During the war the city lay near the geographical intersection of Europe’s old empires—Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian—and of the new kingdoms, nation-states, and nationalities that were quickly spiraling away from their control. The city’s three largest ethnic groups—Russians at 39 percent, Jews at 36 percent, and Ukrainians at 17 percent—were ready audiences for political entrepreneurs marketing radically different visions of the future.
Odessans found themselves on multiple front lines: between Jews and their tormentors, between Ukrainian nationalists and their tsarist opponents, between radical Marxists and the forces of autocracy. But it was hard to tell which events heralded major changes and which might blow away with the next northeasterly wind. A visiting American physician observed in October of 1917 that all the ships in the harbor were suddenly flying red flags. “No one seems to know why, as we have not heard of any Naval Victory, nor is it a special holiday.”1 The doctor was witnessing Odessa’s version of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet even that turned out to be of passing importance, at least in the short term.
Faced with horrible conditions on the battlefield and political revolutions in the imperial capitals, the Russian army collapsed over the course of 1917. Soldiers faded back into the civilian population, formed armed gangs and pitiful bands of beggars, or coalesced into the armies that eventually drew up on opposite sides of the Russian civil war—the Whites who remained loyal to the old order and the Reds committed to the ideals of revolution. The Central powers made plans to rush through the door that now opened on the eastern front. To block Germany, Turkey, or Austria-Hungary from gobbling up Russia’s industrial and shipping centers, the Entente powers divvied up responsibility for occupying portions of the old empire. British troops were dispatched to the east, to the Caucasus region, to secure control of the strategic oil fields of Baku. In Odessa a disheveled army of French colonial forces—composed in part of North African troops outfitted in colorful pantaloons and woolen great coats—marched down Nikolaevsky Boulevard and instituted a hasty and ill-planned military rule.
This effort in prophylactic occupation was short-lived. Despite the French declaration of martial law, the city remained in near anarchy, with hungry refugees raiding shops and people sometimes being killed in the street for their overcoats.2 French sailors, subjected to harsh treatment aboard the republic’s own vessels, heeded the Bolshevik call to soldiers and seamen to unite against capitalist oppression. The French fleet anchored in the Black Sea briefly raised the red flag of Communism alongside the tricolor.3 With French forces in disarray, Russian units now loyal to the new Bolshevik government marched into Odessa and claimed it for the revolution. Yet that effort, too, proved to be temporary. By the late summer of 1919, the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, commanded by the famed White general Anton Denikin, pushed out the Bolsheviks and launched a campaign against suspected Red sympathizers.
The tide soon turned against the White armies across the former empire. Denikin’s forces fled in the face of a new offensive by Bolshevik troops. As the Bolshevik army made its final entry into Odessa in February of 1920, tens of thousands of refugees crowded with their baggage near the ice-choked harbor, seeking passage aboard the few merchant vessels and Allied warships that remained in the bay. Commander Gordon Ellyson, in charge of the U.S. naval detachment sent to evacuate Americans from the city, reported scenes of pathos and horror. A woman made her way through the crowds with a baby carriage, looking for the husband and child from whom she had been separated in the scramble. Another woman lugged a gilt-edged mirror. A man stumbled to the ships carrying only a banjo with no strings, while his partner struggled under the weight of a small church organ strapped to his back. Sailors strained to hoist an automobile aboard a Greek vessel before the ping of rifle shots from Bolshevik snipers convinced them to abandon the project.
Crowds surged ahead, slipping on the ice-covered docks and trying to stuff themselves aboard small launches. Some were thrown overboard or beaten back by panicked sailors trying to keep their own craft from capsizing. Meanwhile, gunfire echoed throughout the city as the remaining shore-side defenders fired potshots at Bolshevik advance parties. Now and then, the thundering thirteen-and-a-half-inch guns of the British battleship Ajax, anchored in the inner harbor, sent shells hurtling toward Bolshevik positions. Within days, the last defenders—bits of the Volunteer Army, Ukrainian irregulars, and Allied soldiers and seamen—had left the city for good.4
After the departure of the Whites, the city was a place of burned buildings and refugees. Average urban-dwellers tried to make sense of the power shifts that seemed to occur from month to month. “Miles of houses still await reconstruction,” noted a visitor nearly a decade after the war had ended. “Their blackened walls stick up like decayed teeth against the brilliant blue of the sky, and in the suburbs of the city are whole streets, empty, plundered, dead.”5 The march of armies across the defunct empire had put millions to flight, emptying villages and bringing agricultural production to a halt. Jewish inhabitants of the old Pale of Settlement were targeted by all sides, from tsarist units who blamed them for the Red menace, to Ukrainians seeking an independent Ukrainian state, to Bolshevik cavalry who requisitioned grain, goods, and animals at will.
A remarkable snapshot of the chaos of this period—and its particular effect on the region’s Jews—is provided by a survey conducted in Odessa in the summer of 1921.6 With the Bolsheviks now squarely in charge, activists from the Jewish Public Committee for Aiding the Victims of Pogroms, an independent social organization headquartered in Moscow, conducted a survey of Jewish refugees resident in the city. They posted fliers in Russian and Yiddish requesting that Jews register voluntarily at one of ten bureaus set up in the center and on the outskirts of town. Since registering was also a way of receiving aid channeled through the committee from Jewish communities abroad, there was an incentive for Jews to present themselves to be counted. Interviewers collected a wealth of information about families and individuals based on oral testimony. When interviewers had reason to be suspicious about someone’s story, they recorded no information unless the person could provide proof, such as showing up with all of their children in tow or producing an official document to confirm residence or employment. The result was a sophisticated sociological record of civilian suffering at the end of the Russian civil war.
Capturing and holding the city had been a strategic goal of the Austro-Hungarians, French, Ukrainians (in several factions), Whites, and Bolsheviks. But given that individuals and families drifted into the city from a relatively limited region—mainly the southern Ukrainian provinces of Kiev, Odessa, Podolia, and Nikolaev—the scale of Jewish displacement and death across the former Pale of Settlement is all the more evident. The committee counted 12,037 Jewish refugees, of whom 9,042 were currently resident in Odessa. Another 1,801 were registered by family members as still living in their home towns and villages; 1,194 were named as deceased. Just under a third had lost at least one family member in a pogrom, around 44 percent of them losing one or both parents. Most often, it had been the fathers, but many had seen their mothers killed as well. Families were still sizable, however, with the average respondent reporting five family members still living. The vast majority of victims were adults, but nearly 17 percent of families had lost someone under the age of sixteen.
Pogrom survivors came from all professions and social classes. Students, traders, business owners, clerks, teachers, and port workers comprised the majority. But the single largest group—nearly 31 percent—were housewives, probably a reflection of the disproportionate targeting of men in pogroms and the wider civil war, with women left as the head of household. (Not surprisingly, two-thirds of the registered dead were men.) With families and entire villages on the move on foot and by oxcart, covering hundreds of miles to reach relatives or the assumed safety of a city; with Cossack detachments, Red and White armies, and ordinary bandits roaming the countryside; and with a history of organized anti-Jewish violen
ce across the western empire stretching back a half century or more, it was no surprise that people reported what amounted to serial victimhood. More than half the respondents said that they had lived through three or more events that they classed as pogroms.
The survey provides a unique, microscopic view of displacement and violence, but it pales in comparison to what we know overall about refugees and death during this period. By the summer of 1917, over seven million people had been displaced in European Russia. The majority were probably what would now be called ethnic Russians, but minority groups—always suspected of loyalty to some enemy power—were explicitly targeted by invading armies, bandits, and the many independent military groups that formed amid war and revolution. In all the cities of the western empire, refugees arrived from the countryside seeking food and a modicum of shelter, adding to the mass of homeless wanderers that had emerged already during the disorders of 1905.7
The survey captured a vital change in the city’s Jewish population, however. The community—some 125,000 people in the last tsarist-era census—had been as diverse as any other in the city in terms of profession and social class. But if there was a typical Odessan Jew, at least the kind revealed by censuses rather than by the antisemitic imaginings of Russian nationalists, it was the lower-middle-class businessman working as a merchant, petty trader, innkeeper, or small factory owner, making a living in an economic landscape that was both uncertain and at times actively hostile. Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans had nearly as many of their number living as peasants on Odessa’s outskirts as they did working in urban-based professions on the docks and the industrial periphery. But Jews, far more than the Christians with whom they shared the city, were the quintessential urban community. By the 1890s over 95 percent of Jews were classed as petty bourgeois by estate—the old category of meshchane into which they had rapidly moved over the course of that century.8
Yet after nearly two decades of upheaval, from the primordial violence of 1905 through the First World War and the rolling pogroms of the Russian civil war, that individual was largely gone. Now the prototypical Jew was likely to be a housewife and widow who had brought her children from the countryside after some terrible act of violence, and had experienced even more horrors along the way. That was one of the people whom Odessa’s greatest writer, Isaac Babel, was working to describe at the time.
WHILE VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY was busy trying to create a fighting force for Palestine, his fellow Odessan was sitting on a horse in a Cossack cavalry regiment. It was an unlikely place for a Jew, to say the least. But Isaac Babel made a habit of being in the wrong place at the right time.
Babel was born in June of 1894 in Moldavanka, to middle-class Jewish parents. Round-faced and bespectacled, with a hairline that quickly lost out to an expansive and furrowed brow, he was steeped in the classics of European literature, as well as in the ancient traditions of Talmudic reasoning and argumentation. The family survived the 1905 pogrom only because of the intervention of Christian neighbors, who hid several family members from the mobs that roamed the empty streets. Babel’s grandfather, however, was among the victims.
Babel’s ambitions were those of many Jewish men in Odessa: to complete his education and then go into one of the few fields open to him, such as business, journalism, or the vague but vital vocation known as the intelligentsia. Anti-Jewish quotas in many educational institutions, including the local university, blocked Babel’s admission. He enrolled instead in a technical school in Kiev. From there, he eventually moved to Petrograd, using his Odessa wiles to avoid the police since he lacked a residency permit. He soon embarked on a modest career as a writer of short stories and essays.
Petrograd was a city in ferment. More than a decade earlier, while Odessa was being terrorized by anti-Jewish gangs, the city had been the site of a failed uprising that nevertheless managed to wrench some liberalizing concessions from Tsar Nicholas II. Babel found himself swept up in the political fervor that swirled around the imperial capital, its name now changed, through the passions of war, from the overly Germanic “Sankt-Peterburg.” He had come under the patronage of the major leftist writer and editor Maxim Gorky, who published a few of his early stories. With that entrée into the world of underground socialists and surreptitious printing presses, Babel became part of the earliest generation of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.
But his true introduction to the realities of revolutionary life came from the Cossacks. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the former Russian Empire remained divided between supporters of the new government and their many opponents. For the next four years, the territory of the old empire was scarred by mobile warfare among a host of rival factions—Reds, Whites, nationalists, and local peasants intent mainly on protecting their homes and fields from marauders.
Babel was an early version of an embedded journalist. He was assigned to the detachment of Semyon Budenny, the legendary commander of Cossack cavalry fighting on the Bolshevik side in the western borderlands of the defunct empire. He was technically a correspondent for the horse troops’ in-house newspaper, Krasny kavalerist (Red Cavalryman), assigned to report on the daily life of soldiers fighting for Soviet power against the forces of imperialism and reaction. But the casual violence of irregular warfare—with villages burned and peasants displaced, often with little justification except the boredom of the soldiers who did the burning and displacing—found expression in what would become Babel’s greatest literary achievement: the short-story collection Red Cavalry, first published in 1926.
“Babel tells old wives’ tales, fumbles in old women’s secondhand underwear, narrates in a horror-stricken old woman’s voice how a hungry Red Army soldier took a chicken and a loaf of bread; he invents things that never happened, and throws dirt at the best Communist commanders. He fantasizes and simply lies.”9 That was the unequivocal judgment of Budenny himself, the enabling muse of Babel’s most creative period as a writer in the terrifying transition from tsarism to Bolshevism. The old cavalryman was right in one sense. It was precisely the gossip and garbage of the civil war experience—an appreciation for which he had cultivated in the muddy streets and steamy courtyards of Moldavanka—that Babel transformed into stories of delicate insight.
The characters who populate the stories are pastiches of people he met in the cavalry ranks and in the villages and shtetls far to the north of his hometown. But many are also versions of Babel himself, people swept up in purposeless violence, spinning in the middle of a revolution that threatened to burn itself out before anything great could be achieved. There is old Gedali, the Jewish pawnbroker, who would gladly trade the message of Bolshevism for “an International of good people.” There is the unpredictable and empty-hearted platoon commander Afonka Bida, ruthless in his prosecution of the war but oddly sentimental about his horse.
Over time the stories’ first-person narrator—a writer like Babel—finds his own heart callused and bruised by the experience of war. Churches and synagogues are smashed. People are run down on horseback. Looted clothes and valuables produce military units that look less like an army and more like a wandering, apocalyptic carnival. The narrator is as drawn to the broad chests and studied swagger of the Cossacks as he is repelled by their actions, a horrified witness unable to turn his eyes away from the atrocity.
Babel was a man of the borderlands who spent his early life moving between worlds: Jewish and Russian, tsarist and Bolshevik, army and artistic. At the end of the civil war, he returned off and on to Odessa, where he worked on another of his major literary works, the series of short-stories later collected as Odessa Tales, a riveting evocation of the crooks, schemers, prostitutes, and bent cops of Jewish Moldavanka. The stories are still a magnificent introduction to the cavaliers of the city’s criminal underworld, people who are merciless when exploiting an easy mark or punishing a rival, but who can also be disarmingly nice to old women and charming to romantic interests. Today, Babel’s writing is often approached through his Odessa storie
s, but to do so is to risk mistaking dark elegies for exercises in light nostalgia. Where Red Cavalry was a work of searing reportage, a fictional version of experiences that were still fresh and raw when they were published, the Odessa Tales is one of twilight recollection. The Odessa that he evoked had already faded into history.
One of Babel’s lasting legacies is the fact that when people think of Odessa, it is fictional characters—not the real-life builders of the city—who come most readily to mind. The mobster kingpin Benya Krik is the archetypal inhabitant of this imaginary city. He becomes “king” of Moldavanka by extorting money from business owners and bringing a kind of rough justice to the more disorderly thugs who run the neighborhood. He is the kind of person who can be kind to widows and cruel to subordinates who disappoint, and do it all in a chocolate-colored jacket, cream pants, and raspberry ankle boots, seated behind the wheel of a red car whose horn plays the opening march from Pagliacci.
Benya’s Odessa—that is, Babel’s—is something of a community, one built on theft, prostitution, and murder, but a community nevertheless. There is a kind of honor among thieves, and no one knew its contours better than a writer from the city’s most squalid and storied neighborhood, a place that its inhabitants—like the windswept and gritty port as a whole—saw as home. In the stories, it is sometimes hard to tell whether Babel is writing with a smile or a sneer. “Moldavanka, our generous mother,” he wrote in one passage, “a life crowded with suckling babies, drying rags, and conjugal nights filled with big-city chic and soldierly tirelessness.”10 But that was precisely the point. You didn’t quite get Odessa unless it drew you in and repelled you at the same time.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Page 16
