Borderland Page 7
One of the reasons Catherine felt able to do away with the Cossacks was that she no longer needed their help against the Turks. In 1774 she had signed a peace treaty with the Sultan handing the Crimean khanate, formerly an Ottoman protectorate, over to Russia. With the khanate came control of the ‘wild field’, the fertile, uninhabited no-man’s-land between Crimea and the Sich lands to the north. The treaty meant that the centuries-old to-and-fro between Tatar and Cossack raiders was over. Ruthenian peasants would no longer be marched south for sale in the slave-markets of Kaffa and Constantinople; Tatars would no longer wake to find their ports torched by Cossack galleys. The ‘wild field’ had suddenly become a safe place.
According to the Russian scheme of things, the peace restored a rightful inheritance. By annexing the Black Sea steppe, Russia was ‘gathering the Russian lands’, rebuilding the ancient kingdom of Rus. Catherine had a commemorative medal struck, engraved with the words T have recovered what was torn away’, and gave her new territories the name Novorossiya – New Russia.
Today, New Russia exists only in the imagination. The endless plains and vast skies are still there of course, but the grey-green grass, the bison, marmots and antelope, the buzzards and wild horses, have long since disappeared under the plough. People who did see and describe the virgin steppe all came up with the same image – the ocean. ‘I sail a sea where waters never ran/My wagon like a boat,’ wrote Mickiewicz.6 Riders disappeared into the rippling grass like a fish into waves; canvas-covered ox-carts rolled over it like ships under sail. Nothing pierced the gently undulating horizon save the occasional line of willows by a river, or the distant gravemound of some Scythian warrior-princess, buried complete with horse and manservant, battle-axe and turquoise-studded jewellery. So featureless was the landscape that the wagoners, like sailors, steered by the stars.
For some the steppe was a desert, but for most, like Nikolay Gogol (a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian), it was an inspiration:
The surface of the earth appeared here like a golden-green ocean, flecked with the colours of a million different flowers. Through the tall, slender stalks peeped pale-blue and lilac cornflowers; the yellow broom thrust its spiky tips upwards; the white clover adorned the surface with its umbrella-like caps; an ear of wheat, blown God knows from where, stood ripening, deep in the grass. Partridges with craning necks darted hither and thither among the slender roots. The air was filled with the song of a thousand different birds. Hawks hung motionless in the air, their wings spread wide and their keen eyes fixed on the grass. The cries of a passing flock of geese carried to their ears from a distant lake. With measured strokes of its wings a gull rose from the grass and bathed luxuriantly in the deep-blue waves of the air . . .7
But once made safe for farmers, the steppe could not stay empty for long. For centuries tall stories had been told about its fertility. Leave a plough in a field overnight, it was said, and next morning you couldn’t find it again for new grass. So numerous were the bison that hunters didn’t even bother to eat their meat, just taking the hides. So packed were the rivers with fish that a spear would stand upright, unsupported, in the water. Growing up on the Sea of Azov in the 1870s, Anton Chekhov saw the wilderness eaten away by windmills and telegraph poles, villages and ploughed fields. His lyrical short story The Steppe, based on boyhood journeys with the old ox-drawn wagon-trains, was written as a memorial to a landscape that was vanishing for ever:
You drive on for one hour, for another . . . You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom; a night bird floats noiselessly over the earth, and little by little those legends of the steppes, the tales of men you have met, the stories of some old nurse from the steppe, and all the things you have managed to see and treasure in your soul, come back to your mind . . . And in the triumph of beauty, in the exuberance of happiness you are conscious of tension and yearning, as though the steppe knew she was solitary, knew that her wealth and inspiration were wasted for the world, unsung, unwanted; and through the joyful clamour one hears her mournful, hopeless call for singers, singers!8
Catherine gave the job of opening up ‘New Russia’ to her one-eyed lover Grigory Potemkin. His job was to attract new settlers into the countryside, and to found naval and commercial ports on the lower Dnieper and along the coast. In both enterprises he was spectacularly successful. Cheap government loans and remissions from serfdom and taxation brought in the farmers, and trading exemptions helped the towns. In 1787, to show off his achievements and celebrate the twenty-fifth year of Catherine’s reign, Potemkin organised a royal progress down the Dnieper to Crimea. Catherine and her entourage left St Petersburg in early January, travelling in gilded coaches mounted on sleds. Reaching Kiev at the end of month, they waited three months for the ice to break on the Dnieper, before setting off downriver in a fleet of eighty boats led by eleven brocade-upholstered Roman-style galleys. At the new town of Yekaterinoslav, the present-day Dnipropetrovsk, Catherine was met by her ally Josef II of Austria, and the two laid foundation stones for a vast new cathedral. Though the city was still nothing more than a collection of wooden houses, Potemkin had grand plans for a university, law courts and a conservatoire. Josef was cynical: ‘I performed a great deed today,’ he wrote to a friend. The Empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid - the last.’9 But further downriver at Kherson, where things were more advanced, the party could not but be impressed:
Imagine on the one hand a quantity, increasing hourly, of stone buildings; a fortress, which encompasses a citadel and the best buildings; the Admiralty, with ships being built and already built; a spacious suburb, inhabited by merchants and burghers of different races; and, on the other hand, barracks housing about 10,000 soldiers. Add to this, almost opposite the suburb, an attractive-looking island with quarantine buildings, with Greek merchant vessels, and with canals constructed to give these vessels access. Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment, for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives were kept for winter.10
The tour climaxed at Sevastopol, where Catherine reviewed her new sixteen-ship Black Sea Fleet, threw roubles to a troop of ‘Amazons’ done up in turbans and ostrich feathers, and enjoyed a spectacular fireworks display, which terrified the natives. As the coloured sparks faded into the hot Crimean night, the letter E – for Yekaterina – appeared on a hillside, etched in 55,000 torches. Potemkin had done well, and Catherine was delighted. An excellent portrait of the empress, taken in Kiev as she set off on her New Russian tour, still hangs in the city’s Tereshchenko Gallery, former town-house of an artistically inclined sugar magnate. Direct, blue-eyed, Germanic, she resembles nothing so much as a shrewd and forceful headmistress.
New Russia may have been the work of the Russian monarchy, but ‘New Russia’ was still a misnomer. Potemkin’s new cities, with their newfangled boulevards and fancy classical names, were certainly not very Ukrainian places. But they were not very Russian either. From the first, New Russia depended on foreigners.
The place that epitomised this was Odessa. Its history begins with the capture by a Spanish-Irish mercenary in Russian pay of a small Turkish fortress called Khadzhibey. A Dutch engineer, Franz de Voland, recommended to Catherine that the fort, with its good natural harbour, be turned into New Russia’s capital. Catherine approved, and gave him the money to build breakwaters. Her city, she decided, should be female – hence Odessa, after the ruins of the ancient Greeks’ Odessos along the coast to the east.
The man who turned Odessa from idea into reality was Armand-Emmanuel, Due de Richelieu. A great-nephew of the cardinal, he had sat out the French Revolution in Russian service, fighting under Suvorov in Turkey. In 1803 Tsar Alek-sandr I made him governor of Odessa, and, two years later, of all three provinces of New Russia. A foreign exile who had done well under the expanding Russian empire, the 36-year-old de Richelieu populated his new kingdom with more of the same. Offering cheap land, religious toleration and exemptio
n from military service, he attracted persecuted minorities from all over Europe and the empire. From the south came Bulgars, Serbs, Moldovans, Greeks and Armenians; from the north Jews; from the west Swiss and hard-working Mennonite Germans; from the east dissenting Molokans, Dukhobors and Old Believers. By 1817, when there was no more virgin land to be given away, Richelieu was able to report that ‘Never, Sire, in any part of the world, have there been nations so different in manners, language, customs and dress living within so restricted a space.’11 Remarkable as much for his incorruptibility as for his energy, when de Richelieu returned home to France to serve as prime minister under the restored monarchy he is supposed to have taken nothing with him but a suitcase containing his uniform and two shirts. A statue at the top of the Odessa Steps shows him in a Roman toga; in its plinth is lodged a piece of round-shot, fired by the British frigate Tiger during the Crimean War.
The next governor-general was another Frenchman, Count Alexandre Langeron. Unlike de Richelieu, he found the New Russian salad indigestible. The territory entrusted to me,’ he wrote gloomily, ‘is as large as all of France and is populated by ten different nationalities . . . There are to be found also ten different religions and all ten are practised freely. One can judge the work which burdens me and the absolute impossibility of my doing it all.’12 His successor, after a brief interregnum, was Mikhail Vorontsov, a Russian but also a passionate Anglophile. He had spent his childhood in London, where his father was Russian ambassador, and gone to university at Cambridge. His father had married an Englishwoman, and his sister an Earl of Pembroke. (Her portrait still hangs, surrounded by beefy in-laws, on the grand staircase at Wilton House in Wiltshire.) Arriving in Odessa in 1823, Vorontsov brought his English tastes with him. On the cliffs near the Crimean fishing village of Alupka, English architects built him an extraordinary palace, half Moghul mosque and half Scottish castle, which he filled with Holbeins and statues of the Duke of Wellington. Suitably, it was in this monstrous piece of Victoriana that Churchill and his suite were housed during the Yalta conference of 1945.
Meanwhile Odessa was booming. When Vorontsov took office the population stood at 30,000. By the time he left it had more than doubled, and continued to grow at breakneck speed right up to 1914. Grain from the hinterlands rolled into the city by oxcart, later by train, for export to the great corn-marts at Genoa, Leghorn and Marseilles. Laid out on a grid-shaped street plan and surrounded by sea and prairie, it reminded Mark Twain, researching a comic travel book in the 1860s, of the boom towns of the American West:
It looked just like an American city; fine broad streets and straight as well; low houses (two or three stories), wide, neat, and free from any quaintness . . . a stirring business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and everything; yea and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored American way. Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw only America!13
Foreigners founded Odessa; foreigners made it grow. The export trade was dominated by Greeks and Italians, prompting hand-wringing articles in the Russian press about the lack of native entrepreneurial drive. A German firm installed the gaslights, Belgians the trams, British the waterworks. The paving-stone for the roads came from Trieste; after the eruption of Mount Etna in 1900, some were re-covered in black Sicilian lava. The opera house, completed in 1887 after its predecessor burned down, was the work of Austrians, and the acacias shading the boulevards were descendants of trees imported by de Richelieu from Vienna. Even the famous Odessa Steps, nearly twice as wide at the bottom of the flight as at the top, were installed by a shady English engineer named Upton, who had fled Britain while on bail on a charge of forgery. In Odessa, wrote a visitor in the 1840s,
the Russian jostles against a Turk, a German against a Greek, an Englishman against an Armenian, a Frenchman against an Arab, an Italian against a Persian or a Bucharestian . . . Everything surges and mixes together: the dress coat, the swallowtail coat of the West European mixes together with the kaftan and robes of the oriental. Here there is glimpsed . . . the modern hat of a Frenchman, the high towering cap of a Persian and the turban of an Anatolian and the fez of a Morean and a Dutch sailor in a wide-brimmed low hat.14
Commercial, apolitical, foreign, Odessa was a city for runaways, for outsiders. For the poor it was a place to change one’s life, to make a fortune. Serfs fled there in their thousands, knowing that the demand for labour meant they were unlikely to be returned to their owners if discovered. They were nicknamed neznayushchiye – ‘I don’t knowers’ – for their refusal to say where they came from. Later most of the immigrants were Jews fleeing the impoverished shtetlech of the Pale. For the rich, it was an escape from the stifling atmosphere of St Petersburg – not quite abroad, but almost as good. Exiled from the capital, Pushkin and the Polish poet Mickiewicz both spent pleasant, frivolous summers strolling the boulevards and seducing star-struck poetry groupies – Pushkin going so far as to have an affair with Vorontsov’s wife. Retiring world-weary Onegin to Odessa after his fatal duel with Lensky, he describes nights of oysters and opera; mornings smoking and sipping Turkish coffee while a doorman swept the pavement in front of the casino. ‘But why succumb to grim emotion?’ asks Onegin. ‘Especially since the local wine/Is duty free and rather fine./And then there’s Southern sun and ocean./What more my friends, could you demand?’15
Odessa is still a lovely city. Unspoilt by war or planners, it is a place for idling away one’s time in outdoor cafés – it has more of them than anywhere else in Ukraine – and quizzing the passing crowds. In most ex-Soviet cities people shuffle; they keep their eyes to the ground and don’t swing their arms or legs. Not so in Odessa. Odessans have style, self-confidence. In winter they eat stuffed pike in little basement restaurants, in summer they snorkel for mussels on the breakwaters, and brew their own wine from the vines trailing across their sagging balconies. Their city is somewhere everyone in the Soviet Union used to dream about, and they know it. After the helpless degradation of places like Donetsk, watching Odessans go about their business is a relief and a pleasure.
Quicker than anywhere else, Odessa is stripping away its monochrome Soviet varnish to reveal the old multi-ethnic identity underneath. Ulitsa Karla Marksa has turned back into Yekaterinskaya, Lenina into Richelyevskaya, Karla Libknechta into Grecheskaya – ‘Greek Street’. Babelya, named after the great Odessan novelist Isaac Babel, has become Yevreyskaya – ‘Jewish Street’. Just as foreigners built the city, foreigners are bringing it to life again. A Swiss firm has done up the grand old Londonskaya Hotel, now a favourite haunt of conspiratorial businessmen. Cypriots have opened a casino in the old stock exchange building, staffing it with bemused Liverpudlian croupiers, and Italians have renovated the port, from which boats full of petty traders and prostitutes ply again the old routes to Haifa, Alexandria, Istanbul.
The most remarkable bit of foreign-led reconstruction is of the city orchestra. Odessa has a proud musical history. ‘All the people of our circle – brokers, shopkeepers, bank and steamship office employees – taught their children music,’ wrote Babel of his turn-of-the-century childhood in the poor Jewish quarter, the Moldavanka.16 Though Babel himself made noises ‘like iron filings’ before running off to play hookey on the beach, it was a tradition that produced great violinists, among them Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh. So I went to hear a concert – a concert, as it happened, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day.
It took place in the old stock exchange building, downstairs from the Cypriot casino. A riot of barley-sugar columns, Egyptian friezes and Gothic heraldry, the hall was filled with the kind of people who look as though they march on May Day and want to rebuild the Soviet Union. Old boys in boxy blue uniforms, dangling tiers of medals, sat next to their tiny, fierce wives. Schoolgirls in long white socks and frilly p
ompoms bobbed up and down expectantly. The orchestra came on and struck up tunes for each of the Allies – Bizet for the French, Elgar for the British, de Souza for the Americans, a grand, grim bit of Shostakovich, all snowy plains and rumbling tank columns, for the Russians. The conductor, a handsome young man, was obviously something of a local hero. In between numbers, the girls and grannies lined up in front of the stage and handed him bunches of lilac wrapped in silver paper. But there was something odd here. The figure at the centre of this festival of Soviet valour wasn’t a Russian, he wasn’t even a Ukrainian. He was, in fact, an American: nash Hobart – ‘our Hobart’ to Odessans.
Visiting Odessa as a guest conductor a few years previously, Hobart had fallen in love with the place and decided to stay. When he arrived the woodwind had run out of reeds, the strings hadn’t had their bows re-haired for years and the trombones were using washing-up bottles as mutes. The repertoire was antiquated. ‘In Soviet days,’ a clarinettist told me, ‘we had a kind of percentage plan – so much modern music, so much Ukrainian music, and so on. If Schnittke wasn’t a favoured composer we didn’t play him. You didn’t actually get a letter or a phone call – it was just kind of in the air.’ Now that Our Hobart was in charge, the players were still only being paid ten dollars a month, but life had begun to perk up. There was new music to learn and they had performed abroad in Germany, Spain and Britain, even in America. To save money on these trips they took all their food with them and busked in shopping malls between concerts. I asked Hobart if he ever worried that his orchestra might simply melt away mid-tour, resurfacing as a bunch of illegal waiters and cleaning ladies. He didn’t. ‘We had one musician who went to Poland where he earned ten times as much on a building site. But he came back. He missed the orchestra, he missed Odessa, and he missed me.’