Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
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When he arrived, Richelieu discovered not so much a city, despite the robust commerce, as an architectural drawing—all plan and relatively little substance, with streets and foundations laid out in the chalky dust of the plain. One of de Ribas’s lasting contributions had been his insistence on self-conscious urban organization. Odessa is young by European, even by American, standards. A city that we now think of as typically old world was founded three years after Washington, D.C. Both cities’ central districts are eighteenth-century fantasies of what a city should be: rationally laid out on a grid of symmetrical streets intersected by long, wide avenues and dotted with pocket-sized parks. The avenues provide edifying sight lines over great distances. The parks are places of relaxation and civic-mindedness, with statues and monuments that extol the virtues of duty, honor, and patriotism. It was a thrill for later visitors to Odessa—such as Mark Twain in the 1860s—to stand in the middle of a broad thoroughfare and see the empty steppe at one end and the empty sea at the other, just as visitors to Washington can connect the dots of the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and other prominent landmarks via the major avenues and open spaces.
Preobrazhensky Cathedral, from an early-twentieth-century postcard. Author’s collection.
Richelieu found this basic town structure already in place. De Ribas had worked with a Dutch engineer, Franz de Voland, to design a city based on a grid pattern, or at least as much of one as could be squeezed into the ravine-cut landscape on which Khadji bey was situated. Nearly two-dozen administrative buildings fashioned from the ubiquitous limestone rose beside hundreds of wooden shops, grain magazines, and earthen huts.7 But the mass of people that soon flooded into the town contrasted sharply with the designers’ emphasis on order and rationality. Peasants lined the wide streets hawking their produce and seeking occasional work on the docks. Sailors cavorted while their ships were in port. The growing population—seven to eight thousand people when Richelieu took office—was putting pressure on public order.8 In response, Richelieu organized a campaign to reshape city administration, improve sanitation, and erect a series of public buildings that would polish a place that was still little more than a colonial outpost, albeit one with a logical street plan. “To perfect, to encourage, and to finish: that is the spirit of the current regime,” noted a contemporary French observer.9
Within only a few years after assuming his post, Richelieu had built a theater and public schools, including a gymnasium for merchants’ sons, a relative novelty in an empire where education was still a privilege of the upper classes. He established a library and a printing press, which published works in several languages (all overseen by the official state censor, housed in one of the first government buildings to be erected). Throughout the city, he ordered the planting of trees along streets and in parks, creating a green oasis in the flat expanse of blue-black sea and dun-colored steppe—and personally berated citizens when they failed to water the new plantings.10
The American merchant Robert Stevens waxed lyrical about the changes he had seen in the first few years of Richelieu’s tenure, and how spectacular the differences would have appeared to the old inhabitants of Khadjibey. As he wrote in a manifesto on the advantages of commerce with Odessa, “At this epoch could one of the primitive inhabitants of this country, one of those wandering Tartars, could he have been suddenly transported, into the midst of this city, witnessing the public and private prosperity, the elegance and grandeur of surrounding objects, he could not be made to believe he was not viewing, works of enchantment.”11 In relatively short order, Odessans became as status conscious as people in other major cities. “Today a one-horse carriage is the final form of humility, the last reserve of the strictest economizing,” wrote a French marquis, Gabriel de Castelnau. “That is to say, no one goes on foot.”12
But for all Richelieu’s civic-mindedness, Odessa could not escape its location. As a burgeoning entrepôt, the city was open to outsiders like no other port in the empire. The ships that dropped anchor in the inner harbor often carried an unseen cargo lurking deep inside the bundles of textiles or crates of dried fruit. The perils of epidemic diseases, and Russia’s nearly century-long fight against them, became another of the hallmarks of Odessa’s frontier identity.
IN THE BOILING August of 1812, people were falling sick in Odessa at a rate no one had witnessed before. On August 12 a female dancer in the local theater died after an illness of only thirty-six hours. Three days later, a second performer died. A third soon took ill. A few days more, and two servants and an actor were dead as well. All had the same symptoms: a mild vertigo and headache, followed by nausea and vomiting, then fatigue and dizziness, a burning thirst, and swollen, painful carbuncles in the armpits and groin. Death followed in less than six days.13
Large-scale infectious diseases such as cholera and the plague were a fact of life around the Black Sea, much as they were in any region where landscape, climate, robust trade, and variable immunity created propitious breeding grounds and transmission routes for microbes. The Black Death—a highly contagious microbial infection that wiped out a quarter or more of Europe’s population in the 1340s—may have made its leap to the west aboard cargo ships leaving the old Italian ports of Crimea. After Catherine the Great incorporated the region into her empire, returning Russian soldiers and seamen often unwittingly transported disease from the pestilential south to the towns and villages of central Russia. For the cities of New Russia, especially those that regularly welcomed ships from the plague-afflicted ports in the Ottoman Empire, diseases threatened to jump easily from quayside to town center.
For that reason, one of Richelieu’s specific assignments, laid out by Tsar Alexander in his initial orders to the new gradonachal’nik, was to “choose a suitable place for the construction of a quarantine facility and accelerate its construction.”14 In fact, a quarantine system had been in place in Odessa nearly from the city’s founding. Ships’ cargoes were checked and fumigated with sulfur dioxide or other chemicals. Passengers were required to spend at least fourteen days in isolated observation in the old Ottoman fortress, a period of time thought to be sufficient for symptoms to become manifest.
Quarantine officials at the time had little inkling of the specific causes of the bubonic plague—the Yersinia pestis bacillus and its chief vector, the flea—but they knew that some routes of transmission were more likely than others. Bacilli traveled on fleas, fleas on rats, and rats on ships, which, when docked in the harbor, would be drawn to the granaries and rubbish-strewn streets of the city center. People, too, could become vectors. In a city already becoming famous for its corrupt customs officers, a few infected but asymptomatic passengers could always avoid the quarantine regulations—perhaps for a small, informal fee—and pass unnoticed up the hill and into the heart of the city.
Early on in the August outbreak, stories circulated about an actress in the local theater who had received a ring, wrapped in a small fluff of cotton, from an anonymous admirer. Cotton—a prime hiding place for fleas—would certainly have been subjected to inspection and fumigation, but the actress’s admirer, recently arrived by ship, had somehow managed to smuggle the ring and its wrapper past port authorities. That was why the major symptoms—the painful carbuncles, or buboes, from which the bubonic plague takes its name—were first reported by actors and actresses working together on the city’s only stage.
Richelieu, who had just returned from a tour of Crimea, was due to take a field command in the war against Napoleon, but he wisely decided to remain in the city. He ordered an investigation into the illness. City officials soon reported that there had been a spate of suspicious deaths in the last several months, but since the dead were mainly peasants and servants, their fate had gone unremarked. It was only once men and women in the public eye began to succumb—those performing in the theater Richelieu himself had built—that the scale of the problem became evident. By that time the plague had already insinuated itself deep into Odessa’s population.
The Grande Armée of Napoleon was already menacing Moscow far to the north, but Richelieu delayed his departure for the front, reckoning that fighting the local and unseen enemy was more pressing than fighting his fellow Frenchmen on the outskirts of Moscow. He called together several doctors and sought their advice. They were divided on the cause and seriousness of the illness. Some argued that it could not possibly be the plague. No sailors had been reported ill, and there was no news of the disease raging in Constantinople, which had usually been taken as a signal to be particularly careful with ships hailing from the Ottoman capital.
But the mere suggestion that the plague might have made an appearance in the city determined Richelieu to act. On August 26 he ordered all buildings where people might gather in large numbers—churches, the commercial exchange, courts, the custom house, and the theater—to be closed. Markets were allowed to remain open, but new regulations were put in place to prevent loitering. The smell of vinegar wafted through the sparsely populated bazaars, as merchants soaked their money in the liquid to kill whatever pestilence was thought to carry the disease.
As with any epidemic, information was the chief weapon. Richelieu ordered the city divided into several districts and assigned deputies to make daily reports, based on household surveys, of the progress of infection in their territory. The quarantine zone was extended far inland, to the Bug and Dniester rivers, as well as on roads and drover paths leading to the north, and the length of quarantine monitored by officials: twenty-four days for individuals without baggage and twelve weeks for those with merchandise or suspect goods.
Notwithstanding these precautions, the number of deaths soared. District inspectors reported as many as twenty people dying each day. Outbreaks were now seen in surrounding villages as mothers embraced infected children and husbands tended to dying wives, flouting restrictions on contact with the infected. Physicians, racing from household to household to provide terminal care to the dying, were themselves falling victim.
At this point, Richelieu took a daring decision that probably secured Odessa’s future. He ordered the city’s borders to be sealed and established a general quarantine in all neighborhoods. It was a bold, even foolhardy, move. He had virtually no military forces at his disposal to enforce the quarantine. Most soldiers were at the front. Richelieu eventually managed to secure a detachment of five hundred Cossacks, but they were given the nearly impossible task of invigilating a city whose population had swollen, in the previous seven years of Richelieu’s tenure, to around thirty-two thousand people.
The new regulations came into effect on November 12. All doors and windows were to remain closed. Only people in public service were permitted to leave their homes, and even they were required to have a special identification ticket. To provision the shut-down city, police and commissary officials conveyed food through each district twice a day. Meat was dipped in cold water and bread was fumigated before distribution. Each house was inspected twice daily, and anyone exhibiting signs of illness was taken to a separate surveillance area until he either died or, much more rarely, recovered.
Wooden carts crawled through the streets conducting those who were to be removed for observation. Red flags announced that the cart was hauling the living, black flags that the victim had already expired. Prisoners were dragooned into serving as ferrymen for the dead and dying. Wearing oil-drenched overcoats as prophylactics against the disease, they trudged through the deserted streets, their corpse-bearing carts trailing behind them.
“I was present at these scenes of sadness,” wrote the French traveler Auguste, comte de Lagarde, “and I have viewed with bitterness the despair of those prepared to give up all they had in order to escape death.”15 Another observer described the eerie stillness that enveloped the port and the changes in everyday social relations that the disease seemed to spawn:
People were almost afraid to breathe, lest the contagion should be floating in the air,—fires were lighted, and odoriferous substances burned before their doors:…[T]wo horsemen, posted in every street, paced it slowly in opposite directions; the functionaries addressed each other only at a distance; letters, when received, were fumigated and delivered by means of a stick slit at one end, being refumigated before they were opened and read; all the exterior marks of friendship were forbidden, and no one dared to make enquiries after his relations or friends, for fear of hearing that they had died of the plague.16
The city, once bustling and full of life, now ground to a halt. Fumigation fires filled the streets with acrid smoke. On the outskirts of town, freshly dug mass graves created false hillocks on the flat steppe. When those pits were full, piles of human bodies were put to the torch. Even Richelieu himself, who wandered freely about the city throughout the epidemic, was occasionally seen to pick up a shovel and dig graves when the workmen tired or feared for their own safety.
With the rate of death increasing, Richelieu finally ordered the docklands—the jumping-off point for the infection and the locus of its greatest toll—to be razed. Smoke billowed from the piers that de Ribas had worked to build and from the array of warehouses that peppered the quay. Despite the regulations on public gatherings, some citizens ventured outside, past the Cossack pickets, to watch the spectacle of their city’s ruin. Ships at sea witnessed the fat column of smoke rising in the distance, dark evidence of the city’s self-immolation and a beacon warning them to keep away.
After nearly two months of general quarantine, on January 7, 1813, citizens were finally allowed to venture out of doors, although customs and quarantine barriers around the city remained in place and were never completely removed. Suspect houses were emptied or torched. Richelieu’s harsh methods, rather than stoking fear and disorder, had almost miraculously caused the plague to burn itself out. From August 1812 to January 1813, the number of people infected was 3,331, of whom only 675 recovered, a death toll of just over 10 percent of the city’s population.17
A city that had imagined itself as a shining example to the outside world, a young town that had grown from unrefined frontier post into a minor metropolis, had found itself building walls against the unseen dangers that could come floating in from the sea. Odessa had gone through the first episode of an internal struggle that would last well into the twentieth century: a conflict between a self-image of openness and grandeur and one of insularity and terror. But there was also a brighter and unexpected side effect. The sadness inevitably produced by thousands of deaths, coupled with a long and deadly winter, brought a new and happier epidemic. City officials noted a marked increase in births in the autumn of 1813.18
OF RICHELIEU’S several innovations in dealing with the plague, perhaps the one that mattered most to the city’s future was the egalitarianism with which even the harshest restrictions on movement and public gatherings were enforced. Surprisingly for the time, Jews were subjected to the same regulations as their Christian neighbors (although infected Jews were treated in a separate surveillance facility and hospital).
In previous instances of the plague, from Provence to Catalonia and from Switzerland to the Rhineland, Jews were usually the scapegoats for outbreaks of infection. They were routinely blamed for a host of imagined transgressions, from their allegedly inadequate hygiene to grand plots aimed at weakening Christian civilization. From the fourteenth century forward, repeated attacks on Jews in western Europe—burnings, beatings, tortures, and exiles—were one of the principal incentives for Jews to migrate to the east, to the borderlands of central Europe and Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which would eventually become the cultural epicenter of European Jewry. In this particular epidemic, however, Richelieu managed astutely to avoid the frequent and fatal combination of plagues and pogroms—providing an early example of Odessa’s place as a refuge for an increasingly diverse community.
In addition to the hundreds of sailors stopping off at Odessa each trading season, the city had begun to attract a mottled collection of individuals seeking their own fortune at the border of sea
and steppe. Some of the earliest informal censuses recorded contingents of Greek and Albanian soldiers; Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Bulgarian merchants; runaway Russian serfs; as well as communities of Cossacks. The city was already gaining a reputation as a place in Russia—barely—but decidedly not of it. It was located on a sea that had become, in just a few short decades, “the common domain of the Nations of Europe,” wrote Robert Stevens, and Odessa now lay at the center of the “vast speculations” launched by the opening of trade.19 As the comte de Lagarde noted, “Through beautiful squares planted with trees and crossed with footpaths circulate the Turk, the Greek, the Russian, the Englishman, the Jew, the Armenian, the Frenchman, the Moldovan, the Pole, the Italian, and the German, most of them wearing the costume appropriate to each and speaking different tongues.”20
As the owners of the major trading houses and with strong family and business connections with the Mediterranean, Italians dominated city life, a recapitulation of their role when Genoese and Venetian trading centers ringed the Black Sea. Italian became the city’s lingua franca, lilting through the commercial exchange and wafting up from the docklands. Street signs—another innovation of Richelieu’s tenure—were written in both Italian and Russian, a practice that lasted well beyond his days in office.21 An eight-hundred-seat opera house, established by Richelieu only three years before the plague and designed by Jean-François Thomas de Thomon, one of the great shapers of St. Petersburg, featured a visiting Italian company performing a standard repertoire of classics. The company offered an early-nineteenth-century version of surtitles: a Russian actor would helpfully summarize the libretto for any audience members who happened not to speak Italian.22 Even the city’s ubiquitous carters and petty traders, or chumaks, were known to break into choruses of “La donna è mobile”—that is, unless they were singing their own ditties about the glories of the city at the end of the drover trails: