Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  Like the city itself, the Milgroms found themselves living in a world of tissue paper and crystal, beautiful, delicate, and unspeakably fragile. In an era of political radicalization, Lika is expelled from school and sent off to a two-year exile for seditious activity. Marko puts down Nietzsche and joins a Jewish self-defense organization in the back streets of Moldavanka. Torik, the conscientious student and good Jew who pores over Hebrew textbooks, makes plans to convert to Christianity. Seryozha, the fun-loving hedonist, has acid splashed in his face by a cuckolded husband. Even for Marusya, the perpetual tease, things end badly. In the novel’s climax, she performs a shocking act of self-sacrifice. Now married and with children, she heats milk on the stove for her young son, who is playing in the hallway of their country house. In a moment of carelessness, she allows the fire to lick the sleeve of her housecoat. Seconds later, engulfed in flames, Marusya struggles to the kitchen door and throws the latch from the inside, preventing her son from opening it. He remains safely in the hall while his mother burns to death only inches away. Half of Odessa attended her funeral.

  The Five has many messages. Decay holds more interest than flourishing. Pride is the essence of human agency. Rebellion against misfortune may seem the logical and heroic option, but pride reinforces the power of the sufferer. Even though it was written more than a quarter century after the period it describes, the novel has a freshness that makes it a powerful characterization of the city’s travails. Odessans spent their history learning to laugh at one another, the narrator says, and this was the crucial skill that enabled its many tribes to live together, more or less.

  But joie de vivre and jokester skills were only a weak kind of social glue. In times of trouble, the novel asks, what resources did this urban society really have at its disposal other than shrugged shoulders and comic relief? Gentle, early-evening strolls were cut short or abandoned. People now hurried along, drawing themselves into the shadows. “They’d always cursed each other as rogues or idiots, and had sometimes even fought,” the narrator says of Odessa’s major ethnic communities, “but in all my memory there’d never been any authentic, ferocious hostility. Now all this had changed. The first sign of benevolence among men had disappeared—that is, the southern custom of considering the street as your home.”11

  THE FIVE is a novel about a family, closed and ultimately tragic. But the Milgroms were also living in the middle of the most widespread and destructive public violence the city had yet seen, a series of events that would later seal Odessa’s place in the Soviet Union’s pantheon of revolution. The events of 1905—especially the brief workers’ demonstration in St. Petersburg in January of that year—are now thought of as the first throes of revolutionary change, the beginning of the short march toward October of 1917, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the coming of the Soviet Union. At the time, however, things were never that clear. Anarchy only seems like revolution after the revolutionary power wins. The tsarist state enacted a series of reforms in response to the uprising—such as forming an elected legislature with real power, the State Duma—but they were short-lived. On the ground across the Russian Empire, the violence of the opening years of the twentieth century looked either devastating or mildly troublesome, depending on one’s social standing, business interests, political engagement, and ethnic or religious affiliation.

  On the imperial periphery, violence took different forms. In the Caucasus region, anarchic street fights between Armenians and Muslims torched entire villages, brought down a forest of oil derricks, and mangled the pipelines that had made the city of Baku one of the empire’s premier boomtowns. In villages and cities across the old Pale of Settlement, rolling pogroms decimated Jewish communities and spurred others to action. Already in 1903 a bloody pogrom in the city of Kishinev left dozens dead and drew international attention to the plight of Jews in Russia. Jewish self-defense units expanded to counter Russian nationalist thugs, whose bloody work was often abetted by local police and Cossack cavalry.

  Odessa in 1905: “A demonstration of revolutionists,” a photograph from the Illustrated London News, November 18, 1905. Author’s collection.

  In Odessa a concatenation of factors led to its own version of 1905, producing the deadliest and most notorious pogrom in Russian history. Worker dissatisfaction was growing. A range of underground socialist and anarchist groups were finding ways of taking advantage of it. Trade unions, mutual aid societies, and workers’ cooperatives channeled discontent and provided information and resources for industrial activism. Police surveillance and official paranoia were growing apace. Strikes and occasional mob violence ramped up in the 1890s and early 1900s as the city’s growing working class discovered its own power.

  Odessa also experienced the one war that it could neither weather nor turn to a profit. On the other side of the empire, tensions were growing between Russia and Japan for dominance in northeast Asia. The Russian navy had made repeated shows of strength in the region, leasing port facilities in Manchuria and threatening Japan’s role as power broker in China and Korea. In January of 1904, the Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on Russian forces stationed at Port Arthur. The two ambitious empires declared war, and the war ministry of Tsar Nicholas II rushed to build up sufficient land and sea forces to counter the Japanese. The results were disastrous. Russian forces, undersupplied and over-stretched, lost one battle after another. Nicholas was finally forced to sue for peace.

  The effects on Odessa were profound. The city had been the primary grain supplier to the Russian Far East, as well as a key trading center for manufactured goods being shipped to the Pacific. The blockade of Russian holdings by the Japanese navy dried up some of the city’s major overseas markets. Grain exports were cut in half, and exports overall fell by more than a third. A credit crunch followed, with manufacturing businesses declaring bankruptcy and trading firms closing their doors.12

  Odessans had more reason than ever to take to the streets. They were joined by the mass of soldiers and sailors who had arrived in the city by train, waiting to be loaded onto ships for the long journey into the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and toward what they knew to be the growing calamity in the Far East. With thousands of men now idle, thefts, burglaries, and general public disorder increased. To augment the number of men available for wartime service, the tsar pardoned prison inmates who had not been involved in violent crimes, releasing some two hundred people from the Odessa jail. “It will therefore be readily understood why the outlook…is not reassuring,” reported the U.S. consul, Thomas P. Heenan.13

  By the summer of 1905, discontent was at a boil. Worker activism and strikes turned violent. Barricades filled the streets, and bomb-throwing anarchists attacked police and military units dispatched to quell the unrest. In mid-June crowds descended on the port, looting warehouses and engaging in pitched battles with police. Hundreds lay dead in the streets, the victims of random bullets, raging waterfront fires, and targeted attacks by the authorities on underground political movements and their sympathizers. The arrival in the harbor of a mutinous battleship, the Potemkin, spurred on the street fighters. But after sitting ominously in port and then lobbing a few ill-placed shells, the Potemkin sailed on to Romania and eventual surrender.

  A lull followed the “June days,” but disorder returned in the fall, this time in the form of massive attacks on Jews. Antisemitic rumors had blamed Jewish self-defense organizations for the June violence, and the tsarist authorities certainly saw Jewish activists as key instigators of strikes and even of revolutionary agitation aimed at overthrowing the government. A scuffle between Jews and Russians near Moldavanka led to mass marches designed to support the tsar against perceived Jewish revolution. By mid-October the marches had escalated to attacks on Jewish homes and businesses. Those who were willing to pay police reportedly received protection from the crowds.14

  In contrast to earlier pogroms, there was now a coordinated response by the self-defense organizations that had already tested their mettl
e in June. Running battles filled the grid of streets in the city center. Political organizations claimed that revolution was in the air. Others sought revenge for past pogroms and riots. But self-defense groups were no match for the crowds that descended indiscriminately on Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues. Even in response to the most brutal acts of violence—the killing of women and children, torture, rape, and mutilation—the city authorities did little, claiming that the size of the disturbances proved impossible to control. Police discipline had broken down, but the attitudes of municipal authorities against Jews were clear: the self-defense organizations were part of the problem, and they were now getting their just deserts. “The position of the Hebrew element of the population is one of great danger, in my estimation, as great bitterness exists against them on account of recent events,” wrote Heenan. “The peasantry in many parts of the province are reported to be robbing, stealing, and even worse and telegrams have been received here begging for help. Taking it all and all I think I may safely suggest that the times are out of joint.”15

  The red flags of revolt sometimes fluttered in the sea breeze. Crowds hailed the news from St. Petersburg that the tsar had granted the empire its first ever elected parliament. “Here in the great commercial city of southern Russia,” wrote the correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, “there was a gloom, silence and abandon that spelled revolution, disorder and economic disaster.”16 But for people in the middle of these events, they had the look not of political change but of a nightmarish circus that upended all the city had built. Odessa’s civilized core seemed to have withered and blown out to sea. As Lyubov Girs, the wife of a senior city official, noted in her diary, “Jewish pogroms are breaking out. [The Jews] have organized and armed themselves, and they are going so far as to shoot out of windows at the Russians. On Deribasovskaya Street all the Jewish stores have been smashed and the goods looted, and the riff-raff and their wives are strutting about in expensive clothes, boots, and fur coats…. The Jews on our street grabbed a dog and hung a label on his tail that said ‘Nicholas II.’”17

  In the end, perhaps three hundred Jews and another hundred non-Jews fell victim to the violence of October, adding to hundreds of people, both Jewish and Christian, killed the previous June. Odessans had never seen violence of this scale and scope. A score of different causes and motivations were braided together over more than a year of disturbances, street fights, and large-scale confrontations. Political activism, drunkenness, boredom, fear, tit-for-tat attacks, and the religiously inspired antisemitism of the workers and peasants who ringed the city center all came together to produce Odessa’s descent into chaos.

  Odessa in 1905: “A rough funeral: conveying bodies of Jewish victims from the hospital to the cemetery,” a photograph from the Illustrated London News, November 18, 1905. Author’s collection.

  It was a series of events that touched the heart of the business and administrative classes, groups that had to a degree been exempt from the routine violence that had previously afflicted the docklands, Moldavanka, and some of the inner suburbs. Overall, the toll from assassinations, bomb blasts, shoot-outs, and mob attacks between February 1905 and May 1906 in the wider Odessa region was staggering: the dead included thirteen provincial governors and mayors, thirty police captains and senior officers of the gendarmerie, twenty-nine bankers and leading businessmen, fifty-four factory owners, 471 other police officers, and 257 local constables, in all some 1,273 deaths that the Russian state attributed to “terrorist acts”—not counting the hundreds of ordinary citizens killed or injured over the same period.18

  IT IS HARD TO KNOW when you find yourself in the middle of history. Most Odessans of the day, like the characters in The Five, were not living in a prologue or an aftermath but rather in the uncertain present. After all, a decade before the unrest, around the time of Odessa’s centennial in 1894, the city was still full of unparalleled cultural promise—for both gentiles and Jews—despite the earlier pogroms and tightening government repression.

  Odessans, for example, had celebrated their city’s birthday with commemorative albums, military parades, endless speeches, and solemn masses, all overseen by the long-serving, barrel-chested mayor Grigory Marazli. More than 1,500 people could crowd into the gilded interior of the opera house that, for nearly twenty years, had stood regally at the top of Richelieu Street. After a show, patrons could stroll down Langéron or Catherine Street, both flanked by new buildings decorated with classical columns or florid baroque reliefs, and enjoy a coffee or flavored ices at the Fanconi or Robinat café. For those with the right credentials, private associations such as the exclusive Odessa Club—earlier known as the English Club—offered drinks, dining, and foreign newspapers.

  Citizens with more specific interests might seek membership in the Black Sea Yacht Club, the New Russian Society for the Encouragement of Horse Breeding, the New Russian Society of Hunting Enthusiasts, or the Odessa Society of Amateur Velocipedists. The reading public could find books at several libraries and reading halls, or purchase their own volumes at one of the city’s eighteen bookstores. Visitors might find lodging at any of twelve first-class hotels and countless private houses and small inns. They could stroll among the curious statues and engravings displayed in the museum of the Imperial Odessan Society of History and Antiquities, or lose themselves in the green expanse of Alexandrovsky Park. When they had had enough of the city, they could take the regular train service to anywhere in the empire or Europe, or board one of the dozens of steamships making daily runs to the other Russian ports on the Black Sea or weekly excursions to Constantinople.19

  It was hardly a golden age for the city. The grain trade had fallen off, and Odessa’s relative importance in the empire and the wider world was already in decline. But a snapshot of the individual lives being played out in the city’s modest homes and courtyards reveals a wealth of talent and imagination—some of it belonging to native Odessans but most connected with people who passed through the city while making their reputations elsewhere. The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was living near the park. He later became the celebrated creator of Tevye the Dairyman and, after a move to the United States, the masterful codifier of what we now think of as shtetl culture. Simon Dubnow, the distinguished historian of Russian Jewry, was holding court in his flat in Bazaar Street. Leon Pinsker, one of the early prophets of what would come to be called Zionism, was dying in his rooms on Richelieu Street. A few blocks away, the register of the Preobrazhensky Cathedral recorded the christening of one Anna Gorenko. She later resurrected an old family name, Akhmatova, as her nom de plume. A few blocks farther to the west, in Moldavanka, the warehouse-owner Emmanuel Babel was celebrating the birth of his son, Isaac.

  For Jews, a wide array of ideologies, political programs, and social networks spread themselves through the city like melons offered at the bazaar. The Odessa branch of the Society for the Propagation of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia worked to forward the values of the maskilim, including the use of the Russian language. The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine—known informally as the “Odessa Committee” and for a time the only legal Zionist organization in Russia—supported Jews who opted to begin new lives as farmers in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, at least until the Ottomans began restricting Jewish immigration.

  The promise and horror of Odessa in the decade separating 1894 from 1905 seem deeply contradictory. How could a city generally satisfied with its easy cosmopolitanism fall so speedily into communal chaos? Many Odessans—especially Jews—seemed to be swimming against a swelling tide. “Assimilation begins precisely with the relaxation of old prejudices,” says one of the characters in The Five, “but a prejudice is a sacred thing;…Perhaps the genuine meaning of morality…consists of prejudices.”20 That was the novel’s essential point. The growing exclusion of Jews from Russian civic life was not merely a result of their neighbors’ biases. For the author of The Five and its thinly veiled narrator, Vladimir Jabot
insky, exclusion, self-awareness, and pride in one’s own cultural peculiarities were crucial dimensions of what Jewishness ought to be. In his day, Odessa seemed to confirm the view that national identity was the atomic unit of human society. The veneers offered by assimilation, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism could not disguise the age-old yearning for nations to express their own unique genius. Jews, Poles, Russians, and Greeks might bump up against each other on Deribasovskaya, but everyday civility was not the same thing as commonality of interest or ambition. In the end, this particular way of thinking about nationality was both the antithesis and the product of everything Jabotinsky’s native city claimed to be.

  NEARLY A THOUSAND MILES away from Odessa, the Israeli port of Acre contains an old prison famous for housing heretics. Originally constructed during the Crusader era, the imposing Acre fortress was a place where the Knights Templar could hide away their infidel captives. Successive Arab and Ottoman rulers used it to stash the rebellious, the unorthodox, and the merely inconvenient. The nineteenth-century religious leader Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í faith, was shoved into a dingy cell by Ottoman authorities for preaching the revolutionary idea that all religions are part of a divine and progressive revelation. Almost a century later, the new political power in the city—the British mandate authorities in Palestine—found the prison an equally serviceable place to keep one of the most troublesome Odessans of the era, the novelist, journalist, and activist Vladimir Jabotinsky, Zionism’s archetypical champion as well as its most controversial dissenter. His storied career—from Odessa to Palestine to an early death in the United States—reveals a great deal about the political eddies that swirled around his hometown in the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth.