Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  But the plague was only a waver in the Odessa boom which was now under way. Exports through the port had tripled in value between 1804 and 1813. Then a coincidence of crop failures in Western Europe with breakneck rearmament after Napoleon's escape from Elba sent grain profits up in a geyser of easy money which only began to falter in about 1818. Through the Treaty of Adrianople, in 1829, the defeated Ottoman Empire conceded free passage to Russian shipping through the Narrows; Odessa went into another boom in the 1840s and into yet another, following Britain's abolition of the Corn Laws in 1847, which lasted until the outbreak of the Crimean War.

  This was the beginning of more disasters. The war itself, bringing maritime trade to an instant halt, was serious enough. An Anglo-French naval squadron bombarded Odessa on 10 April 1854, killing a number of citizens and hitting some of the large public buildings, like the governor-general's palace, which were built along the low cliff-top above the port and made an easy target. A ball lodged in the plinth of Richelieu's statue, where it still remains. Honour was saved, however, by a gun battery on the end of one of the moles, commanded by Ensign Shchegolov, which managed to disable the British frigate Tiger. She was beached somewhere near Langeron Point. One of her cannon, taken as a trophy, now stands mounted at the end of Primorskie Boulevard, the majestic terrace which runs along the cliff-top at the summit of the Steps. But the Crimean War was also the beginning of Odessa's decline. Although the competition of American wheat was becoming serious, Odessa — coddled by free-port status which assisted trade but also meant that the harbour was cut off from the Russian domestic market by tariff frontiers - had not bothered to industrialise or to diversify.

  Odessa began to rejoin the Russian economy in 1859, when the free-port privilege was withdrawn and New Russia lost its autonomy within the Empire. After the European slump of 1873, which brought the grain trade temporarily to its knees and caused a wave of bankruptcies in the city, a new influx of foreign capital began to exploit Odessa as the main port for the Ukrainian hinterland; the Belgians, above all, set up sugar-beet refineries and invested in the huge coal and iron deposits being opened up in the Donets basin. The Belgian entrepreneur Baron Empain, the world's pioneer of electric transport, laid down a tramway network. The British built a waterworks (Odessans, drinking the foul water of the Dniester estuary, had been subject to outbreaks of cholera almost every summer), while the Germans provided gas lighting for the streets. After the eruption of Mount Etna in 1900, some of the seaward boulevards were re-paved with black Sicilian lava.

  At the same time, Odessa's demography began to change. In the first years of the century, Richelieu had worked to bring in Jewish colonists from Russian-occupied Poland. By the 1860s, and especially after the 1882 'May Laws' restricted Jewish business activity in the countryside, the population of the Jewish shtetls in the west of the Russian Empire began to flow down to the Black Sea in a broadening torrent. A census of 'native language' in Odessa taken in 1897 suggested that more than 32 per cent of the population spoke Yiddish, while the figure for Russian was only just more than 50 per cent. The third mother-tongue was Ukrainian which -in a city now proclaimed to be ancestral Ukrainian territory - was spoken by a mere 5.6 per cent; almost as many Odessans spoke Polish. This new Yiddish Odessa, whose people were overwhelmingly artisans and small shopkeepers, took over the city's already Mediterranean culture and gave Odessa its special raucous, parvenu brilliance which survived until the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the Jews were poor, and many were revolutionary. In this intellectual and physical turbulence, punctuated by pogroms organised by the Russian authorities themselves, were formed the minds of Isaac Babel, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Jabotinsky.

  The inner city is divided between crows and doves. The crows rule the district by the railway station, where Richelieu and Catherine Streets - for fifty years disguised as Lenin and Karl Marx Streets - set off on their dead-straight march to the sea. In spring, twigs clatter down on the broken pavements of Richelieu as the rookery nests pile up in the plane trees. White bird-lime draws a line round the feet of the beggars in the cathedral porch on Pushkin Street: Russian beggars with matted fringes and buniony faces, who cross themselves continuously with shaking hands.

  The crows make enough noise in the mornings to wake the guests in the cheap hotels near the station; their quarrels are louder than the grinding and crackling of the trams. Further on, in the streets between the station and the Moldavanka quarter where the Jewish gangsters used to live, is the real heart of crow territory. No dove or pigeon would survive long here, for this district is the site of the crows' food supply, the Privoz market. In the mud between the market halls, they hop and haggle over shreds of calf-muzzle, crumbs of brinza cheese, carrot-tops and the skeletons of anchovies. Gypsies passing with jam-jars of hot tea shout at the crows, and the Tatar women selling grated carrot slash at them with sticks if the birds sidle too close to their stalls.

  About halfway down Catherine Street towards the sea, as you approach Deribasovskaya, the doves begin. They do not hustle, but get a living by charm. They sit in rows along the cornices of the opera house, whirring down prettily to beg from children in the Palais Royal gardens or by the monument to the Battleship Potetnkin's mutineers. The families mooching along Deribasovskaya shed trails of sunflower seeds and fragments of ice-cream wafer for the doves.

  The doves disdain the trees, although there are huge old planes all along Primorskie Boulevard — a street which is really a long esplanade garden with palaces down one side and an open view over the port and the Black Sea on the other. A few years ago, at the end of the Soviet period, a planner decided to improve this view by cutting the trees down, and it was the first sign of changing times in Odessa when dozens of young people came down to Primorskie and clung to their trees until the workers with chainsaws grew ashamed and went away. But the doves prefer to feel marble and bronze under their pink feet, on the ledges of the ancient London Hotel and the governor-general's palace, on the Tiger cannon, on the sculptured forehead of Pushkin's statue or on the shoulder of Richelieu at the top of the Steps.

  Konstantin Paustovsky, who wrote about Odessa as a man writes about a wife who died young, used to sit here on the low wall. Giddy with hunger — it was 1910, a year of blockade and famine - he would rest in the early morning on his way to the newspaper office where he worked and breathe the wind.

  Apart from decks, it smelt of acacias, dry seaweed, the camomile in the cracks of the sea wall, and of tar and rust. Occasionally, all these smells were washed away by a special after-storm smell from the open sea. It was quite unlike, and could not be mistaken for anything else. It was as though a girl's arm, cool from bathing, were brushing my cheek.

  When I first read those words, nearly twenty-five years ago, I knew at once that this could no longer be true about the sea wind on Primorskie, and that Paustovsky had known that it would not be true. The air at the top of the Steps now smells of oily brine, low-octane petrol and fatigued cement. But those words cannot be unwritten. I have remembered them in other Black Sea places, like the harbour at Anapa at dawn after a night of wind. They are accurate because nothing can be added to them and nothing taken away.

  The Odessa steps, the Escalier Monstre, are enigmatic. To see them, for anyone who cannot forget how Eisenstein in The Battleship Potemkin made them into the most famous flight of stairs in the world, is like seeing a famous actress: smaller, drabber, less purposeful than in the movie. The Steps seem to go nowhere in particular. Once they leaped straight down from the city to the harbour, a triumphal strut towards the sea and the southern horizon. Now the main dock highway cuts across the foot of the Steps and the view is blocked off by walls of stained cement: the dilapidation of the Ocean Terminal.

  And, from the top, the Steps seem short and neglected. They are so constructed that a glance down them sees only the landings between each flight, suggesting a mere set of terraces. The grass on either side is unkempt. On one flank an ugly metal funicular railway is brok
en down and rusting. It is all a disappointment. But then, as you start off down the 220 granite steps, there arises a sense of entering some process of illusion, rather like going into a maze or walking up to a Greek column.

  There is even some legerdemain about who built the Odessa Steps; they were certainly started in 1837, but not by the Italian architect Boffa whose name is engraved on them. So is the name of an Englishman called Upton, but his Steps numbered only 192 and were made of Trieste sandstone.3 At some point, the design, the material and the master of works all changed. The Steps were re-planned in granite by Boffa, or possibly by Rossi or even Toricelli who both built much of Odessa, with a sharply diminishing width from base to summit.

  So it happens that at the bottom you turn around and are amazed. From here only the risers are visible; the Steps, extended by a false perspective, race up to heaven. At the top is Richelieu, with clouds streaming past his head. In reality, his statue is dwarfish, smaller than lifesize. But from the foot of the Steps he is a colossus.

  After Richelieu, Langeron governed in Odessa. He was a pleasant, witty old soldier who found the New Russian salad of races too much for him and said so: 'a territory as big as France and populated by ten different nationalities.' He was succeeded by the first Russian Governor-General, Ivan Inzov, who lasted only a year and in 1823 was replaced by Count Mikhail Vorontsov.

  With Vorontsov, a new magnificence arrived in Odessa. Educated in England, where his father had been ambassador, this was a gentleman of enormous public and personal ambition. He helped to make New Russia and Odessa rich, and the Vorontsovs offered splendid official hospitality in their white palace at the end of Primorskie. He also made himself spectacularly rich on the profits of private land speculation (while he was still Governor-General) and of new Crimean vineyards equipped to produce champagne. At Alupka, on the Crimean coast, he converted Richelieu's old villa into a Tudor-Moorish palace with 150 rooms.

  I I

  It stands there still, a monstrosity in perfect taste, chilly on the hottest summer day. The British delegation stayed there during the Yalta conference in 1945.

  Alexander Pushkin thought Vorontsov was a marmoreal prig. Vorontsov inherited this cross, untrustworthy poet from Ivan Inzov when he took over Odessa in 1823. It was then nearly five years since Pushkin, at the age of twenty-one, had been rusticated from St Petersburg. He was officially a member of the Foreign Service, so that he could be discreetly punished by being sent on an official journey; Pushkin was handed over to Ivan Inzov, a tolerant guardian who took the poet with him on a succession of appointments in Ekaterinoslav and Kishinev, and allowed him to wander off on a prolonged 'convalescence' in Crimea and the Caucasus. When Inzov was transferred to Odessa, Pushkin went too, and took up enforced residence in the city.

  This was not exactly a serious punishment for a dissident writer suspected - accurately - of anti-state activities. But Pushkin, who could not know what worse fates would fall upon other Russian poets in the two centuries ahead, felt himself a martyr. Part of his punishment in Odessa was to be taken up by Vorontsov and bored stiff. He resented having an eye kept on him, and still more the governor-general's suggestions for little jobs to keep him busy.

  One reason for Pushkin's resentment was that he was already busy. In May that year, he had started writing Eugene Onegin in his dark apartment behind Primorskie. But there was another reason. Soon after the new governor-general's arrival, Pushkin had started a love affair with his wife, the Countess Vorontsova. In Odessa, nothing stays secret. Pushkin met the cold, English gaze of the count and did not like what he fancied he saw there. Early in 1824, Vorontsov overruled the poet's noisy protests that he was dying of a heart aneurism and was too sick to move, and appointed him to a travelling commission to study locust damage in the Dniester country. Pushkin never forgave him. His report is supposed to have consisted of a four-line poem:

  The locusts flew and flew over the plain.

  They landed on the ground,

  Ate everything they found,

  And then the locusts flew and flew away again.

  This may be apocryphal, but by now Pushkin was becoming unbearable to Vorontsov, who wrote to his friends in St Petersburg and secured Pushkin's dismissal from the Foreign Service. This meant that he had to leave Odessa and live on his father's country estate for two years of boredom and loneliness, in the course of which he wrote most of his best verse. He took with him a gold talisman-ring with a cabalistic Hebrew inscription, which Countess Vorontsova had slipped onto his finger one day after they had made love on a Black Sea beach. Pushkin wore the ring for the rest of his life. It was removed by friends after his death thirteen years later in a duel, and survived until 1917 when an unknown looter took it from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in the early months of the Revolution.

  Pushkin was expelled from Odessa in July 1824. Less than a year later, Vorontsov was sent another poet to keep an eye on. In late February 1825, after a journey, mostly by sledge, from St Petersburg, three young Poles arrived in Odessa. They were Franciszek Malewski, Jozef Jezowski and Adam Mickiewicz.

  They were all under sentence: banned from the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire and subject to orders of enforced residence. A few months before, they had been released from imprisonment in Vilnius and transferred to the Russian capital, where they had persuaded the authorities to let them be redirected to the south, hoping to wind up in Crimea or the Caucasus. As a compromise, they were sent as far as Odessa.

  All three had been involved in a plot, or more correctly in a secret society, devoted to the restoration of Polish independence. The Filarets ('lovers of virtue') had arisen in the early 1820s among students at the Wilno (Vilnius) University, some twenty-five years after the final suppression of Poland by the Third Partition. Before the Filarets, there had been a much smaller grouping called the Filomats ('lovers of learning'), to which all three exiles had belonged: something between a Masonic lodge and a debating club in which romantic students discussed Byron, sex (they invented an 'Erometer' for measuring passion) and the liberation of Poland. But too many people heard about them and wanted to join.

  The Filarets started as an overflow organisation from the Filomats. Soon, however, they became much larger and bolder, not to say reckless. Prominent Polish conspirators, sought by the tsarist police, came to Vilnius and talked insurrection. So did a few young

  Russian friends of liberty, who later became members of the 'Decembrist' conspiracy. Russian informers kept note of words and names. But the explosion, when it took place in 1823, was expected by nobody, touched off by a stroke of pure Polishness.

  It started in a classroom at the Vilnius Lycée. One lesson was over, but the next teacher had not turned up. A boy called Plater, in the fourth form, sidled to the blackboard and wrote Vivat Konstanqa in chalk. He had some girl in mind. But another boy in the form, a serious-minded youth called Czechowicz, rubbed out the end of the second word and wrote Konstytucja - Long Live the Constitution.

  Every boy in the room knew what that meant. It meant the patriotic Constitution of the Third of May, 1791, the charter of Polish national enlightenment and liberty which had been erased by the tyrannous partitioning powers. Somebody else drew an exclamation mark. Then yet another schoolboy got hold of the chalk and added: 'Ah, what a sweet memory!' Hubbub broke out in the classroom and spread down the corridors.

  It was too late to contain the outbreak. The school authorities arrested three of the boys and were then arrested themselves by the Russians. All over the pink, yellow and white walls of baroque Vilnius, graffiti unreeled themselves: 'Long Live the Constitution! Death to Tyrants!' Senator Novosiltsev, who had been sent to Vilnius to investigage rumours of sedition in the university, was roused from a drunken coma and signed an order licensing the police to act on the Filaret files. Within a few days, most of the leading Filarets and Filomats, including Adam Mickiewicz and his companions, were locked up in a dungeon in the cellars of the Basilian Monastery.

  I
t was October when they were arrested, already disagreeably cold, and they remained in the dungeon for most of the ensuing winter. They got through the weeks and months by drinking mugs of hot tea, arguing about what sort of Poland they intended to restore, singing to the distant sounds of the monastery organ at Mass, and listening to Adam Mickiewicz while he read his own poems. They lived, in other words, through the essential experience of every generation of young Poles from that day to this.

  Mickiewicz, who was to become the 'national poet', even the lay patron saint of his country, was then twenty-four: about a year older than Pushkin. He was already a famous young man. With his

  collection Ballads and Romances, he had introduced Romanticism into Polish literature: 'Faith and feeling more reveal to me/Then the sage's lens or eye . . . ' In an occupied, demoralised nation whose hope of new life seemed to be a matter of visionary faith rather than of reason, the book had instantly sold out. He had written the long poem Grazyna, and in Vilnius he had composed two acts of Dziady (Forefathers' Eve). This was the beginning of an extraordinary poetic drama about love, magical religion and political sacrifice which is unlike anything else in European literature and which was never to be completed. The writer Ksawery Pruszyriski has compared it to a cathedral of which 'an aisle, a chapel, a presbytery, part of the choir' were raised but never united under a single roof.