Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (4 page)

J
OSÉ
P
ASCUAL
D
OMINGO
de Ribas y Boyons—known to Russians as Osip Mikhailovich Deribas—was born in Naples in June of 1749, the son of the Spanish consul and his aristocratic Irish wife. A port city of breathtaking views, nestled in a natural amphitheater before the brooding cone of Mount Vesuvius, Naples had for centuries been a pawn in political struggles among Spain, France, and Austria. In the 1730s the city at last became the seat of an independent kingdom, ruled by a Bourbon dynasty and momentarily safe from the machinations of other foreign empires.

Naples soon embarked on an era that would see its greatest flowering. The Bourbons patronized the arts and restored medieval and Renaissance-era buildings to their former splendor. But beneath it all swirled an underworld of urban destitution, cultish saint-worship, corruption, and creative debauchery, all surrounded by a benighted countryside that Jesuit priests dismissed as “the Indies over there.”
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Naples was “the most beautiful country in the universe inhabited by the most idiotic species,” quipped the Marquis de Sade on a visit to the city when de Ribas was in his early twenties.
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Whether it was to escape the gilded squalor of Naples or to seek adventure abroad, de Ribas found himself in the position of many upwardly mobile men in the late eighteenth century: looking longingly to the east, toward Russia, as the next great opportunity. Like John Paul Jones, he must have found the chance to gain a military commission, serve a legendary empress, and fight the infidel Turk a singular inducement to decamp to Catherine’s domains.

De Ribas had served a short stint in the Neapolitan army in the late 1760s, and in 1772 he secured a post as a junior officer at the close of Catherine’s first war with the sultan. Afterward, he remained on the margins of the empress’s court. He was one of the many young men hoping to gain the favor of a monarch who relished her role as defender of Christendom against the supposed barbarities of Ottoman rule. It was a role Catherine embraced. “If you had similar neighbors in Piedmont or in Spain, who brought you annually plague and famine…,” she is reported to have said of the Ottomans, blaming them for a host of natural ills on the Black Sea steppe, “would you find it agreeable that I should take them under my protection? I believe then you would indeed treat me as a barbarian.”
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The men she welcomed into her court shared that vision, seeing themselves as crusaders against the cultural and religious darkness—Islamic, despotic, and seminomadic—looming to the south. In St. Petersburg they also found themselves in one of the great centers of Enlightenment-era culture, with heated conversations on liberal philosophy, rapier-sharp witticisms delivered in conversational French, and games of whist that extended late into the night.

The difficulties of liberating and remaking the southern borderlands would have been familiar to a Neapolitan mercenary. After all, de Ribas had seen both the triumphs and the failures of perpetual reformism in his Italian hometown, itself both provincial and southern. From his brief wartime experience, he was also familiar with fighting on the stormy Black Sea, the sweltering plains of southern Russia, and the swampy estuaries—or limans—of rivers such as the Bug and Dnieper. When a new war came in 1787, he was assigned a task that must have been particularly unwelcome: liaising between Potemkin’s headquarters in the field and the unit commanded by the hapless Jones. Still, it was a chance to join in the opening salvos of a war rather than trail in at its conclusion, as he had done before.

De Ribas was present at one of the most important and most gruesome episodes of the Russo-Turkish conflict, an engagement in which he served alongside the disoriented and indecisive John Paul Jones. In midsummer 1788, de Ribas was Potemkin’s liaison officer with Jones at the Battle of the Liman, an encounter on the Dnieper estuary before the ramparts of two fortresses, Ochakov and Kinburn. The former was held by the Ottomans, the latter by the Russians; the twin outposts faced each other across a narrow water inlet connecting the Dnieper with the Black Sea. Jones was given command of a detachment of oar-powered boats outfitted with small cannons. Their task was not to engage Ottoman warships head-on but to lure them into the shallows, where they would be stuck fast in the mud and offer easy targets to Russia’s heavy guns and incendiary bombs. “Humanity recoils with indignation and horror from seeing so many wretched creatures perish in the flames,” Jones wrote to de Ribas during the fighting.
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The senior officers bickered and prevaricated, but the combination of overwhelming firepower and difficult sailing conditions led to a Russian victory. More important, the battle paved the way for the Russian taking of Ochakov in December, an even more horrific slaughter that produced so many Turkish dead that the Russians simply piled the bodies on the frozen estuary in massive blood-soaked pyramids. The victory, hard won and merciless, was repeated over the next two years against other garrisons farther to the west. Ottoman positions along the Black Sea coast fell in succession after grinding sieges. Brilliant seaborne maneuvers underscored the might of Russia’s newly built fleet of sailing ships, bristling with cannons.

Despite his role in these events, Jones ended his Russian career in ignominy. After numerous run-ins with Nassau-Siegen and other aristocratic officers, he was transferred from the southern fleet by Potemkin and returned to St. Petersburg. With the war still raging, he was drummed out of Russia altogether, accused of forcibly deflowering a twelve-year-old girl. His defense was not to disown the affair—a matter usually glossed over by American historians—but rather to deny that it was rape. He admitted in a statement to prosecutors that he had “often frolicked” with the girl for a small cash payment, but that “I can assure you with absolute certainty that I did not despoil her of her virginity.”
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He died in penury in Paris a few years later, a broken man in a faded uniform, still pestering foreign diplomats with plans for new naval campaigns in faraway lands.

De Ribas, by contrast, proved to be a supremely capable, loyal, and decorous adjutant. He worked assiduously to soothe relations between Jones and the European officers, especially Nassau-Siegen, as well as with Potemkin. He dealt with cases of insubordination and drunkenness by talking firmly with the offenders rather than exacting immediate punishment. His performance was noted and rewarded. Potemkin personally transferred him from the navy and placed him in charge of an army detachment under the operational command of Count Ivan Gudovich, one of the most decorated and accomplished generals in the southern theater.

In Gudovich’s outfit, de Ribas was made commanding officer of a battalion of Nikolaevsky grenadiers, an elite unit founded by Potemkin himself in honor of St. Nicholas, one of Russia’s patron saints. The battalion was composed of just over eight hundred men, including soldiers from three different Cossack regiments. In the summer of 1789, Russian forces were massing for a new series of attacks on Ottoman positions along the sea’s northwest coast.

Nearly forty Ottoman vessels lay at anchor offshore from the village of Khadjibey, including two large multimasted warships, or
chebeks
, propelled by both sail and oar. They were the backup force for the small garrison now quartered in the village. Over the years, the Ottomans had improved the fortifications there, adding a stone-walled citadel and a few outbuildings. The village grew to supply the needs of the troops, while Tatar nomads still wintered their flocks on the grasslands beyond. However, the diminutive buildings hardly earned the portentous name the Ottomans gave their outpost: Yeni Dünya, or “new world.”

That August, Russian troops under Gudovich and de Ribas approached with caution. The garrison seemed quiet. But the wide bay that opened before the Yeni Dünya facility provided a safe anchor for what remained of the Ottoman fleet, and with the considerable Ottoman firepower located within cannon shot of the coast, the Russian commanders were understandably cautious about how to proceed. “I’ll decide how to bring [the Russian fleet] out and how to approach Khadjibey by land so as to seize it and to provide support for our vessels there,” Potemkin wrote to the empress from the field. “This matter requires…great skill and bravery. Placing my hope in God, I have called upon His help and shall try to entirely surround the enemy.” The challenges were taking their toll on his health. “My piles, however, are giving me a bad headache,” he concluded in his field report.
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Finally, after ordering a well-planned reconnaissance, in September of 1789 Potemkin learned almost by surprise that de Ribas’s grenadiers had marched up to the walls of Yeni Dünya and claimed it for Catherine. It was, in fact, one of the great non-battles of the war. The entire affair lasted no more than half an hour. The Ottoman garrison, a few-dozen startled soldiers and their senior officer, surrendered on the spot. The ships at sea remained silent. A few days later, a force of some twenty-six Ottoman ships-of-the-line—large-scale fighting vessels—appeared off the coast and fired some cannonballs ashore. But after a few engagements of this sort, the ships retired. Their captains seemed satisfied to have secured a few tall tales of their heroically lame defense of a small fortress against underwhelming odds.
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Meanwhile, the Russians set about surveying what they had conquered almost by happenstance. There was little to report. Khadjibey consisted of a few barracks and five or six small houses. One of them, slightly better kept than the rest, served as the residence of Ahmed Pasha, the garrison commander. The Yeni Dünya citadel was protected by a few crenellated walls and towers, but it had no ditch or other obstacle to prevent the walls from being stormed.
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It was not much on which to rest a career, and de Ribas himself never claimed that the Battle of Khadjibey was anything more than good fortune married to the lack of resolve of the Ottoman troops and naval squadron. He would go on to serve in a much more illustrious capacity. The following year he was instrumental in the taking of several Ottoman strongholds on the Dnieper and Danube rivers, battles whose credit even the vainglorious Potemkin was willing to distribute. “I cannot praise Major-General Ribas enough,” Potemkin wrote to his empress. “Along with his excellent bravery, he is filled with unspeakable fervor”—a word that appears frequently in Potemkin’s descriptions of the Neapolitan officer.
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De Ribas was soon returned to naval service and given command of his own oared flotilla. In perhaps the most important single engagement of the war, he helped plan the attack on the key Ottoman fortress at Izmail, a victory that secured the Danube delta for Russia. He eventually rose to the rank of admiral (bypassing his erstwhile superior, the disgraced Rear Admiral Jones) and took command of the entire Black Sea fleet. Even Lord Byron, who featured the Russo-Turkish conflict in his epic
Don Juan
, recorded de Ribas’s role in the war:

E
VEN AFTER THE GORY
and glorious conquest of fortresses from Ochakov to Izmail, the diminutive Khadjibey remained on de Ribas’s mind. At the end of the war, the village became formally a part of the Russian Empire, relinquished by the Ottomans in the peace treaty of 1792. The site had gone overlooked for centuries, but it mattered now, at the close of the eighteenth century, in ways that generations of Greeks, Italians, Tatars, and Ottomans could not have foreseen.

Khadjibey and the fortified Yeni Dünya were situated near the mouths of several major rivers: the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, and Bug. A detachment of infantry or dragoons stationed there could conceivably control the mouths of the widest, most navigable rivers in eastern Europe. In the interior, nomads were losing out to settled farmers. The village was a natural gateway to the herds of cattle and sheep grazing along the southern rivers, to the orchards and farms situated in the inland regions of Podolia and Volhynia, and even to the distant trade fairs of Poland and the Baltic Sea. With appropriate planning and construction, the wide bay could house a serviceable harbor. Given the comparatively mild climate, ships that anchored there would have a nearly ice-free winter, something that virtually no other Russian port at the time could boast. Docks had already been created farther to the east, in the cities of Kherson and Sevastopol, but neither of those ports provided the immediate access to the open sea and the link with established overland trade routes that Khadjibey seemed to offer.

Shortly after the war, de Ribas approached the empress Catherine with a plan. The old garrison town could be transformed into the jewel of her new southern possessions. With enough money and de Ribas’s notorious fervor, a purposeful city could rise like a beacon at the edge of the sea. The greatness of her reign, evident in the new edifices of St. Petersburg and in the European customs of her court, would have a southern exposure.

Catherine was evidently taken with the idea. On May 27, 1794, she issued an edict to de Ribas recognizing the “profitable situation of Khadjibey on the Black Sea and the advantages connected therewith.” She ordered its development as a commercial and shipping center and personally named de Ribas the chief administrator—the
glavny nachal’nik
—of the project. “As Our trade in these lands flourishes, so the city will quickly fill with inhabitants,” pronounced the empress.
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