Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (5 page)

The Neapolitan soldier of fortune was now tasked with building his own city from scratch, one that would be all that his native Naples was not—fresh, modern, rationally organized—as well as the favored property of one of the world’s great empires. It was to be a new city built around a broken-down fortress that the Ottomans had themselves named, coincidentally, the “new world.” De Ribas may have been the person who suggested that the city be called Odessos, picking up the name of an ancient Greek colony that had once existed farther down the coast. He may have had his own fondness for antiquities. The lost city of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, had been unearthed near his hometown only a year before de Ribas was born, spurring widespread interest in the ancient world and making Naples one of the foremost centers of neo-Hellenism in the arts, literature, and philosophy.

In any case, “Odessos” would have fit with the emerging Russian practice of resurrecting ancient traditions along the coastline. The other cities founded or expanded by Potemkin were given russified versions of Greek names, some of them more fanciful than others. Old Tatar villages had been rechristened “Sevastopol” (“the august city”) and “Kherson” (“the city of gold”). Crimea became “Tavrida,” the Russian spelling of Tauris, a name that would have been familiar to Euripides and Herodotus. Within a year of his appointment as chief of the city-building project, de Ribas was already urging Russian diplomats to talk up the advantages of the facilities in old Khadjibey. Fortifications had been erected to protect the building works from Ottoman reprisals. More than a hundred stone houses and other administrative buildings took the place of Tatar hovels.
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According to a story that is as fitting as it is unverifiable, the empress made one lasting change to de Ribas’s original plans. All the new foundations on the steppe and coasts of the Black Sea had masculine names. Odessos, commanded the most powerful and self-consciously modern woman in Russian history, should be changed to “Odessa”—the feminized version of a name forever associated with the ancient Odysseus, the wily warrior and navigator. By January of 1795, when St. Petersburg finally got around to issuing a gazetteer of the official labels for the lands taken from the Ottomans three years earlier, the document affirmed that the town “the Tatars call Khadjibey” would be firmly fixed as “Odessa.”
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Green spaces and fashionable shops: Deribasovskaya Street, from a nineteenth-century postcard.
Author’s collection.

T
he most famous thoroughfare in Odessa is Deribasovskaya Street. It is a green, pedestrianized walkway, tree-lined and pleasant, with a park and commemorative statues, a bandstand, and a fountain that spurts in time to music. It is one of the main destinations for a city that comes out for cool-of-the-evening strolls and gentle public wooings, the same ritual promenade that takes place on summer nights from Madrid to Istanbul. Deribasovskaya lies at the heart of historic Odessa, flanked by nineteenth-century storefronts and ornate facades. Cafés choke the sidewalks in the warmer months, and amid the children with melting ice creams and sunburned Ukrainians and Russians returning from the beach, you might find a billiard table plonked in the middle of the street, with an enterprising Odessan trading trick shots for small donations.

The street is a tribute to de Ribas himself—his name is wrapped inside the Russian adjective—and he is still considered the city’s truest founder. As he envisioned things, Odessa was to be a lighthouse of civilization and commerce on the edge of Russia’s expanding empire. De Ribas managed to secure Catherine’s personal support for enlarging the Ottoman fort and beginning work on a jetty to provide protection for ships coming into the harbor. The empress died suddenly in 1796, however, leaving the Odessa project without a clear patron and advocate.

De Ribas soon found himself caught up in the political intrigues that followed Catherine’s death. The new tsar, her son Paul, was passionately devoted to undoing much of what his mother had achieved. She had studiously kept him at arm’s length throughout her reign, fearing the pent-up ambitions of an heir who was already in his early forties by the time the old empress fell ill. He looked with disdain on his mother’s camarilla of courtiers, advisors, and lovers. Pet projects were allowed to languish. Old associates were pushed aside or placed in administrative positions that limited their power. One contemporary observer claimed that the purge included some eighteen thousand men dismissed by the tsar from state service, along with another twelve thousand who resigned voluntarily—a mark not only of the depth of change under Paul but also of the bloated state service created by his mother and Potemkin (who had died five years earlier).
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The Odessa project was falling by the wayside. State funds promised for ambitious building plans and port facilities never materialized. De Ribas’s dream of creating an eastern Naples—a port that would be grander and more prosperous than his native city—was fading. De Ribas was frustrated at the tsar’s inattention, but he had little power to alter what seemed certain to be Odessa’s fate: to become no more than a Russian version of the minor Ottoman fortress-town that he had easily conquered the previous decade. Even de Ribas seemed to lose interest as the obstacles to building Odessa grew during Paul’s reign.

Fortunately for Odessa, de Ribas’s personal frustrations with the new tsar were widely shared. Paul I made considerable enemies among the Russian nobility, and he ended his short reign as the victim of a palace coup and regicide. There is some suggestion that de Ribas might have had a minor role in planning the end of Paul’s time on the throne—and his life—in 1801. But even if he had been a bit player in the drama of imperial succession, he was not around to see the climax. He died several months before Paul was deposed.

The new tsar, Alexander I, came to power intent on returning to his grandmother’s policy of encouraging ties with Europe, tugging the empire toward modernity, and developing the southern borderlands of New Russia. Alexander had good reason to begin rethinking New Russia’s place in imperial development. The international turmoil brought about by the French Revolution highlighted the importance of the natural resources that Catherine’s conquests had bequeathed to his empire, particularly the grain fields and cattle herds of Europe’s eastern borderlands. Overland transport across Europe was long, expensive, and—with armies now crisscrossing the continent—frequently dangerous.

The rise of Napoleon, who promised a pan-European and French-dominated order in the wake of revolutionary change, only exacerbated the problem. To starve his enemies in other parts of the continent, Napoleon slapped a ban on the export of grain from Hungary, a move that increased the demand for wheat and barley from other sources. At the same time, there were new ways to profit from Russia’s surplus foodstuffs. Ottomans were caving to European pressure and allowing foreign ships to travel unimpeded into the Black Sea via the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits. Russian-flagged vessels had already been granted that privilege in the early 1770s. In 1784 access was extended to Austria, in 1802 to France, and soon thereafter to Britain, Naples, Ragusa, the Netherlands, and other trading powers.

These circumstances combined to make de Ribas’s original vision for Odessa more timely than the Neapolitan mercenary could have imagined. The Black Sea now “became the common domain of the Nations of Europe,” wrote Robert Stevens, a contemporary American visitor, “and Odessa the centre of vast speculations…. The very circumstances, that paralysed commerce elsewhere…acted upon Odessa in an inverse ratio.”
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New funds were appropriated for enhancing port facilities and realizing de Ribas’s earlier building plans.

With this renewed attention to the south—and Russia’s key role as a trading partner and ally against the looming threat of Napoleon—European interest in the new port skyrocketed. When Russia was at peace with France, shipping flowed freely from the major European ports. When it was at war, Russia found ways of supplying precisely the goods that were most in demand. Europe’s misfortunes were Odessa’s gain, and money from across the continent swirled around the city: Dutch ducats, Venetian sequins, Spanish dubloons, Turkish piasters, Viennese thalers.
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Fortified wines from Spain and France, silk from Florence and Genoa, olive oil and dried fruits from the Levant, and nuts and fine woods from Anatolia were offloaded from cargo ships. Sacks of grain and stacks of cowhides from the prairie took their place in the ships’ holds for the return journey.
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New breakwaters sheltered cargo ships from destructive winds, while newly built docks groaned beneath casks and bundles. Both seaborne and overland commerce made Odessa the centerpiece of an expanding international network that tied the city more to its European counterparts than to the imperial metropolises of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The deplorable state of Russian roads meant that the overland journey from Moscow to Odessa could take up to forty days in bad weather, while a traveler could get from London to Odessa in as few as twenty-one days, via Hamburg, Berlin, and Cracow.
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Like the New Russian region of which it was now the effective capital, Odessa was following a path from distant colonial outpost to commercial center. De Ribas’s vision had spurred the city’s founding, while Alexander I presided over the initial boom in New Russia that revived Odessa’s role in the southern empire. But much of the real credit for its takeoff goes to a French aristocrat on the lam.

I
N THE TUMULTUOUS
final decades of the eighteenth century, Russia became a haven for down-and-out European nobles, bored adventurers, and impecunious philosophers, musicians, and artists seeking patrons in an empire that had only recently discovered its European vocation. Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, was one of them. Born in September of 1766, Richelieu was a member of the great family of French nobles and heir to a long tradition of state service. His great-uncle, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, had been the famous and powerful chief minister to Louis XIII.

Well educated and urbane, lean and slightly stoop-shouldered, with arrestingly dark eyes and hair, the young duc reportedly bore a striking resemblance to the cardinal. The Richelieu name alone guaranteed access to the French court. In time he developed a reputation for constancy and honest dealings, both of which were rarities in the gilded and intrigue-ridden world of late-eighteenth-century France. After an early arranged marriage, Richelieu remained uxorious throughout his many subsequent years of travel and state service.

Before the age of twenty, he had inherited from his grandfather the role of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the French king, a senior position at court. He soon became a trusted advisor to Marie Antoinette, even begging the royal family not to return to Paris when news of the revolution reached Versailles. That association nearly cost him his life. After the mobs of Paris descended on the Bastille and French aristocrats were marched to the guillotine, Richelieu escaped eastward, to Russia. There he joined the cloud of European nobles swirling around Catherine and Potemkin. He served in minor roles during Catherine’s second war with the Ottomans, alongside Potemkin, de Ribas, and John Paul Jones. He was lightly wounded during the storming of the fortress at Izmail and in return received the expected military decoration and gratitude of the empress herself.

As a veteran of courtly machinations in Versailles, Richelieu skillfully weathered the uncertain years following the death of his new patron and the brief reign of the petulant Paul. When Alexander became tsar in 1801, Richelieu was thus in a good position to seek a major role in the reformed administration. Given the growing importance of France—both as a trading partner with New Russia and as an occasional enemy of the Russian Empire—appointing someone with French connections to a position in the south made good sense. In 1803 Alexander named the thirty-seven-year-old Richelieu to the post of
gradonachal’nik
—city administrator—of Odessa, with responsibility for all military, commercial, and municipal affairs. He soon found himself journeying southward to take up the new assignment on a piece of territory that, as he recalled in his memoirs, probably overstating the case, was still “a desert inhabited only by hordes of Tatars and by Cossacks who, rejecting all civilization, sow terror through their brigandage and cruelties.”
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When he arrived, Richelieu discovered not so much a city, despite the robust commerce, as an architectural drawing—all plan and relatively little substance, with streets and foundations laid out in the chalky dust of the plain. One of de Ribas’s lasting contributions had been his insistence on self-conscious urban organization. Odessa is young by European, even by American, standards. A city that we now think of as typically old world was founded three years after Washington, D.C. Both cities’ central districts are eighteenth-century fantasies of what a city should be: rationally laid out on a grid of symmetrical streets intersected by long, wide avenues and dotted with pocket-sized parks. The avenues provide edifying sight lines over great distances. The parks are places of relaxation and civic-mindedness, with statues and monuments that extol the virtues of duty, honor, and patriotism. It was a thrill for later visitors to Odessa—such as Mark Twain in the 1860s—to stand in the middle of a broad thoroughfare and see the empty steppe at one end and the empty sea at the other, just as visitors to Washington can connect the dots of the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and other prominent landmarks via the major avenues and open spaces.

Preobrazhensky Cathedral, from an early-twentieth-century postcard.
Author’s collection.

Richelieu found this basic town structure already in place. De Ribas had worked with a Dutch engineer, Franz de Voland, to design a city based on a grid pattern, or at least as much of one as could be squeezed into the ravine-cut landscape on which Khadji bey was situated. Nearly two-dozen administrative buildings fashioned from the ubiquitous limestone rose beside hundreds of wooden shops, grain magazines, and earthen huts.
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But the mass of people that soon flooded into the town contrasted sharply with the designers’ emphasis on order and rationality. Peasants lined the wide streets hawking their produce and seeking occasional work on the docks. Sailors cavorted while their ships were in port. The growing population—seven to eight thousand people when Richelieu took office—was putting pressure on public order.
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In response, Richelieu organized a campaign to reshape city administration, improve sanitation, and erect a series of public buildings that would polish a place that was still little more than a colonial outpost, albeit one with a logical street plan. “To perfect, to encourage, and to finish: that is the spirit of the current regime,” noted a contemporary French observer.
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