ODESSA
ALSO BY CHARLES KING
Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe
The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus
The Black Sea: A History
The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture
Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union (as coeditor)
ODESSA
Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
CHARLES KING
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
For the Martens family:
Karl, Karleen, Jay, and Jerry,
and to the memory of Eldon, Marie, and Leland,
whose ancestors, with bravery and hope,
left the Russian plains for the American prairie
[A] great city is a kind of labyrinth within which at every moment of the day the most hidden wishes of every human being are performed by people who devote their whole existences to doing this and nothing else.
STEPHEN SPENDER, World within World
Odessa knew what it meant to bloom. It now knows what it means to wither—a poetic fading, a little lighthearted and totally powerless.
ISAAC BABEL, “Odessa”
Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.
Psalms 74:20
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MAPS
INTRODUCTION
PART I
City of Dreams
CHAPTER 1: The Sinister Shore
CHAPTER 2: Potemkin and the Mercenaries
CHAPTER 3: Beacon
CHAPTER 4: The Governor and the Poet
CHAPTER 5: “There Is Nothing National about Odessa”
PART II
The Habitations of Cruelty
CHAPTER 6: Schemes and Shadows
CHAPTER 7: Blood and Vengeance
CHAPTER 8: New World
CHAPTER 9: The Fields of Transnistria
CHAPTER 10: “I Would Like to Bring to Your Attention the Following”
PART III
Nostalgia and Remembrance
CHAPTER 11: Hero City
CHAPTER 12: Twilight
CHRONOLOGY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Odes, Odesa, or Odessa? The city has been known by many names in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages. Today mapmakers often prefer the Ukrainian version—Odesa—given that the city has been situated inside the independent country of Ukraine since 1991 (and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic before that). I use the spelling most familiar to English readers—Odessa—a convention that masks no particular cultural agenda.
In general I have opted to use spellings that are easy on the eye when rendering foreign names or phrases in the text. The more academic versions are used in the notes and bibliography. The Russian word for a person from Odessa is odessit or odessitka, which has sometimes been rendered into English as “Odessite.” I use the more sonorous “Odessan.”
Most works of literature are quoted in their readily available English translations. Other translations from Russian, Romanian, and French, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.
Until 1918 Russia used the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one. That distinction left the Russians thirteen days behind the West in the twentieth century, twelve days behind in the nineteenth, and eleven days behind in the eighteenth. Dates for events in the Russian Empire are given according to the old system.
IF BY SOME MIRACLE this book finds its way to the families of Vera Nikolaevna Sepel or Nicolae Tnase, whose story is related in chapter 9, I would be very grateful to hear from them.
ODESSA
INTRODUCTION
Mark Twain felt supremely at home when he visited Odessa in the late summer of 1867. He had come to the Russian port city on the world’s first long-distance pleasure cruise, a jaunt across the Near East related in The Innocents Abroad. After a twenty-hour run across the Black Sea on the American steamer Quaker City, Twain stepped ashore to see Odessa’s cascade of stone steps—one of the most famous staircases in the world—beckoning him from the docklands to the upper city. At the top, looking like a casual visitor peering out over the harbor, the diminutive statue of the duc de Richelieu, one of the city’s early builders, held out a welcoming hand. Twain puffed his way to the heights and gazed out over the grain silos and quays below. Behind him rose the city center, buzzing with the business of trade, shipping, and exchange.
Broad, well-kept streets intersected at right angles. Low houses of two or three stories flanked the boulevards. Plain facades plastered in blues and yellows reflected the sunlight that bounced ashore from the calm waters of the Black Sea. Acacia trees lifted their branches over sidewalks that teemed with people taking in the summer air, while dust clouds roiled with each passing carriage. “Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way,” Twain wrote, “we saw only America!”1
That was an odd way of seeing things. Twain was standing in a city that had been scouted by a Neapolitan mercenary, named by a Russian empress, governed by her one-eyed secret husband, built by two exiled French noblemen, modernized by a Cambridge-educated count, and celebrated by his wife’s Russian lover. It was one of the largest cities in Russia and the empire’s preeminent commercial port, even though it was situated closer to Vienna and Athens than to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The population was almost a quarter Jewish.
Not long after Twain’s trip, the city witnessed some of the most horrific antisemitic violence in Russian history. Jews were literally murdered in the streets in repeated outpourings of hatred and fear. Much later, in a forgotten chapter of the Holocaust, Odessa’s Jewish community—by then a third of the city’s population—was nearly destroyed by the largest wartime program of planned killing committed by a country other than Nazi Germany, in this case, Nazi-allied Romania. What Twain saw in the streets and courtyards of Odessa was a place that had cultivated, like his homeland, a remarkable ability to unite nationalities and reshape itself on its own terms, generation after generation. What he missed was the city’s tendency to tip with deadly regularity over the precipice of self-destruction.
At the time of his visit, Odessa was still developing the identity that its boosters would embrace and its detractors decry: a taste for the witty and the absurd; a veneer of Russian culture laid over a Yiddish, Greek, and Italian core; a boom-and-bust economy; a love of the dandy in men and the daring in women; a style of music and writing that involved both libertine abandon and controlled experimentation; and an approach to politics that swung wildly between the radical and the reactionary. It would eventually transfer many of those habits and values to new locales, from the jazz clubs of Leningrad to the borscht-belt banquet halls of the Catskills and Brighton Beach. In the four countries that have governed it—the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Romania (as an occupying power), and now Ukraine—Odessa has stood out as a mixed and rambunctious city, an island of difference perched between sea and steppe, yet a place continually threatened by its own mottled personality. “Odessa did not have any tradition, but it was therefore not afraid of new forms of living and activity,” recalled the Zionist activist and Odessa native Vladimir Jabotinsky. “It developed in us more temperament and less passion, more cynicism, but less bitterness.”2
From its founding in 1794 all the way to the present, Odessa has struggled to survive somewhere between success and suicide. Like many vibrant seaports and multicultural urban spaces, th
e city has continually sought to unleash its better demons, the mischievous tricksters that are the vital muses of urban society and the restless creators of literature and art. But it has often loosed its darker ones instead, those that lurk in alleyways and whisper of religious loathing, class envy, and ethnic revenge. When things worked, Odessa nurtured intellectuals and artists whose talents lit up the world. When they didn’t, the city’s name became a byword for fanaticism, antisemitism, and deadly nationalism.
This book follows the arc of Odessa’s story from its imperial beginnings, through the punctuated tragedies of the twentieth century, to its passage into the realm of myth and longing. It traces how generations of native and adopted Odessans built a city with a uniquely incorrigible disposition, a place that became Russia’s most ambitious port and the inspiration for writers from Alexander Pushkin to Isaac Babel. It weaves together the city’s history with some of the individual lives, both well known and obscure, that made it a beloved and legendary hometown for Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and many others.
How does a city thrive? And how does it do so in ways that give it a distinct reputation—a spirit or identity that makes denizens into local patriots? How does a piece of real estate get transformed into a way of being rather than just a place to be from? Many cities, especially ports and boomtowns—New Orleans and Naples, Las Vegas and Liverpool—have reputations that lend themselves to easy and familiar labels, but only a few become modes of living and doing. Today, it is easy to be nostalgic about the cosmopolitan idyll that Odessa has tried heroically to represent. Odessans themselves have made a profession of it. But the harder truth is that this city, like all others with some claim to greatness, disappoints as much as it inspires. The monstrous aspects of its identity have won out as often as the more noble ones, and far more than the gauzy version of its past normally allows. In the end, Odessa’s experience reveals the creative power as well as the everyday difficulty of being diverse. In the exacting art of urban flourishing, teetering between genius and devastation may be the normal state of affairs.
PART I
City of Dreams
CHAPTER 1
The Sinister Shore
City on a hill: A nineteenth-century engraving of the Odessa city center and port. Author’s collection.
Visitors don’t arrive in Odessa so much as stumble upon it. From the landward side, the city appears unexpectedly on the Pontic steppe, an ancient grassland now covered in Ukrainian farms and the detritus of Soviet industrial agriculture. The slight roll in the landscape, dipping into dry draws and ravines that cut down to the sea, hides the city until you are well inside it. “Here is the steppe, and a yard further the city,” noted a German traveler more than a century ago, “and one might almost fancy it exercised no influence whatever on the surrounding country.”1
From the sea, Odessa rises atop a range of low cliffs, with the city center coming into view only once a ship is around the prominent headlands that hide the bay. Tall apartment blocks dot the outer suburbs, but the older parts of the city seem oddly absent until a ship turns its bow toward the small lighthouse at the end of the mole. “Europe was once more before our eyes,” recalled a French visitor in the 1840s upon seeing the public buildings silhouetted against the sky.2 The same sentiment would echo again and again among both locals and strangers. The low roofs and wind-blown trees announced a dreamlike city rising out of nothing, a surprising blip on the blank horizon formed by steppe, sea, and sky.
Odessa is still best approached from the water, the way that the earliest recorded visitors to the Black Sea world—the ancient Greeks—would have experienced it. Here, the coast sneaks into view, appearing as a low ridge of dun-colored limestone bluffs that can turn dull orange or even pink in full daylight. It must have been a tremendous sight for seafarers from the Aegean, who had hugged the coast for days staring out at the monotony of wavy grassland and rippled sea, the one barely distinguishable from the other. It is still an astonishing view. The broad bay opens azure from the blue-black sea, flanked by craggy promontories rising a hundred feet or more above the beach.
On some parts of the Black Sea coastline, the land ends in imposing mountains, wooded and alpine, that tumble straight into the water. In others, it falls away suddenly as immense limestone cliffs, the dark waves crashing noisily against the gray-green walls. Yet around Odessa, in the sea’s northwest corner, the water doesn’t so much meet the land as complete it. The flat earth slips gently into the brackish shallows. The sea floor, choked in places with seaweed and algae, forms a continuation of the steppe, once a vast prairie of undulating feather grass and fescue, now divided into strips of plowed and planted farmland, the soil burled in blacks and browns.
Yet if anyone in antiquity found the cliff-top location of modern-day Odessa remarkable, they failed to mention it. The wide-open bay would surely have been known to the ancients, but none of the extant written records gives an unambiguous account of long-term settlement there. Other modern cities on or near the Black Sea—the grimy port of Constana in Romania, the storied Russian naval station at Sevastopol, and the jewel of the Black Sea world, Istanbul—all have ancient pedigrees. Beneath modern concrete and asphalt lie Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ruins. But Odessa has none of this. The site had little to offer beyond a bay open to harsh northeasterly winds. When you see the city from a cruise ship or ferry, you are looking at a recent creation, a place that for two hundred years has both reveled in and regretted the fact that it has no history.3
Explorers found more attractive destinations in other parts of the Black Sea. Arriving in shallow-draft rowed vessels, perhaps in the early first millennium BCE, sailors from the Mediterranean gradually colonized much of the Black Sea coastline, beginning with the south and eventually extending their reach to the north. The draw was substantial. The southern and eastern coasts yielded precious metals. The legend of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for a mysterious golden fleece may have recalled a time when Greek traders scoured what are today the coasts of Turkey and Georgia in search of gold that natives sluiced from the fast-running rivers of the Pontic Alps and Caucasus. The north provided contact with the flat interior, which in turn offered access to the grains that were cultivated by the non-Greek peoples already living there when Mediterranean sailors first ventured north from their warmer, saltier sea.
Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, either visited the Black Sea himself or, more likely, heard some of the tall tales about the region that flowed southward all the way to his hometown, Halicarnassus, along the western coast of modern-day Turkey. Already by his day, the Black Sea was a place of mixed cultures and allegiances. The area north of the sea was the realm of the Scythians, a word that Greek writers used as a catchall for different non-Greek tribes of herders, farmers, and nomads, united to a degree by commonalities of custom and belief. In his Histories, Herodotus describes the peoples living at the mouths of the Dnieper, Bug, and Danube rivers, near the future Odessa. The Callipidae and the Alizones, he says, were a “Greco-Scythian tribe,” the offshoots of marriages between Greek colonists and inlanders, who resembled the Scythians in their dress and manners but grew onions, leeks, lentils, and millet, some for their own consumption and some for export.
For Herodotus, the Dnieper River—which he knew as the Borysthenes—represented a kind of boundary. To the east lived rogue bands of Scythians who had little regard for outsiders. There were the Androphagi—literally, “man-eaters”—who were said to live on the edge of a vast desert. Other peoples marched across treeless prairies or engaged in almost constant warfare and slave-taking. To the west, Scythians and Greeks intermingled freely, enriching themselves through commerce with the Mediterranean. The flatlands watered by the Borysthenes and its tributaries were a veritable paradise, a river system that was “the most valuable and productive not only…in this part of the world, but anywhere else, with the sole exception of the Nile.”4 Lush pastures unrolled themselves along the riverbanks. Great school
s of fish churned in the shoals. Tidal flats nearer the coast yielded salt that was used to pickle fish for transport to the south, a delicacy lauded by Greek and Roman gourmands—“even though it causes severe flatulence,” warned Pliny the Elder in the first century CE.5
The physical remnants of this civilization—part native, part Greek and Roman—can still be found along the northwest coast of the Black Sea, at archaeological sites such as Olbia, Chersonesus on the Crimean Peninsula, or Histria in Romania. Stone houses lined narrow streets, some even paved and fitted with complex drainage systems. Rocky breakwaters reached out into the sea, welcoming ships from the Mediterranean and small sailboats coming from other cities, commercial emporia, and distant outposts. These cities were destroyed, resurrected, and refashioned over the centuries following the first Greek forays, yet the archaeological digs still give modern visitors a sense of what it was like to live there in antiquity—a place that Mediterranean Greeks considered to be the true edge of the world.
Cities such as Olbia, Chersonesus, and Histria lasted for perhaps half a millennium. They grew and expanded in some periods and fell prey to raiders in others. Relations between colonists and locals not only gave rise to cordial trading relations but also produced bloody warfare. While many Greeks tended to see the peoples of the region as uncouth, unlearned, and prone to violence, some observers found the foreign colonists themselves to be the source of social problems. “Our mode of life has spread its change for the worse to almost all peoples,” commented the Roman writer Strabo, “introducing amongst them luxury and sensual pleasures, and, to satisfy these vices, base artifices that lead to innumerable acts of greed.”6
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