Humanitarian
The Ukraining Port of Odessa is Defiant and Putin's Ultimate Target
Published: 15 November 2023
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Odesa - Ukraine was Once Home to one of the Most Powerful Jewish Communities
Explore Odessa and Discover the Roots of Modern day Israel: The Odessa Fine Arts Museum, a colonnaded early-19th-century palace, stands almost empty. Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine, its staff removed more than 12,000 works for safe keeping. One large portrait remained, depicting Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odessa, as a just and victorious goddess. President Vladimir V. Putin knows that Ukraine’s fate, its access to the sea and its grain exports hinge on Odesa. Without it, the country shrivels to a landlocked rump state.Seen from below in Dmitry Levitzky’s painting, the empress is a towering figure in a pale gown with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1792. “She’s textbook Russian imperial propaganda,” said Gera Grudev, a curator. “The painting’s too large to move, and besides, leaving it shows the Russian occupiers we don’t care.”
Catherine the Great, Abandoned! Leaving it in the Museum Shows Russian Occupiers Ukranians Don’t Care
The decision to let Catherine’s portrait hang in isolation in the first room of the shuttered museum reflects a sly Odessan bravura: an empress left to contemplate how the brutality of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president who likens himself to a latter-day czar, has alienated the largely Russian-speaking population of this Black Sea port, established by her in 1794 as Moscow’s long-coveted conduit from the steppe to the Mediterranean.
The Odessa Opera Theater reopened on June 17, 2022
Odessa, grain port to the world, city of creative mingling, scarred metropolis steeped in Jewish history, is the big prize in the war and a personal obsession for Mr. Putin. In a speech three days before ordering the Russian invasion, Mr. Putin singled out Odessa with particular venom, making clear his intention to capture “criminals” there and “bring them to justice.”
A Barley Field in the Mykolaiv Region
Mr. Putin believed at the outset of the war that he could decapitate the Ukrainian government and take Kyiv, only to discover that Ukraine was a nation ready to fight for the nationhood he dismissed. As the focus of the fighting shifts to southern Ukraine, Mr. Putin knows that on Odessa’s fate hinges Ukrainian access to the sea and, to some degree, the world’s access to food. Without this city, Ukraine shrivels to a landlocked rump state. “Odesa is the key, in my view,” said François Delattre, the secretary general of the French Foreign Ministry. “Militarily, it is the highest-value target. If you control it, you control the Black Sea.”
For three summer weeks, as the Russian bombardment of the broader Odessa region intensified, I listened to children’s voices and the squeaking of swings in the Old Market Square. There, I contemplated the statue of a Cossack leader, an emblematic figure of tangled Ukrainian and Russian history. I lived with the blaring of sirens warning of imminent attack. I heard occasional explosions, journeyed east toward the front and pondered the fate that a fratricidal war holds for this city with a history of feast and famine.
Almost six months into the war, Odessa resists, not untouched, but unbowed. On its broad tree-lined avenues, redolent of linden blossom, where stray cats slither and a golden light bathes the gray-green, ocher and light blue buildings, a semblance of everyday life has returned. Restaurants and the storied Opera Theater, founded in 1810, have reopened. People sip coffee on the elegant Derybasivska Street. Insouciance is one expression of Odessan pride.
But an insidious unease lurks beneath it. The war is close, its front line no more than 80 miles to the east. Sandbags filled from deserted city beaches and anti-tank “hedgehog” obstacles of angled metal bars form barricades on many city blocks. Night patrols enforce an 11 p.m. curfew. “You go to sleep and you don’t know if you will wake up,” said Olga Tihaniy, an insurance agent.
The Vew from the Restaurant Oblaka - Insouciance is one Expression of Odessan Pride
Playing Chess in Sobornaya Square
The Arcadia District Used to be a Popular Beach Resort - Now the Beaches are Closed
Odessa is the crux of the war not only because it holds the key to the Black Sea but also because in it the battle between Russian and Ukrainian identity — an imperial past and a democratic future, a closed system and one connected to the world — plays out with particular intensity. This is the city, of fierce independence and stubborn inclusiveness, that symbolizes all Mr. Putin wants to annihilate in Ukraine.
Odessans look in the mirror, see a face like theirs, speaking the same Russian language, sharing much of the same history — yet the face now belongs to a stranger intent on killing them. They live in a state of shock. “Russia is destroying its claim to be a cultural nation, and Odesa is the intercultural capital of Ukraine,” said Gennadiy Trukhanov, 57, the mayor, himself a former Russian sympathizer. “Mr. Putin has turned Russia into the nation of killing and death.”
What follows here, told through the people who make Odesa, is a story of what happens when the barbarism that frenzied autocratic Russian nationalism has unleashed meets a city forged in diversity and openness.
This should have been the place, according to Mr. Putin’s understanding of Ukraine and his plans of capture, that would roll over for him as an invading savior. Instead, it did the opposite.
After Curfew in Odessa
Echoes of Terror: Perhaps the most famous flight of stairs in the world, the 192 granite steps and 10 landings immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent movie “Battleship Potemkin” tether Odessa on its plateau to the water below. Named the Potemkin Stairs in the Soviet era, they are now sometimes referred to by an earlier name, the Primorskiy Stairs, a sign of the ongoing battle for Odesa’s identity.
In the movie, the steps, now cordoned off for military reasons, were the scene of a brutal confrontation between Czarist troops and Odessan sympathizers with the revolutionaries on the Potemkin, who mutinied in 1905. The implacable Cossacks firing down the steps, the crowd of every age in desperate tumbling flight, and above all a stroller propelled down the stairs by the baby’s mother as she fell to her death, have become universal symbols of the very terror now emanating from Moscow.
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Mr. Putin seeks to seize Odessa by reviving, in twisted form, the spirit of the Great Patriotic War. But Odesa now finds itself in a war of disentanglement from Russia’s tenacious hold. Instead Mr. Putin’s crazed act has stirred an old defiance, forged in suffering.
The steps lead up to a statue of the Duck of Richelieu, the city’s first governor, a work admired by Mark Twain when he visited in 1867 and predicted that Odessa would yet become “one of the great cities of the Old World.” Many have heard about Duke, but what exactly? Who is the famous Duke de Richelieu and why is there a monument to this man in the very center of Odessa? The surname Richelieu is familiar to everyone from the novel by Alexandre Dumas “The Three Musketeers”. And this is not a fictional character, in reality there was Cardinal Richelieu, who was a prominent political figure in France in the 17th century.
Duke of Richelieu, Mayor of Odessa
In March 1803 Richelieu arrives in Odessa, at that time, the city had been without a mayor for the last two years. There was practically no production, there were no large houses and cobbled streets. The Duke of Richelieu asked Alexander I for trade privileges – Porto-free (the port territory had the right to import and export goods duty-free). Thanks to his merits, already in 1805, he retained the post of mayor of Odessa, and also became the Kherson military governor. Under Richelieu and duty-free trade, Orthodox, Catholic, Old Believer churches, a synagogue, a market, a theater, the first city hospital, the Noble Institute, and the Commercial Gymnasium were built in Odessa in 11 years. The volume of grain sales increased, and animal husbandry and winemaking enterprises began to develop. De Richelieu brought the acacia to the city, in those days in Odessa there was a problem with water, but local residents found means to water these wonderful trees, because of which the city became famous.
Odessa always had that potential. In the 19th century, this was the Russian Eldorado, a raucous, polyglot city on the make, populated by Greeks, Italians, Tatars, Russians, Turks and Poles. Because they were freer here than anywhere else in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the area of the empire where they were generally confined, Jews flocked from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to this booming port. By 1900, about 138,000 of Odesa’s 403,000 inhabitants were Jewish.
Odessa's Moldovanka District was to the Jewish Community what the Lower East Side Once was to New York's Jews
The bawdy world of smugglers, gangsters, shakedown artists and fast-talkers, concentrated in the Moldovanka district, is immortalized in Isaac Babel’s classic “Odessa Stories.” Babel — born in Odessa in 1894, executed by Stalin on fabricated charges in 1940 — captured in his antihero Benya Krik, the Robin Hood “King” of the underworld, some enduring essence of Odessa’s anarchic yet generous spirit. “Benya Krik, he got his way, because he had passion, and passion rules the world,” Babel observes.
It is this freewheeling Odessan passion Mr. Putin seeks to quash by reviving, in twisted form, the spirit of what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945. Then, in 1944, Red Army troops liberated the city from Nazi control; now Russian troops seek to impose on Odessa a repressive autocracy as part of the campaign to “denazify” a democratic Ukraine.
This twisted nightmare takes a particular form in Odessa, because its lingua franca is still Russian and its Russian sympathies lingered long after Ukrainian independence in 1991. A hub of the “New Russia” forged in the 18th century from conquered land bordering the Black Sea, the city now finds itself in a war of disentanglement from Russia’s tenacious hold. In the 5,000-word essay written last year that revealed the depth of his obsession with Ukraine, Mr. Putin wrote that Russia and Ukraine formed the “same historical and spiritual space” and that “Russia was robbed, indeed” by Ukrainian independence. Ukraine, in short, was a fictive nation. His response became clear on Feb. 24, 2022: the absorption by force of Ukraine into Russia.
Mr. Putin has reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason. It is of the nature of crazed acts to provoke the antithesis of their desired effect.
As Odessa, perhaps more than any other Ukrainian city, illustrates, Mr. Putin has spread and redoubled Ukrainian national consciousness. “There’s been a tectonic shift,” said Serhiy Dibrov, a researcher on recent Odesan history. “People crossed the line to full belief in Ukraine.” Still, he said, a substantial minority of Odessans retain some sympathy for Russia.
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Lilia Leonidova, 46, and Natalia Bohachenko, 47, run Hospitable House, a center that provides help to some of the tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians who have fled to Odessa since February. They listen to stories of rape; they see children from the devastated Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin who wet themselves when sirens sound.
Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War
On the Ground: Analysts say that a new Ukrainian strategy of attacking logistical targets in Russian-held territory is proving successful — symbolically as well as militarily.Trading Accusations: Russian and Ukrainian militaries accused each other of preparing to stage an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The United Nations issued warnings about the risk of a nuclear disaster and called for a demilitarized zone around the plant.Crimea: Attacks by Ukrainian forces have tested security on the Black Sea peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 and has become a vital staging ground for the invasion.Visa Ban: A proposal to bar Russian tourists from countries in the European Union over the invasion has stirred debate inside the bloc, with some questioning whether it would play into Kremlin claims of persecution by the West.
Sitting in a room full of blankets, clothes, eggs, diapers and stuffed animals, Ms. Leonidova, a former schoolteacher, told me: “Russia is close but Russia is very far away now. Our differences were not so explicit before, but with independence we grew completely apart.” “Yes,” said Ms. Bohachenko, who has volunteered to help the Ukrainian Army since Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. “Russia evolves backward.” “They want to rule as czars,” said Ms. Leonidova. Ms. Bohachenko laughed. “It’s such a huge country and almost no opposition to Putin! How come? When we were oppressed we had the Maidan” — a reference to the 2014 uprising that led to the ouster of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who had acted as Mr. Putin’s toady. “Russians can do the same!”
Daubed on almost every building in Odessa are lines of blue and yellow paint, the national colors. Flags flutter over heavy wooden doors. A billboard proclaims, “Russian Soldier! Instead of getting flowers, you’ll get bullets here.” Another wastes no words: “1941: Fascist occupation. 2022: Russian occupation.” An old Odesan defiance, forged in suffering, has stirred. “People can’t live without Odessa. It’s like a magnet,” said Yevgeniy Golubovskiy, 86, a writer. “I watch some of the people who left coming back, even with a curfew, and the sea closed.” A loud explosion interrupted him. The book-lined room hung with the Odessan paintings that adorn his home shook. Mr. Golubovskiy scarcely flinched. “A few kilometers away,” he said. “I got used to it. What can we do? I am a fatalist.”
Cherries, strawberries, cheese, sausages, tomatoes and bread adorned a table. Liudmyla Gryb has a firm family rule: no mention of Mr. Putin over a meal. Some Odessans have an app that provides a daily bulletin on whether Mr. Putin is alive or dead. Suffice to say the Russian president would not be missed. A cousin in Russia had sent greetings for Ms. Gryb’s 71st birthday the previous day but did not want to speak in order to avoid “these discussions.” Another relative in Odessa remains fiercely pro-Russian, nostalgic for the Soviet empire. Ms. Gryb’s husband, Andriy, cannot comprehend this. “We fought alongside Russians to defeat fascism and now they come to slaughter our grandchildren,” he said.
Sergiy (rear) and Oleg Gryb at Oleg’s home - Mr. Putin Wants to Eradicate Us
Everyone in Odessa, it seems, has a relative in Russia. Generally they have broken off all contact because any communication is futile. They share a language but have no shared conception of truth.We were gathered at the house of Oleg Gryb, 47, the couple’s older son, a doctor. As soon as the war broke out, he packed his wife and two children off to Switzerland, enlisted in the Territorial Defense Forces (akin to the National Guard), and put his skills as an emergency-room surgeon and anesthetist to work.His parents and younger brother, Sergiy, a financial adviser, moved in to take care of the house and the cat. As we ate, Ms. Gryb ironed her son’s military uniform with painstaking care. “When I joined up on Feb. 27, I told my commander that I am a Christian and a doctor and I want to take people off the battlefield and save lives,” Dr. Gryb, dressed in his olive-green military uniform, had told me earlier, when we met at a dismal self-serve restaurant near his base. In his Odesan youth, he said, he had thought China might invade Russia and he would then fight to defend the brotherhood of Slavic peoples. “Fighting against fellow Orthodox Christians, that I could never imagine,” he said. Dr. Gryb’s world has been upended. His private medical clinic, treating addictions and Covid, was a financial success. He had recently renovated his spacious house on a typical Odessan internal courtyard — vines grow on trellises, climbing roses crisscross walls, the scent of honeysuckle lingers, and neighbors are intimately, even critically, observed. Dr. Gryb’s son, 5, and daughter, 12, would play there. Now he misses them acutely. “I have told my family they have to stay away for another year,” Dr. Gryb said around the dinner table. “The Russians will attack. They will target Odessa ultimately. Mr. Putin wants to eradicate us.”
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Then, as suddenly, he laughed. Ms. Melnyk said she had renamed a local specialty known as Moscow sausage. It was now Chornobaivka sausage — a reference to a village near Kherson where Ukraine has repeatedly inflicted heavy losses on Russia. It’s curious, Mr. Gryb mused later, how many countries overcame the disease of imperialism in the 20th century, but not Russia.
“Well, they cannot invent Microsoft or Tesla so they have to go back to history and re-fight the Great Patriotic War,” his brother, Dr. Gryb, said. Discussion turned to language. Dr. Gryb said that in his unit, “90 percent of people speak Russian, and maybe half of them can speak Ukrainian.” He himself can speak Ukrainian but is more comfortable in Russian — “the language of the hymns I learned and of Soviet schooling.” His 12-year-old daughter has already taken five years of Russian. Only recently, with the onset of war, have these classes been abolished. “The common ground is the nation, not the language,” Dr. Gryb said. “The war is not about language, it is about freedom.
