Borderland (12 page)

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:

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,

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 pompoms 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.’

For Ukrainians, Russia’s conquest and settlement of New Russia was something of a sideshow. The Black Sea steppe had never been part of Ukraine anyway. If it had belonged to anyone, it was to Tatars and Greeks. What affected them much more was the beginning of ‘Russification’, the insidious centuries-long process whereby not only the Ukrainians’ political institutions, but their culture and identity, were fitted to the Russian mould.

Russification did not only happen in Ukraine. All the nations of the empire suffered it, under tsarism as well as Communism. But Russification was more determined and more successful in Ukraine than elsewhere. First, Ukraine joined the empire early: Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper went to Russia in 1686, Estonia and Latvia were conquered twenty years later, the Caucasus and Finland not until the nineteenth century. Ukraine thus became to Russians what Ireland and Scotland were to the English – not an imperial possession, like Canada or India, but part of the irreducible centre, home. Hence Lenin’s (probably apocryphal) remark that ‘to lose Ukraine would be to lose our head’, and the dream of romantic nationalists such as Solzhenitsyn that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will one day be reunited.

Second, Russians regarded – and still regard – Ukrainians as really just a subspecies of Russian in the first place. Any differences that did demonstrably exist between them were the artificial work of perfidious, Popish Poles – replaced in today’s Russian imagination by the meddling West in general. Rather than attacking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-ness as inferior, therefore, Russians deny their existence. Ukrainians are a ‘non-historical nation’, the Ukrainian language a joke dialect, Ukraine itself an ‘Atlantis – a legend dreamed up by Kiev intellectuals’ in the words of a parliamentary deputy from Donetsk. The very closeness of Ukrainian and Russian culture, the very subtlety of the differences between them, is an irritation. Why Lithuanians and Kazakhs refuse to consider themselves Russians is perfectly obvious. But that Ukrainians should choose to do the same is simply infuriating. A Ukrainian friend who used to live in Moscow described to me the appalled reaction of her impeccably anti-communist Russian friends to Ukrainian independence:

The ethnic Russian I got to know best in Kiev was Yuriy – George as he preferred to be called – Pestryakov, a retired physicist. Speaking courtly English gleaned from Dickens and Maugham, and liable to recite Kipling’s
If
off by heart at a moment’s notice, he was the model of the old-style
intelligent.
Many of his friends had emigrated to Israel or America, leaving him rather lonely in a tiny flat dominated by massive mahogany furniture and an out-of-tune grand piano stacked with old newspapers. But for all his devotion to Kipling and the World Service, for all his long years spent debating
samizdat
in smoky kitchens, Yuri was appalled both by the West – ‘The Americans, they’re robots, they never read, all they do is
barbecue
!’ – and by Ukrainian nationalism – ‘It’s not renaissance, it’s Nazification!’ Though his father’s family came to Kiev in the 1850s, and his own grandfather, an Orthodox priest, was shot by the Bolsheviks during the Red Terror, he considered himself a Russian through and through. Still, after 150 years in Ukraine? ‘Look. Before 1989, there was never any antagonism between Ukrainians and Russians, never in anything. The only exceptions were some people from the Union of Writers who were unhappy about their inability to distinguish themselves in any other way.’ Ukrainianism, in other words, was a fraud, the self-justifying invention of second-raters.

Like Polonisation before it, the Russification of Ukraine started at the top. One of the reasons Catherine the Great was able to dissolve the hetmanate so easily was that she simultaneously extended Russian noble privileges to the Cossack ruling class. In 1785, along with the rest of Russia’s nobility, they were exempted from taxes, from government duties, and from military service. In another sop to Cossack self-interest Ukrainian peasants, like Russian ones earlier, were forbidden to leave their landlords, reducing them to the status of serfs.