The Black Sea

by Charles King

  The growth of new cities along the coast altered the nature of shipping on the sea. Previously, the quadrangle of Caffa, Trabzon, Sinop, and Istanbul had been the natural link between the northern and southern coasts, an extension of the routes that led overland across the steppe to the north and east, and south across Anatolia to Persia. After the late eighteenth century, however, that water route fell into desuetude. The real center of commerce—and increasingly of urban life and culture—no longer lay in the middle of the sea, in the Crimean peninsula, but to the west, along the outlets of the Dnepr and Dnestr rivers, a return, in fact, to the important status of the northwest littoral during the age of Greek colonization.

  The reasons for this shift lay in the imperatives of strategy and geography. Caffa and the other Crimean ports were really more a part of the southern coast than they were of the northern; they were separated from the Crimean interior by a chain of mountains and naturally looked out to the seaports of Anatolia, not to the flatlands of the north. That situation suited the Ottomans, of course, but it was a problem for the Russians, for whom the transport of goods over the mountains was time-consuming and expensive. Those ports were also far away from the other economic and strategic points of concern for Russian foreign policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the Polish lands, the Danube, and the Balkans—and were easily exposed in the event of an Ottoman attack from the south.

  The new center of gravity became Odessa, the greatest of modern Black Sea ports. For the past two centuries, Odessa has been synonymous with the idea of a Russian imperial city, and for good reason. It was the premier example of the new political and cultural optimism that pervaded Russia’s acquisitions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the southern equivalent of the creation of St. Petersburg a hundred years earlier. The city’s expanding population, drawn from across the empire, central Europe, and the Near East, became a microcosm of the multiethnic and multi-religious reality of the tsarist empire, more diverse and far less Russian than either of the twin imperial capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Until the end of the empire, it remained the commercial, administrative, and cultural heart of the Russian Black Sea, the quintessential imperial seaport and the leading export center of the entire empire.

  At the time of the Russian conquest, Odessa had little to recommend it. It was a dusty Tatar town named Hadji-bey, with no more than 2,000 inhabitants. Its harbor was unattractive because of its poor anchorage and exposure to easterly winds; in winter, ice could obstruct the bay for several weeks. Nevertheless, it was the most significant fortified town on the northwest coast (the small Ottoman fortress there had been captured by Jose de Ribas, John Paul Jones’s former adjutant, in 1789) and held a commanding position between the Dnepr estuary and the Dnestr and Danube rivers; it was also a short race from the Russian fleet’s base at Sevastopol. (Two other important sites, the forts at Ochakov on the Dnepr estuary and Akkerman on the Dnestr, both had serious disadvantages. The former had no natural harbor, and the latter could not host heavily laden vessels because of river silting.) In 1794 the town was rechristened Odessa, after the old Greek colony of Odessus. The feminization of the name was apparently the preference of the empress Catherine herself.

  Credit for the development of the city belongs to two capable administrators whose collective tenure stretched over the better part of the early nineteenth century. Armand, duc de Richelieu, served as governor of the Odessa district from 1803 to 1814, latterly as governor-general of the entire New Russian territory. His statue now stands atop the famous granite steps that cascade from the upper city down to the modern port. Richelieu was a scion of the great family of French courtiers and statesmen, and like John Paul Jones and his other contemporaries, he sought adventure (and, in Richelieu’s particular case, refuge from the revolutionary throngs of Paris) by joining the Russian army as a volunteer during the Russo-Turkish war. His service was repaid with a commission and, after the war, a post as administrator of the new city.

  Richelieu’s time in office was relatively short—only eleven years—after which he returned to France to serve as prime minister following the defeat of Napoleon; but the changes that he brought to the city and to the entire region were spectacular. Odessa’s population grew to 35,000 inhabitants over the span of a decade. Richelieu founded banking facilities and a commercial court, laid out the modern street system, and encouraged the growth of printing, the theater, and the arts.43 The romantic elan that he brought to raising a city up from the dust attracted the attention of many outside the empire; he may even have been a model for Byron’s Don Juan.

  Richelieu was succeeded by a compatriot, the comte de Langeron, whose short period of service normally goes unremarked, but it was under Langeron’s successor, the long-serving governor-general Mikhail Vorontsov (in office 1823—45), that New Russia became fully a part of the growing empire, with Odessa as the jewel in the crown. A graduate of Cambridge, he laid the foundation for a university library and encouraged the growth of charitable societies. He also ordered the construction of the famous Odessa steps (criticized at the time as a costly folly) and planned the majestic buildings and boulevard that top the cliff overlooking the harbor.44 Under his tenure, Odessa was also granted the status of a free port, exempt from tariffs. When he left office, the city’s population had risen to some 78,000.45

  Another of Vorontsov’s achievements lay in Crimea. Odessa was the administrative hub of New Russia, but its military center lay at the naval arsenal of Sevastopol, on the southwest coast of the peninsula. The site was formerly a simple Tatar village, captured in 1783, but the location had powerful symbolic associations. It was located near the ancient colony of Chersonesus, the same place where St. Vladimir had converted to Christianity in the tenth century. Of even greater significance, however, were the natural advantages of the inlet that lay nearby. The deep harbor was entered by a very narrow passage, less than 1,000 yards wide, that could be easily closed off to intruders; the long inner harbor, surrounded by cliffs, had solid anchorage and a precipitous slope from the shore, which meant that ships could anchor close in without fear of running aground. It was unquestionably the finest natural site for a protected naval station on any coast, and with the addition of fortified roadsteads and gun emplacements in the 1820s, it became the focus of Russian naval might in the south.

  Why had no other power realized the military advantages of Sevastopol? The short answer is that none had needed to. Neither Greeks nor Romans were much concerned with creating a naval station on the north coast, and for the Byzantines, relations with the city of Chersonesus—at times rebellious, at times congenial—depended on a delicate balance with the peoples of the interior, not on military strength. For the Ottomans, with their Tatar vassals in control of the entire Crimean peninsula, there was little reason to expend effort there, especially when the rivers—the Don, the Dnepr, the Dnestr, and the Danube—were far more threatening avenues for potential invaders (whence the attention given to holding the fortresses at Azov, Ochakov, Akkerman, and Kilia). It was only with the coming of a new, northern naval presence that having a fortified port in Crimea became imperative, and from the time of Catherine on, the city would become the most important naval outpost on the entire coast.

  When the Russian naturalist Peter Simon Pallas traveled through New Russia in the 1790s, he found little to remark. Once great cities were in ruins, and even the promising port of Sevastopol was overrun by disease and the depredations of a wood-boring worm that wrought havoc on the hulls of Russian sailing vessels. The new Odessa was poor and choked with dust, and the port at Kherson had fallen into disuse because of the prevalence of infectious diseases, such as those that had taken Anthoine’s brothers in the 1780s.46

  Within only a few decades, however, the coast would have been nearly unrecognizable. The extension of Russian control to other littoral areas consolidated the security of the northern shore, and the Ottoman agreement to free passage of foreign-flagged commercial ships p
rovided steady traffic to and from the Mediterranean. Once the sea was opened, the water provided a natural outlet for the province’s products—and an outlet that was far cheaper and easier than traveling the poor roads that led off to the north. The railway did not arrive in Odessa until the 1860s, and travel through the interior was effected by caravans of ox-carts or, for passengers, by “posting,” bumping along in a straw-lined cart drawn by horses that would be refreshed at regular post-stations along the road.47 The new cities naturally looked out to the sea as their connection to the rest of the world.

  The changes in the first decades of the nineteenth century were manifold. At Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, a profitable trade in wine imports from the Aegean began. It was said that more wine was imported into the customs house there than in all other ports of the Russian empire combined.48 Salt, scooped up from the coastal lakes in northern Crimea, was exported to the Caucasus, Poland, and even Istanbul.49 Some of the towns that Pallas had found in ruins were beginning to revive. Caffa, which had been destroyed by the Russians in the last war, was now coming back. Its mainly Greek, Tatar, and Jewish population was again engaged in trade, spurred on by a regular sailing link with Istanbul, and foreign merchants soon reestablished the sailing routes to Sinop, Trabzon, and the Caucasus coast.50 Kherson, once virtually abandoned, also had a new lease of life. The Dnepr river had been banked to prevent flooding, an engineering innovation which eliminated the pools of stagnant water that had accelerated the annual summer epidemics. The port was still largely inactive, due to the relocation of the Admiralty headquarters to Nikolaev, but rope-making factories and other sea-related industries were beginning to take off.51 (Even the aging baron Anthoine managed to reestablish a small business there through an intermediary. 52) “These … towns,” a British visitor noted already in 1802, “as well as the numerous villages which have suddenly reared their heads in a country formerly inhabited by lawless banditti, or traversed by roving hordes, are filled with Russians, with Tartars reclaimed from their wandering life, and with numerous colonists, particularly Greeks and Armenians, who migrated from the adjacent provinces of the Turkish empire.”53

  Among the new cities, Odessa clearly held pride of place. A mole was built to protect ships against northeasterly winds and to prevent the harbor’s silting up from the currents produced by the mouth of the Dnepr; 150 sailing ships could be accommodated inside it. With the full opening of the sea to European commerce and the declaration of a tax-free regime in Odessa, Austrian and British flags dominated in the harbor. The city’s population expanded and contracted over any given year, rising considerably in the summer when convoys from Poland and central Ukraine arrived in the city and petty traders crowded the marketplaces, but the number of permanent residents grew steadily. “Were it not for the swarms of Israelites, and the dreadful dust in the streets,” commented a British sea captain in 1823, “the first impression of the town would be favourable"54

  These “Israelites” and other diaspora peoples, however, were part of what drove the rapid development of the New Russian towns and seaports. The population of Slavic-speaking peasants and Cossacks had already begun to grow in the late eighteenth century and accelerated in the early nineteenth, the product of a state-sponsored program of resettlement to the borderlands.55 But successive Russian governments also actively encouraged colonization from abroad—from central Europe, the Polish lands, and elsewhere. Tax concessions, exemption from military service, religious tolerance, loans, and grants of land were provided to groups that wished to populate the newly opened steppe.

  Already under Catherine, German-speaking immigrants, especially Mennonites, had been given incentives to farm the steppeland and establish towns. Others, such as Greeks and Armenians, were resettled from Crimea or arrived from various parts of the Ottoman empire, drawn not only by the prospects of economic advantage but also by the hope of living in an empire governed by a beneficent Christian monarch. Jews, subjected to harsh restrictions in other parts of the empire, were given relative freedom of settlement and employment in the new border regions.

  Foreign settlers were made subjects of the Russian empire, but their lives were largely separate from those of the Slavic peasants, Tatars, and Cossacks who surrounded them. Throughout the nineteenth century, the distinctiveness of these communities impressed outsiders, who saw the German towns in particular as islands of civilization on a frontier that was only recently integrated into a European empire. “The town is neatly laid out,” wrote a British visitor about one major colony, “and beautifully supplied with clear water.”

  The church, the school, and a few of the most important buildings, are of stone, the rest of wood. Avenues of trees line the streets; and here, under the grateful shade, we can imagine the patriarchs of the community seated during the afternoon, enjoying tobacco of their own growing, moistening it with beer of their own brewing, and regarding the members of the happy little society as children of their own rearing.56

  Life, of course, was hardly the idyll that some imagined, but the colonies did have a considerable impact on the economy of the region. Already by the end of Richelieu’s tenure as governor-general, in 1814, the population of New Russia had increased by a million people, and land values had grown tenfold.57 Agricultural surpluses grew rapidly and coincided with diminishing production in western Europe. Shipments of wheat from the New Russian colonies and from the large holdings of Russian nobles found their way to Livorno, Genoa, Marseilles, and other major ports. (Ease of shipment for cargoes of wheat had been specifically guaranteed in the treaty of Adrianople in 1829.) The repeal of the British corn laws in 1846, which eventually eliminated tariffs on foreign grain, opened up yet another major market. In only a decade, from the early 1840s to the early 1850s, the volume of annual wheat exports to France and Italy increased by about a quarter and to Britain by sevenfold. The total number of ships entering Russian ports more than tripled. By 1853 more than a third of all Russian exports passed through the Black Sea.58 As more and more European businesses sprang up in the ports, however, the tsarist government became wary of delivering its commerce into the hands of British and French merchants, and a series of laws restricted brokerage activity to Russian subjects—a restriction that actually enhanced the position of the traditional “middlemen minorities” in the province such as Greeks, Jews, and Armenians.

  By the middle of the century, New Russia was no longer simply a political and cultural periphery; it was on its way to becoming a well-integrated part of the Russian empire, governed by talented imperial administrators and populated by Russian and Ukrainian peasants, foreign colonists and businessmen, and Tatars both settled and, in diminishing numbers, semi-nomadic. Sailing ships could go from Crimea or Odessa to the Straits in three days, steamers in half that time, and from there to the major ports of southern Europe and the Atlantic.59 There was, however, still an identifiable frontier in the region, and any traveler who arrived by ship, horse, or cart knew it intimately. Crossing it usually meant spending days or weeks in seclusion, deloused, examined, and left to cool one’s heels in a quarantine house. The intersection of steppe and sea no longer represented a cultural frontier. It now marked an epidemiological one.

  Fever, Ague, and Lazaretto

  The plague—a catch-all term for several related bacterial diseases—had been known around the sea since at least the fourteenth century, and its effects were felt throughout the period of Russian expansion.60 The great plague in Moscow in 1771 was probably the result of infected soldiers’ returning from along the Dnestr river during the first war of Catherine’s reign, and the wars of 1806—12 and 1828—9 were likewise marked by a raging epidemic throughout New Russia and the eastern Balkans. As new ports grew up in the nineteenth century, a major concern was preventing the spread of the disease from Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans, where outbreaks were frequent and poorly contained, by ensuring that both goods and people were thoroughly inspected before being allowed into the towns.

  Fro
m the plague’s earliest appearance in western Europe, publicly funded systems were put in place to deal with its spread. Although physicians had little understanding of the exact causes of the disease or the mechanisms of transmission, they quickly discovered that isolating suspect patients—usually for the biblical period of forty days, whence the French word quarantine—allowed the disease to run its course. The infected patient died and the uninfected survived. The first quarantine hospital was founded in 1403 in Venice, and other Mediterranean port cities, such as Genoa and Marseilles, established their own not long after.

  It was almost another four centuries before full quarantine systems were put in place around the Black Sea. The absence of large-scale foreign commerce coming to the seaports until the end of the eighteenth century meant that there was little concern about long-distance infection. It was only with the Russian acquisition of outlets on the northern coast and the revival of ties with the Mediterranean that transmission of the disease became an issue. (Previously, the major barrier lay on the Ottoman—Austrian land frontier, which ran along the border of modern Croatia and through central Romania.)61 Even then, when there were outbreaks of the plague, the initial response was either to attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the sick—the famous British prison reformer John Howard died in Kherson in 1790 while ministering to an infected woman—or, in medieval fashion, to blame it on the Jews.62 As it turned out, the early contacts between the Russian ports and Marseilles, pioneered by Anthoine, would eventually have an advantage beyond the purely commercial. Marseilles had the most sophisticated quarantine system in all of Europe in the eighteenth century, and the systems eventually put in place in the Russian ports were designed on the general lines of the Marseilles model.