issue of human trafficking.

Shakarova: For me, making this film, which wasn't even a film back then, it was, you know, I was a photojournalist, and it was more of a photo essay that I wanted to do about where I come from, about some of the young women who had managed to escape, and finding them and really getting a chance to learn their stories. I come from the Balkans. I grew up in Bulgaria. My mom and I immigrated to the US when I was 13. So, I grew up under communism, and my parents grew up under communism. And so, I understood that system. And it took a while to really get a sense of what happened once communism collapsed. And, you know, I remember in the early 90s and then the mid 90s, just reading all these articles, seeing these photo spreads in magazines about trafficked women from Eastern Europe. You know, the titles, the headlines were always so, how can I put it? There was so much shock value put to those headlines. It was, you know, sex slaves, you can buy a woman for $500. And it really bothered me. And I think when I was in my early 20s, I thought there has to be a different way that we can report on this. And I think I understood the dangers. I was a little bit naive because I thought that somehow, you know, once I found the women and I gained their trust, I would be able to complete this project in a year to two years. I had no idea it would take seven years. There was a variety of reasons why it took such a long time. But I think my first and foremost reasoning for beginning this was the stigma. It really bothered me how we stigmatized, and still do, women and young girls who are sold into this, especially in the region where I come from. There is this notion that once you are sold into this, you could never be the same again. You could never be, how can I put it, a valuable member of society? And so, a lot of young women who manage to escape one way or another, a lot of them chose not to speak about it. So, there was this code of silence, which is another reason it took such a long time. So, yeah. So, it started off as a photo documentation. There is always people who say something cannot be done. And in my case, it was this notion that you're not going to be able to show faces. I think all of the NGOs that I was working with at that time said that, you know, you have to protect, you know, they use different language. Some called them victims, some called them clients, but you have to protect their identity because of the dangers involved. And I thought that from knowing the young women and having spent quite a considerable amount of time with them, I knew that showing their faces is the only way to really humanize them, to really show them as these normal young women. And also taking you to the places where they're from, taking you to the villages, showing you the factories where they worked, showing you the lack of opportunity. Because you have to understand the why. Why is someone willing to take such a huge risk? Why is someone still believing that there is this possibility of having a legitimate job abroad? What I often tell people, especially people who didn't grow up under such a system, is that we were like, under communism, we were like domesticated animals. You know, we were provided for. We had education. We had healthcare. We had ample amount of food. We were all poor, equally poor. And I think none of us, none of us, were prepared for the extreme capitalism that we encountered after the collapse of communism. We didn't have the skills and we didn't have the safety net to really understand the dangers of what happened. You know, because you have to keep in mind, we had our borders closed for, you know, in Bulgaria over forty years. And in other places like Albania, I mean, all over Moldova, if you think about Moldova, Ukraine, and so on. So, people always think, well, how could you be so naive? And I can understand this question because if you grew up in a society where you didn't have, you know, the safety net that we had back at home, you know, that we didn't have much of a crime. I mean, I'm not trying to romanticize how we grew up because there was nothing romantic about it.

Mcfarlane: I think it's so interesting how you have grounded the focal point of exploring how so many of these journeys took place as a result of the collapse of communism and the vacuum which allowed vulnerable, perhaps naive women and girls and people to be exploited in the way that they did and in such huge numbers as they were in the nineties and continue to do so. I mean, it's interesting that your film was so grounded at the specific point of history, but the circumstances can and are replicated in present day and in so many other situations where vulnerable people are being exploited and sadly go through the same trauma and exploitation that the girls you spoke to. And I think, you know, desperation can sometimes lead to the same places that naivety does. I want to ask you to take us through the girls' stories that you spoke to. How did they find themselves along their journeys, and have you kept up with any of them in the years since The Price of Sex first aired?

Shakarova: Yes and no. There were three central characters in The Price of Sex. Vika, we begin the film with her, and we end the film with her. She is one of the most amazing women I've ever met. And Vika had been trafficked to Dubai with this promise that she would be a waitress. And then she had been, you know, sold into prostitution. And with Vika, it took four years to gain her trust. You know, I photographed her for quite some time. And then on the fourth year, proposed. I had this idea. She's actually the reason for the film, that the film exists. I had this idea. There was something that happened when I would photograph her. She would, and she would speak about Dubai. I don't know if she still smokes probably, but she was a very heavy smoker. So she would smoke a pack of cigarettes, just one cigarette after the next. And it was just something about how when she would speak about Dubai and what they did to her and what happened to her there. The cigarette, you know, the ash of the cigarette would get closer and closer to her fingers, and it's almost like she didn't feel the pain. It would be burning her finger and she was transported someplace else. And I remember looking at this, because it happened multiple times, and thinking, as a photographer, as a photojournalist, I don't know how to capture this. I don't know how to capture this moment. And I thought the only way I can do this is through video, through taking actual footage of this. So, I asked her after four years if I could interview her. And I'll never forget. She said, I know you. I trust you. You know my story. I'll tell you exactly what happened. But after this, no more. I don't want you to ask me anymore about Dubai. So, it was ironic because it was the first interview, but also the last interview. And she was getting married the following year. And I really wanted to go to her wedding. You know, I was the godmother to another young woman who is in the film. You know, I knew her family. Because you have to keep in mind, this took a long time, so I would stay with the families. I knew, you know, their relatives. I knew their children. I knew who they were with, if they were dating someone, if they were getting married. I just, I felt like I was very much in their lives. And I'm going to go off a little bit on a tangent because a lot of people, even to this day, they talk about, oh, it must have taken so much courage to go there, you know, because of the danger, because of this, or, you know, it's a high risk, especially once we started exposing the traffickers and the clients and the other side of the coin, which is who purchases these women. And, you know, I always thought that word courage was so peculiar, you know, so strange to me that people use that. Because the only driving force for me to get on that plane, because trust me, was not a single time where I felt like I'm ready to go. I want to go back there. And I would just dread that day coming and me having to pack up my equipment and head out. But the only thing, so it wasn't courage. It was this promise I had made to these young women that I would come back. And it was every year I would say, I'll see you during my winter break. I'll see you during my spring break. I'll see you during the summer. So I think it was the fact that I kept coming back, and they got used to the fact that, you know, she's gonna return. She'll come back again and again. So, you know, even after we had finished filming for The Price of Sex, you know, I still had this intention to go back and see them on a social, you know, like a social. And what happened was Vika was supposed to get married the following year. And when I tried to contact her, she had changed her number. And it was clear that that was it. She didn't want to keep contact. I even, I remember telling her, look, this is gonna premiere. We could fly you out. And she looked at me and, you know, she's a very strong woman. She said, to talk about this? You want me on stage talking about this? And she said, I gave you everything about my story. I don't see any, I don't want people asking me these questions. I don't want to be on stage. And I said, Vika, you know, but it's a chance to be in New York because, you know, we were showing this at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. And, you know, we had this amazing screening at the Lincoln Center, and they were willing to fly her out. And she did not want any part of it. Ten years later, I completely understand. You know, I understand that reluctance. So, to go back to your question about what happened, and I'll just, I'll stick with Vika because we started with her story. She was trafficked to Dubai. She was sold by a woman. She, which is another thing that's extremely disturbing and continues to this day, most of the traffickers are women, because women are more likely to trust other women. She was sold and she fought. She, you know, she was not someone who was not going to put up a fight. Everyone reacts to this differently. Vika was a fighter. And so, there is something called the breakdown period where they will break you down like an animal. And what they would do is they would starve the girls. They would gang rape them. They would threaten them. You know, photography was used a lot. They would use, you know, pictures that they would take of them, you know, while they're being gang raped. They would say, we'll send this to your fathers, we'll send this to your family if you ever try to run away. So, there was a lot of manipulation, a lot of psychological as well as physical violence. And often, you know, they would beat them, starve them, degrade them. And it took a long time for Vika to be broken down. You know, if you resist and if they feel, you know, some girls cut themselves to try to, you know, they think if I, you know, if I do these horrible things to my body, no one would want to have sex with me, so maybe they'll release me. So, there was this one young woman who had horrible cuts on her arms, both her arms and her legs. And what they do is they just sell you to another place. And it starts all over again. Your debt, this debt that we all know about, the debt you're charged for, the shower you take, the clothing you wear, the taxi that costs to take you from point A to point B, the food that you eat. It's a daily accumulation of debt. And this is not even, this is once you go to the destination country, I'm not even including the document fees, the travel fees. So, even before you go, you already are in debt and you're going to have to pay this back. And the horrible thing is that a lot of the young women, they keep track of how much they owe and how many clients they have, if you even want to call them clients. And, you know, they somehow feel like I'm getting closer and closer to gaining my freedom. And just when they're at that point, they get sold to another place. And again, the cycle starts all over again. One of the questions that people tend to ask is why didn't they run away? There must be an opportunity to run away. They do. Some of them jump out of windows. We had Zhenya in the film who jumped out of a window. She was on the 8th floor, managed to get to the 5th, and then lost her balance and fell from the 5th floor and survived. It's not for lack of wanting to escape. A lot of them, you know, they managed to get to the police station, and some of them will tell me, we got to the police station and I saw one of the clients. He was a cop. They also know that a lot of the police, and, you know, we have police in the film as well. We have corrupt police officers in Turkey that I managed to interview. They tell you how it works. They're part of that system. So, if you go to a police station and you speak to police and they laugh in your face and they call the trafficker or the pimp, or they themselves take you back to the brothel, you know, it doesn't take long for girls and women to realize that, you know, there is just really no way out. A lot of them are killed. I remember Vika talking about how they were being moved from one location to another and they had to walk through this patch of desert. And one girl couldn't keep up, so the pimp just pulled out a gun and shot her and left her there in the desert. And that's it. And so, there goes. I remember reporting in the Czech Republic, in this border town between the Czech Republic and Germany, this little town called Dubí. It's known as, it was known as the Highway Of Love because truckers would come from, there was a BMW factory on the other side, and so a lot of the workers would come and then it was a trucking route. So, I remember pretending to look for a friend of mine from Bulgaria and going to these different brothel places and actually meeting a guy who was, you know, kind enough to say, kind enough because he didn't have to tell me this, but he said, you know, they just killed a girl a few weeks ago and buried her in the backyard. And so what I'm trying to say is there is a large number of girls and women who don't make it out. And the other thing is that I think over ninety percent of people who are trafficked into sex are women and girls.

Mcfarlane: I remember your interview with the policeman in Turkey, and you sort of, you film him speaking on camera that you don't show his face. That was an extraordinary achievement of yours to get that side of this process to admit the complicity and culpability in these crimes. How is it that you managed to convince that police officer to reveal what he did to you and to be filmed, albeit with his identity protected, but I mean, in his office, admitting his guilt and his complicity in these hideous crimes?

Shakarova: It goes back to what I said earlier. It was the consistency of returning to the same place. I made a lot of contacts in Turkey. In some contexts were good, you know, law abiding citizens, in some contexts were people living on the dark side, you know, people doing things that they would not necessarily want to speak about on camera. But nevertheless, I knew who they were. And it was this running joke. I would show up in Istanbul. I had a very good friend who helped me set up this whole interview, and I'll tell you more about this, but I had a very good friend. He went by the nickname of Mike, the Turkish, wonderful man. And he would see me and he'll say, they haven't killed you yet. That's how he would usually greet me. They haven't taken care of you yet. You're still here? And I would just laugh because every time he saw me, he was surprised that I was still around. I was still alive. And so, I think it was maybe the sixth or seventh time I went there and I said, look, I have all these interviews with all of these young women. And I know exactly where they were trafficked to. I know the neighborhoods. I have undercover footage from these places. But I need to show the huge missing piece here is the complicity and the lack of accountability. And just the fact that these people feel that no one can touch them, you know, that they're above the law. And he said, you know, I'll put you in touch with a friend of mine who's connected to the mafia in Turkey. And it was also someone I had met in prior years. I knew what his, you know, what his line of work was. And, you know, we set up a meeting with him. And I told him, I really would like to show that the police is involved in this. I wanna show the corruption. We keep talking about corruption, but unless people see it on camera, it's just a word. And so he said, well, I know a couple of guys. Let me see if they would be willing to talk. And so, he set it up, and it was actually not in an office. The man, I'm obviously, I'm not gonna use his name, but the man who helped me with this, he owned a hotel. And he allowed me to film this in one of his hotel rooms. So, it was just this tiny little room. And I remember my cameraman was in the back of the room. You know, he had this big camera and there was hardly any space for him. And, you know, he needed to get all the way to the corner to get the shot. And they were sitting right in front of me on the bed. I cannot tell you how compromised I felt and how degrading this whole interview felt. And then the two cops are in front of me because they didn't want their faces shown. And, you know, you just see a small section in the film. But you can imagine this was, I don't know, one to two hours of them talking about how they got girls, how they helped with across the border transport, how they would go to different places as sex tourists and use their police status to exploit girls, how young the girls were. I mean, just, it was just, it was horrible.

Mcfarlane: Your contact, your Turkish mafioso contact, what was in it for him? Why did he go to lengths to get these police officers to talk? Because I remember watching it and just wondering why they were admitting to these things.

Shakarova: You have to keep in mind that the male ego is insatiable. The male ego, you know, there is a little funny side story to this. I was so grateful that he did what he did, because he didn't have to, that I went to a wonderful little Turkish market in Istanbul and bought him a white orchid because he was notorious for wearing white suits. And I remember him looking at me and just saying in broken English, this is all I'm going to get in return. And I said, what did you expect? I said, what is it that you expected? And he said, more than this, more than a flower. And I said, it's not just a flower. It's a white orchid to match your suits. And he kind of laughed. You know, I felt like he was disappointed. Maybe there was a different type of exchange he expected. But you also have to keep in mind, when you are in a world where there is a constant exchange, especially as a woman, there is this expectation. You're in these patriarchal places, and there is this expectation that if you want something, you can always pay with your body. You can always, there is always that.

Mcfarlane: When people see the lengths that you went to make this film, it's sort of unsurprising why The Price of Sex is so unique, and there hasn't really been a film like it. You finished it in 2010. You were making it in the early naughties. We've seen, despite the fact that this is still an underground issue, still, we have seen an explosion in the media landscape. The ability to spread awareness has come in leaps and bounds. I think The Price of Sex also benefited a lot from a kind of explosion on the international discourse of the issue of human trafficking. I think it was a couple of years after the Taken film with Liam Neeson was released. Do you think that where we are now, all these years later, that we are any further forward in combating human trafficking in the sense that at least it is an issue which is more widely known. Do you think that the lay of the land is any different in 2023 than it was in the early naughties when you were making this film?

Shakarova: You know, there is a part of me that wants to say, because of how much it took to make this, that we're much better off, right, that things have gotten better. But that would be so naive of me. You know, I went to the United Nations. I went to Vienna, and the whole idea was that a group of journalists and lawmakers would get together and talk about best practices for reporting about human trafficking. And I can't tell you that I walked out of there feeling optimistic. I just felt like what we're battling is so much bigger than what one country can do. Unless we tackle this globally, unless we say globally as a global community, this is not acceptable, and here is how we can fix it, and unless you change behavior. You know, people would ask me, what can I do? And I would say, stop watching porn. And they would always feel so shocked by that answer. So, I would say, how many of you here are watching porn? And of course, no one raises their hand. There will be 300, 400 people in a theater and everyone is just quiet and uncomfortable. How many of you go to strip clubs? How many of you engage? I mean, we're still getting movies about strip clubs. I don't care if it's about men or about women. There's still this socially acceptable thing that you can dance for money, that people are gonna, I mean, it's just, it's everywhere. It's all around us. And all of these things are connected to trafficking. There's just a few degrees, there's a few degrees of separation between that girl who's locked up and that girl who's at the strip club, or that girl who's locked up and the girl you see in the porn movies and she's high out of her mind. You know, but she looks so happy because she's been drugged. Socially, we all say sex slavery is horrible. But then there is all of these degrees that we somehow accept as society that are somehow okay, and somehow men can still engage in. Then there is the other side. I would have women in the audience just stand up and they'll say, just cut off their penises! And I thought, well, that's not a solution either. Cutting off penises is not going to solve this problem. And I would say, what would you do to all the traffickers who are women? You know, it's not, it's not black and white. There's so many shades of gray.

Mcfarlane: What are your fears given what we are seeing in Ukraine? I mean, we are certainly already getting reports of children, young girls, young boys, teenagers being removed from their parents in Ukraine and being taken away. You know, a lot of kids are being sent back to Russia, these forced deportations. But there are also, there's always an influx of human trafficking, of people being transported without their consent for purposes that they have been misguided and misled about against their will. There's always a spike in human trafficking in these kinds of cases. And we, in the last year, have seen the largest refugee crisis, the largest movement of people in many years flowing out of Ukraine. Was there a point last year when you're watching the news and watching the developments? You know, this was your patch. This is Eastern Europe. This is many, many millions of people moving westward like they did at the fall of communism. Were you thinking, oh, shit. It's happening again, and it's not that it's never stopped, but this is a huge volume of vulnerable people, and there will undoubtedly be many of these young women and girls being exploited.

Shakarova: Of course, I was thinking that, but also I was thinking the same when Syria was happening, which was years before Ukraine. When you had the Syrian refugees ending up in Greece, and you know, and I've worked with NGOs in Greece, and I was hearing from them about all of these kids who are being exploited and who are being raped. And so it happens. I think Ukraine is just another example of something that we have been seeing for decades. And, again, anytime someone mentions Ukraine to me, I think about all of these Syrian kids, and I don't think we paid as much attention to them. You know? And there is a variety of reasons for that, but that has been happening. Or, you know, kids from Yemen, that has been happening for a while. There have been a lot of places and a lot of blind eyes being turned. And also, it goes to this bigger question of whose lives do we value the most and who do we pay more attention to? And in my opinion, all of these lives have an equal amount of value, whether you're a little kid from, you know, Ghana or a little kid from Moldova or a little girl from a village in China.

Mcfarlane: It shouldn't make a difference. It's your life. I think that's a really powerful note to end on. Thank you so much, Mimi.

ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE

Mcfarlane: My cohost, Sir Richard Dearlove, lived in what was then known as Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, when he was working at Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. He worked at the front lines of national security when the Iron Curtain fell and witnessed the huge shift that was rippling across Eastern Europe. Part of what makes Mimi's experience and investigation so important and so relevant to today isn't just that she has contextualized and shone a light on a vastly underreported aspect of the fall of communism and one of the ways it impacted so many people in Eastern Europe. But many of the factors that led to a huge spike in trafficking are manifesting once again at this very moment in time, the mass migration of people and vulnerable human beings. So Richard, Mimi's film was such an emotional, powerful, arresting watch.

Dearlove: It was very striking because it immediately brought to mind my own experience of visiting sort of post communist Eastern and Central Europe. I mean, it did vary from country to country, but I did go to Bulgaria, and Bulgaria was probably one of the worst affected. And what I mean by that is the breakdown in civil society, the breakdown in law and order was quite extraordinary. And in fact, the reason I went to Bulgaria at the time was to discreetly, on behalf of the UK, to read the riot act about corruption and other issues to senior ministers of the Bulgarian government, including the then Bulgarian premier. And one of the most extraordinary things was that I learned that I think something in the region of 15% of the Bulgarian population had disappeared without the Bulgarian government having any clue at all where they'd gone and what had happened to them. And the other thing which was memorable was that if you drove slightly out of Sofia and went into the countryside, you saw these extraordinary mansions built in the middle of nowhere, obviously with no regard for planning laws, with great big walls and fences around them, in the middle of areas which were full of peasant poverty. So you could actually see, you know, with your own eyes that there was a group of evidently corrupt business people living off the fat of the post communist regime in the midst of appalling poverty. I mean, it was an extraordinary experience. And I think going back to Mimi's own particular view, Bulgaria perhaps was originally one of the worst places. But the other thing which was, I think, very graphic in Mimi's description was how corrupt the police forces were, and how it wasn't possible for these trafficked women. God, I mean, the stories are horrible, you know, to go to the police and expect to escape from their circumstances. And they were just caught up in a vicious circle where, you know, every time they thought the situation might get better, they were sucked back into this criminality.

Mcfarlane: I'd love to hear your thoughts on Romania. But when we compare, you know, some former FSU countries with others such as the Baltics and, you know, places like Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia that did not fall into the corrupt traps that may have been set for them when the Soviet Union collapsed. How were they able to quickly get to speed rebuilding their countries from scratch and to be ready for European Union membership so many years earlier than other FSU states?

Dearlove: Good question. You know, I'm not a sociologist, but I think that the reason has something to do with the prehistory. What I mean by that is what happened to them, what sort of societies they were before World War Two, what happened when they emerged after World War Two. And I mean, the country I know best, for example, or I knew best before it split in half was Czechoslovakia. And if you look at the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, I mean, the most industrially sophisticated part of the empire was in Bohemia, was in the Czech Republic, what is now the Czech Republic. And if you look at the educational system, the rates of literacy and all of those issues, I mean Bohemia, what is now the Czech Republic, right from the early twentieth century, it was a very sophisticated society. Similarly, bits of Poland were, although Poland also had a massive agricultural peasant economy. I mean, if you go to Romania, which I did after the fall of Ceaușescu, if you go to Romania, you're very, very struck by the sort of impact of the nasty characteristics of the Ceaușescu regime and the traces that they left behind. And they're very evident across the country. But you also get this mix of extreme privilege amongst the very small wealthy elite, and then, in a way, charming, almost undeveloped peasantry. So if you go to the Carpathian Mountains or those sorts of areas in Romania, which are stunningly beautiful and undeveloped, I mean, they've changed from the nineteenth century. And I think it's that degree of the sophistication of civic society, which although it was completely taken over by the communist regimes, how much of it was there beforehand? What sort of countries were they traditionally? So it's been much easier for bits of the Baltic Republics, or the Baltic Republics generally, or in the Czech Republic, to reestablish themselves after what was, you know, a total political and social revolution.

Mcfarlane: Is it true that the, is it the People's Palace in Romania is sort of the world's biggest governmental building, Ceaușescu's old Palace, or at least certainly it was at the time bigger than the Kremlin?

Dearlove: Well, I've certainly been there. And, I mean, it's, I've been taken around it, and it's ridiculous. I mean, you've never ever seen anything so ornate, so extreme, so vulgar, and so dominant in this town. And, you know, god, what do you do with this monstrosity that Ceaușescu left behind? I also stayed when I was there in what had been one of Ceaușescu's guest houses in Bucharest. And it was one of those creepy and uncomfortable places I've ever been. Everything sort of false Louis Quatorze and massive marble bathrooms. And the only thing that gave the game away was when you went into the bathroom and switched the lights on. Cockroaches as large as tea saucers scuttled away into the drains.

Mcfarlane: What a metaphor.

Dearlove: And, you know, you really began to understand the peculiarities and the sort of discomfiture, the lack of humanity. And yet, you know, you could go down the road and remain into the countryside, as King Charles did when he was Prince Charles, buy a beautiful old farm, convert it, and make something extraordinary and wonderful. And I mean, some of the places the Romanians took me in the countryside, because I was a guest of the government there, I went there after my retirement to advise them on the reorganization of their intelligence and security community, and they treated me in a princely fashion. And I mean, some of the bits of Romania we went to in the countryside, there's a city called Sibiu. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's fantastically interesting and unspoiled. But the problem is that, I mean, Ceaușescu really set about destroying the country's traditions, and they weren't strong anyway, of civic society. So all those little organizations that make countries tolerable and good places to live had been annihilated.

Mcfarlane: I think it's important that we go into some of this, because corruption is almost sort of a weather vane for countries around the world where you tend to get a lot of exploitation. And of course, one thing that Mimi really reiterated was that the trafficking industry is one that depends on corruption. From the part of the world where I grew up in Southeast Asia, it is a huge country. It is facilitated by corrupt officials. And I think Eastern Europe is another part of the world which doesn't get much attention. But it is getting more widely discussed, particularly with the context of Ukraine. And I think it's interesting, Richard, that you have revealed to us that you were dispatched to Bulgaria to try and advise the Bulgarians at the time about how to clean up their act, to deal with corruption. And particularly when we look at present day Ukraine, Ukraine has had a lot of issues with corruption, including recently. And of course, it is one area that the West, and there will be people in your capacity, in your former capacity, Richard, who will be making the same trip that you did to Kyiv to try and get the government to clean up their act, to stamp out corruption because, of course, it's something that they need to do if they want to join the EU and NATO. But we are seeing the same kind of conditions which created that vacuum after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Thousands of people on the move. And when people are on the move, they become vulnerable to being exploited. How much of an issue do you think that is for present day Ukrainian refugees?

Dearlove: Well, I think it's a huge issue for the West, for the EU, and for the UK, and for the United States. And I think we ought perhaps at some point to focus on the issue of Ukrainian corruption. And the reason I think it's important is, you know, we have heroic Ukraine. We're all a 100% behind Ukraine in resisting this, you know, Russian aggression and invasion of their country. But that heroism, that military conflict has overlaid a situation before the war broke out in Ukraine, which is extremely troubling. And I've been trying to sort of amass some facts about Ukrainian corruption because it's going to be one of the big issues after the conflict has finished. And I could almost sit down already for you and list the names of the oligarchs that one needs to start thinking and looking at and wondering, you know, how they've penetrated and manipulated the media, how they've been involved politically in Ukraine, how the rule of law has been corrupted. And we shouldn't turn away from this problem because the big issue after the conflict isn't just gonna be reconstruction. It's going to be building a fair and just civic society in which the rule of law is strong. And, of course, an important human aspect to this is the trafficking of women, which, you know, as we know from Mimi's extraordinary research in films, I mean, is a horrendously awful issue and, you know, ruins people's lives. And it's one of the main expressions. And we have to bear this in mind of organized criminality. It's not just casual. This is highly organized. The trafficking and enslavement of women is equivalent to international organized crime dealing in drugs. And there are interrelationships between these groups, and they're treating women almost as a sort of commodity like drugs. I mean, it's horrendous. And I'm actually with one or two others trying to do some research on this Ukrainian issue, and I think we should soon start to highlight it. Because the other thing which is, I think, very worrying and concerns all of us is that the opportunities for corruption in a period of reconstruction of the country. I mean, the amount of money that will be pumped into Ukraine when the conflict is over or when the conflict is frozen or when there's peace negotiations or whatever. You know, the EU will be pumping money and the Americans will be pumping money and there will be so many people trying to exploit and benefit from that. And it's important that the infrastructure is put in place to try to help the Ukrainians deal with it because ultimately, they may find it very, very difficult to deal with themselves. They may require some sort of outside commission attached to the Ukrainian government to do this.

Mcfarlane: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday. Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Drop us a line. Tell us your thoughts. What decisions have impacted you and where you live? You can write to us. Our email is 1decision@1decisionpodcast.com. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.