Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (12 page)

Oxen and wagons filled with sacks of wheat in the port of Odessa, from a nineteenth-century photograph.
Author’s collection
.

Of all these goods, the queen was wheat. Ninety percent of Russian wheat exports flowed out of the empire’s Black Sea ports, and many of the sights, sounds, and smells of Odessa derived from its production and sale.
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Immense herds of cattle provided manure for fertilizer in the countryside and pulled the thousands of wooden carts that bore the harvested grain from field to storage centers.
Chumak
carters and drovers followed established routes that cut deep ruts across the steppe, converging from the far reaches of Bessarabia, Podolia, and other parts of the western empire. Once in the city, they could deposit their loads in any of hundreds of storage facilities, some of them empty, repurposed stone houses, others elaborate granaries, resplendent with pilasters and pediments, rising on the far side of the ravines that divided the city.
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Some carters would return north with cloth, wine, or other imported goods offloaded from merchant vessels in the harbor, while others chose to transform their infrastructure into capital. The dried dung could be collected and sold as fuel to poor families, and the animals could then be given up to slaughter for meat and hides. The sweet smoke of burning, grass-rich manure mingled in the air with the reek of tallow vats and the sharp odor of tanneries, the factories that produced the bricks of processed fat and bundles of unworked leather destined for Turkey, Italy, or France.

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.
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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.
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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.’”
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

O
DESSA 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 Balkans, 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.
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