Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (20 page)

Babel’s ambitions were those of many Jewish men in Odessa: to complete his education and then go into one of the few fields open to him, such as business, journalism, or the vague but vital vocation known as the intelligentsia. Anti-Jewish quotas in many educational institutions, including the local university, blocked Babel’s admission. He enrolled instead in a technical school in Kiev. From there, he eventually moved to Petrograd, using his Odessa wiles to avoid the police since he lacked a residency permit. He soon embarked on a modest career as a writer of short stories and essays.

Petrograd was a city in ferment. More than a decade earlier, while Odessa was being terrorized by anti-Jewish gangs, the city had been the site of a failed uprising that nevertheless managed to wrench some liberalizing concessions from Tsar Nicholas II. Babel found himself swept up in the political fervor that swirled around the imperial capital, its name now changed, through the passions of war, from the overly Germanic “Sankt-Peterburg.” He had come under the patronage of the major leftist writer and editor Maxim Gorky, who published a few of his early stories. With that entrée into the world of underground socialists and surreptitious printing presses, Babel became part of the earliest generation of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.

But his true introduction to the realities of revolutionary life came from the Cossacks. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the former Russian Empire remained divided between supporters of the new government and their many opponents. For the next four years, the territory of the old empire was scarred by mobile warfare among a host of rival factions—Reds, Whites, nationalists, and local peasants intent mainly on protecting their homes and fields from marauders.

Babel was an early version of an embedded journalist. He was assigned to the detachment of Semyon Budenny, the legendary commander of Cossack cavalry fighting on the Bolshevik side in the western borderlands of the defunct empire. He was technically a correspondent for the horse troops’ in-house newspaper,
Krasny kavalerist
(Red Cavalryman), assigned to report on the daily life of soldiers fighting for Soviet power against the forces of imperialism and reaction. But the casual violence of irregular warfare—with villages burned and peasants displaced, often with little justification except the boredom of the soldiers who did the burning and displacing—found expression in what would become Babel’s greatest literary achievement: the short-story collection
Red Cavalry
, first published in 1926.

“Babel tells old wives’ tales, fumbles in old women’s secondhand underwear, narrates in a horror-stricken old woman’s voice how a hungry Red Army soldier took a chicken and a loaf of bread; he invents things that never happened, and throws dirt at the best Communist commanders. He fantasizes and simply lies.”
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That was the unequivocal judgment of Budenny himself, the enabling muse of Babel’s most creative period as a writer in the terrifying transition from tsarism to Bolshevism. The old cavalryman was right in one sense. It was precisely the gossip and garbage of the civil war experience—an appreciation for which he had cultivated in the muddy streets and steamy courtyards of Moldavanka—that Babel transformed into stories of delicate insight.

The characters who populate the stories are pastiches of people he met in the cavalry ranks and in the villages and shtetls far to the north of his hometown. But many are also versions of Babel himself, people swept up in purposeless violence, spinning in the middle of a revolution that threatened to burn itself out before anything great could be achieved. There is old Gedali, the Jewish pawnbroker, who would gladly trade the message of Bolshevism for “an International of good people.” There is the unpredictable and empty-hearted platoon commander Afonka Bida, ruthless in his prosecution of the war but oddly sentimental about his horse.

Over time the stories’ first-person narrator—a writer like Babel—finds his own heart callused and bruised by the experience of war. Churches and synagogues are smashed. People are run down on horseback. Looted clothes and valuables produce military units that look less like an army and more like a wandering, apocalyptic carnival. The narrator is as drawn to the broad chests and studied swagger of the Cossacks as he is repelled by their actions, a horrified witness unable to turn his eyes away from the atrocity.

Babel was a man of the borderlands who spent his early life moving between worlds: Jewish and Russian, tsarist and Bolshevik, army and artistic. At the end of the civil war, he returned off and on to Odessa, where he worked on another of his major literary works, the series of short-stories later collected as
Odessa Tales
, a riveting evocation of the crooks, schemers, prostitutes, and bent cops of Jewish Moldavanka. The stories are still a magnificent introduction to the cavaliers of the city’s criminal underworld, people who are merciless when exploiting an easy mark or punishing a rival, but who can also be disarmingly nice to old women and charming to romantic interests. Today, Babel’s writing is often approached through his Odessa stories, but to do so is to risk mistaking dark elegies for exercises in light nostalgia. Where
Red Cavalry
was a work of searing reportage, a fictional version of experiences that were still fresh and raw when they were published, the
Odessa Tales
is one of twilight recollection. The Odessa that he evoked had already faded into history.

One of Babel’s lasting legacies is the fact that when people think of Odessa, it is fictional characters—not the real-life builders of the city—who come most readily to mind. The mobster kingpin Benya Krik is the archetypal inhabitant of this imaginary city. He becomes “king” of Moldavanka by extorting money from business owners and bringing a kind of rough justice to the more disorderly thugs who run the neighborhood. He is the kind of person who can be kind to widows and cruel to subordinates who disappoint, and do it all in a chocolate-colored jacket, cream pants, and raspberry ankle boots, seated behind the wheel of a red car whose horn plays the opening march from
Pagliacci
.

Benya’s Odessa—that is, Babel’s—is something of a community, one built on theft, prostitution, and murder, but a community nevertheless. There is a kind of honor among thieves, and no one knew its contours better than a writer from the city’s most squalid and storied neighborhood, a place that its inhabitants—like the windswept and gritty port as a whole—saw as home. In the stories, it is sometimes hard to tell whether Babel is writing with a smile or a sneer. “Moldavanka, our generous mother,” he wrote in one passage, “a life crowded with suckling babies, drying rags, and conjugal nights filled with big-city chic and soldierly tirelessness.”
¹⁰
But that was precisely the point. You didn’t quite get Odessa unless it drew you in and repelled you at the same time.

People like Benya Krik were already passing from the scene by the time Babel first put pen to paper, and that is one of the central messages of the
Odessa Tales
. In one of the later stories, “Froim Grach,” which was not published until long after Babel’s death, an old gangland boss who claimed to control a criminal army of “forty-thousand Odessa thugs” is executed at the hands of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. “You’re killing off all the lions!” the boss says minutes before his death. “And you know what you’ll be left with if you keep it up! You’ll be left with shit!”
¹¹

Babel understood that his characters had finite lives. He was writing both about an imperial Odessa that used to exist and about another kind of city, a Soviet one, that was in the process of becoming. In one of the screenplays he wrote based on the Odessa stories, for the 1926 silent film
Benya Krik
, the kingpin himself falls prey to Soviet power. The gangster king of Moldavanka ends up as just another bandit. He is shot by Bolshevik authorities, one more remnant of the old regime erased in the creation of the new order.

If Babel’s Benya Krik was a transitional figure in the making of Soviet Odessa, new characters were rushing in to take his place. Their essential qualities were flexibility and an ability to bend their necks to the overwhelming power of the state. Benya had the old tsarist police on the run (or, more frequently, on the take) and ruled his neighborhood with little regard for the niceties of formal law. His successors knew how to deal with the new power, softly and carefully, without the bluster and bravado of Benya’s generation. Other fictional characters emerged as the instantly recognizable Odessans of the new era. The writing team of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov created one of the most memorable, the essential entrepreneur of the easy deal, Ostap Bender—fast-talking, self-assured, and just Jewish enough to be acceptable to Russian readers. Unlike Benya, however, Ostap always shaved his schemes to fit within the confines of the law. “I’m no cherub. I don’t have wings. But I do honor the legislative code,” he says in Ilf and Petrov’s picaresque novel
The Golden Calf
(1931).

That might well have been Odessa’s informal motto after the advent of Soviet power. Good-natured criminality, a southern sense of laissez-aller, and a secular, modernized version of Jewishness were part of the city’s heritage. To it were added the universal aspirations of Soviet Communism, the cult of the worker, and a talent for bending one’s ambitions to the dictates of an overweening state. The core visual representation of this new world was created by a director who made Odessa into the unlikely birthplace of revolution and turned Vorontsov’s “monstrous staircase” into a piece of film history.

A
FOREIGN DIPLOMAT
who traveled by car all the way from Moscow in the 1930s reported that, beyond Kiev, roads reduced to earthen tracks and short stretches of rough, granite-paved highway. Small hotels were available along the route, but they were invariably swarming with flies. It was easy to lose your way because of the lack of signage, and even locals seemed uncertain about how to reach the sea.

When he arrived in Odessa, he was told there were no rooms available in the grand old Hotel London, one of the main buildings along the seaward heights—at least until he displayed his diplomatic passport and demanded accommodation. The only things that made the diplomat feel he was in a remotely well-connected city were the small group of American tourists he found complaining loudly in the hotel’s restaurant and the fact that nearly everyone he met in the city, on his reckoning, was Jewish.
¹²

What he missed was that Odessa was already being transformed, root and branch, from an imperial city into a new, Soviet one. Shortly after the Bolshevik conquest, old streets were renamed in honor of heroes of the revolution and civil war. Imperial symbols were pulled down and replaced with the hammer and sickle. The opera house staged spectacles lionizing the workers’ triumph over tsarist oppression. The bodies of Count and Countess Vorontsov were exhumed from their crypts in Preobrazhensky Cathedral and removed to a local cemetery. The cathedral was then razed and its marble facings used to outfit a nearby school, the old god of tsarist tradition and hierarchy now unfit for an era of progress and egalitarianism. As the site of one of the iconic episodes in the Bolshevik Revolution’s own prehistory—the disorders of 1905—Odessa occupied a special place in the emerging myth-making of the Soviet state.

Today it is almost impossible to separate our understanding of 1905 from the way in which the events were mythologized twenty years later. All of the key images, in fact, come from the skillful hands of one man, Sergei Eisenstein, the master of early Soviet cinematography. Through his 1925 silent film
Battleship Potemkin
, Odessa became the tocsin that heralded the coming of revolution, ground zero for the emergence of triumphant Bolshevism, and by extension the truest birthplace of the Soviet Union.

In late June of 1905, the tsar’s steel-hulled battleship
Potemkin
—named for the great eighteenth-century prince and field marshal—had left port in Crimea to engage in firing exercises in the Black Sea. Conditions on board were dire. The beating of naval conscripts by noncommissioned officers was common. Food was in short supply. When a ration of meat was found to be crawling with maggots, the crew refused to eat and gathered on the quarterdeck to display their disgust.

Beyond that point, however, Eisenstein’s version of events departed from history. In his film, a contingent of marines is called out to restore order. The sailors rush to their fellow crewmen and urge them not to shoot. The marines hesitate, and a rebellion is born. The mutineers run through the ship, grabbing everyone on board with officers’ insignia on their summer uniforms. Some try to hide below decks or plead with the sailors to stand down. Others are thrown overboard. The
Potemkin
then sets sail for Odessa. From the topmast, the red flag of freedom waves in place of the naval ensign.

In the city, workers, peasants, and seamen gather on the cliffs and in the docklands. The body of the mutiny’s ringleader, shot by a treacherous officer, is placed on the quayside, an informal lying in state for a martyr of the revolution. Among the starched collars and felt hats of the bourgeois onlookers, a provocateur yells out, “
Bei zhidov!
”—“Let’s bash the yids!”—the battle cry of pogrom-makers since the 1870s. But the citizens refuse to respond to this diversion. Fighting the capitalist and imperialist oppressor, not beating up on their fellow citizens, is hailed as the common task of the emboldened masses. The mutiny has become a revolution.

All of this, however, was a work of purposive imagination. The real
Potemkin
mutiny ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The seamen steamed hopefully into Odessa but lost their nerve once the ship arrived. They failed to take advantage of a general strike then in progress in the city. Public protests that had filled the tree-lined streets soon fizzled, and the city’s revolutionaries slunk back into the shadows. The crew issued periodic proclamations to the workers of the world to join with them against the evils of tsarist autocracy, but in the end, even the crew’s enthusiasm waned. The mutineers sailed down the coast to the Romanian city of Constan
a, where they surrendered to Romanian authorities. Some of them were arrested and sent back to Russia, where they were tried and hanged. Others remained behind and made new lives abroad. Until the late 1980s, visitors to a small fish-and-chips shop in Dublin could hear the proprietor, an old veteran named Ivan Beshoff, regale them with memories of the revolt that paved the way for a revolution.