Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (13 page)

The fear in western Europe was that the uneasy balance around the Black Sea was now upset. Russia would undoubtedly press its advantage against the Ottomans to its logical end, nibbling away at the edges of the empire until the tsar was able to take the real prize, Constantinople, and with it control of the only seaway access between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire, weak and ineffectual, was a constant inducement to Russian interference. But it was also a strategic necessity to European powers wary of Russian ambitions. Without the sultan in place, there was little to prevent Russia’s political and military dominance in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean.

After the debacle at Sinop, Britain and France sided with the sultan and declared war on Russia the following March, once the winter storms and unfreezing of Russian ports had enabled naval action. The British, French, and Ottoman expeditionary forces made the Black Sea the locus of their response to Russia’s adventure in Sinop, and in September the allies landed on the appendage sticking into the sea, the Crimean Peninsula. Over the next year, allied forces laid siege to the Russian naval base at Sevastopol and to other strategic towns and ports along the Crimean coast, in a series of military engagements—such as the Charge of the Light Brigade—now famous for their bravery and folly. The damp winter, boiling summer, and rampant disease took an enormous toll.

Odessa was near the seat of war, less than two hundred miles from Sevastopol—the same distance that Nakhimov’s fleet had covered to stage the surprise attack on Sinop. The city was thus vulnerable to allied ships en route from Constantinople or anchorages along the western coast. And given Odessa’s long-standing commercial ties to Britain, part of Russian strategy involved not only trying to defend the city against allied attack but also closing it down to civilian shipping, ensuring that British importers would not continue to profit from the very port their ships were likely to shell.

Once the western allies seemed certain to join the conflict, Tsar Nicholas I imposed a ban on the export of all grain from Russian ports on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov on any vessel—an effort both to preserve strategic food reserves and to undercut British and French commerce. At the time, a million
chetverts
of grain, nearly six million bushels, were in deposit in Odessa, where they were becoming ready fodder for mice and rats. Merchants had no way of quoting prices for commodities, since trade had ground to an absolute halt. “Transactions have been abated to such a degree as never yet has been experienced at this place,” reported the U.S. consul John Ralli.
³⁹

Soon an even more threatening problem appeared on the horizon: the British and French expeditionary fleet. At the beginning of April, thirty allied warships anchored in the Odessa roadstead. On April 9, 1854, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the fleet sent a small boat ashore and demanded that all British, French, and Russian commercial ships be surrendered. The local military commander gave no reply. The next morning the fleet opened fire on the artillery batteries ringing the harbor. Little damage was reported, but a city that had been open to the world now had its first experience of war. The allied fleet eventually sailed on to Crimea, where the distant explosions of cannon and mines rattled the windows of Odessa’s houses and hotels.
⁴⁰
Two steamers remained behind to blockade the port and search any neutral ships that might pass by for evidence of munitions.

When the city’s inhabitants got a chance to take revenge, they grabbed it. On April 30, 1854, a British steamer, the
Tiger
, ran aground off the coast in a heavy fog. When the retreating mists revealed it the next morning, stuck fast near the shore, the Odessa batteries began firing from atop the cliffs. Most of the 260 men aboard managed to flee the damaged vessel, which soon lowered its flag in surrender. Heavy cannon fire that evening caused it to explode in a spectacular rush of steam and saltwater. The officers and men were taken prisoner, while the guns recovered from the wreck became prized trophies, although some exploded unexpectedly when the Russian army attempted to fire them in salute.
⁴¹

Ships appeared off the coast, passing by en route to Crimea. Grain fields lay fallow. Granaries were empty. Within three years, it was all over. News reached Odessa by telegraph in the first week of April 1856 that Russia and the allies had signed a peace treaty in Paris, ending a brutal war that had left the Russian fleet at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor while accomplishing little of real strategic value for Britain, France, or the Ottomans. The news was relayed to the allied steamers still anchored outside the Odessa harbor. The captains in turn sent a boat ashore and requested permission to salute the Russian flag. Crowds gathered in the port as the ships drew near, the Russian colors hoisted on their mainmasts. They fired a salute, which was returned by the shore batteries, themselves now flying the British flag in gentlemanly reciprocity. Shortly thereafter the blockade was lifted, and the steamers retired from their long duty as unwelcome sentries.
⁴²

“I confess that I was formerly amongst those who thought that Odessa ought to have been destroyed,” wrote a British war veteran on touring the city in 1871, “but now, having visited the place, I am of a different opinion.”
⁴³
The civilized ending to the conflict masked the profound changes that the city soon faced. Its status as a free port, suspended during the war, was never restored. The British and French, chastened by the effects of the export ban, were seeking new sources of foodstuffs. The Kansas and Nebraska territories soon competed directly with New Russia for the lion’s share of the European grain trade. The grand project to find a southern outlet from the Mediterranean—the Suez Canal—reached completion in 1869, shifting trade in ways that dampened the significance of the Black Sea. Overland routes from central and southern Europe to Persia and Central Asia, which had previously had their trailheads at the Ottoman Black Sea ports, were now displaced by the easier water route through the Suez.

The wheat business remained important. The average annual output of cereals probably doubled again before the outbreak of the First World War.
⁴⁴
But other Russian ports on the Black and Caspian seas—Novorossiisk, Batumi, Baku, even Sevastopol, rebuilt and improved a decade after its destruction by the allies—were now stepping out from Odessa’s shadow and building their own reputations as centers of trade, industry, and military power. By 1914 Odessa was still the largest commercial center in the Russian south, but it accounted for less than 20 percent of the value of goods traded on the Black Sea.
⁴⁵
Cities such as Nikolaev and Rostov—both older than Odessa but long eclipsed by their western neighbor—were catching up.
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The Russian Steam Navigation Company, founded not long after the war’s close, used steam technology to enable travel and commerce across the entire sea and tie together its varied ports. By 1860 thirty-five Russian steamships were making regular runs on the sea and the major rivers, from the Danube to the Dnieper.
⁴⁷
But railroads began to reorient trade away from the south, easing the transport of goods across the empire and toward the busy ports of the Baltic Sea to the north. Count Vorontsov was gone, and his successors, some more able than others, never managed to continue the enlightened governance and privileged status forged by the founding generation of administrators. The office of governor-general of New Russia was finally abolished in 1874, replaced with a state administration more concerned with centralization and rooting out political subversives than with enhancing Odessa’s natural endowments.

Society, too, seemed to be changing in ways unfamiliar to Odessans who had thought of their city as a model of seaside hospitality and a haven for good-natured libertinism. Serfdom was abolished in the Russian Empire in 1861, part of a wave of liberalizing reforms under Tsar Alexander II, who had assumed the throne during the middle of the Crimean War. But peasant uprisings in the countryside disrupted harvests, and the flight of villagers to the city began to tax an already groaning municipal administration. The rate of suicides was up, increasing by nearly a quarter between 1870 and 1890. More people killed themselves in Odessa, relative to the city’s size, than in St. Petersburg or London. More managed to do it with guns than in any other major city in Russia. The greatest number of deaths occurred during the spring and summer months, when flowers filled the city’s public parks and warm winds caressed the shoreline—but when fortunes could also be made or lost, depending on the harvest or the caprice of buyers in Marseille or Livorno.
⁴⁸

Public violence was always a part of Odessa’s life, but the state was beginning to play a role in it. In August of 1878 newspapers reported that the first execution for a political crime in the city’s history—for belonging to a socialist-revolutionary party and for forming an illegal underground group—had recently been carried out by firing squad. In the closing decades of the century, Russian judges would order more hangings in Odessa than in any other city.
⁴⁹
Residents used to make jokes about the police; if you were stuck up to your ankles in the mud-choked streets, the story went, you could be sure of hitting something solid, since a mounted officer had probably gone in, horse first, before you.
⁵⁰
Now the humor took on a darker edge. The tsar’s secret police began to see the multilingual and cosmopolitan city as a breeding ground for agitators, saboteurs, and terrorists—because in large part it was. Odessa was a natural meeting place for radicals of various persuasions, and the lax customs regulations and venal culture of port officials meant that even minimally adept conspirators could smuggle incendiary books and pamphlets, along with weapons.

After the Crimean War, it was still possible to amass considerable wealth as shipping picked up and trade returned. Many of the buildings rising from the streets and boulevards of the central district—the old banks, trading firms, and hotels that hide their wedding-cake facades behind plane and horse chestnut trees—were products of the continued growth in the city’s fortunes. A new drumlike, Italianate opera house, still the first old building visible to ships rounding the headlands on a clear day, opened its doors in 1887 on the site of Richelieu’s smaller establishment, which had been destroyed in a fire.

But the mid-century crisis did mark something of a watershed. The era of freewheeling commerce was giving way to a more somber, more turbulent time. The city could no longer take comfort in its being on the sidelines of empire, quietly being itself and making money while the affairs of states and peoples unfolded far from Nikolaevsky Boulevard. Odessans were awakening to the fact that the world mattered to them in ways far removed from wheat prices, the exchange rate for silver rubles, and the new opera premiere.

An urban promenade: Richelieu Street, with a view of the Opera, from a nineteenth-century photograph.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

L
ev Bronstein chalked up his earliest lessons about treachery and manipulation to Odessa, especially his classes at St. Paul’s School on Uspenskaya Street. St. Paul’s was a
realschule
, a secondary school specializing in mathematics, science, and modern languages, rather than history and classical languages as taught in the more traditional, and more prestigious,
gymnasiums
. His parents had sent Bronstein from the family farm in rural Kherson province to Odessa in 1888 to live with a distant relative—a successful Jewish publisher, Moisei Spentzer—and to take advantage of the educational opportunities the city provided.

St. Paul’s had been founded by Lutherans, but its teaching staff was a mix of confessions and nationalities, all teaching in Russian and keeping close tabs on their rambunctious charges. “The percentage of freaks among people in general is very considerable, but it is especially high among teachers,” Bronstein recalled in his memoirs.
¹
He was severely disciplined and suspended on several occasions yet managed to graduate at the top of his class. He took two lessons away from the experience. One was that the city—like the broader empire of which it was a part—was both disorderly and overgoverned, a place at the same time “commercial, multi-racial, loudly colored and noisy” but still “perhaps the most police-ridden city in police-ridden Russia.”
²

The other lesson was that in such a place few people could be trusted. The school’s authorities saw Bronstein as the ringleader of a group of thuggish boys habitually engaged in disrupting classes. He was only fingered, though, because one of his associates informed on him. “These were the groups that resulted from that episode,” he wrote, “the tale-bearers and the envious at one pole, the frank, courageous boys at the other, and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle. These three groups never quite disappeared even during the years that followed. I met them again and again in my life, in the most varied of circumstances.”
³

Bronstein left the city in 1896 and rarely returned. But the political gloss he put on his early experiences led him down the path of the professional revolutionary. Not long after leaving Odessa, he joined the life lessons of St. Paul’s with the political tenets of Marxism. Soon, he was arrested by the tsarist government as a political agitator and exiled to Siberia. He eventually changed his name and dedicated his life—as Leon Trotsky—to stirring up the “neutral, vacillating mass” he first discovered among the uniformed schoolboys, milling about in their tunics and peaked caps, on Uspenskaya Street.

Odessa has always had two undergrounds, a figurative one explored by the future Trotsky and a literal one of caves and passageways. A labyrinth of catacombs wends through the porous stone on which the city rests. Some of the tunnels are natural, while others have been quarried and carved out over the centuries as storage rooms, places of refuge, and hideouts for everyone from truant schoolchildren to prostitutes, political agitators, and partisan guerrillas. The damp limestone crumbles to the touch in the narrow caves that snake for hundreds of miles under the city and its suburbs.

Drop down any courtyard well, Odessans say, and you will find a side tunnel leading to a hideout or smugglers’ den. But Odessa’s limestone underworld was a literal representation of a shadow city that existed alongside the real one, above ground and in plain sight. In the final years of the nineteenth century, the city’s demimonde—a place of criminality, disease, conspiracy, and revolution—became the source of its signature reputation as well as its enduring ills. Its heart lay a short distance from St. Paul’s school, in a neighborhood called Moldavanka.

The district’s name is an oblique reference to the Romanian-speaking Moldovans, an ethnic minority that first came into the city as cattle drovers and workmen. According to some sources, the neighborhood predated the founding of Odessa. It first emerged as the temporary quarters of Moldovans who labored to build the Yeni Dünya fortress under the Ottomans. It was later home to Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks, and others, including sympathizers of Philike Hetairia and refugees who fled the warfare of the 1820s in the Balkans.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Moldavanka held more poor Jews than Moldovans and Bulgarians. It was infamous as a dilapidated den of poverty, cheap booze, and inventive criminality, all set amid the facades of Catholic and Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues and prayer houses. Aggressive child beggars roamed the streets, past milliners and tailors, tinkers and carters. Yiddish-speaking teenage boys ruled the alleyways at night, looking for a brawl to start or a wedding party to crash. (One of them, Yankele Kulachnik, or “Jake the Fist,” later mended his ways and became the great American Yiddish actor Jacob Adler.)
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The district’s Jewish gangsters were known to be kindly neighbors as well as ruthless killers. The police generally stayed away, refraining from pursuing criminals unless they first secured permission from the gangland “kings” who dispensed both justice and cruelty from their leafy courtyards. The line between Moldavanka and the city center—defined by the street known as Staroportofrankov skaya, or Old Free Port Street, the inland boundary of the nineteenth-century duty-free zone—continued to be seen as something of a frontier well into the Soviet era. Even today you know you have moved to the wrong side of the tracks when you cross it—into a big village of acacias and catalpas, where grapevines cover low, tumble-down houses and the street life seems a little rougher than on the wide avenues of the center.

Most sea and river ports have well-earned reputations as havens for shysters, and cities as diverse as Naples, London, and Rio de Janeiro, at various points in their history, developed criminal classes famous for their conniving ways and brutal behavior. But Odessa’s underworld produced a collective pride in the seamier side of the city and its immediate outskirts—a way of living woven into the very identity of the city, to outsiders as well as to Odessans themselves. As the nineteenth century raced toward its end, the city’s dangerous underworld became one of the deepest and most enduring features of its character. In the alleyways and overcrowded houses, in the wharf area and the dust-choked neighborhoods, Odessa developed the Russian Empire’s greatest collection of criminals, delinquents, and creative crooks, men and women who managed to raise the vocation of the lowly
goniff
—an ingenious schemer and artful dodger, in Yiddish—to a profession. Underground Odessa was where some of the city’s most distinctive qualities, as well as its most tragic ones, were forged.

Two portraits from the Odessa streets by the photographer Rudolf Feodorovets, 1860s-70s.
Pavel Khoroshilov Collection, courtesy of Nic Iljine.

W
ARNINGS ABOUT
the wily ways of Odessans go back to the beginning of the city itself. “Having spoken of the productive population of Odessa, it still remains to say a word about a disagreeable element common to all new towns,” reported one of the city’s earliest historians, Gabriel de Castelnau, “that is, the arrival of adventurers in swarms.”
⁵
Even the comte de Langéron, once he had finished his tenure as governor-general, complained that the city was congenitally unruly, containing as it did “the dregs of Russia and Europe.”
⁶

Its natural partner across the sea—Constantinople—was a hub of illicit commerce. Ottoman officials imposed exorbitant duties while European governments managed to wrench lopsided commercial privileges from the sultan. Sailors and merchants traveling through the Ottoman capital often found little changed once they reached the other side of the Black Sea. As one saying went, cheats learned their profession in Pera—the medieval headquarters of Genoese merchants, situated on the heights overlooking old Constantinople—but practiced it in Odessa. In both cities, bribes, baksheeshes, and blandishments could be negotiated in a version of Italian, a mainstay of the dockside culture of stevedores and ship captains.

The city’s outward prosperity through much of the nineteenth century was the catalyst for venality and thievery, but the real fuel of Odessa’s
goniff
reputation was its shadow world of deep and abiding poverty. Beyond the fashionable central streets near Nikolaevsky Boulevard, Odessa harbored shantytowns where Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other inhabitants plied their trades. Living in overcrowded courtyards or ramshackle huts, they were usually the first and most vulnerable victims of the downturn in the grain trade or a shift in the exchange rate. The city’s population increased by 3,677 percent from 1800 to the 1890s, a figure astronomically higher than for other rapidly growing imperial cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Riga.
⁷
By the time of the 1897 census—the first truly comprehensive population count in the empire’s history—just over 400,000 people were crammed into the old central district and the close-in neighborhoods of Peresyp to the north, Slobodka-Romanovka to the northwest, and Moldavanka to the west. That figure would swell beyond 650,000 by the First World War.

With the magnetic pull of paying jobs in the port, many people broke their formal ties to the countryside but dragged along with them many of the ways of the village. “Could we even grace with the name of town the place where we then were and the streets we beheld?” asked a French traveler in 1838. “It was a great open space without houses, filled with carts, and oxen rolling in the dust, in company with a mob of Russian and Polish peasants, all sleeping together in the sun.”
⁸
In fact, the alleged contrasts between Odessa and the most backward parts of the Pale of Settlement could often be superficial. In the shtetl, a beggar eats his crust of bread in gloom, quipped the Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher-Sforim, but in Odessa he eats the same crust to the music of a hurdy-gurdy.
⁹

Early on, the city developed the central trait that visitors to the developing world know today: the extreme costliness of poor-quality service. Public conveyance might be accomplished in a closed carriage, but more often travelers were required to make their way through the dust and mud on a horse-drawn droshky, a rough contraption consisting of little more than four wheels joined by a leather-covered board.
¹⁰
Even then, the passenger might find that the driver had charged a multiple of the normal rate.
¹¹
When he arrived at his hotel, an establishment guidebooks might describe as decent and fashionable would require that guests provide their own linen and bedding, offering only a room and an empty bedstead at an exorbitant rate.
¹²
Still, the constant stream of visitors to the city—as seamen,
chumaks
, runaway serfs, European travelers, and summering Russian nobles—helped knit its many districts and social classes into an economy of hierarchical dependence, despite their mixed origins and transient habits.

In the late 1890s, the American consul in Odessa reported one emblematic instance of Odessa’s reputation as an oddball haven, the case of a man known as Whirlwind. A Lakota Sioux by origin, Whirlwind—the apparent translation of his given name, Hampa—arrived in Odessa in unusual circumstances. He had been part of a traveling Wild West show on tour through the Russian Empire, an Indian whose job was to be routinely chased around arenas by a herd of American cowboys. His career was proceeding well, enabled by the new steamship connections that ran between the major Black Sea ports and the Russian susceptibility to the alien allure of cowboys and Indians. But after seven years on the road, things began to sour. The availability of cheap vodka took its toll. When the company stopped for a performance in Sevastopol, Whirlwind was discharged for drunkenness, left penniless and utterly alone.