All the same, the cultural treasures and scientific data which Russian archaeologists saved have to be measured against all that simply vanished. Much was melted down for bullion or sold abroad. Russian archaeologists still remember the charlatan D. G. Shulz, who pretended that he had official authorisation and excavated some of the magnificent burials at Kelermes, in the Kuban. Shulz had the chutzpah to pose as the scourge of the tomb-robbers, and he persistently denounced plunderers to the local authorities until, in 1904, he was himself caught in Rostov selling Scythian gold to a jeweller who melted it into ingots. Further west along the coast, Odessa was the centre not only of this illegal antiquities trade but of forgery — the highly skilled and impeccably scholarly confection of Scythian and Sarmatian articles custom-made for the tastes of individual Western museums. The most famous victim was the Louvre in Paris which bought, at enormous cost, the Tiara of Saitapharnes'. This was manufactured by the Odessa goldsmith Ruchomovsky. He had studied a famous Olbia inscription — incomplete — describing how King Saitapharnes of Scythia was to be propitiated with an 'honour' from the city, and he used all his craft and imagination to supply this honour to the Louvre. The talent represented by Ruchomovsky has not yet died out. Exquisite 'Greek' cameos and brooches can still be bought from young men who hang around the museum in Odessa.
An almost equally frustrating problem for archaeologists is the mass of material that survives without any certain facts about where and how it was found. Looking along the showcases of gold ornaments in the town museum of Novocherkassk, I noticed how few of them had any information about provenance. The interpreter, herself an archaeologist, smiled ironically. They come from lucky people,' she said. As we travelled on across the Don country and into the Kuban, visiting museums wherever we stopped, I heard a great deal more about 'lucky people'.
Schastye is a Russian word that means both luck and happiness. It is the sort of happiness which is not planned or earned but which falls from heaven or jumps out of the earth: a blessing. It is the feelings of a Russian peasant whose mattock grinds against a jar crammed with Bosporan gold coinage or a bundle of Sarmatian horse-harnesses studded with emeralds and garnets. His poverty is over; his life is transformed as if by the Last Judgement. Those who found wealth in the ground in this way became known as the schastlivchiki - the lucky, happy ones. The term appeared among the inhabitants of Kerch, the Crimean port built on the ruins of Panticapaeum where much of the 'Scythian' goldwork was made, and spread throughout New Russia.
In Chekhov's short story 'Schastye,' two shepherds lying out on the steppe at night with their flocks fall into conversation with a stranger, a passing estate foreman who has stopped to get a light for his pipe. The talk is of buried treasure. They are all certain that gold is stowed away in the earth all about them, in kurgans or in pots dug into the banks of streams, but they are almost equally certain that they will never find it. Why is it denied them, who need it so badly?
The older shepherd complains at one point that the treasure is under a spell, which makes it invisible to all seekers except those who have acquired a special amulet. But then he begins to talk as if the rich and powerful were immune to the spell and needed no amulet. 'It will come to this, that the gentry will dig it up or the government will take it away. The gentry have begun digging the barrows ... They scented something! They are envious of the peasants' luck.'
Dawn comes up, and they all stare into the 'bluish distance' where 'the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs ... rose here and there above the horizon, and the boundless steppe had a sullen and death-like look'. The foreman slowly mounts his horse.
' "Yes," he says, "your elbow is near, but you can't bite it. There is fortune, but there is not the wit to find it. . . Yes, so one dies without knowing what happiness is like." '
One of the three inalienable rights in the American Declaration of Independence is the pursuit of happiness. Can this also mean the right to seek luck? The right to the pursuit of schastye - that liberation which happens when the earth suddenly opens and gold blazes around the end of the spade - has always seemed inalienable to the poorest people of many lands and times. A man's fate had little to do with his ability; hard work or natural talent or entrepreneurial flair could not free an English villein, a Russian serf or a Mexican peon from inherited slavery. On the contrary, the whole human world seemed fashioned in order to perpetuate their unfreedom. If there were to be an escape from misery, it must therefore come either from the superhuman or from the inhuman; from God in the sky above, or from whatever force ruled the darkness under the earth.
'Lucky people' were chosen to find treasure by a sort of grace. And yet, as Chekhov's old shepherd was suggesting, the ruling-class could be cruel enough and greedy enough to lock even that last door of hope against the poor, and to pocket the key. This fear survives, its origins scarcely understood, not only in Russia but even among sophisticated urban populations in the West. In Britain, for example, during the 1980s, a war of words and often of fists raged between the metal-detector clubs and bodies like the Council of British Archaeology. Superficially, this appeared to be a contest between responsible scientific authorities defending the material evidence of Britain's past, and rapacious scavengers (some of whom could be justly described as tomb-robbers) interested only in ripping 'valuable finds' out of the context which made them significant. But under that surface lay, on the one hand, archaic popular attitudes to traditional rights and, on the other, a complacent and authoritarian possessiveness with almost equally ancient roots.
The metal-detector lobby, whose club members were largely working-class, pronounced that its supporters were exercising a natural liberty of free-born Englishmen to seek treasure. That liberty was now being dismantled by a middle-class professional élite with the insolence to proclaim itself the rightful guardian of Britain's 'heritage'. (Here the treasure-seekers were offering bad history: treasure in England belongs to the landowner unless the Crown exercises its right to 'treasure trove' and appropriates it, rewarding the finder rather than the landowner.) But there was, all the same, something authentic in their sense of the emotional importance of 'luck' to ordinary people in the past. Equally, there was something penetrating in their question to the State's official heritage custodians: WI10 do you think you are? Why should a university degree in archaeology and a government excavation licence allow you to assert ownership over the buried treasures of Britain, and to deny the opportunity of 'luck' to the vast majority of the population?
Cossacks have been especially lucky, and their descendants still fantasise about where their ancestors may have hidden their luck. In that Chekhov short story, there is hungry speculation about the treasure supposedly buried by Don Cossacks on their way home after the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812. And all over southern Russia and Ukraine tales are told about the hidden wealth of the Zaporozhe Cossacks, the Treasure of the Sech.
The powerful Zaporozhe host, which had dominated Ukraine and the debatable lands between Poland and Russia for hundreds of years, was finally suppressed by Catherine II in 1775. A Russian army, pretending to be paying a peaceful visit on its way to harry the Turks, attacked the Cossack stronghold on the Sech island in the Dnieper in the middle of the night. The Cossacks, taken by surprise, surrendered without resistance. Their ataman Peter Kalnishevsky and his lieutenants were arrested (the Russian records of confiscation show that Kalnishevsky had in his barns 162 tons of wheat and personally possessed 639 horses, 1,076 long-horned cattle and over 14,000 sheep and goats). The rest of the host were disarmed and allowed to disperse quietly. Some forty thousand of them moved into Crimea, still then under Turkish-Tatar control, and settled near the Cimmerian Bosporus around Kerch.
This was not the way a Cossack host preferred to end. Within a few years, more flattering myths about the Zaporozhe Cossacks began to circulate. One of the most persistent claimed that Peter Kalnishevsky had escaped from his Russian captors and, with a few comrades, had driven sixteen peasant
wagons loaded with treasure across the steppe from the Dnieper to the Don country. There he had buried the wealth of the Zaporozhe Cossacks in a secret cache.
There was not a world of truth in this. Kalnishevsky and his chancellor Globa were taken off to Moscow under guard, and the ataman was then imprisoned in the Solovetsky Monastery, on an island in the Wfaite Sea which was still a penal settlement in Khrushchev's time. There Kalnishevsky was kept until his death, reputedly at the age of 112. As for the treasure, it seems never to have existed. Catherine's favourite Potemkin, who was in charge of the raid against the Cossacks, stole the gilded decorations from the Pokrovsky Church on the island, which were found in his palaces after his death. The herds and the grain were sold for a large sum of money which was used as founding capital for a municipal bank in the newly built port of Novorossisk. The Cossack artillery, with any petty cash and valuables found in the Sech by the empress's officers, was removed to St Petersburg.
But these facts were not allowed to impede the Cossack dream. Only five years ago, a Rostov newspaper announced that the 'Treasure of the Sech' had been located near Azov. A Rostov town councillor named Anikeev insisted that it had been buried in a field belonging to a Cossack named Zabarin, which lay between the town of Azov and the sea at Kagalnik. Here a hidden well had been discovered, close to a mound which contained six barrels of treasure hanging from oak beams. Councillor Anikeev gave no information about when the discovery was made, or even about what happened to the contents of the barrels - the book of local legends from which he turned out to have plagiarised the story had given no details either — but he added helpfully that while this treasure might have been Kalnishevsky's, it might equally well have belonged to indiabu, Tsar of the Alans'. At all events, the indifference to this great discovery shown by the head of the Azov museum was an example (Anikeev declared) of disgraceful bureaucratic sloth.
The local archaeologists at Azov, enraged by Anikeev's article, chose the scientist S. V. Gurkin to reply. In an eight-page essay entitled 'Field of Miracles in a Land of Imbeciles', Gurkin proceeded to devastate the wretched Councillor Anikeev for credulity and ignorance. 'Here on the open spacious steppe,' Anikeev had written, 'with its scent of grass and the incessant voices of birds stood, more than 250 years ago, the persecuted ataman Kalnishevsky with his comrades.' Gurkin pointed out mercilessly that Kalnishevsky had not been an ataman 250 years ago, that he had demonstrably never been near the Don in his life, and that if he had been there when Anikeev said he had, he would have been burying his treasure in Turkish-held territory under the noses of the Azov garrison. The only 'lucky' Russian in the whole of this story, Gurkin concluded, was the man who had looted the Pokrovsky Church on the Sech, Prince Potemkin himself.
Chapter Six
We [Russians and Poles] started from different points, and our paths only intersected in our common hatred for the autocracy of Petersburg. The ideal of the Poles was behind them; they strove towards their past, from which they had been cut off by violence and which was the only starting-point from which they could advance again. They had masses of holy relics, while we had empty cradles.
Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, Part VI
I am these two, twofold. I ate from the Tree Of Knowledge. I was expelled by the archangel's sword.
At night I sensed her pulse. Her mortality.
And we have searched for the real place ever since.
Czeslaw Milosz, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'
THE OCEAN TERMINAL, which is Odessa's new gateway to the Black Sea, juts out into the harbour at the foot of the Odessa Steps. When I went there, the great modern building was desolate and silent, its concrete decks and curtain walls scarred and holed as if the place had been bombarded.
The indicator board had jammed many months before, showing still the previous summer's ship departures for Yalta, Ochakov or Sevastopol. The plate-glass windows lay in shards across the floors. The sea-wind gusted in past ranks of passenger ferries and launches rocking uselessly at their moorings, the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian ensigns already fraying at their sterns. Only one ship showed signs of life: the big motor-vessel Dmitri Shostakovich, which had taken most of Odessa's Jews away to Israel when emigration became easy in the late 1980s, was tuning up her engines for the voyage to Haifa.
Inside the terminal, a few embers of activity still glowed. The parade of tourist shops and duty-free booths was shuttered up, and some had clearly been looted. But on one of the upper decks, next to a roped-off chasm in the floor, I discovered a small coffee bar was open. Better still, it was selling coffee, which had become almost as rare as petrol and diesel in Odessa. A Ukrainian family had found its way to the bar, picking its way through the unlit concourse and up a staircase impeded with rubble, and was cheerfully drinking Crimean champagne.
As I left, walking along the quayside, I saw ahead of me an exquisite grey Honda with lightly smoked windows, parked on the edge of the dock. It was crate-new, so fresh from a Japanese freighter that it had no licence plates. Coming up to the car, I saw through the darkened glass two men on the front seats, each bent forward to sniff lines of powder off a board spread across the facia top. I saw them and one of them, pulling himself upright in an unhurried way, saw me. It seemed wise to walk faster. Fifty yards further on, I passed the maritime police post. An officer inside, drawing on a cigarette, watched me and the Honda without apparent interest.
Odessa has experienced times like these before, intervals — sometimes lasting for years — when its heartbeat runs down and the streets fall quiet, when some disaster freezes the harbour and its shipping like January ice and separates the city from the Black Sea. But these intervals are in the city's nature: a port thrown up hastily on a barren shore to bring New Russia into the capitalist age of slump and boom. It has always been feasting or famine with Odessa.
Foreigners built Odessa and ran it for the Russian Empire, and it was more than twenty-five years before a Russian became governor-general there. Most of the planners were French emigres — the Due de Richelieu who was to become the father, benefactor and tutor of Odessa's childhood; the Comte de Maisons who had been the president of the Rouen parlement before the French Revolution; Alexandre Langeron who left his name to the headland and the wide beach east of the harbour where children still swim and fish. The architects were usually Italians, as was the first generation of grain dealers, and Italian was the official language of commerce in the early years. Much of the shipping business was Greek. The suppliers of wheat, for the first hundred years the reason for Odessa's existence, were the great Polish landowners whose estates lay far up country in Podolia and Galicia. Their nation had been finally obliterated by the Third Partition in 1795, the year after Odessa's foundation, but now, sometimes quite cheerfully, these eastern Polish magnates were adapting to life as subjects of the tsar.
The city went up with a rush. Two years after its official inauguration, held on a dusty building-site on the cliffs between the steppe and the sea, Odessa had a cathedral, a stock exchange and a censorship office. There were just more than two thousand settlers at the end of the first twelvemonth, in 1795, and by 1814 there were 35,000. That was the year when Richelieu, the true founder, climbed into his coach among lamenting crowds and set off back to France. He took with him one small trunk containing his uniform and two shirts. Everything else had been given away. His salary was paid into the fund for distressed immigrants. His books were left behind to form the library of the Odessa school which he had founded, and which later took his name: the Lycée Richelieu.2
This was a man of the Enlightenment: energetic, austere, universal, lonely. Richelieu, whose statue notches the sky at the summit of the Odessa Steps, was happier among immigrants than among the Russian bureaucrats whom he commanded. As the city prefect and then as the governor-general of New Russia, he looked forward to creating another America in which the displaced and the ambitious of all countries would gather to live and to trade in freedom. Serfdom did not follow Russ
ian and Ukrainian peasants who arrived as settlers, and Richelieu carefully embedded them among German, Greek, Moldavian, Jewish and Swiss colonists who would teach them both modern agriculture and the practice of liberty. In all, more than a million human beings emigrated to make their homes under his protection. Richelieu was especially fond of the contingent of Nogay Tatars who had fallen under his persuasive influence. It pleased him that he had induced these steppe nomads to settle. For them, among their new vineyards overlooking the Black Sea, he had stone mosques erected and houses for their mullahs.
Odessa's first disaster happened in 1812, while Richelieu was still there. Plague broke out that August. Richelieu shut down every public institution, including the new Italian opera house, and ordered the population to remain at home. He segregated the city into five sealed districts, each with a doctor and an inspector (four out of the five doctors died). A few carriages still passed through the wide, dusty streets, bearing black flags for a corpse, red flags for an infected passenger. Patricia Herlihy, in her Odessa, A History records that 'convicts dressed in black leather suits soaked in oil, and still wearing chains, were sent into the contaminated houses to clean them out twenty days after the dead were removed,'
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