Black Sea (25 page)

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 Russian 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,'

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
1
860s, 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.