Odessa: Genius and death in a City of Dreams by Charles King 2011 282pg

 A very different Russian City  5/8/21

The history of Russia is of people moving away from the control of the regime, but as they moved the regime court up with them and eventually got to Alaska. Odessa was in New Russia and had a long free period before the Tzarist law clamped down on it.

1876 Mark Twain saw Odessa and considered that it could be a US well run city with a multinational population. Only a few years later there was horrific anti-Semitic violence at that time a third of the population was Jewish. This ended up with the holocaust with the planned killing by the help of Nazi ally Romania.

Languages spoken Yiddish, Greek, and Italian were the core with a Russian veneer over it.

1794 it was founded and nurtured intellectuals and artists like Alexander Pushkin, Isaac Babel. 

The Dnieper, Bug and Danube river run into the Black Sea, and the origin population were Greco Scythian tribes.  Italian towns and cities flourished built on Greek foundations and there were Tartars, Circassians, Georgians and other peoples, with Genoan sailors and Florentine financiers and adventurers like Marco Polo passed through.

The Tartars were the remnants of Genghis Kahn’s empire.

Before it became Odessa it was Khadjibey and parts were ceded to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

1453 The Ottomans marched into Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire melted away and they also took the Balkans. Khadjibey citizens didn't know that they were Ottoman subjects.

1690 Peter the Great tried to get the area for Russia without success.

1768 to 1774 Catherine the great in a series of wars took the area and massive ship building program was started.

Under George III of England 13 colonies were lost while Catherine was colonizing the Black Sea.

Potemkin engineered the coup and Catherine deposed her husband the ineffective Tsar Peter III. Potemkin established Black Sea arsenals along the coast and Sebastopol which remains the seat of the Black Sea port. Germans, Albanians and Greeks were given privileges to establish trading ports like Kerson and Nikolayev.

1787 the Ottomans wanted the return of Crimea. The Russians hastily pressed and army including Jewish lancer.

In the Russian navy John Paul Jones the American hero volunteered but never spoke a foreign language and was not very effective he ended up in Paris in pecuniary.  Jose Ribas an Italian noble from Naples that was under the bourbons dynasty,also fought for Russia and became an admiral in their navy, he translated for Jones and is mentioned in a Lord Byron poem.

1795 the town called Khadjibey is named Odessa after Odysseus, the main road De'ribas'ovskaya name after Ribas. Founded 3 years after Washington, DC. As an organized city, with a theater and public schools. He became the Mayor of Odessa . 1801Tsar Paul who was unpopular died in a palace coup and regicide he was followed by Nicholas 1 who wanted to drag Russia into modernity. The Napoleonic wars resulted in a demand for all Black Sea grains.

Armand duc de Richelieu the grandson of Cardinal Richelieu who had been Louis XIII chief minister fled the revolution eastwards and 1803 named administrator of Odessa by the Tsar.

1812 large scale plague cholera, whereas in the Rhineland Jews were blamed for the infectious outbreaks, egalitarian Odessa took steps to deal with this.  Italian was the lingua franca and street signs were put up in Russian and Italian a tradition that lasted long after Richelieu who retired in 1814.

1823 Mikhail Vorontsov as a child went to London as his father was the Russian ambassador there bought up estates near Odessa and was appointed Governor of New Russia.

1814 Greek patriots set up Philika Hetairia to rally for Greek independence from the Ottomans. Dozens of secret societies could operate in Odessa freely.

1821 Moldova and Wallachia sparked a Christian uprising against the Ottomans in Balkans wars.

1827 Russia joined in a destroyed the Ottoman - German fleet in the Battle of Navarino.

1840s by this time the city had over 100 schools and private schools and 5000 students, founded by Greek , German , Jewish and Armenian communities.

1854 Crimean War Britain and France against Russia.

Odessa was a magnet for Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe and Russia. Till the Nazi's it never had a Jewish Ghetto or distinct Jewish quarter but wealth rather than religion and ethnicity determined your neighborhood. By the 1860 there were 17000 Jews about a quarter of the population.  90% of the grain traders were Jewish. From the Pale, Jewish migration to other parts of the Russian Empire was prohibited. This Yiddish speaking community had no great Rabbis, learned scholars or mythical preachers.

 Mendel Mocher-Sforim1836 to 1917, born in Minsk and got to Odessa in 1981 part of the Haskalah. Because of the Russian Government lax enforcement on residency restrictions also resulted in Jewish enlightenment here not the Judaism of the Pale. Maskilim made their way to Odessa especially from Brody, Galicia. 

1772 Galicia became part of Austria and Brody was a free city except from many taxes and in Odessa they established private schools that taught also Russian math’s, geography bookkeeping. The maskilim took control Jewish affairs and their shul brought about new cantorial lithergies.

Between 1790 and 1830 there were 5 separate outbreaks of plague.

1847 France Liszt gave a series of piano recitals and Nikolai Gogol had a premier of his new play "The Inspector General" in Odessa.

1908 Ilya Mechnikov at was a university of Odessa and he later shared with Paul Erlich the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.

1860 Ratzvet The first Russian- Jewish periodical in the whole Empire.

1880 2/3 of registered merchant and traders were Jewish, 3/4 of public houses, 2/3 veterinarians and pharmacists 

1871 1881 pogrom’s against the Jews at a time when the city’s population was exploding and more peasants were moving into the city, laws with  a retreat from the liberalism. Resulting in emigration and utopian movements of Zionism and Russian social democracy.

1903 Kishinev pogroms in Maldavia.

1935 Jabotinsky wrote The Five in Odessa in Russian which was translated into Hebrew in the 1940s but only in 2005 to Hebrew. Which portrays this movement against liberalism. In the Moldovanka neighborhood he organized a storeroom in a house with revolvers, crowbars and kitchen knives for Jews to fight back next time.

The Russo Japanese war meant that the grain markets in the Far East dried up. This caused a decline in the importance of Odessa to the Empire and the world. However many soldiers and sailor came through the city to take ship to the battle in Japan.

1905 Mutinous Battleship Potemkin

Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish Russian historian Simon Dubnov and Leon Pinsker all lived near each other. Isaac Babel the writer's  father had a warehouse in Moldavanka , Odessa was brought up on Talmudic reasoning and later moved to St. Petersburg where he worked for Maxim Gorky. It was only found out during Gorbechov's glasnost that he was shot in a Stalin Gulag in 1940.

1890s The Odessa Committee was set up to support Jewish settlers in Palestine. It helped to establish Rehoboth and Hadera and rehabilitate Mismar Hayarden, It was run by Leon Pinsker. It had as many as 4000 members and supported Hoveve Tzion and closed in1913.

1911 -1913 2 Balkan Wars. Sergei Eisenstein was not from Odessa but is known for the Odessa steps even though the real massacre did not take place there.

1921 After the revolution Chaim Bialic was hounded by the authorities he was a great pioneer of Hebrew poetry and came to Palestine.

1929 Trotsky who had been at St Paul’s school Odessa left from the city for exile, having gone from revolutionary prophet to disgraced enemy of Stalin.

1937 to 1941   19361 Odessans workers, intellectuals and government officials were arrested and a third of them were shot in the Stalinist purges.

1941 The NKVD headquarters in Odessa was blown up by Stalin's secret police this killed General Ion Glogojano and  the Romanian occupation forces there, this was the area of Romanian, Transnista over 220000 Jews were killed by Romanians on the way to the ghettoes and concentration camps set up in Soviet Russia. There was no large scale removal of Jews from Romania itself but Bessarabia and Transnistia this was something else. In this area the Romanian recruited police amongst the local ethnic Germans.

Gheorghe Alexianu was an obscure professor and Romania Nationalist and he was decorated by the Papal Nuncio for his diligent management overseeing the deportations in this new Romanian province. His job was to Romanize it.

As the Russians fled and  those who knew what to expect of the Germans fled with them. Odessans were spread as far afield as Uzbekistan. Even the trolley cars from Odessa were found to be working in Romania.

1944 with th Soviets pushing westwards the Romanian king Mihai overthrew Ion Antonescu and declared Romania accession to the Allies. Where the Romanians withdrew from Odessa the Germans took over.

Odessa was under occupation for 907 days before the Soviet return, and the former "fascist" enemy Romania became a socialist friend.

 1947 the Soviet, installed the communists and king Mihai was forced to surrender his throne and flee.

1950s synagogues that reopened after the war were closed by the Soviets.

Leningrad held out against the German siege for 2 and a half years, Sevastopol , 9 months  and Stalingrad eventually crushed the German army  and these were considered "hero cities"

Tashkent film Studios became home of filmmakers and actors who evacuated.

 1903 and 1905 As a result of the pogrom’s Jew emigrated to mostly the US and Brighton Beach was just developing and they went there instead of Delancy Street and the Lower East Side. Briton Beach theater which had vaudeville acts and specialized in Yiddish plays with Jacob Adler, Jenny Goldstein , David Kessler, composer Joseph Rumshinsky. After the holocaust further immigrants of Russian speaking Jews  arrived and they are was called Little Odessa.

Wassily Kandinsky the artist and Daniel Oistrakh the violinist were both raised in Odessa.

With the fall of the Soviets the bust of Marx was substituted for the founder Catherine the Great. 

There were up to 70 thousand Jews in the Odessa region in 1989 most emigrated today perhaps 36 thousand left.