With hundreds of thousands of head of livestock coming through the city each harvest season, dust and mud were constant features of Odessan life. Choking, white-yellow clouds, stirred up by hooves and swirled about by the prevailing winds, powdered residents like talcum. Rain turned inches of accumulated limestone grime into impassable sloughs. Carriage drivers were forced to adopt a uniquely Odessan approach to dealing with the provisional swamps of gray mud. Whereas the British drove on the left and the French on the right, one visitor reported, Odessa’s coachmen would simply shout out to an oncoming driver, “Go to the left!” or “Go to the right!” depending on the location of the obstacle.28
An open, brick-lined drainage system, about two feet deep, ran alongside the major thoroughfares, crossed by occasional footbridges and wooden planks. But the rivulets they contained—the wastewater runoff and solid offal of houses and hotels, as well as animal dung and mud from the streets—could gag even the toughest pedestrian.29 The blooms of acacia trees and oleander fought back with their perfume, but it usually took a change in wind direction, blowing off the plains and toward the sea, to unburden the city of its own stench.
Odessa’s distinctive sounds, too, rose up from the wheat trade. The curses of carters correcting a recalcitrant bullock mixed with the lows and screams of cattle from the docklands and slaughterhouses and the brittle pop of old wheat carts being broken up for firewood. Each ox brought its own swarm of flies, buzzing around businessmen inside the Exchange or thumping against the windows of the shops along Pushkin and Richelieu streets. When the chumaks came to town, swelling the population by thousands from April to October, hawkers and organ-grinders added to the carnival atmosphere, their calls and tin-pipe tunes filling the squares and avenues. Even in the quieter streets, the Byzantine harmonies of an Orthodox choir or the European chords floating out of the Brody synagogue wafted around the grand buildings whose foundations were built on the grain trade. In the center of town, near the theater and the Hotel Richelieu, café patrons called out for coffee or kvass, the beer made from fermented bread, trying to be heard over the rattle of dice boxes, the slap of dominos, and the clink of glasses. “The words ‘roubles’ and ‘grain,’ ‘grain’ and ‘roubles,’ are, however, to be distinctly heard above all this hubbub,” one observer remarked in the late 1830s, “and now and then, ‘hides,’ ‘wool,’ ‘hemp,’ and ‘tallow.’”30
The wealth that flowed into the city in the middle decades of the nineteenth century enabled the raising of new public buildings and municipal improvements. The city’s early builders had required imperial or noble patronage to erect the accoutrements of a real city, but these gave way to publicly funded efforts to address the problems of sanitation, dust, and decay. The soft limestone of which many of the major buildings were constructed was easily scarred by the wind and salt air, giving even newer buildings an ancient and pockmarked appearance—and adding further to the gritty dust circulating through the town. Each year, buildings were refaced and plastered and, bit by bit, streets paved or macadamized, covered with a packed layer of broken stone.
New cultural institutions sprang up to meet the demand of a wealthier and more sophisticated populace. By the middle of the century, Odessa hosted three printing houses, a lithographer, six bookshops, and scores of private clubs, theaters, learned societies, and public and private schools, including the famed Richelieu Lycée, which later served as the foundation for both a gymnasium and Novorossiya University. Opera and theater were the main entertainments in a city “fanatico per la musica,” as one visitor remarked, with performances by traveling companies as well as the city’s own repertory players.31 One of the city’s boosters, the historian Konstantin Smolyaninov, wrote that as of 1851 the city could boast thirty-two churches, of which seventeen were for non-Orthodox Christians; two male and female monasteries; four synagogues; thirty-four Jewish prayer houses; seventy-six public buildings; five public gardens; sixty-five private gardens; 4,463 private houses; 1,619 shops; 564 granaries; forty-seven factories; three boulevards; and forty-nine streets (of which twenty-four were paved).32
But the foundations of Odessa’s mid-century success were always shaky. Smolyaninov’s revealing list showed that shops, granaries, and public buildings far outnumbered factories. Apart from bricks, rope, and some foodstuffs (macaroni, for example) the city produced rather little. It was a center of business—of movement, commerce, and finance—but not of manufacturing. With its wealth coming to a great degree from effective slave labor in the countryside—the dark fruit of Russia’s serf-based economy—producers had little incentive to invest in improved agricultural techniques. And since peasants were largely tied to the land, there was no readily available and truly mobile labor force even if Odessans had decided to try their hand at building factories.33 Dependent on the grain coming from the countryside and the imports coming from the sea, Odessa’s fate was also captive to the whims of nature and the fickleness of foreign producers. Locusts, hailstorms, or a lasting drought could destroy the harvest. A devastating dry spell in the middle of Mikhail Vorontsov’s tenure as governor-general, in the early 1830s, produced a famine across New Russia, with thousands kept from starvation only by handouts from state reserves.34
Even within the city, freshwater was always a scarce resource. Odessa was situated far from a river or other natural source. From the city’s earliest days, huge cisterns and reservoirs were required to provide drinking water for livestock; on the outskirts of town, lines of watering troughs stretched deep into the prairie.35 For humans, too, freshwater was hard to come by and, therefore, expensive. The main source was a spring situated a few miles from the city, on the seashore and down a steep embankment. A small building was erected over the site, which was guarded by a detachment of Cossacks. The water, gushing out of the surrounding limestone, was collected in barrels and transported to the town. Prices in the 1820s stood at a ruble and a half per barrel, and a household could pay as much as twenty rubles for sufficient freshwater for a week—a substantial sum even for prosperous families.36 An aqueduct was added later, but it was not until 1873 that a system of piped water carried all the way from the Dniester River began to meet the city’s needs.37 Until then, as Pushkin once quipped, the wine in Odessa was cheaper than the water.
The city learned to live with shocks: a late-season icing of the harbor, which disrupted shipping; a scorching summer or a sudden gust of hail and wind, which thinned livestock herds and flattened wheat or knocked off barley heads; an outbreak of typhus, cholera, or even the plague, which sealed off the city and choked its commercial lifelines; or a sudden shift in the preferences of kings or the tastes of the buying public in a faraway country, which could cause prices to fluctuate wildly and make the Exchange buzz with speculation about world affairs. That was the case in the spring of 1854, when news reached the city that Russia was now suddenly and unexpectedly at war with Odessa’s best customer, Great Britain.
ODESSA WAS FOUNDED in war, and war was not always bad for the city. Russia’s conflict with Napoleon had enabled it to flourish as an alternative route into the empire for European products and a source of raw materials for a continent strangled by French trade restrictions. The disorders in Greece and the Balkans in the 1820s had produced a new wave of Greek immigration to the city, which enhanced the class of energetic entrepreneurs. But in the 1850s, Odessa was near the center of conflict. For the first time, it was a target not for British shippers and merchants but for British cannons.
The Crimean War was about nothing and about everything. The proximate cause was a dispute between the tsar and the Ottoman sultan over control of the holy places in Jerusalem, specifically which empire should superintend the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: the Islamic power on whose territory the church was situated—the Ottomans—or the Orthodox Christian power that claimed a special religious connection to it—Russia. But the bigger issue concerned the struggle for influence along the borderlands of both empires: in the Caucasus, in the southern Balk
ans, along the Danube River, and on the Black Sea.
Over the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia had carved out greater control over the old kingdoms and principalities that had once insulated one empire from another. Some—such as the kingdom of Georgia and the Muslim khanates near the Caspian Sea—had been wholly absorbed into the Russian state; others—such as the twin principalities of Moldova and Wallachia north of the Danube River—had periodically been placed under temporary Russian occupation, even though they were still Ottoman vassals. Russia had shown itself to be a consummate meddler in Ottoman affairs, for example, by supporting the Greek uprising that had been launched by Philike Hetairia. Western powers were increasingly concerned. Britain and France had by and large lauded the humanitarian impulse of protecting Christians in the Near East from despotic Muslims. But Russia’s habit of provoking Ottoman aggression now seemed part of a strategic plan—perhaps even to resurrect Catherine’s aim from the previous century and seize control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits.
When diplomatic overtures to resolve the status of the holy places failed, in July 1853 Russia sent its troops across the Prut River into Moldova and Wallachia, occupying two principalities recognized as Ottoman protectorates. Fearing that Russia would soon cross the Danube—igniting a full-scale revolt among Orthodox Christians in the Balkans and perhaps even threatening the capital of Constantinople itself—the sultan ordered military operations to begin against Russian forces along the river as well as on the Caucasus front. The Ottoman fleet was ordered into the Black Sea to disrupt Russian shipping and naval activity, and then to winter well beyond the vulnerable capital, in port at Sinop in the middle of the sea’s southern coast.
The bombardment of Odessa by British ships during the Crimean War, April 1854, from a nineteenth-century engraving. Author’s collection.
The Ottoman ships were safely distant from Constantinople, but they were closer than ever to the center of Russian naval firepower: the port and arsenal at Sevastopol, an easy sail from Sinop across the sea in Crimea. In a surprise attack on the morning of November 30, 1853, Russian ships under the celebrated admiral Pavel Nakhimov sailed out of Sevastopol and descended on the Ottoman fleet. It was the last time in European history that wooden-hulled sailing ships would square off in a major naval engagement, yet it proved to be an ignominious end to the age of sail. Caught completely off guard, hemmed in at anchor by the approaching vessels and protected by inferior shore batteries, the Ottoman ships were easy targets. In the space of only an hour, the fleet was destroyed. Some three thousand Ottoman dead floated ashore in the following days, while the Russians reported only thirty-seven men killed in action.38
The fear in western Europe was that the uneasy balance around the Black Sea was now upset. Russia would undoubtedly press its advantage against the Ottomans to its logical end, nibbling away at the edges of the empire until the tsar was able to take the real prize, Constantinople, and with it control of the only seaway access between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire, weak and ineffectual, was a constant inducement to Russian interference. But it was also a strategic necessity to European powers wary of Russian ambitions. Without the sultan in place, there was little to prevent Russia’s political and military dominance in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean.
After the debacle at Sinop, Britain and France sided with the sultan and declared war on Russia the following March, once the winter storms and unfreezing of Russian ports had enabled naval action. The British, French, and Ottoman expeditionary forces made the Black Sea the locus of their response to Russia’s adventure in Sinop, and in September the allies landed on the appendage sticking into the sea, the Crimean Peninsula. Over the next year, allied forces laid siege to the Russian naval base at Sevastopol and to other strategic towns and ports along the Crimean coast, in a series of military engagements—such as the Charge of the Light Brigade—now famous for their bravery and folly. The damp winter, boiling summer, and rampant disease took an enormous toll.
Odessa was near the seat of war, less than two hundred miles from Sevastopol—the same distance that Nakhimov’s fleet had covered to stage the surprise attack on Sinop. The city was thus vulnerable to allied ships en route from Constantinople or anchorages along the western coast. And given Odessa’s long-standing commercial ties to Britain, part of Russian strategy involved not only trying to defend the city against allied attack but also closing it down to civilian shipping, ensuring that British importers would not continue to profit from the very port their ships were likely to shell.
Once the western allies seemed certain to join the conflict, Tsar Nicholas I imposed a ban on the export of all grain from Russian ports on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov on any vessel—an effort both to preserve strategic food reserves and to undercut British and French commerce. At the time, a million chetverts of grain, nearly six million bushels, were in deposit in Odessa, where they were becoming ready fodder for mice and rats. Merchants had no way of quoting prices for commodities, since trade had ground to an absolute halt. “Transactions have been abated to such a degree as never yet has been experienced at this place,” reported the U.S. consul John Ralli.39
Soon an even more threatening problem appeared on the horizon: the British and French expeditionary fleet. At the beginning of April, thirty allied warships anchored in the Odessa roadstead. On April 9, 1854, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the fleet sent a small boat ashore and demanded that all British, French, and Russian commercial ships be surrendered. The local military commander gave no reply. The next morning the fleet opened fire on the artillery batteries ringing the harbor. Little damage was reported, but a city that had been open to the world now had its first experience of war. The allied fleet eventually sailed on to Crimea, where the distant explosions of cannon and mines rattled the windows of Odessa’s houses and hotels.40 Two steamers remained behind to blockade the port and search any neutral ships that might pass by for evidence of munitions.
When the city’s inhabitants got a chance to take revenge, they grabbed it. On April 30, 1854, a British steamer, the Tiger, ran aground off the coast in a heavy fog. When the retreating mists revealed it the next morning, stuck fast near the shore, the Odessa batteries began firing from atop the cliffs. Most of the 260 men aboard managed to flee the damaged vessel, which soon lowered its flag in surrender. Heavy cannon fire that evening caused it to explode in a spectacular rush of steam and saltwater. The officers and men were taken prisoner, while the guns recovered from the wreck became prized trophies, although some exploded unexpectedly when the Russian army attempted to fire them in salute.41
Ships appeared off the coast, passing by en route to Crimea. Grain fields lay fallow. Granaries were empty. Within three years, it was all over. News reached Odessa by telegraph in the first week of April 1856 that Russia and the allies had signed a peace treaty in Paris, ending a brutal war that had left the Russian fleet at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor while accomplishing little of real strategic value for Britain, France, or the Ottomans. The news was relayed to the allied steamers still anchored outside the Odessa harbor. The captains in turn sent a boat ashore and requested permission to salute the Russian flag. Crowds gathered in the port as the ships drew near, the Russian colors hoisted on their mainmasts. They fired a salute, which was returned by the shore batteries, themselves now flying the British flag in gentlemanly reciprocity. Shortly thereafter the blockade was lifted, and the steamers retired from their long duty as unwelcome sentries.42
“I confess that I was formerly amongst those who thought that Odessa ought to have been destroyed,” wrote a British war veteran on touring the city in 1871, “but now, having visited the place, I am of a different opinion.”43 The civilized ending to the conflict masked the profound changes that the city soon faced. Its status as a free port, suspended during the war, was never restored. The British and French, chastened by the effects of the export ban, were seeking new sources of foodstuffs. The K
ansas and Nebraska territories soon competed directly with New Russia for the lion’s share of the European grain trade. The grand project to find a southern outlet from the Mediterranean—the Suez Canal—reached completion in 1869, shifting trade in ways that dampened the significance of the Black Sea. Overland routes from central and southern Europe to Persia and Central Asia, which had previously had their trailheads at the Ottoman Black Sea ports, were now displaced by the easier water route through the Suez.
The wheat business remained important. The average annual output of cereals probably doubled again before the outbreak of the First World War.44 But other Russian ports on the Black and Caspian seas—Novorossiisk, Batumi, Baku, even Sevastopol, rebuilt and improved a decade after its destruction by the allies—were now stepping out from Odessa’s shadow and building their own reputations as centers of trade, industry, and military power. By 1914 Odessa was still the largest commercial center in the Russian south, but it accounted for less than 20 percent of the value of goods traded on the Black Sea.45 Cities such as Nikolaev and Rostov—both older than Odessa but long eclipsed by their western neighbor—were catching up.46
The Russian Steam Navigation Company, founded not long after the war’s close, used steam technology to enable travel and commerce across the entire sea and tie together its varied ports. By 1860 thirty-five Russian steamships were making regular runs on the sea and the major rivers, from the Danube to the Dnieper.47 But railroads began to reorient trade away from the south, easing the transport of goods across the empire and toward the busy ports of the Baltic Sea to the north. Count Vorontsov was gone, and his successors, some more able than others, never managed to continue the enlightened governance and privileged status forged by the founding generation of administrators. The office of governor-general of New Russia was finally abolished in 1874, replaced with a state administration more concerned with centralization and rooting out political subversives than with enhancing Odessa’s natural endowments.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Page 10
