Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  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.16

  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.17

  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.18

  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.19

  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:

  But the stone bastion still kept up its fire,

  Where the chief pacha calmly held his post:

  Some twenty times he made the Russ retire,

  And baffled the assaults of all their host;

  At length he condescended to inquire

  If yet the city’s rest were won or lost;

  And being told the latter, sent a bey

  To answer Ribas’ summons to give way.20

  EVEN 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.21

  The Neapolitan soldier of fortune was now tasked with building his own city from scratch, one that would be all that his native Naples was not—fresh, modern, rationally organized—as well as the favored property of one of the world’s great empires. It was to be a new city built around a broken-down fortress that the Ottomans had themselves named, coincidentally, the “new world.” De Ribas may have been the person who suggested that the city be called Odessos, picking up the name of an ancient Greek colony that had once existed farther down the coast. He may have had his own fondness for antiquities. The lost city of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, had been unearthed near his hometown only a year before de Ribas was born, spurring widespread interest in the ancient world and making Naples one of the foremost centers of neo-Hellenism in the arts, literature, and philosophy.

  In any case, “Odessos” would have fit with the emerging Russian practice of resurrecting ancient traditions along the coastline. The other cities founded or expanded by Potemkin were given russified versions of Greek names, some of them more fanciful than others. Old Tatar villages had been rechristened “Sevastopol” (“the august city”) and “Kherson” (“the city of gold”). Crimea became “Tavrida,” the Russian spelling of Tauris, a name that would have been familiar to Euripides and Herodotus. Within a year of his appointment as chief of the city-building project, de Ribas was already urging Russian diplomats to talk up the advantages of the facilities in old Khadjibey. Fortifications had been erected to protect the building works from Ottoman reprisals. More than a hundred stone houses and other administrative buildings took the place of Tatar hovels.22

  According to a story that is as fitting as it is unverifiable, the empress made one lasting change to de Ribas’s original plans. All the new foundations on the steppe and coasts of the Black Sea had masculine names. Odessos, commanded the most powerful and self-consciously modern woman in Russian history, should be changed to “Odessa”—the feminized version of a name forever associated with the ancient Odysseus, the wily warrior and navigator. By January of 1795, when St. Petersburg finally got around to issuing a
gazetteer of the official labels for the lands taken from the Ottomans three years earlier, the document affirmed that the town “the Tatars call Khadjibey” would be firmly fixed as “Odessa.”23

  CHAPTER 3

  Beacon

  Green spaces and fashionable shops: Deribasovskaya Street, from a nineteenth-century postcard. Author’s collection.

  The most famous thoroughfare in Odessa is Deribasovskaya Street. It is a green, pedestrianized walkway, tree-lined and pleasant, with a park and commemorative statues, a bandstand, and a fountain that spurts in time to music. It is one of the main destinations for a city that comes out for cool-of-the-evening strolls and gentle public wooings, the same ritual promenade that takes place on summer nights from Madrid to Istanbul. Deribasovskaya lies at the heart of historic Odessa, flanked by nineteenth-century storefronts and ornate facades. Cafés choke the sidewalks in the warmer months, and amid the children with melting ice creams and sunburned Ukrainians and Russians returning from the beach, you might find a billiard table plonked in the middle of the street, with an enterprising Odessan trading trick shots for small donations.

  The street is a tribute to de Ribas himself—his name is wrapped inside the Russian adjective—and he is still considered the city’s truest founder. As he envisioned things, Odessa was to be a lighthouse of civilization and commerce on the edge of Russia’s expanding empire. De Ribas managed to secure Catherine’s personal support for enlarging the Ottoman fort and beginning work on a jetty to provide protection for ships coming into the harbor. The empress died suddenly in 1796, however, leaving the Odessa project without a clear patron and advocate.

  De Ribas soon found himself caught up in the political intrigues that followed Catherine’s death. The new tsar, her son Paul, was passionately devoted to undoing much of what his mother had achieved. She had studiously kept him at arm’s length throughout her reign, fearing the pent-up ambitions of an heir who was already in his early forties by the time the old empress fell ill. He looked with disdain on his mother’s camarilla of courtiers, advisors, and lovers. Pet projects were allowed to languish. Old associates were pushed aside or placed in administrative positions that limited their power. One contemporary observer claimed that the purge included some eighteen thousand men dismissed by the tsar from state service, along with another twelve thousand who resigned voluntarily—a mark not only of the depth of change under Paul but also of the bloated state service created by his mother and Potemkin (who had died five years earlier).1

  The Odessa project was falling by the wayside. State funds promised for ambitious building plans and port facilities never materialized. De Ribas’s dream of creating an eastern Naples—a port that would be grander and more prosperous than his native city—was fading. De Ribas was frustrated at the tsar’s inattention, but he had little power to alter what seemed certain to be Odessa’s fate: to become no more than a Russian version of the minor Ottoman fortress-town that he had easily conquered the previous decade. Even de Ribas seemed to lose interest as the obstacles to building Odessa grew during Paul’s reign.

  Fortunately for Odessa, de Ribas’s personal frustrations with the new tsar were widely shared. Paul I made considerable enemies among the Russian nobility, and he ended his short reign as the victim of a palace coup and regicide. There is some suggestion that de Ribas might have had a minor role in planning the end of Paul’s time on the throne—and his life—in 1801. But even if he had been a bit player in the drama of imperial succession, he was not around to see the climax. He died several months before Paul was deposed.

  The new tsar, Alexander I, came to power intent on returning to his grandmother’s policy of encouraging ties with Europe, tugging the empire toward modernity, and developing the southern borderlands of New Russia. Alexander had good reason to begin rethinking New Russia’s place in imperial development. The international turmoil brought about by the French Revolution highlighted the importance of the natural resources that Catherine’s conquests had bequeathed to his empire, particularly the grain fields and cattle herds of Europe’s eastern borderlands. Overland transport across Europe was long, expensive, and—with armies now crisscrossing the continent—frequently dangerous.

  The rise of Napoleon, who promised a pan-European and French-dominated order in the wake of revolutionary change, only exacerbated the problem. To starve his enemies in other parts of the continent, Napoleon slapped a ban on the export of grain from Hungary, a move that increased the demand for wheat and barley from other sources. At the same time, there were new ways to profit from Russia’s surplus foodstuffs. Ottomans were caving to European pressure and allowing foreign ships to travel unimpeded into the Black Sea via the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits. Russian-flagged vessels had already been granted that privilege in the early 1770s. In 1784 access was extended to Austria, in 1802 to France, and soon thereafter to Britain, Naples, Ragusa, the Netherlands, and other trading powers.

  These circumstances combined to make de Ribas’s original vision for Odessa more timely than the Neapolitan mercenary could have imagined. The Black Sea now “became the common domain of the Nations of Europe,” wrote Robert Stevens, a contemporary American visitor, “and Odessa the centre of vast speculations…. The very circumstances, that paralysed commerce elsewhere…acted upon Odessa in an inverse ratio.”2 New funds were appropriated for enhancing port facilities and realizing de Ribas’s earlier building plans.

  With this renewed attention to the south—and Russia’s key role as a trading partner and ally against the looming threat of Napoleon—European interest in the new port skyrocketed. When Russia was at peace with France, shipping flowed freely from the major European ports. When it was at war, Russia found ways of supplying precisely the goods that were most in demand. Europe’s misfortunes were Odessa’s gain, and money from across the continent swirled around the city: Dutch ducats, Venetian sequins, Spanish dubloons, Turkish piasters, Viennese thalers.3

  Fortified wines from Spain and France, silk from Florence and Genoa, olive oil and dried fruits from the Levant, and nuts and fine woods from Anatolia were offloaded from cargo ships. Sacks of grain and stacks of cowhides from the prairie took their place in the ships’ holds for the return journey.4 New breakwaters sheltered cargo ships from destructive winds, while newly built docks groaned beneath casks and bundles. Both seaborne and overland commerce made Odessa the centerpiece of an expanding international network that tied the city more to its European counterparts than to the imperial metropolises of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The deplorable state of Russian roads meant that the overland journey from Moscow to Odessa could take up to forty days in bad weather, while a traveler could get from London to Odessa in as few as twenty-one days, via Hamburg, Berlin, and Cracow.5

  Like the New Russian region of which it was now the effective capital, Odessa was following a path from distant colonial outpost to commercial center. De Ribas’s vision had spurred the city’s founding, while Alexander I presided over the initial boom in New Russia that revived Odessa’s role in the southern empire. But much of the real credit for its takeoff goes to a French aristocrat on the lam.

  IN THE TUMULTUOUS final decades of the eighteenth century, Russia became a haven for down-and-out European nobles, bored adventurers, and impecunious philosophers, musicians, and artists seeking patrons in an empire that had only recently discovered its European vocation. Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, was one of them. Born in September of 1766, Richelieu was a member of the great family of French nobles and heir to a long tradition of state service. His great-uncle, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, had been the famous and powerful chief minister to Louis XIII.

  Well educated and urbane, lean and slightly stoop-shouldered, with arrestingly dark eyes and hair, the young duc reportedly bore a striking resemblance to the cardinal. The Richelieu name alone guaranteed access to the French court. In time he developed a reputation for constancy and honest dealings, both of which were rarit
ies in the gilded and intrigue-ridden world of late-eighteenth-century France. After an early arranged marriage, Richelieu remained uxorious throughout his many subsequent years of travel and state service.

  Before the age of twenty, he had inherited from his grandfather the role of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the French king, a senior position at court. He soon became a trusted advisor to Marie Antoinette, even begging the royal family not to return to Paris when news of the revolution reached Versailles. That association nearly cost him his life. After the mobs of Paris descended on the Bastille and French aristocrats were marched to the guillotine, Richelieu escaped eastward, to Russia. There he joined the cloud of European nobles swirling around Catherine and Potemkin. He served in minor roles during Catherine’s second war with the Ottomans, alongside Potemkin, de Ribas, and John Paul Jones. He was lightly wounded during the storming of the fortress at Izmail and in return received the expected military decoration and gratitude of the empress herself.

  As a veteran of courtly machinations in Versailles, Richelieu skillfully weathered the uncertain years following the death of his new patron and the brief reign of the petulant Paul. When Alexander became tsar in 1801, Richelieu was thus in a good position to seek a major role in the reformed administration. Given the growing importance of France—both as a trading partner with New Russia and as an occasional enemy of the Russian Empire—appointing someone with French connections to a position in the south made good sense. In 1803 Alexander named the thirty-seven-year-old Richelieu to the post of gradonachal’nik—city administrator—of Odessa, with responsibility for all military, commercial, and municipal affairs. He soon found himself journeying southward to take up the new assignment on a piece of territory that, as he recalled in his memoirs, probably overstating the case, was still “a desert inhabited only by hordes of Tatars and by Cossacks who, rejecting all civilization, sow terror through their brigandage and cruelties.”6