Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

Towering and auburn-haired, Potemkin had been present at the advent of Catherine’s reign, first attracting the empress’s attentions in the early 1760s. He was then a dashing figure in an imperial guards regiment, she the ambitious consort of a boorish and ineffective tsar, Peter III. When Catherine engineered a coup to depose her husband, Potemkin joined the ranks of those loyal to the new sovereign. As the troops prepared to march on the Peterhof Palace outside St. Petersburg, Potemkin boldly edged his horse over to Catherine’s position. The two exchanged friendly words, and the empress laughed at the skittishness of his horse.

  He soon parlayed this familiarity into a position as gentleman of the bedchamber—at this point, merely a courtly rank rather than a profession. He could now engineer further encounters with Catherine in the mazelike corridors of the Winter Palace. At every meeting, Potemkin would fall to his knees, declare his undying love, and rashly kiss the hand of one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe.2

  Some of the tales of Catherine’s sexual proclivities are apocryphal, but she was clearly a ruler who enjoyed the company of men—intimately, energetically, and not always serially. Under Catherine’s protection, Potemkin received a post in the empire’s fighting forces during the first Russo-Turkish war of her reign. He returned from the frontlines a hero, bearing the title of lieutenant general and basking in the glory of citadels captured, Ottoman armies routed, and new lands acquired for the empress, with whom he had corresponded, off and on, throughout the conflict.

  Around the time the empire was formulating its peace treaty with the Ottomans in 1774, Potemkin became Catherine’s lover and court favorite, a position that gave him unimpeded access to the empress’s bedchamber and, by extension, to the affairs of state. There were other favorites both before and after him, and Potemkin’s signature injury—the disfiguring loss of an eye—may well have come about from an encounter with one of the men he shunted aside, the obstinate and philosophical Grigory Orlov, father to Catherine’s illegitimate son. But Potemkin accomplished something that none of his rivals quite managed: to build a relationship of eroticism and genuine affection—sealed in what may have been a secret marriage—while also making himself indispensable to the running of an expanding empire.

  Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, Potemkin became the chief architect of Russia’s breakneck development of the southern borderlands. He remained in this position long after he had ceased to be Catherine’s preferred lover. He created new naval arsenals along the coast, including the port at Sevastopol, which even today remains the seat of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Germans, Albanians, Greeks, and others were given special privileges to establish farming or trading communities on the steppe and in seaside towns and river ports such as Kherson and Nikolaev.

  The regions that fell to Catherine’s armies were gathered into a new administrative unit known as Novorossiya, or “New Russia.” Like New Spain, New France, and New England, New Russia was an experiment in imperial implantation. Colonists were sent to explore and settle the virgin territory. Mapmakers and geographers were dispatched from the learned Academy in St. Petersburg to catalog the natural wealth and exotic natives. Vast tracts of land—of uncertain boundaries and indefinite content—were bestowed upon stockinged and befrilled aristocrats who could now add an exotic marquisate or baronetcy to their list of honors. “[T]hey have been vaguely informed of their having been distributed among several lords,” a new landowner remarked of the indigenous Tatar shepherds, “but…they do not exactly understand what it means.”3

  To illustrate—and market—the transformation of the prairie and coastlands, Potemkin organized a massive display of imperial pomp in the late winter and spring of 1787. In the style of Cleopatra, Catherine the Great promenaded south from St. Petersburg, across the Eurasian flatlands, and down to the Dnieper River, where her retinue embarked on the waterway that meanders across Ukraine toward the Black Sea. A convoy of fourteen carriages and 184 sledges carried dignitaries over the snowbound steppe. Once they reached Kiev, a flotilla of seven large galleys, more than eighty other boats, and three thousand crewmen and guards ferried them down the Dnieper toward their final destination, the old palace of the Tatar khan at Bakhchisaray in Crimea.

  The guests comprised a veritable who’s who of European nobility, from assorted princes and counts to the king of Poland and the emperor of Austria. The staterooms on board the galleys were outfitted with Chinese silk and Oriental-style sofas. Every time one of the guests exited or returned, a small orchestra of twelve musicians signaled the departure or arrival. Once in Bakhchisaray, the guests were assigned to the living quarters once occupied by the last of the Crimean Tatar khans and his harem, a treat that thrilled even the most worldly travelers.

  For the delectation of the entourage and the thousands of spectators, Potemkin organized delights and surprises along the route. He installed English gardens on the virgin steppe, complete with mature, transplanted trees. Huge tents, garlanded and pearl-studded, served as dining halls. Regiments of Cossacks and loyal Tatars paraded before Catherine to pay homage. Silver-clad horsemen from the Caucasus Mountains thundered past in feats of martial skill. Lanterns shone from trees while bonfires lit up the night sky. Near the city of Kremenchug on the Dnieper River, a magnificent re-creation of Vesuvius rained down fire and brimstone on the peaceful prairie.4

  Although masterful, Potemkin’s stagecraft could not cover up the fact that the new lands were, in reality, something other than the wondrous paradise that now seemed to stretch out before the European heads of state, ambassadors, and aristocrats in Catherine’s retinue. This part of New Russia had only recently passed from Ottoman to Russian control. The peasants and herders who inhabited the flatlands, hill country, and coastline were awed more by the flamboyance of the procession than by the freedom and rational governance that the Russians now promised. As one of the European nobles on the journey, Charles-Joseph, prince de Ligne, wrote at the time, “The empress, who cannot run on foot as we do, is made to believe that towns…are finished, whilst they often are towns without streets, streets without houses, and houses without roofs, doors, or windows.”5 Potemkin did not construct fully operational, idealized peasant villages, in the style of his contemporary, Marie Antoinette. But his enthusiasm for painting the southern prairie in the best-possible light did produce the derisory label “Potemkin villages” to describe the diverting entertainments, barely functional towns, and orchestrated displays of loyalty he created for his Matushka, the imperial “beloved mother,” as he called Catherine in his most intimate letters, using a common term of endearment for the sovereign.

  After tooling down the Dnieper, visiting Crimea, and lodging in the palace at Bakhchisaray, the Russian delegation returned to St. Petersburg, leaving the steppe much as it had been before. During the voyage downriver, a squadron of Ottoman ships had been drawn up at the mouth of the Dnieper. Their mission was not to prevent the Russians’ descent to the sea but rather to provide a bellicose counterdemonstration to Potemkin’s lavish parade. “This I consider as a pretty prognostic of a pretty war with which I hope we shall soon be gratified,” enthused the prince de Ligne.6 He was not to be disappointed.

  IN EARLY AUGUST of 1787 the Ottoman government presented an ultimatum to Russia demanding the immediate return of Crimea, recognition of Georgia—an Orthodox Christian kingdom in the Caucasus—as a protectorate of the sultan, and the right to routinely search Russian vessels passing through the Bosphorus. The terms were ludicrous from Catherine’s point of view. After all, the entire point of Potemkin’s grand journey had been to inspect Crimea and other lands that she now considered her own. Moreover, the right to travel freely into the Black Sea under a Russian flag had been secured in the last peace treaty, signed nearly a decade and a half earlier.

  When Russia rejected the ultimatum, the Ottomans declared war. Both empires raced to ready their army and navy for assaults on strategic choke points on the estuaries of the Bug and Dnieper rivers, as well as along the Dniester River and on
the delta of the Danube. Fortresses were resupplied. Potemkin took personal command of an army of more than a hundred thousand men—a motley collection of noble officers, Cossacks, peasants impressed into a lifetime of military service, and even a hastily assembled cavalry of Jewish lancers.7 Catherine’s triumph in the earlier war drew numerous soldiers of fortune to her cause in the second. Some were noble and well bred, like the prince de Ligne. Others were lowborn adventure-seekers. The war provided a chance not only to serve a successful Christian sovereign in the Orient, but also to profit from the wealth that the newly opened Black Sea seemed to offer. Both these inducements appealed to one famous mercenary: John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the American Revolution.

  His work for the newly independent United States now finished, Jones traveled eastward to serve as commander of a Russian squadron in engagements with the Ottoman navy. Jones had made his reputation in America through a series of successful attacks on British warships; he is today revered as the founding father of the U.S. Navy, his remains encased in a lavish shrine in Annapolis, Maryland. But Potemkin was unimpressed. “This man is unfit to lead: he’s slow, lacks zeal and is perhaps even afraid of the Turks,” he wrote to Catherine. “He’s new at this business, has neglected his entire crew and is good for nothing: not knowing the language, he can neither give nor comprehend orders.”8

  Jones had been a brilliantly successful captain in the Atlantic, but his skills were essentially those of a pirate: the ability to lead a small contingent of men aboard a single ship in order to confront a single adversary. His abilities as a commander in a more complex struggle—especially among the haughty, intrigue-ridden, and multilingual European officer corps into which he had placed himself—were questionable. “Jones was very famous as a corsair, but I fear that at the head of a squadron he is rather out of place,” wrote Charles of Nassau-Siegen, another foreign officer in Catherine’s employ.9 Jones reacted petulantly to any perceived slight from his aristocratic brother-officers and spent much of his time in Russia arguing over rank and chain of command. “Never, probably, did any commanding officer commence service under circumstances more painful,” Jones complained. “My firmness and integrity have supported me against those detestable snares laid by my enemies for my ruin.”10

  Whatever reputation Jones managed to salvage from his Russia years was in large part owed to the good judgment, operational savvy, and decorum of one of his lieutenants, another mercenary named José de Ribas. During the war with the Ottomans, de Ribas proved far more adept than the storied American captain at securing his fortune on the Russo-Turkish frontier, as well as his place in history as Odessa’s true founding father. His mixed background and improvised life were emblematic of the city he helped to establish.

  JOSÉ PASCUAL DOMINGO 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.”11 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.12

  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.”13 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.14

  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, a
ccused 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.”15 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.”