Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (3 page)

Yet that commerce in turn rested on the same kinds of relationships between coast and hinterland—mutually beneficial yet also often fraught—that had allowed Greek colonies to flourish in antiquity. For Italian sailors and merchants, the inland partner was no longer the Scythians, who had disappeared centuries earlier into a fog of migrations, intermarriages, and invasions. It was now one of the many nomadic and settled peoples that had exerted control of the steppe in the millennium separating Herodotus from Marco Polo: the Tatars.

The Tatars were the successors to the Golden Horde, the last remnant of the great movement of peoples out of Central Asia that had accompanied Genghis Khan in the early thirteenth century. After the breakup of Genghis’s empire, the Golden Horde laid claim to much of the western Eurasian steppe and governed a massive imperial landscape traversed by Turkic herdsmen, Italian merchants, emissaries from European heads of state, and intrepid Christian missionaries. European visitors invariably condemned the barbarity of the Mongol-Tatar nomads, whose customs and traditions seemed to represent the antithesis of learning and civilization. But Europeans’ own recorded experiences often flew in the face of their prejudices.

In the 1240s, the rotund friar John of Plano Carpini was dispatched by Pope Innocent IV to establish relations with the Mongol-Tatar khan. Friar John was convinced of the nomads’ barbarous ways. “The slaughter of other people is accounted a matter of nothing with them,” he wrote. But his own eyewitness report reveals a cosmopolitan culture of erudition and exchange, albeit one that was often on the move, as the Mongol-Tatars followed their herds of sheep, cattle, and horses across the steppe and down to the shores of the Black and Caspian seas. As Friar John prepared for his long-awaited audience with the Mongol emperor, he was embarrassed to learn that the emperor’s secretaries were able to write in Arabic, Russian, and Tatar—whereas John himself knew no other written language but Latin. With considerable back-and-forth, the group managed to render the emperor’s multilingual thoughts into a Latin text that John could at last ferry back to the pope.
¹¹

In time, the Golden Horde, like its larger Mongol predecessor, fell prey to internal dissension and dynastic rivalries. It eventually broke apart, forming a new patchwork of small khanates scattered across Eurasia. These, in turn, struggled for control over trade routes and resources with some of the emerging Christian powers of the region: Muscovy, which was prospering north of the steppe zone and managed to throw off Mongol-Tatar dominance in the late fourteenth century, and Lithuania, which had also begun to expand at the expense of the Golden Horde, claiming even the lower reaches of the Dnieper River in the 1360s. The eastern nomads who had once threatened Europe—sparking desperate long-distance diplomatic missions like that of Friar John—were no longer the conduit of commerce they had been in the late Middle Ages. Business with China slowed, and Italian trading centers around the Black Sea withered.

Beneath these grand geopolitical changes, as tracts of territory shifted from one great power to another through decisive battles or royal successions, the lives of fishermen, merchants, farmers, and nomads continued from season to season. An army on the march ruined crops. Locusts ate what remained untouched. Cattle failed to calve, or spring lambs came earlier than expected. The arrival of ships flying unknown flags signaled some imponderable change beyond the sea. The sensible localness of Odessa was prefigured in the fate of its earliest and truest ancestor, a small windswept settlement lying at the meeting place of rival empires.

B
EFORE IT BECAME
Odessa, Khadjibey was an out-of-the-way village situated on the heights overlooking the Black Sea. Its origins are obscure, but local lore maintained that it was founded by an eponymous Tatar chieftain, Hadji I Giray. Seeking support against internal rivals and nomadic incursions, Hadji allegedly ceded a portion of his western territories to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a military and political powerhouse whose lands stretched across much of modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. The village of Khadjibey entered nominally into the Lithuanian domain, but in practice life probably went on as usual. Tatar villagers herded cattle, feuded with rivals over grazing lands, and traded livestock and grain with peoples farther inland, from the distant Poles and Lithuanians to the nearer Moldovans.
¹²

If the Lithuanians were the dominant force in the early fifteenth century, when a place called Khadjibey first appears in written sources, a century later a new set of influences came rushing in from the south. The Muslim Ottomans had created a voracious empire after the conquest of the Byzantine throne at Constantinople in 1453. Originally a set of allied Turkic-speaking tribes that long before had migrated out of Central Asia, the Ottomans gradually conquered or assimilated the panoply of Christian communities, Greek-speaking villagers, and migrant shepherds who lived on the margins of Byzantium. At their head was the sultan, a dynastic title carried by rulers who traced their lineage to Osman I in the 1290s—a chieftain from whose name the English term “Ottoman” is derived. Although Islamic at its core, the Ottoman state evolved as an empire in the truest sense of the term: a collection of peoples and territories loosely bound together by an overarching political leader and governed by an enormous machinery of taxation, tribute, and war-making.

By the time the Ottomans marched into Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire had nearly melted away on its own. Over the centuries, it had become a ghostly shell of the glorious eastern Rome of centuries past. Ottoman armies had already spent many summers on the march across southeastern Europe, bypassing the imperial capital and placing pressure on the Christian kings and princes of the Balkans, from Serbia to Moldova. But by the 1520s, with Constantinople subdued, the Ottoman sultan was able to secure the full acquiescence of the major powers in the region, who promised fealty in exchange for his recognizing their authority in their own lands. The coasts of the Black Sea were now under Ottoman suzerainty, even if the sultan often had to rule indirectly through local notables. The sea itself, with Ottoman warships commanding access to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, was the watery domain of the world’s greatest Islamic empire.

The port of Odessa, from an early-twentieth-century postcard.
Author’s collection.

Villagers in places like Khadjibey, whether they knew it or not, were now Ottoman subjects. That news did not always convince the locals, however. Pirates from north of the Black Sea frequently targeted Ottoman ships, even hitting the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia and occasionally menacing Constantinople. These raiders grew up out of the frontier society that defined the coastal borderlands of the empire—a mixture of former Polish-Lithuanian or Muscovite peasants, local Muslims, and nomadic herders, some of whom coalesced into distinct communities given the catchall label “Cossacks.” Cossack groups emerged in the mid-sixteenth century as a key power at the intersection of Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman authority, offering their services as freebooters—the word “Cossack” probably derives from
kazak
, a Turkic word for “free man”—to whichever sovereign could pay the highest fee. Although a substantial livelihood came from raiding and piracy, Cossacks were a true multipurpose frontier people, farming, herding, and fishing in the grassy lowlands and estuaries of the Dnieper and other rivers.

The French artillery engineer Guillaume de Beauplan, who witnessed Cossack raids in the seventeenth century, left a graphic description of the Cossacks and their waterborne lives, painting them not as the legendary cavalrymen they would eventually become, but rather as able and daring seamen, commanding small river craft that could be reoutfitted for voyages across the sea. As he wrote in his
Description of Ukraine
:

As the Cossack raids illustrated, in the seventeenth century at least, the Ottomans exercised little direct control north of the Black Sea, except during seasons of war when troops might descend on local villages to burn crops or requisition livestock. Even then, the Ottomans depended on a web of relationships of treaty, tribute, and vassalage with Christian sovereigns as well as the Muslim Tatars of Crimea. Agreements were as often breached as honored. Constantinople’s inconstant hold on the northern coast lasted until yet another imperial power, Russia, moved southward to challenge the sultan’s notional hegemony. The riches of the sea and its hinterlands—including grain, sheep, cattle, and timber—had been an inducement to imperial rivals for centuries. But the sea also offered two things that the Russians in particular desired: ports that were ice-free for most of the winter and potential access to the Mediterranean.

Under Peter the Great, Russia launched a series of military forays against the Ottomans and their clients. Most of Peter’s southern expeditions, in the 1690s and 1710s, came to little. But one of his successors, Catherine the Great, was able to combine strategic daring, technological innovation, and careful diplomacy to present a sustained challenge to the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars, a remnant of the old Golden Horde based on the Crimean Peninsula and exercising some sway along the northern coast of the Black Sea.

In a series of military campaigns from 1768 to 1774, Catherine pushed back Ottoman armies and secured territorial gains that made the Russian Empire an emerging Black Sea power. The empress took control of old Ottoman fortresses at Kinburn, Yenikale, and Kerch, vital choke points that commanded access to the Dnieper and Bug rivers, as well as to the shallow, fish-rich Sea of Azov. Under the terms of the Russian peace treaty with Constantinople, the Crimean Tatars were proclaimed independent of Ottoman authority, although they were permitted to recognize the sultan as caliph, or earthly spiritual leader of all Muslims. Russian-flagged ships were allowed to enter the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, an essential boon to commerce in the Russian lands north of the sea.

The empress ordered a massive shipbuilding campaign to outfit a new commercial and naval fleet. New towns grew up in the areas now under Russia’s control, small but promising hamlets that were soon attracting merchants and immigrants from across the empire’s uncertain borders and even from across the sea. As one observer noted at the time, “These towns…as well as numerous villages which have suddenly reared their heads in a country formerly inhabited only by lawless banditti, or traversed by roving hordes, are filled with Russians, with Tartars reclaimed from their wandering life, and with numerous colonists, particularly Greeks and Armenians, who migrated from the adjacent provinces of the Turkish empire.”
¹⁴

Settlements were rising farther inland, along the southern reaches of the Dnieper and Bug rivers, but in backward places such as Khadjibey—coastal villages, Cossack settlements, and Tatar camps—the martial designs of kings and sultans were probably less important than the advent of rain, the seasonal migration of fish, or the availability of freshwater and salt licks during the winter trek from steppe to coastal meadow. An early frost or the lavish wedding of an elder’s daughter might leave more of a mark than the faraway coronation of a new ruler or the fall of an imperial capital to invaders. All this began to change in the late 1780s, when a new war between Russians and Ottomans focused attention on the part of the sea that travelers and traders had often bypassed—the shallow inlets and grasslands of the northwest, including the dusty cliff-top village of Khadjibey.

Founding father:
Portrait of Admiral Osip de Ribas
[José de Ribas] (1796) by Johann-Baptist I. Lampi,
© The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

“R
ather than sign the secession of thirteen provinces as…George has done,” Catherine is reported to have said of her contemporary, Britain’s George III, “I should have shot myself.”
¹
Russia had expanded toward the Black Sea, but Catherine saw her empire’s natural frontier as lying even farther to the south, well into Ottoman lands, perhaps even to the Mediterranean. George III, along with other eighteenth-century monarchs such as Joseph II of Austria and Louis XVI of France, ruled domains that stretched across Europe and around the world. Catherine was not to be out-done by their imperial acquisitiveness. From the coast of the Black Sea, she reckoned, Russia could realize its longer-term aims of removing the sultan from his throne in Constantinople and replacing him with a Christian (and Russian) prince. The rise of a new Byzantium under Russian protection would then mark the end of Islam’s reign on the borderlands of Europe.

In 1783 Catherine had taken a further step southward by formally annexing Crimea, backtracking on the independence that the region had been guaranteed less than a decade earlier. The immediate results were disastrous. Tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire. Their fellow Muslims soon called for the sultan to intervene on behalf of the embattled refugees now overwhelming the Turkish ports. But the plight of starving, typhus-ridden Tatars, however galling to the sultan, paled before an ostentatious display of Russian power stage-managed by Catherine’s personal and political partner—Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.

Towering and auburn-haired, Potemkin had been present at the advent of Catherine’s reign, first attracting the empress’s attentions in the early 1760s. He was then a dashing figure in an imperial guards regiment, she the ambitious consort of a boorish and ineffective tsar, Peter III. When Catherine engineered a coup to depose her husband, Potemkin joined the ranks of those loyal to the new sovereign. As the troops prepared to march on the Peterhof Palace outside St. Petersburg, Potemkin boldly edged his horse over to Catherine’s position. The two exchanged friendly words, and the empress laughed at the skittishness of his horse.

He soon parlayed this familiarity into a position as gentleman of the bedchamber—at this point, merely a courtly rank rather than a profession. He could now engineer further encounters with Catherine in the mazelike corridors of the Winter Palace. At every meeting, Potemkin would fall to his knees, declare his undying love, and rashly kiss the hand of one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe.
²

Some of the tales of Catherine’s sexual proclivities are apocryphal, but she was clearly a ruler who enjoyed the company of men—intimately, energetically, and not always serially. Under Catherine’s protection, Potemkin received a post in the empire’s fighting forces during the first Russo-Turkish war of her reign. He returned from the frontlines a hero, bearing the title of lieutenant general and basking in the glory of citadels captured, Ottoman armies routed, and new lands acquired for the empress, with whom he had corresponded, off and on, throughout the conflict.

Around the time the empire was formulating its peace treaty with the Ottomans in 1774, Potemkin became Catherine’s lover and court favorite, a position that gave him unimpeded access to the empress’s bedchamber and, by extension, to the affairs of state. There were other favorites both before and after him, and Potemkin’s signature injury—the disfiguring loss of an eye—may well have come about from an encounter with one of the men he shunted aside, the obstinate and philosophical Grigory Orlov, father to Catherine’s illegitimate son. But Potemkin accomplished something that none of his rivals quite managed: to build a relationship of eroticism and genuine affection—sealed in what may have been a secret marriage—while also making himself indispensable to the running of an expanding empire.

Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, Potemkin became the chief architect of Russia’s breakneck development of the southern borderlands. He remained in this position long after he had ceased to be Catherine’s preferred lover. He created new naval arsenals along the coast, including the port at Sevastopol, which even today remains the seat of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Germans, Albanians, Greeks, and others were given special privileges to establish farming or trading communities on the steppe and in seaside towns and river ports such as Kherson and Nikolaev.

The regions that fell to Catherine’s armies were gathered into a new administrative unit known as
Novorossiya
, or “New Russia.” Like New Spain, New France, and New England, New Russia was an experiment in imperial implantation. Colonists were sent to explore and settle the virgin territory. Mapmakers and geographers were dispatched from the learned Academy in St. Petersburg to catalog the natural wealth and exotic natives. Vast tracts of land—of uncertain boundaries and indefinite content—were bestowed upon stockinged and befrilled aristocrats who could now add an exotic marquisate or baronetcy to their list of honors. “[T]hey have been vaguely informed of their having been distributed among several lords,” a new landowner remarked of the indigenous Tatar shepherds, “but…they do not exactly understand what it means.”
³

To illustrate—and market—the transformation of the prairie and coastlands, Potemkin organized a massive display of imperial pomp in the late winter and spring of 1787. In the style of Cleopatra, Catherine the Great promenaded south from St. Petersburg, across the Eurasian flatlands, and down to the Dnieper River, where her retinue embarked on the waterway that meanders across Ukraine toward the Black Sea. A convoy of fourteen carriages and 184 sledges carried dignitaries over the snowbound steppe. Once they reached Kiev, a flotilla of seven large galleys, more than eighty other boats, and three thousand crewmen and guards ferried them down the Dnieper toward their final destination, the old palace of the Tatar khan at Bakhchisaray in Crimea.

The guests comprised a veritable who’s who of European nobility, from assorted princes and counts to the king of Poland and the emperor of Austria. The staterooms on board the galleys were outfitted with Chinese silk and Oriental-style sofas. Every time one of the guests exited or returned, a small orchestra of twelve musicians signaled the departure or arrival. Once in Bakhchisaray, the guests were assigned to the living quarters once occupied by the last of the Crimean Tatar khans and his harem, a treat that thrilled even the most worldly travelers.

For the delectation of the entourage and the thousands of spectators, Potemkin organized delights and surprises along the route. He installed English gardens on the virgin steppe, complete with mature, transplanted trees. Huge tents, garlanded and pearl-studded, served as dining halls. Regiments of Cossacks and loyal Tatars paraded before Catherine to pay homage. Silver-clad horsemen from the Caucasus Mountains thundered past in feats of martial skill. Lanterns shone from trees while bonfires lit up the night sky. Near the city of Kremenchug on the Dnieper River, a magnificent re-creation of Vesuvius rained down fire and brimstone on the peaceful prairie.
⁴

Although masterful, Potemkin’s stagecraft could not cover up the fact that the new lands were, in reality, something other than the wondrous paradise that now seemed to stretch out before the European heads of state, ambassadors, and aristocrats in Catherine’s retinue. This part of New Russia had only recently passed from Ottoman to Russian control. The peasants and herders who inhabited the flatlands, hill country, and coastline were awed more by the flamboyance of the procession than by the freedom and rational governance that the Russians now promised. As one of the European nobles on the journey, Charles-Joseph, prince de Ligne, wrote at the time, “The empress, who cannot run on foot as we do, is made to believe that towns…are finished, whilst they often are towns without streets, streets without houses, and houses without roofs, doors, or windows.”
⁵
Potemkin did not construct fully operational, idealized peasant villages, in the style of his contemporary, Marie Antoinette. But his enthusiasm for painting the southern prairie in the best-possible light did produce the derisory label “Potemkin villages” to describe the diverting entertainments, barely functional towns, and orchestrated displays of loyalty he created for his
Matushka
, the imperial “beloved mother,” as he called Catherine in his most intimate letters, using a common term of endearment for the sovereign.

After tooling down the Dnieper, visiting Crimea, and lodging in the palace at Bakhchisaray, the Russian delegation returned to St. Petersburg, leaving the steppe much as it had been before. During the voyage downriver, a squadron of Ottoman ships had been drawn up at the mouth of the Dnieper. Their mission was not to prevent the Russians’ descent to the sea but rather to provide a bellicose counterdemonstration to Potemkin’s lavish parade. “This I consider as a pretty prognostic of a pretty war with which I hope we shall soon be gratified,” enthused the prince de Ligne.
⁶
He was not to be disappointed.

I
N EARLY
A
UGUST
of 1787 the Ottoman government presented an ultimatum to Russia demanding the immediate return of Crimea, recognition of Georgia—an Orthodox Christian kingdom in the Caucasus—as a protectorate of the sultan, and the right to routinely search Russian vessels passing through the Bosphorus. The terms were ludicrous from Catherine’s point of view. After all, the entire point of Potemkin’s grand journey had been to inspect Crimea and other lands that she now considered her own. Moreover, the right to travel freely into the Black Sea under a Russian flag had been secured in the last peace treaty, signed nearly a decade and a half earlier.

When Russia rejected the ultimatum, the Ottomans declared war. Both empires raced to ready their army and navy for assaults on strategic choke points on the estuaries of the Bug and Dnieper rivers, as well as along the Dniester River and on the delta of the Danube. Fortresses were resupplied. Potemkin took personal command of an army of more than a hundred thousand men—a motley collection of noble officers, Cossacks, peasants impressed into a lifetime of military service, and even a hastily assembled cavalry of Jewish lancers.
⁷
Catherine’s triumph in the earlier war drew numerous soldiers of fortune to her cause in the second. Some were noble and well bred, like the prince de Ligne. Others were lowborn adventure-seekers. The war provided a chance not only to serve a successful Christian sovereign in the Orient, but also to profit from the wealth that the newly opened Black Sea seemed to offer. Both these inducements appealed to one famous mercenary: John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the American Revolution.

His work for the newly independent United States now finished, Jones traveled eastward to serve as commander of a Russian squadron in engagements with the Ottoman navy. Jones had made his reputation in America through a series of successful attacks on British warships; he is today revered as the founding father of the U.S. Navy, his remains encased in a lavish shrine in Annapolis, Maryland. But Potemkin was unimpressed. “This man is unfit to lead: he’s slow, lacks zeal and is perhaps even afraid of the Turks,” he wrote to Catherine. “He’s new at this business, has neglected his entire crew and is good for nothing: not knowing the language, he can neither give nor comprehend orders.”
⁸

Jones had been a brilliantly successful captain in the Atlantic, but his skills were essentially those of a pirate: the ability to lead a small contingent of men aboard a single ship in order to confront a single adversary. His abilities as a commander in a more complex struggle—especially among the haughty, intrigue-ridden, and multilingual European officer corps into which he had placed himself—were questionable. “Jones was very famous as a corsair, but I fear that at the head of a squadron he is rather out of place,” wrote Charles of Nassau-Siegen, another foreign officer in Catherine’s employ.
⁹
Jones reacted petulantly to any perceived slight from his aristocratic brother-officers and spent much of his time in Russia arguing over rank and chain of command. “Never, probably, did any commanding officer commence service under circumstances more painful,” Jones complained. “My firmness and integrity have supported me against those detestable snares laid by my enemies for my ruin.”
¹⁰

Whatever reputation Jones managed to salvage from his Russia years was in large part owed to the good judgment, operational savvy, and decorum of one of his lieutenants, another mercenary named José de Ribas. During the war with the Ottomans, de Ribas proved far more adept than the storied American captain at securing his fortune on the Russo-Turkish frontier, as well as his place in history as Odessa’s true founding father. His mixed background and improvised life were emblematic of the city he helped to establish.