People like Benya Krik were already passing from the scene by the time Babel first put pen to paper, and that is one of the central messages of the Odessa Tales. In one of the later stories, “Froim Grach,” which was not published until long after Babel’s death, an old gangland boss who claimed to control a criminal army of “forty-thousand Odessa thugs” is executed at the hands of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. “You’re killing off all the lions!” the boss says minutes before his death. “And you know what you’ll be left with if you keep it up! You’ll be left with shit!”11
Babel understood that his characters had finite lives. He was writing both about an imperial Odessa that used to exist and about another kind of city, a Soviet one, that was in the process of becoming. In one of the screenplays he wrote based on the Odessa stories, for the 1926 silent film Benya Krik, the kingpin himself falls prey to Soviet power. The gangster king of Moldavanka ends up as just another bandit. He is shot by Bolshevik authorities, one more remnant of the old regime erased in the creation of the new order.
If Babel’s Benya Krik was a transitional figure in the making of Soviet Odessa, new characters were rushing in to take his place. Their essential qualities were flexibility and an ability to bend their necks to the overwhelming power of the state. Benya had the old tsarist police on the run (or, more frequently, on the take) and ruled his neighborhood with little regard for the niceties of formal law. His successors knew how to deal with the new power, softly and carefully, without the bluster and bravado of Benya’s generation. Other fictional characters emerged as the instantly recognizable Odessans of the new era. The writing team of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov created one of the most memorable, the essential entrepreneur of the easy deal, Ostap Bender—fast-talking, self-assured, and just Jewish enough to be acceptable to Russian readers. Unlike Benya, however, Ostap always shaved his schemes to fit within the confines of the law. “I’m no cherub. I don’t have wings. But I do honor the legislative code,” he says in Ilf and Petrov’s picaresque novel The Golden Calf (1931).
That might well have been Odessa’s informal motto after the advent of Soviet power. Good-natured criminality, a southern sense of laissez-aller, and a secular, modernized version of Jewishness were part of the city’s heritage. To it were added the universal aspirations of Soviet Communism, the cult of the worker, and a talent for bending one’s ambitions to the dictates of an overweening state. The core visual representation of this new world was created by a director who made Odessa into the unlikely birthplace of revolution and turned Vorontsov’s “monstrous staircase” into a piece of film history.
A FOREIGN DIPLOMAT who traveled by car all the way from Moscow in the 1930s reported that, beyond Kiev, roads reduced to earthen tracks and short stretches of rough, granite-paved highway. Small hotels were available along the route, but they were invariably swarming with flies. It was easy to lose your way because of the lack of signage, and even locals seemed uncertain about how to reach the sea.
When he arrived in Odessa, he was told there were no rooms available in the grand old Hotel London, one of the main buildings along the seaward heights—at least until he displayed his diplomatic passport and demanded accommodation. The only things that made the diplomat feel he was in a remotely well-connected city were the small group of American tourists he found complaining loudly in the hotel’s restaurant and the fact that nearly everyone he met in the city, on his reckoning, was Jewish.12
What he missed was that Odessa was already being transformed, root and branch, from an imperial city into a new, Soviet one. Shortly after the Bolshevik conquest, old streets were renamed in honor of heroes of the revolution and civil war. Imperial symbols were pulled down and replaced with the hammer and sickle. The opera house staged spectacles lionizing the workers’ triumph over tsarist oppression. The bodies of Count and Countess Vorontsov were exhumed from their crypts in Preobrazhensky Cathedral and removed to a local cemetery. The cathedral was then razed and its marble facings used to outfit a nearby school, the old god of tsarist tradition and hierarchy now unfit for an era of progress and egalitarianism. As the site of one of the iconic episodes in the Bolshevik Revolution’s own prehistory—the disorders of 1905—Odessa occupied a special place in the emerging myth-making of the Soviet state.
Today it is almost impossible to separate our understanding of 1905 from the way in which the events were mythologized twenty years later. All of the key images, in fact, come from the skillful hands of one man, Sergei Eisenstein, the master of early Soviet cinematography. Through his 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, Odessa became the tocsin that heralded the coming of revolution, ground zero for the emergence of triumphant Bolshevism, and by extension the truest birthplace of the Soviet Union.
In late June of 1905, the tsar’s steel-hulled battleship Potemkin—named for the great eighteenth-century prince and field marshal—had left port in Crimea to engage in firing exercises in the Black Sea. Conditions on board were dire. The beating of naval conscripts by noncommissioned officers was common. Food was in short supply. When a ration of meat was found to be crawling with maggots, the crew refused to eat and gathered on the quarterdeck to display their disgust.
Beyond that point, however, Eisenstein’s version of events departed from history. In his film, a contingent of marines is called out to restore order. The sailors rush to their fellow crewmen and urge them not to shoot. The marines hesitate, and a rebellion is born. The mutineers run through the ship, grabbing everyone on board with officers’ insignia on their summer uniforms. Some try to hide below decks or plead with the sailors to stand down. Others are thrown overboard. The Potemkin then sets sail for Odessa. From the topmast, the red flag of freedom waves in place of the naval ensign.
In the city, workers, peasants, and seamen gather on the cliffs and in the docklands. The body of the mutiny’s ringleader, shot by a treacherous officer, is placed on the quayside, an informal lying in state for a martyr of the revolution. Among the starched collars and felt hats of the bourgeois onlookers, a provocateur yells out, “Bei zhidov!”—“Let’s bash the yids!”—the battle cry of pogrom-makers since the 1870s. But the citizens refuse to respond to this diversion. Fighting the capitalist and imperialist oppressor, not beating up on their fellow citizens, is hailed as the common task of the emboldened masses. The mutiny has become a revolution.
All of this, however, was a work of purposive imagination. The real Potemkin mutiny ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The seamen steamed hopefully into Odessa but lost their nerve once the ship arrived. They failed to take advantage of a general strike then in progress in the city. Public protests that had filled the tree-lined streets soon fizzled, and the city’s revolutionaries slunk back into the shadows. The crew issued periodic proclamations to the workers of the world to join with them against the evils of tsarist autocracy, but in the end, even the crew’s enthusiasm waned. The mutineers sailed down the coast to the Romanian city of Constana, where they surrendered to Romanian authorities. Some of them were arrested and sent back to Russia, where they were tried and hanged. Others remained behind and made new lives abroad. Until the late 1980s, visitors to a small fish-and-chips shop in Dublin could hear the proprietor, an old veteran named Ivan Beshoff, regale them with memories of the revolt that paved the way for a revolution.
Two makers of modern Odessa: Isaac Babel (left) and Sergei Eisenstein (right), ca. 1935. Russian Museum of Cinema/Abamedia.
Sergei Eisenstein was only twenty-seven when he created his version of the Potemkin events. Short and compact, with a large head and a shock of wild, clownlike hair that retreated behind his substantial brow, he was not from Odessa. But he was part of Babel’s generation, the group of artists and intellectuals who drew inspiration from the revolutionary élan of the Soviet 1920s, an era when novelty in art, literature, theater, and virtually every aspect of social and cultural life was not only tolerated but encouraged.
Like Babel, Eisenstein had served with the Red Army d
uring the civil war and, in 1921, began work as a set painter for Proletkult, the “proletarian culture” movement that became the epicenter of artistic experimentation in the early Bolshevik state. A year later he was made director of the First Moscow Workers’ Theater and soon began exploring film. In his first full-length feature, Strike (1925), he experimented with the montages that became his filmic signature. In time, as a prominent proponent of the use of film not only as entertainment but as a form of political education, Eisenstein emerged as the dean of Soviet filmmakers and the master of the earliest video imagery of Soviet power. Even today, his staged scenes of revolutionary workers and reactionary soldiers are routinely misinterpreted, by Western audiences as well as by Russians, as “documentaries” of Russia’s multiple revolutions.
Battleship Potemkin became one of his preeminent pieces and certainly one of the most copied works in film history. It was commissioned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, but by the time Eisenstein began the project, the end of the anniversary year was only a few months away. He and a vast team worked in Odessa and other parts of the Black Sea region for weeks, using the Hotel London as their base. To save time and money, they scraped together archival footage that could be used in place of new film. (The shots of tsarist ships steaming ominously toward the valiant mutineers are actually old images of the U.S. Navy on maneuvers, the giveaway being a small American flag visible in one scene.) In a mad rush at the end of the year, Eisenstein cut down some fifteen thousand meters of film into a running time of around seventy minutes.13 “The fetters of space and the claws of time held our excessive and greedy fantasy in check,” he later wrote, surely with little inkling of the lasting success produced by just over three months of scenario writing, set design, shooting, and editing.14
What Eisenstein injected into the story was its single most memorable—and in large part imaginary—element: the slaughter on the Odessa steps. Eisenstein’s genius was to place the steps at the center of his film, a scene that he called in his memoirs “the very core of the film’s organic substance and general structure.”15 Ranks of soldiers and Cossacks fire on the striking workers. When a Cossack strikes a woman across the face with his cavalry saber, we know exactly what has happened in that gruesome and shocking scene, even though the director never shows the sword making contact with her upturned face; the woman simply turns her gouged eye full-on to the camera. In the climactic sequence, a baby carriage teeters on the edge of the staircase then slides horrifically down the granite cataract.
In reality, there was no popular memory of a “massacre on the steps” as the centerpiece of the violence of 1905. The major shooting occurred elsewhere in the city and involved not only the military but also a whole series of self-protection units organized by city neighborhoods to guard against bandits and the inciters of pogroms. The idea for the scene may have come from an illustration of the staircase that Eisenstein found in a contemporary French magazine while doing background research for the film in Moscow.16 In Eisenstein’s retelling, the single bloodiest event of 1905—the murder of hundreds of Jews—faded into the background. Through the film, Odessa was transformed from a place where Jews had been killed in the streets to a city remembered for working-class solidarity and opposition to the tsar’s arbitrary rule. It was, to say the least, a heroic act of misremembering.
When Soviet audiences viewed the silent film, they were witnessing the birth of their own country—a revolutionary nation that looked back to the heroes and martyrs of 1905. By the time the film was released in 1925, the Soviet Union had succeeded the Russian Empire as the de facto ruler of much of the Black Sea coastline, including Odessa. Yet it was a country without a history. Its ideology proclaimed youth and rejection of the past as the hallmarks of a new social and political order. Even its founder—Lenin—lay dead, his legacy uncertain and a host of former courtiers now vying for power. The Potemkin mutiny, in Eisenstein’s talented hands, became the Old Testament of the Bolshevik Revolution, a series of events that presaged the triumphant changes of October 1917.
One of the last places Battleship Potemkin was shown was in Odessa itself. It had played at the Bolshoi Theatre and the First Sovkino Cinema in Moscow in December of 1925 and January of 1926, and when the American film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford saw it during a visit to the Soviet Union that summer, they hastened its release abroad.17 Charlie Chaplin pronounced it the best film in the world.18 It soon played to packed houses in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before arriving in Odessa later in the year. The film had been taken for a dry documentary elsewhere in the Soviet Union and had been screened to half-full houses. But in Odessa it was an instant hit—and also an instant scandal.
A local citizen claimed to have been a participant in the events on board the original Potemkin and brought a court case against Eisenstein, demanding a cut of the royalties for having his personal story stolen by the famous director. When he was questioned on the matter, the old sailor maintained that he had been aboard ship at a critical stage in the rebellion, when a group of seamen were draped with a tarpaulin in preparation for their execution as mutineers. The case was soon dismissed. As Eisenstein pointed out, the tarpaulin scene had been solely the product of directorial creativity—an artistic representation of a collective blindfold being draped across the condemned heroes. No such event had taken place.19
Eisenstein’s filmic techniques are often stunning in their originality and effectiveness. He decomposes images into their component parts. He moves between one image and another to create a visual metaphor, such as the famous comparison between men and maggots in the dark larder of the battleship. He uses multiple, staccato shots to indicate a single event, rather than recording the action as one fluid set of movements by the actors. The director was clear on the connections among technique, art, and politics. Battleship Potemkin was part of a new era in filmmaking, he believed, an age of “the new psychologism” in art that would focus on audience reaction as the central measure of worth and influence.20
As Eisenstein recalled in an interview not long after the film’s release, the power of the images, not their historical veracity, was the real worth of his creation. “Take the scene in Potemkin where the Cossacks slowly, deliberately, walk down the Odessa steps firing into the masses,” he said. “By consciously combining the element of legs, steps, blood, people, we produce an impression. Of what kind? The spectator does not imagine himself at the Odessa wharf in 1905. But as the soldiers’ boots press forward he physically recoils. He tries to get out of the range of the bullets. As the baby carriage goes over the side of the mole he holds on to his cinema chair. He does not want to fall into the water.”21 Imagery, lighting, camera angle, and editing were all intended to provoke a discrete emotional response in the viewer, and these effects could be calculated with almost scientific precision. The impact on the filmgoer, not the verisimilitude of image and action, were the hallmarks of a film’s success, even when dealing with historical topics. “By ‘film’ I understand tendentiousness and nothing else,” he wrote blankly.22
Battleship Potemkin is arguably the single most important cultural artifact in Odessa’s modern history—a piece of art that did more than any other to encapsulate the city’s own image of itself and the way in which it would be remembered for generations to come. If portside hucksters and the mélange of East and West had impressed visitors for much of the nineteenth century, Eisenstein’s staging of the Potemkin affair came to define the city in the twentieth. Eisenstein included all the basic elements of the incident that were passed down from the participants themselves, such as the crew’s refusal to eat rancid meat as the impetus for the mutiny. But he added the heroic gloss that turned Odessa into the avant-garde of revolutionary change, providing a usable prehistory for the Bolshevik Revolution and, by extension, for the new Soviet state.
But that is also why the film has so little to do with Odessa itself. The
steps were there, of course, but other images were not. In one sequence, a stone lion seems to lift itself from its plinth, like the working masses of the Russian Empire rising against their capitalist oppressors. Eisenstein composed the scene from separate shots of several statues, each in a different pose from prone to standing. Visitors to Odessa still look in vain for the restless lion, however. The original statues are actually hundreds of miles away, at Count Vorontsov’s old summer palace in Crimea.
FOR A TIME, Isaac Babel lived in an ornate apartment building not far from the old Brody and Glavnaya synagogues. Today the commemorative plaque is easy to miss beside the plate-glass window of the Bang and Olufsen store that occupies the ground floor. Until recently there was no plaque at all, and the obscurity was intentional.
For most of the Soviet period, Babel’s fate remained a mystery, a secret guarded by generations of bureaucrats. The full story only became available once Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost began to shine light on the blackest corners of Soviet history. A special investigation revealed what even Babel’s close associates had never known in detail. He had been arrested as an enemy of the people in May of 1939 and tortured at the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the dungeon of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Babel’s arrest was part of the massive purge of artists and writers that accompanied the broader self-immolation of Soviet society in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s campaign to reengineer society and root out supposed enemies. The official Soviet story was that Babel had died in 1941 while serving a sentence, bizarrely, for spying for France and Austria. It later emerged that he had already been shot in January of 1940, one of many Soviet artists who fell during Stalin’s terror.
Not long before his arrest, Babel had been living in Moscow. He was at the center of Soviet artistic life, even if his output had been modest compared to that of many of his contemporary writers. He had celebrated the birth of a daughter with his longtime companion, Antonina Pirozhkova. (His estranged wife and elder daughter, Yevgenia and Nathalie, had been living safely in Paris for more than a decade, after Yevgenia had emigrated from Odessa in the mid-1920s.) Sergei Eisenstein, a friend of Babel’s and always a flamboyant jokester, arrived to welcome the new baby with a child’s chamber pot filled with a bouquet of violets.23 But within two years, Babel’s friends and family were left bewildered and paralyzed at the prison door. “I’ll be waiting for you,” said Pirozhkova as she accompanied Babel and his captors to the Lubyanka. “It will be as if you’ve gone to Odessa…only there won’t be any letters.”24 His manuscripts had been scattered and burned by the police.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Page 17
