Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine 9781442688438

Citation preview

K A L E I DO S C OP I C O D E S S A : HI S TO RY A ND P LA C E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY U K R A I N E

Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ and its aftermath exposed some of the deep political, social, and cultural rifts running through the former Soviet republic. This book explores the intersection of these divisions in Odessa, a Black Sea port in Ukraine that was once the Russian Empire’s southern window to Europe. Odessans view their city as a cosmopolitan place with close ties to Russia and the world despite the state’s attempt to generate feelings of national belonging. Odessans’ sense of place is cultivated in various urban spaces through the narration of histories that are both intimate and official, imperial and local, traumatic and nostalgic. In illuminating the interplay of history with competing senses of place and nation in Odessa, this study shows how nationbuilding policies interact with the legacies and memories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Exploring the tensions between local and national identities in a post-Soviet setting from the point of view of everyday life, Tanya Richardson argues that Odessans’ sense of their distinctiveness is characteristic of those living in borderland countries like Ukraine. At the same time she explores the many ways in which local conceptions of cosmopolitanism shaped and preserved the city’s identity within a newly formed state. Drawing on the existing literature and her own direct observations and experiences in settings such as history classes, markets, and walking groups, Richardson presents a unique work of urban ethnography that is both analytically sophisticated and methodologically innovative. A fascinating and richly detailed study, Kaleidoscopic Odessa will be of interest to anthropologists, Slavicists, sociologists, historians, urban planners, and general readers alike. (Anthropological Horizons) tanya richardson is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethnographic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic disciplines: women’s studies, history, philosophy, psychology, political science, and sociology. For a list of the books published in this series see page 281.

Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine

Tanya Richardson

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9837-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-9563-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Richardson, Tanya Kaleidoscopic Odessa : history and place in contemporary Ukraine / Tanya Richardson. (Anthropological horizons) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9837-5 (bound). ISBN 978-0-8020-9563-3 (pbk.) 1. Odesa (Ukraine) – History. 2. Odesa (Ukraine) – Social conditions. 3. Sociology, Urban – Ukraine – Odesa. I. Title. II. Series. DK508.95.O33R43 2008

947.7c2

C2008-902850-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii ix

Note on Transliteration and Translation xiii 1. Kaleidoscopic Odessa 3 On the Edges and Afterlives of Empires 6 A Cosmopolitan Place 15 Kaleidoscopic History 21 History in an Eastern European Borderland From Textbooks to Talking Streets 33

24

2. Uncertain Subjects: Youth, History, and Nation Lessons in History 43 Home Truths 53 On Knowing History: The Holocaust 61 Talking History, Talking Politics 66

40

3. Living History and the Afterlives of States 74 Remembered Lives, Remembered History 77 ‘Everyone had their own war’: Remembering the Second World War in Odessa 93 4. On Odessa’s Kolorit and the Place(s) of Moldovanka History in Place 109 Moldovanka at the Margins and the Centre 111

106

vi

Contents

Courtyards and Markets as Places of Kolorit 119 Touring Moldovanka and the Performativity of Place

134

5. Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa The My Odessa Club 142 Walking the Streets of Old Odessa 143 Mapping History, Making Place 148 Disputing History 154 Odessa as Courtyard 157 Transforming Cityscape, Transforming Society 164 Walking the City, Making the Self 166

139

6. Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial: Spaces of History and the Place of Odes(s)a 171 Spaces of History 173 The Odessa Literature Museum 176 A Jewish Capital in a Provincial Town 188 Ukrainian History in a ‘Non-Ukrainian City’ 197 Epilogue Notes

207

221

Bibliography Index

263

241

Illustrations

1 Map of Odessa, 1915 (Skinner 1986) 2 The Odessa Opera Theatre 3 Primorskii Boulevard

xiv

12

13

4 Map of the expansion of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century (Subtelny 1991) 26 5 Courtyard at the corner of Malaia Arnautskaia and Utesev Streets 121 6 Courtyard on Balkovskaia Street near Dalnitskaia Street

122

7 Street vendors at the Old Horse Market on Petropavlovskaia Street 130 8 Street vendors on Rizovskaia Street 131 9 Valery Netrebsky and the My Odessa club in a courtyard on Stepovaia Street 145 10 Participants examine a pre-revolutionary roof tile made in Marseille 153 11 The original Balkovskaia Street 158 12 The courtyard at 133 Balkovskaia Street 159 13 The My Odessa club in a courtyard on Bogdanov Street

161

14 Members of the My Odessa club speak with a local resident on Stepovaia Street 162

viii Illustrations

15 Entrance hall in the Odessa Literature Museum (photo by Georgy Isaev) 181 16 Room dedicated to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in the Odessa Literature Museum (photo by Georgy Isaev) 183 17 Display dedicated to the works of Isaac Babel and Konstantin Paustovsky (photo by Georgy Isaev) 186

Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to be able to acknowledge the contributions of many people and institutions to the making of this book. My deepest gratitude goes to the numerous Odessans who generously shared their knowledge, stories, and sense of place with me with characteristic warmth and wit. I thank Professor Emma Gansova for her friendship, intellectual engagement, and tireless efforts to ensure the smooth progress of my research. Anna Misiuk, Mark Naidorf, Taras Maksymiuk, Valery Netrebsky, Tatiana Dontsova, and Albert Malinovsky all spent many, many hours sharing not only their knowledge of Odessa’s histories and contemporary transformations, but also, more importantly, how to learn about them. I am profoundly grateful to Leonid Kinoshever, Mikhail Kordonsky, Roman Kremen, Tatiana Rybnikova, Vladimir Chaplin, Mikhail and Olga Kozorovitsky, Vladimir Mikhailenko, and Nina Cherniavskaia for conversations and introductions that opened up new paths of research. Special thanks must go to the director, teachers, and students of the school in Tairova that I attended year long for their patience in dealing with the puzzling presence of an ethnographer. Support from a number of institutions enabled me to undertake and write up the research for this book. I was awarded doctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, and Lucy Cavendish College. The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, the William Wyse Fund, and Lucy Cavendish College provided additional fieldwork funding. The Institute for Civic Education at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and the Institute of Social Sciences at the Odessa National University offered me institutional bases while I was in Ukraine. A postdoctoral

x Acknowledgments

fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology enabled me to return to Odessa for a month in 2005. I also benefited immensely from discussing my work with Chris Hann and the talented group of scholars he had assembled working in postsocialist Eurasia. A second postdoctoral fellowship at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and a term free of teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University gave me valuable uninterrupted time and resources for the writing involved in transforming my dissertation into a book. I remain deeply indebted to my supervisor, Frances Pine, for her enthusiasm, intellectual engagement, and steady guidance in bringing my project to fruition. Her insightful comments about my unruly ethnography were instrumental in uncovering its central themes. I thank my fellow graduate students in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, particularly Tara Sinclair, Hadas Yaron, Gisa Weszkalnys, Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, and Youngho Nam, for conversations and friendships that invigorated my thinking and enriched my graduate experience. I am immensely grateful to the people who have read all or portions of my manuscript. Although I have not been able to address all of their criticisms, their comments have improved my writing and strengthened my analyses. Paola Filippucci read and commented extensively on a complete draft of my dissertation. The thoughtful criticisms of my examiners, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov and Catherine Alexander, opened up new horizons for rethinking my arguments and transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript. Gisa Weszkalnys and Diana Blank each read large portions of my revised manuscript and provided insights that have been instrumental in refining this book’s central claims. Adriana Helbig, Patricia Herlihy, Alaina Lemon, Serguei Oushakine, Eugene Raikhel, Katherine Verdery, Mark Von Hagen, and Alexei Yurchak all gave valuable feedback on particular sections of this text. Numerous conversations with Pamela Ballinger helped me place what I observed in Odessa in broader regional contexts. Finally, two reviewers for the University of Toronto Press read my manuscript critically and empathetically and offered many suggestions that helped sharpen my arguments and highlight hitherto implicit themes. I thank Michael Lambek and Virgil Duff at the University of Toronto Press for their interest in my manuscript and assistance in turning it into a book. Matthew Kudelka, Mary Newberry, and Sarah Wicks provided crucial editorial support in the final stages of preparing the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments xi

Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful to the publishers for giving permission to use the materials here: ‘Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa,’ in Ethnology 44(1):13–39. ‘The Place(s) of Moldovanka and the Making of Odessa’ in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Fall 2005: 72–89. The University of Toronto Press and Indiana University Press have kindly given permission to reproduce maps from their publications. Georgy Isaev has generously allowed me to use some of his photographs of the Odessa Literature Museum. Along the way, friends and family have given me support, practical wisdom, and intellectual insights without which it is difficult to imagine completing this book. My undergraduate supervisor, Julie Cruikshank, has been an unending source of inspiration, encouragement, and advice. Charles Pentland lived through much of this project with me. His friendship, sense of humour, and intellectual engagement helped navigate the sometimes rough waters of graduate school. Lilian Wanderley, Rosemary McDonald, Tilottama Mukherjee, Tara Sinclair, Hadas Yaron, Julie Thompson, Leanne Ross, Adriana Helbig, and Raj Dhami gave reassurance at critical moments. My parents, Olga and Ken Richardson, have been an unfailing source of support throughout this project and in all my other endeavours. I appreciate their constant reminders to ‘stop and smell the flowers’ and savour fleeting moments of beauty. Finally, I thank Derek Hall for his many kindnesses (among them straightening out the kinks in my prose) and running metaphors, but most of all, for the life we are building together.

This page intentionally left blank

Note on Transliteration and Translation

In transliterating Ukrainian and Russian place names I have used the Library of Congress system without diacritical marks. I have, however, used English spelling conventions for personal and family names (Valery instead of Valerii, Starytsky instead Starytskyi). Geographical place names in Ukraine bear their official designations transliterated from Ukrainian. I have retained the Russian spelling of ‘Odessa’ as well as place and street names within Odessa in order to convey the language in which they were often inscribed and virtually always spoken. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Black Sea

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Bul’varnyi District Peresyp’ District Slobodka Romanovka The Moldavanka Mel’nitsy Nikolaevskii Boulevard Deribasovskaia Street Novorossiia University New City Hospital Railway Yards Railway Former Free-Port Boundary Flea Market Main Jewish Synagogue The Gambrinus

Figure 1. Map of Odessa, 1915 (Skinner 1986).

K A L E I DO S C OP I C O D E S S A

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

On 2 September 2001 the central streets of the Black Sea port of Odessa were lined with Russian-language banners and posters advertising parades, concerts, and exhibitions. Although 207 is far from a round anniversary, Odessans were energetically celebrating their city’s founding in 1794 by Catherine II.1 Over the course of the two-day event, residents and visitors flowed continuously through the central streets. A monument to Sergei Utochkin – an early Russian aviator and stuntman who rode a bicycle down what are commonly known as the Potemkin Stairs – was unveiled in the city park on the famed Deribasovskaia Street to a crowd of cheering spectators. A sculpture of Sonya and Kostia – the characters from the song ‘A Boat Full of Fish,’ popularized by the Soviet war film The Two Fighters – was unveiled in the Literature Museum’s sculpture garden. Representatives of Odessa’s many ‘nationalities’ took part in a parade that culminated in a multicultural dance performance on Primorskii Boulevard behind the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, an early city administrator and local hero, while elsewhere the much anticipated Moscow Cinema screened its first blockbuster film. Just prior to the city’s birthday, Taras Maksymiuk, a collector of Ukrainian manuscripts and art in his early sixties, escorted me through the exhibition at Odessa’s Local History Museum, which he had organized in honour of the tenth anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. Independence Day, 24 August, had passed in Odessa with little fanfare and plenty of ironic commentary. Although a ceremony was held at the Taras Shevchenko monument in the morning and a gala concert at the Opera Theatre in the evening, the streets were empty. A recent high school graduate shared a comment with me that had been circulating

4 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

among her friends and family: ‘We are independent now, but nothing depends on us’ (my nezavisimye, no nichego ot nas ne zavisit) – a wry statement on the condition of having autonomy without agency, a sentiment characteristic of the latter period of President Leonid Kuchma’s rule (1994–2004). In the course of his tour, Taras digressed from his discussion of the city’s pre-revolutionary Ukrainian community to address the date of Odessa’s founding: ‘People speak as if Odessa emerged from nowhere. Odessa was founded on top of the Turkish fortress of Khadzhibei. There were Ukrainian settlements nearby and even in the 1500s grain flowed through this place to Constantinople from PolandLithuania.’ Taras’s friend interjected to elaborate: ‘So Odessa is more like 600 years old, not 207. It’s incorrect to call 1794 her anniversary.’ This brief sketch of Odessans’ responses to local and national commemorations encapsulates the issues this book explores: how the cultivation of a cosmopolitan sense of place in Odessa generates tensions and contradictions in the formation of commonsense understandings of Ukraine as a nation and state. The reordering of the temporal and spatial horizons of citizens’ world views has been one of the more significant consequences of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union (Verdery 1996, 1999; Borneman 1992; Berdahl 1999a). Elites of new states such as Ukraine, with little experience of sovereign statehood, have tried to generate a sense of common territoriality and shared history in order to consolidate political communities. The contradictions and contests concerning what kind of political community Ukraine ought to be and where it is positioned in relation to ‘east’ and ‘west,’ Europe and Russia, are the consequence of a borderland history and citizens’ vastly different understandings of major events and state projects (Hrytsak 2004). Although Ukrainians’ contradictory attitudes have been studied from the point of view of language, ethnicity, and region and conclusions drawn about aggregate national or regional populations (Arel 2001; Barrington and Herron 2004; Bremmer 1994; Fournier 2002; Janmaat 1999, 2000; Kubicek 2000; Laitin 1998; Liber 1998; Pirie 1996; Sasse 2002; Wilson 1998), the interplay of these factors has less frequently been studied from the point of view of everyday life in particular localities. In this book we will encounter different historical narratives in high school classrooms, elderly residents’ kitchens, the Odessa Literature Museum, and the neighbourhood of Moldovanka. We will trace the exploratory walks of a Jewish history group, a Ukrainian collector, and the My Odessa local history group. By examining the co-presence and interplay of different

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 5

histories in state institutions, social groups, and urban landscapes, this book offers an ethnographic portrait of the production and reproduction of Odessa as a distinct locality and of contests over its location in cultural geographies of nation and empire. Residents and non-residents alike are emphatic regarding the uniqueness of Odessa in the post-Soviet space and beyond. Odessans, they insist, are a distinct nationality. Moreover, they see their city as international, multiethnic, and Jewish; while Ukrainians might reside there, many do not consider it a Ukrainian city. They point to the city’s links with the world through the port and the diasporic connections of resident ethnic groups. They cite ‘world class’ artists and figures of renown to whom the city gave birth. They view the mixing of nationalities as the source of Odessans’ tolerant attitudes, their tasty cuisine, the beauty of their women, and their dialect, which mixes aspects of Russian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and other European languages. Odessans are known for their joie de vivre, sense of humour, and southern temperament, for their resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit, and for being apolitical. Mixing is stressed; but at the same time, almost always cited are the roles that Jews played in the city and the strong influence of Yiddish culture on the development of what is felt to be distinctively Odessan. However, although Odessan enthusiasts might eschew any natural connections with Ukraine or things Ukrainian as they recount historicomythical episodes from the city’s imperial past, Odessa was part of the Ukrainian SSR for nearly seventy years and has more recently found itself part of an independent state and subject to the state’s nationalizing policies. The strength of local identity in Odessa indicates that despite the efforts of national elites to reshape geography and rewrite history, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union have material and discursive afterlives that persist in the city, challenging the legitimacy of new temporal and spatial regimes. Modern states ‘map history onto territory’ as they ‘solder’ together a multiplicity of regions and locales to create a sense of national time and space (Alonso 1988, 40; Boyarin 1994, 16). In a pioneering anthropological study of post-Soviet nation building, Catherine Wanner (1998) has painted an evocative picture of the Ukrainian state’s efforts in the early 1990s to generate a national culture in school curricula, festivals, commemorations, and urban landscapes. Others have painstakingly analysed the content of competing visions of nationhood and of legitimating historical myths as articulated by various political actors (Kuzio 2002; Wilson 1998, 2002). The perspective of these studies remains, however,

6 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the construction of an overarching sense of nationhood. Viewed from particular localities, this process of ‘soldering together’ is highly contradictory. Places are similar to kaleidoscopes in the way they refract history and geography. Ukraine’s many localities share fragments of imperial, national, ethnic, religious, and social histories, yet the salience and influence of these histories on the present differ radically. Odessa is a place where residents’ historical consciousness of pluralism and former regimes is especially strong and where that consciousness has remained a powerful tool of the social imagination in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. I argue, however, that while the Odessan experience is seen by locals and non-locals alike as unique, that uniqueness is in a way exemplary of something that is quite typical for Ukraine. The powerfully resonant senses of place found in many of Ukraine’s cities and towns are a consequence of changing state regimes and the persistence of ethno-religious heterogeneity despite the violence of twentieth-century history. I do not mean to suggest that Odessa lacks qualities that make it distinct, nor that it is exclusively Ukrainian in an ethnic or national sense. Rather, I am arguing that Odessans’ claims to distinctiveness and their strong attachment to place can be considered Ukrainian if Ukraine is understood spatially – or territorially – as a multiethnic borderland (Berkhoff 2004; Hrytsak 1996; Von Hagen 1995). On the Edges and Afterlives of Empires Ukraine is a country whose very name – meaning borderland – has come to serve as master trope of its own history (Brown 2004; Hrytsak 2004; Reid 1997; Subtelny 1991; Von Hagen 1995; Wanner 1998). With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine – a country similar in area and population to France – became a sovereign state for the first time in modern history, with the exception of brief periods in 1918–20. Divided between the Austrian and Russian Empires from the late eighteenth century until the First World War, and among the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, the territories that comprise the contemporary state were only unified into a single administrative unit, the Ukrainian SSR, following the Second World War. Whereas historians of Ukraine throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries have sought to create a national historiography to buttress arguments for Ukrainian statehood, Ukraine’s emergence as an independent state in 1991 coincided with a trend toward conceiving history and identity politics in postnational,

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 7

transnational, and international terms (Von Hagen 1995, 670). A number of historians of Ukraine have begun to apply the concept of borderland as an explicit methodological and theoretical tool for conducting historical research in order to make sense of the discontinuity, permeability of borders, and ethno-religious diversity characteristic of these lands through the centuries (Brown 2004; Hrytsak 2004; Von Hagen 1995). For these scholars the notion of borderland has served as a postmodern antidote to and critique of the formation of modern territorial states and their corresponding national historiographies.2 While historians have developed postnational paradigms of Ukrainian history, a large body of scholarship on contemporary Ukraine has addressed the impact of internal ethnic, linguistic, and regional divisions on the formation of a national polity and identity, linked sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly to a history of statelessness. Since 1991 Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian commentators of various political stripes have portrayed Ukraine’s internal cleavages in terms of an east–west binary that conflates ethnicity, language and region. Ukrainian political scientist Mykola Riabchuk (2002) coined the concept of ‘two Ukraines,’ ‘European’ and ‘Soviet,’ symbolized by the two cities of Lviv and Donetsk. Anti-Soviet, democratic, and pro-European, western Ukrainians are portrayed as having maintained Central European bourgeois civic values of the type that were destroyed in the east by the communists. Donetsk, by contrast, is ‘a typical Soviet city’ with statues and factories dedicated to Lenin, whose residents speak Russian and possess proletarian manners. Ukrainian scholar Tatiana Zhurzhenko from Kharkiv has called this the ‘Huntingtonization’ of Ukrainian political discourse and argued that the notion of ‘two Ukraines’ is a new myth employed by national democrats to explain the country’s failures – a myth that casts Russian-speaking, Sovietized eastern Ukrainians as the main obstacle to democratic transformation (Zhurzhenko 2002). Roman Szporluk (2002) and Yaroslav Hrytsak (2002) have questioned Riabchuk’s typology, arguing that regional differences are much more complex and that Ukraine’s regions share much more in common than this conception allows. In other words, one could just as easily assert that there is one Ukraine or twenty-two (Hrytsak 2002). More nuanced studies of regions and regionalism have emerged as Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian scholars have provided empirical evidence for the non-overlapping nature of ethnic, linguistic, and regional differences. Different categorizations exist, ranging from two to eleven regions depending on how administrative, political, historical, socio-

8 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

economic, and cultural criteria are employed. These include the following: the historical divide between the right bank and left bank along the Dnipro; five historical regions (former Habsburg regions in the far west, Western Volhynia, Right Bank, Left Bank, former Ottoman lands); the economic divisions between two regions, the southeast and the centre-north; four regions based on the results of the 1994 parliamentary elections; five regions (west, centre-west, centre-east, east, south) based on Ukrainian sociological surveys; and eleven demographical geopolitical regions (Sasse 2002, 75). Scholars have charted the complexity of identities and political orientations in the east (Jackson 1998; Rodgers 2006a) as well as the implications of cross-border relationships along new and old state boundaries (including the significance of the EU border) for forming national and regional identities (Kruglashov 2006; Zhurzhenko 2004). Although this book is not about regionalism per se, it does address some of the themes that surface in this literature – namely, citizens’ geographical and cultural orientations regarding ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia,’ ‘east’ and ‘west.’ My focus is a city in the ‘south,’ a city that was formerly the administrative centre of Novorossiia, a province founded in the eighteenth century during Russian imperial expansion into the Black Sea area. A consideration of urban identity in Odessa complicates simple dichotomies of east/west, Russia/Europe, as applied in contemporary Ukraine. Embedded in Odessans’ sense of place is an understanding of the city’s identity as Russian and European, albeit in very specific ways and rooted in very specific histories. A number of anthropological studies of European borderlands in the post-Cold War period are critical of assumptions regarding the permeability, hybridity, and fluidity of identity that pervades the literature on borderlands. Daphne Berdhal and Mathijs Pelkmans have demonstrated how the increasing permeability of borders can paradoxically result in more rigid social, ethnic, and religious boundaries rather than more fluid ones – Berdhal in the case of a village on the former border between East and West Germany and Pelkmans in a study of the Georgian–Turkish border region (Berdahl 1999; Pelkmans 2006). Pamela Ballinger (2004) argues that the explicitly ‘multicultural’ regional identity that has emerged in the mixed Slav-Italian Istrian lands does not subvert the essentializing logics of the nation-state paradigm but rather works to exclude new categories of people such as Bosnians and Albanians. While these critiques are relevant to Ukraine as well, the term borderland can nevertheless be productive for thinking about place, history, and identity in Ukraine because it foregrounds heterogeneity as

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 9

well as various forms of relationality of different scales – between empires and states, between social classes and ethnic groups. Ukraine comprises a palimpsest of multiple shifting borderlands whose residents and landscapes bear the traces and memories of changing state boundaries in recent and more distant centuries. I use borderland, then, as a descriptive term for these lands as zones of overlapping entities, spaces, and histories that are in part a legacy of centuries of shifting state borders. A systematic comparison has yet to be made of the conscious and unconscious ways in which borderland experiences in different historical periods influence contemporary identities and practices in Ukraine. This work addresses how Odessans’ historical consciousness of having once been an imperial frontier plays a part in the creation of residents’ senses of place. The steppe north of the Black Sea became a frontier and zone of encounter between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. It was inhabited over the centuries by Scythians, Greeks, and Genoese. When the Russian Empire wrested these lands from the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century and began an intensive colonization program, they were sparsely settled by Tatars, Turks, Ukrainians, and Moldovans. As subjects of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian Empires as well as various other western European states settled these colonized lands, Odessa became the pre-eminent port and the administrative capital of the three provinces of Novorossiia. An elaborate mythology has since evolved relating to the founding, development, and special qualities of Odessa that has its roots in the imperial period. This mythology stresses the anomalous position of Odessa with its warm sun and heterogenous population in relation to the Russian metropole (Stanton 2003). It is not my purpose to elaborate the history of the development of this mythology, as do Rebecca Stanton (2003, 2004), Jarrod Tanny (2007), and Walenty Cukierman (1980), but rather to trace how particular features of it circulate in stories and practices that continue to perpetuate a sense of Odessa as a distinct place apart from its hinterland among residents and non-residents alike. Soviet and Nazi codification and purification projects violently unmade ethnically heterogeneous borderlands as well as the memory of this diversity in places such as the Polish-Ukrainian kresy that Kate Brown (2004) describes. However, while ethnic pluralism was unravelled to some degree in southern Ukraine, the consciousness of past diversity was not. Odessans appropriated the Soviet language of ‘nationality’ – a language meant to differentiate and codify discrete nationalities – in order to assert a form of local difference (the Odessan

10

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

nationality) outside official categories. While Brown’s account is at times nostalgic for the carnivalesque quality of ethnic pluralism that predates nationalizing regimes, Mykola Riabchuk is less celebratory, viewing the persistence of ‘tuteshni’ (‘from here’) identities as evidence of incomplete modernization and national identity formation (Riabchuk 2000, 293). Diana Blank’s (2004, 2005) evocative ethnography of an intricately storied sense of place in a Ukrainian bordertown offers another reading of such processes. The sense of place she describes has been produced both through residents’ communication with the city’s Jewish émigrés in North America, Israel, and Germany and through the peculiar way in which power has become entrenched in local institutions and practices in the post-Soviet period. The power of place as a frame of identity and belonging is not a survival from the past; rather, it is produced and reproduced as a consequence of physical landscapes, stories, and shifting relations of power. Like Ssorin-Chaikov (2003) and Grant (1995), who argue that indigenous people’s identification as ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ was a product of Soviet modernization and governance, I suggest that place-based identities are not a result of failed modernization but rather are produced by it. Odessans underscore their city’s urban qualities when speaking about its distinctiveness. Indeed, the diversity in the material forms of Ukraine’s cities stands as physical evidence of their past location in different states (Reid 1997). The winding cobblestoned streets of Lviv, the neoclassical grid planning of Odessa (see Figure 1), and the omnipresent industrial infrastructure and Soviet architecture of Donetsk materialize the different histories that intersect in Ukraine and serve as metaphors of regional identities (see Figures 2 and 3).3 Anna Reid considers Odessa alongside Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Donetsk in her 1997 work on independent Ukraine. Yet a century earlier, as the fourth most prominent city in the Russian Empire, Odessa would have been located in an imperial geography in relation to Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, and Kyiv. Historians of Ukraine have long remarked on the fact that until well into the twentieth century, Ukrainians remained small minorities in cities and more so perhaps in Odessa than in any other city in Ukraine (Guthier 1981; Szporluk 1981; Herlihy 1981). Although historians have examined the implications of the small numbers of Ukrainians in cities for the development of a national movement in the early twentieth century, the role of urban identities and historical consciousness in contemporary cultural politics of nation building has been less fully explored (but for Lviv see Hrytsak and Susak 2003, and

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 11

Czaplicka 2005). Lewis Mumford wrote that ‘by the diversity of timestructures, the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past’ (1938, 4). In different ways, Olga Sezneva (2002, 2003) and Svetlana Boym (2001) capture Mumford’s observation of how urban architecture and history have enabled residents of Kaliningrad, Petersburg, and Moscow to craft identities that subvert state-centric temporal and spatial horizons in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Similarly, ‘time-structures’ in Odessa – in the form of material traces, urban habits and values – perpetuate among residents a sense of the city as a Russian/cosmopolitan place apart from Ukraine. Anthropologists working at the edges of other empires have inquired into the nature of imperial cosmopolitanisms and their relationship to contemporary forms of multiculturalism, nostalgia, and identity politics (Ballinger 2003a, 2003b; Driessen 2005; J.N. Brown 2005). Despite the differences in how ethnicity, race, and national movements intersected with imperialism in the Austrian, British, and Russian Empires, striking parallels exist regarding the formation of contemporary placebased cosmopolitan identities in Trieste, Liverpool and Odessa. Trieste, an important multiethnic Austrian imperial port for two hundred years, was transformed into a peripheral Italian city and home to an irredentist movement. Liverpool’s prominence as an international port stemmed from trade, shipping, and the city’s place in the political economy of empire. Both places are now infected with nostalgia for a more global cosmopolitan past. In Trieste this is cultivated by the urban liberal intelligentsia, in Liverpool by a generation of Liverpool Blacks whose families were involved in the shipping industry. In both cases a longing for a more international past obscures complex ethnic and racial inequalities inherent to that cosmopolitanism. Odessa is similar in the way it has been marginalized in regional and global economies. However, what makes the Odessan case somewhat different is the relationship between the city and the nation. Liverpool served as a major port and node in the political economy of the British Empire. Trieste too, now more Italian than ever, has always had an Italian economic and cultural presence, one that gave rise to an Italian literature about the city. In Odessa, by contrast, the tropes and language of localism are articulated in the language and culture of the former empire from which the Ukrainian nation building project has been attempting to differentiate itself. Many Odessans I met did not (and still don’t) subscribe to the idea of

Figure 2. The Odessa Opera Theatre.

Figure 3. Primorskii Boulevard.

14

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Ukrainian statehood even though they are entangled in its state institutions and may recognize it as a nation in the sense implied by Soviet nationality policy. Some felt an attachment to the Soviet Union. Others thought that Odessa and Ukraine belonged ‘in Russia.’ Still others asserted that ideally Odessa ought to be a kind of free port and a selfadministering city. Conceptually distinguishing between ‘nation’ and ‘state’ helps clarify why people relate so differently to the signifiers ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Ukraine.’ A growing anthropological literature on the state has sought both to deconstruct the state’s unity and to show its historically contingent nature (Gupta 1995; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Steinmetz 1999; Taussig 1992). Although this book is not an ethnography of the state, I am concerned with the relationship between a city imaginary and particular state-ideas. Abrams’s distinction between state-system and state-idea can be used to track different abstract notions of ‘the state’ that circulate as distinct from notions of ‘nation’ or ‘people’ (1988, 82). The state as an abstraction evoked in historical narratives, political ideologies, and informants’ statements can be distinguished from the state as a nexus of institutions of schools, armies, and bureaucracies. In particular, it allows for pinpointing the ways in which different state-ideas with distinct spatio-temporal imaginaries circulate (‘Russia’ or the ‘Soviet Union’) in contrast to the nexus of institutions people associate with the Ukrainian state in which they are entangled. In 2001–2 the Ukrainian state may have been dominant, but it was not uniformly hegemonic. In order to capture how different ideas about past states and attachments to them still have an effect in the present, I employ the concept of the afterlife of the state. Yael Navaro-Yashin has used this term to highlight how the signifier ‘the state’ endures in contemporary Turkey ‘despite public consciousness about the entanglement of the abstraction in relations of social and self-interest’ (2002, 185). I use this term in a more conventional materialist way in a context where particular states have ceased to exist and new ones have emerged on their terrain. My use of the notion of ‘afterlife’ is inspired by Walter Benjamin and other scholars who have followed him in examining ‘how the past affects the present in much more complex ways than the model of points in a straight line permits us to imagine’ (Boyarin 1994, 2). I use it not only to highlight continuities and discontinuities in a postimperial context, but also to destabilize the linear notions of time and change that are naturalized in the nation-state form and that haunt theories and analyses of nation building. A concept of afterlife captures how empires and states

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 15

do not simply cease to exist when formally declared defunct, but rather persist in changed, often diffuse, forms and have various contradictory effects in the present. Just as institutions and political practices persist in peculiar forms in post-Soviet and postcolonial contexts, so too do historical and geographical imaginaries (Beissinger and Young 2002; Von Hagen and Barkey 1997). In using the term ‘afterlife,’ I follow other anthropologists in attempting to disrupt the before/after frame that underlies many accounts of postsocialist contexts (Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Hann 2002). Although many accounts of postsocialism are attentive to history and time, and although in analysing some phenomena the rupture created by the fall of socialism may be central, in other cases longer histories and continuities are equally, if not more, important (Grant 1995; Paxson 2005; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). As in postcolonialism, positing a ‘before’ and ‘after’ fails to take into account that ‘every age is a combination of several temporalities’; that ‘every age has contradictory significations to different actors’; and that the present time, the emerging time, ‘is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depth in other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones’ (Mbembe 2001, 15–16). A Cosmopolitan Place Odessa is the Levant. It’s the Black Sea, warm winds from the Bosphorus, former Greek black marketeers, Pyrenean merchants, Italian Garibaldists, captains and port labourers. The wealth of all countries, the influence of France, the ghetto in Moldovanka, bandits who value wit above all else, grey-whiskered workers from Peresyp, Italian opera, memories of Pushkin, acacias, yellow bricks, colours, the love of jokes, and extreme curiosity about every detail. All of this – is Odessa. – Konstantin Paustovsky

These lines, penned in the 1930s, capture what contemporary residents describe when they invoke Odessan kolorit, a term that can be glossed as colour, character, or exotic quality. Paustovsky elaborates on what literary scholars call the ‘Odessan Myth,’ which refers to the genealogy of images and ideas about Odessa’s distinctiveness from other cities of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, primarily, though not exclusively, in Russian-language texts. This part-historical, part-mythical, part-literary ‘Odessa text’ can be traced to early depictions of the city as a special

16

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

place, one dominated by trade and populated by people from different countries, that seemingly sprang up from nowhere on the wild steppe (Gubar and Herlihy 2005, 5; Naidorf 2001, 329; Stanton 2004, 41). Literary scholars identify Alexander Pushkin – who lived in the city for thirteen months in 1823–4 – as one of the originators on account of a description of the city in Eugene Onegin, although cultural historians find the sources of these images in the memoirs of early travellers and city founders (Tanny 2007). This city-text was elaborated in a number of texts published in the early twentieth century, including the mythicohistorical work by Alexander de Ribas titled Old Odessa, the short stories of Alexander Kuprin, and the writings of various journalists (Naidorf 2001). Odessan writers – including Isaac Babel, Yury Olesha, Valentin Kataev, Ilia Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov – who came of age during the revolution and wrote their most significant texts in the 1920s and early 1930s were labelled the ‘southwest’ or ‘Odessan’ school by literary critic Victor Shklovsky, who had to retract the label almost as soon as he had coined it (Karakina 2004; Stanton 2003, 117). Their writing continued themes of sun, sea, trade, and different nationalities while placing new emphasis on the presence of Jews, criminals, and the seamy underside of city life (Stanton 2004, 49–50). Although much of Odessa’s pre-revolutionary history became, especially under Stalin, illicit or semi-licit knowledge, given the city’s association with capitalism, trade, and bourgeois culture, a sense of its distinctiveness was permitted within certain bounds: ‘Multinational Odessa was a miniature of a new historical community – the Soviet people ... It was the place for people of different nationalities and professions from across the Soviet [Union] to meet and rest by the shores of the Black Sea’ (Gubar and Herlihy 2005, 7). Paustovsky does not explicitly label the city cosmopolitan, yet the images he uses and the connections they imply suggest such a place, although by the 1930s these connections would have been much diminished. Indeed, the story of the city in the twentieth century might be summed up as the transformation of a world city into provincial port, much like what happened to Petersburg/Leningrad (Ruble 1990). Odessa lost half of its population of more than 600,000 as a result of revolution and civil war and was marginalized in the Ukrainian SSR when the capital was located first in Kharkiv and then in Kyiv (Guthier 1981, 175). The founding of the Soviet Union radically curtailed Odessa’s international economic significance and links with the world even though it remained an important Soviet port. During the Second World

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 17

War the Jewish population that remained in occupied Odessa was annihilated; subsequent Soviet policies deported Germans and Tatars for their collaboration with Romanian and German occupiers. Meanwhile, Stalin’s postwar campaign against cosmopolitanism targeted Jews explicitly and negated contact with, and orientation to, the outside world. As a result, Odessa’s cosmopolitan past was, at least officially, denigrated and repressed. In contemporary Odessa, ‘Odessans of the world unite’ is the slogan of the World Wide Club of Odessans, an association formed in the city by the Odessan intelligentsia living in Odessa, Moscow, and New York. This phrasing underscores the interplay of discourses of Soviet internationalism with new global imaginaries created by the collapse of the Soviet Union that feed Odessans’ sense of their city as a cosmopolitan place. The term ‘cosmopolitan place’ may sound like an oxymoron. However, cities, as Abbas reminds us, ‘have historically been the privileged, if not necessarily exclusive, sites for the emergence of life we call the cosmopolitan’ (2000, 772). The disposition of urban elite cosmopolitans has been described as ‘a state of mind, exhibited in a rejection of xenophobia, a commitment to toleration, and a concern for the fate of humans in distant lands’ (Kymlicka 2001, 220), or as ‘belonging to all parts of the world; not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants’ (Calhoun 2001, 5) and as ‘an aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences’ (Hannerz 1990, 239). ‘Place,’ on the other hand, though created through networks of relations external to it, nevertheless tends to be employed to depict ‘the local’ and ‘the particular’ and more often than not – at least in anthropological literature – in small places as opposed to metropolitan centres (Feld and Basso 1996; Rodman 1992). Moreover, my portrayal of Odessa’s slide from international city to regional centre, and of its marginalization within the Ukrainian polity, might make the characterization ‘cosmopolitan’ seem far-fetched. By using the term ‘cosmopolitan place’ I want to posit the existence of a cosmopolitan localism in Odessa that is generated by cultivating a connection to the city’s past. It is akin to the provincial cosmopolitanism that Svetlana Boym describes for Petersburg (2001, 123). It is neither entirely inward looking in expressing opposition to the national or global, nor exactly the global sense of place that Doreen Massey has in mind (Massey 1994, 146). This cosmopolitan localism fixes on features that Odessa possesses or once possessed by virtue of being a particular kind of city – a port city dominated by trade and culture.

18

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Odessans enthusiastically cite the city’s cosmopolitan qualities in asserting their uniqueness. Nevertheless, a sense of loss and nostalgia pervades local discourses and has, indeed, since as early as the midnineteenth century (Tanny 2007, 5). In Old Odessa (1913), Alexander de Ribas narrates the early history of the city and laments the changes that followed the ending of its free-port status, a sentiment echoed by Dorothea Atlas, another chronicler of pre-revolution Odessa (ibid., 6). Nostalgia also infuses accounts of the city by Soviet Odessan writers in the 1920s and 1930s (Stanton 2004). These writers joined the revolutionary project, which lured them away from Odessa to Moscow. Their longing likely emerged not only out of displacement from their city, but also from the annihilation of the city of their youth (Stanton 2004, 57). In the early 2000s, many of the city’s intelligentsia lamented the provincialization of the city, which had begun under Soviet rule and which they felt was intensifying in the post-Soviet period as a result of the emigration of townsfolk (particularly Jews), the inflow of villagers, and the negligence of state and local authorities.4 Their longing is also similar to what Svetlana Boym has identified in Petersburg, following Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, as ‘nostalgia for world culture’ (2001, 130). The predicament of Odessa – at least for the intelligentsia – might be summed up in the words of an Odessan émigré in New York City, who described it as ‘a provincial city that wants to be the capital of the world.’ The recent explosion of writing on cosmopolitanism is a response to issues of transnationalism, multiculturalism, and globalization as well as an attempt to interpret a ‘global field of political, economic and cultural forces’ (Pollock et al. 2000; Robbins 1998, 31). In their efforts to understand ethnographically the nature of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ (ibid., 2), anthropologists have addressed cosmopolitan practices and world views among people who do not fit within elitist Eurocentric definitions (Englund 2004; Werbner 1999). Werbner has insisted that working classes and not just elites are cosmopolitan by virtue of their transnational movements and connections, while Englund has argued that adherents of protestant churches in Malawi are cosmopolitans in the way in which they envision themselves at home in the world. At the same time, anthropologists have demystified popular and scholarly claims that certain people or places are cosmopolitan. In a review of recent writing about Trieste, Pamela Ballinger has pointed out the tendency to see these imperial cities as exemplary of the multiculturalism, hybridity, and tolerance that the ideal of the cosmopolitan

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 19

envisions. However, in imperial cities labelled ‘cosmopolitan’ – and this certainly includes Odessa – class and ethnic divisions and the policies governing them have created other tensions and exclusions that fall short of the cosmopolitan ideal (Ballinger 2003b). Scholars have examined cosmopolitanisms in various geographical locales at specific times. Yet they have paid less attention to exploring the transformation of cosmopolitanism across time in particular milieux. Cosmopolitanism, Abbas and Englund remind us, must take place in specific sites and must be situated in particular politico-economic circumstances and trajectories – a fact often obscured when the focus is on movement and the imagination of the global. Addressing the ‘situatedness’ of cosmopolitanism, as Abbas and Englund do, helps particularize specific features that are held to be characteristic of ‘the cosmopolitan,’ such as openness to other cultures and to the world, and how these qualities are produced in relation to national as well as global contexts. For as Skrbis, Kendall, and Woodward (2004) have noted, openness is often invoked and attributed a positive value without clarifying whether it is a consciously assumed attitude or circumstantially induced – in other words, whether openness refers to interpersonal or intergroup relations or larger structuring relationships. It is in the spirit of thinking about particular manifestations of cosmopolitanism – the historical and relational dimensions of the conditions that engender it – that my own analysis is conducted. But while Englund has problematized the relationship between home and location in suggesting that ‘home’ is not a physical locale but a set of practices – an existential experience more than a location – in other situations, such as Odessa, the existential experience and practice of home is very much entangled with the materiality of place. ‘Cosmopolitan’ has to be carefully distinguished from ‘international’ in the context of the Soviet Union (Humphrey 2004; Yurchak 2005). In the postwar era Stalin launched a campaign against kozmopolitizm in order to purge society and culture of polluting foreign influences. This campaign targeted Jews in particular. Although the persecution of Jews subsided after Stalin’s death, discrimination continued and the term remained one of opprobium. In the late Soviet era a fundamental ambiguity existed in official ideology regarding the relationship between Soviet culture and foreign influences (Yurchak 2005, 162). ‘Cosmopolitan’ was the label for designating harmful bourgeois foreign influences and ‘international’ for signalling positive, progressive influences. This ambiguity ran through Odessa, which had attributes that could be con-

20

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

strued as both cosmopolitan and international. Although Odessans use the word ‘international’ more often than ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe their city, the images of the city as ‘multiethnic,’ ‘tolerant,’ and connected with the world through kin and trade relations suggest what contemporary theorists have in mind when they conceive of cosmopolitanism. However, it is also important to consider Odessans’ assertion that they are a distinct ‘ethnos’ (etnos) or ‘nationality’ (natsionalnost). When Odessans say their city is ‘international,’ they are mixing Soviet understandings (the existence of discrete nationalities) with more typically cosmopolitan ones of openness to the influences of different cultures and links with the world. In calling themselves an ethnos, Odessans are adopting the language of the Soviet state, which linked ethnicity with territory. Conceptions of an ‘Odessan ethnos’ mirror Soviet nationality policy, which envisioned the merging of nations into a Russian-speaking Soviet person yet at the same time maintained recognition and inscription of distinct peoples.5 While Odessan discourse asserts and validates mixing and openness – in other words, the blurring of edges and boundaries – it also essentializes a difference and territorializes the city as a bounded locality with notions such as ‘state within a state,’ in much the same way that Istrian regionalism territorializes and essentializes identity (Ballinger 2004). By referring to Odessa as a ‘cosmopolitan place,’ I am attempting to capture the ways in which global connections and spatial relations of different scales can be embodied and inscribed in an experience of the particular. Philosopher Edward Casey refers to the ‘beguiling and bedevilling dichotomy’ between place and space: ‘one a paradigm of the finite, the other always tending to the infinite’ (1997, 294). I am also attempting to capture how older experiences of globalism, pluralism, and openness play a part in how Odessans imagine and sense their city in the present. Therefore, on the one hand, ‘place’ is used in this study to speak about how locality is produced historically through spatial relations of various scales, while on the other, ‘place’ is a phenomenological experience, one that implicates the senses and the body (Basso 1996; Casey 1996). ‘Senses of place’ are generally described in terms of small places navigable entirely on foot. Cities are generally not considered places of this sort in anthropology (but see Reed 2002 for one example), though urban places can be (Low 2001; Weszkalnys 2004). I want to suggest that Odessans experience their city phenomenologically as a whole through walking, dwelling in courtyards, and encountering other Odessans in marketplaces.

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 21

Odessans articulate a folk phenomenology of place (J.N. Brown 2005, 9) – that is, a local theory of how place produces identity – in their descriptions of how the sea, sun, steppe, and urban places such as markets, courtyards, and the port have produced the peculiarities of city culture. Yet in their attention to the city’s international connections they highlight the relational qualities of place and the broader structuring relationships through which places are historically produced (Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 1993; Massey 1994). Localist discourse makes connections to Russia and the world visible and connections to Ukraine invisible. In tracing how Odessa’s location changes in different political and cultural geographies, I shift the focus of much scholarship on Ukraine that begins with questions about who (identity) in order to emphasize where, much as Sarah Green (2005) does in her study of the Pogoni along the Greek–Albanian border.6 In other words, this book argues that in Ukraine, location (locality and not just region) matters perhaps more than anything else when it comes to how Ukrainian citizens ask and answer questions about history and identity. Kaleidoscopic History The vignettes at the beginning of this chapter illuminate how place acts like a kaleidoscope, refracting history in ways that render particular political and cultural geographies visible and invisible. History transmitted through state institutions such as schools scarcely mentions Odessa, while representations of Odessa’s history produced in the city largely exclude Ukraine and Ukrainians. Yet versions of these two histories confront and coexist with each other in state institutions, cultural organizations, and urban landscapes. To capture the spatial effects of narrating and constituting the past in the present, I will be employing the notion of kaleidoscopic history. Some might characterize this ethnography as a study of ‘memory’ or ‘historical memory.’ However, I share other scholars’ concerns about the growing overextension of the concept of memory and the ensuing lack of conceptual clarity (Berliner 2005; Klein 2000; Olick and Robbins 1998). Memory is now used to describe anything from psychic phenomena to ritual practices to material objects (Klein 2000, 131). Employed in this way, with or without the adjective ‘collective,’ it has been used in ‘an attempt to capture issues of the transmission and persistence of cultural elements through the generations’ (Berliner 2005, 201). Part of the

22

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

problem with the overextension of the concept is that it is used in ways much like ‘culture’ once was before it was subjected to critique for holism and other ills (see, for example, Sturken 1997, 1; Lemon 2000a, 3). Maurice Halbwachs (1980) conceived of the term ‘collective memory’ to argue that remembering was purely social rather than individual. While the notion of ‘collective memory’ is problematic in any setting, given the way in which it reifies or ‘hypostatizes’ memory (Funkenstein 1989, 9), culture or society (Connerton 1989), in a place such as Ukraine the assumption of the existence of ‘collective memory’ is especially troublesome given the consciousness of shared continuity that it implies. Although particular institutions have been harnessed to the project of generating a shared sense of continuity (‘historical memory’), this can hardly be assumed to exist, especially when considered from the vantage point of particular localities. It is necessary to move beyond a framework of ‘individual and collective’ memory if we are to conceive of the relationship of persons to contested notions of community and polity as they intersect at different levels of social organization. Anthropologists have begun paying more attention to different forms of non-academic history making and historicity as they exist outside the confines of Western academic practice (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Anthropological studies of historicity offer ways to make sense of complicated relationships between past and present and of social practices that fall between what are often analytically distinguished as ‘history’ and ‘memory.’ The term ‘history’ is ambiguous, given that it refers to both the historical process and knowledge created about it (Carr, Flynn, and Makkreel 2004, vii). ‘Making history’ is the term used to describe the craft of historians, particularly as it emerged in the nineteenth century, a craft based on writing and a sharp differentiation between the present and the past (de Certeau 1988a). Yet the past exists in the present in more than just narrative and in more complex ways than explicit narratives would make apparent (Bloch 1998). Cole (2001) and Mueggler (2001) have detailed ways in which history exists as a range of rituals and embodied practices. For Cole, ritual suppresses the consciousness of the history of colonialism in such a way that the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar do not talk about it. Mueggler describes certain ritual and memorial practices among members of the Yi minority in southwest China that ‘enact an oppositional time politics’ and a ‘critical history’ of the Chinese state (2001, 9). Lambek (2002), meanwhile, is explicitly concerned with historicity – ways of making history, imagining continuity, and inscribing the passage of time – in practices

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 23

of spirit possession among the Sakalava in Madagascar. Ritual and spirit possession – conceived as history making or social remembering – are both embodied and inextricable from local landscapes. But whereas these scholars examine particular forms of non-narrative history, this book traces the interplay of coexisting historicities and forms of history making, some of which are narrative (life histories) and some of which are not (walking). Finally, in the contexts I examine, the binary of power and resistance inherent in the formulation ‘history and memory’ is particularly problematic, first, because many of the practices and narratives described involve episodes that are beyond the horizons of lived experience, and second, because where lived experience is indeed the object, stories are infused with official historical discourses.7 The kaleidoscope can be used as a metaphor to think through the relationship between history and space in the city and to capture my spatial ethnography of history in Odessa. ‘Kaleidoscope’ has been invoked in writing about the multiplicity of identities and perspectives generated in cosmopolitan cities. In her analysis of the Odessa-text, Rebecca Stanton has written that Odessa was ‘a place where Russian culture appeared as if seen through a kaleidoscope, formed by interaction of multiple coexisting yet irreconcilable “lenses”’ (2004, 42). She employs the metaphor of kaleidoscope to conceive of the variety of gazes through which ‘Odessa’ has been produced as a signifier in Russian culture. I borrow this metaphor from her to think about the multiplicity of pasts that are present in the city and their relationship to Odessans’ senses of place and the geographies of Ukraine, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Europe. As I moved from place to place, person to person, and group to group, the patterns of history linking city, country, and the world beyond transformed as if viewed through a kaleidoscope. Certain fragments were visible at certain times. The elements were similar but the perspective and the pattern changed. In a similar way, places in Ukraine refract, multiply, and fragment historical narratives. They resemble the heterotopias described by Michel Foucault, which juxtapose several incommensurable spaces linked to different times (1986, 25). This ethnography details these shifting patterns and relationships to provide an account of how non-national histories and geographies acquire meaning in one place. In detailing how the presence of different pasts in Odessa positions the city as simultaneously inside, outside, and in between polities, this book contributes to discussions about the specificities of Ukrainian state formation and about the

24

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

interplay of physical landscapes and memorial practices in generating new identities in postsocialist contexts (Lass 1994; Nadkarni 2003; Sezneva 2003; Verdery 1999). History in an Eastern European Borderland Beginnings are never neutral. As the opening vignettes suggest, when one begins a historical narrative – particularly in borderland places – privileges certain peoples, polities, and geo-imaginaries. The historiographies that intersect in Ukraine – Ukrainian, Russian, Soviet, German, Polish, and Jewish, to name some of the most salient – map time and space in ways that render lands and peoples visible and invisible in relation to particular states. Given the conspicuous lack of a Ukrainian state in the modern period and the hegemony of the nation-state paradigm, Ukrainian historiography has been in a marginal and subordinate position to Russian, Soviet, and German historiographies (Von Hagen 1995).8 If modernist paradigms marginalize the Ukrainian historical experience, postmodern ones – using concepts such as borderland, region, and diaspora, which foreground multiplicity and heterogeneity in cultures, institutions, and ideologies – capture the distinctiveness of Ukrainian history instead of seeing it as derivative, and in doing so have provided for a re-valuation and legitimization of that experience. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have begun reconceptualizing Russia and the Soviet Union as multiethnic empires (Von Hagen 2004). This shift has evolved out of the critique of the historical paradigm of Russia as a nation-state – a paradigm that results in a Russo-centric version of the past – and the national historiographies of Russia’s constituent nations. In the prenational era, which in Russia lasted well into the nineteenth century, linguistic and ethnic identities and loyalties were less important than estate-based, religious, regional, and dynastic ones (Kappeler 2001, 6). A tension still exists, however, in the interface between politics and academic paradigms of historiography. Territorial states still do exist, and as a result there are struggles over who owns the past. One example of this is the competition between Ukraine and Russia for the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, a medieval kingdom that incorporated lands that are part of the contemporary states of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.9 The vignette at the beginning of the chapter illustrates some of the complexities involved in narrating the histories that intersect in Odessa. This is because the history of its establishment and development as a

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 25

prominent city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is linked to the expansion of the Russian Empire southward to the Black Sea (see Figure 4). This corresponded with the dismantling of autonomous Ukrainian political formations in the Russian Empire as well as the Partitions of Poland. Below I provide historical background to contextualize subsequent chapters by presenting history related to the founding of Odessa from the perspectives of national and urban history. A central topic in Ukrainian historiography has been the various autonomous political entities that existed prior to the late eighteenth century. Most significantly, Cossacks – frontiersmen who fled Polish rule – established settlements and distinct forms of social organization in left-bank Ukraine (the lands to the east of the Dnipro River) beginning in the 1400s.10 The Uprising of 1648, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks against the Polish nobility, was a key event in Ukrainian historiography. It hoped to establish an autonomous polity, and was accompanied by extensive Jewish pogroms. Because the Cossacks could not achieve autonomy alone, Khmelnytsky attempted to forge an alliance with the Tatars. When this effort failed, he turned to Muscovy (the predecessor of Russia and the Russian Empire) and signed the Treaty of Periaslav in 1654, as a result of which Cossack-controlled territory in left-bank Ukraine came under Muscovite rule (Kohut 1991, 183).11 In the next century, the Hetmanate – as the Cossack polity was called – continued to exist with limited autonomy and fought the Ottomans, Poles, and Swedes. This is frequently referred to as the period of ‘ruin’: the Hetmanate was liquidated in 1764 and the Cossack Zaporizhian Sich destroyed in 1775 by Russian forces on the instructions of Catherine II. In 1783, serfdom was introduced, the indigenous court system abolished, and the Cossack regiments transformed into Russian military formations (Wynar 1985, 21). During this period, Catherine extended the Russian Empire’s control over the southern territories of what is now Ukraine, establishing the province of Novorossiia in 1764. Some historians of the Russian Empire have asserted that Ukrainian rural elites became Russian and that the peasants spoke a variety of dialects but did not identify as belonging to a Ukrainian nation alongside their landowners (Hosking 1997, 27). Historians of Ukraine, by contrast, have pointed out that the traditional elite persisted and did not lose its memory of the two eighteenth century polities abolished by the Russian Empire – the Zaporizhian Sich and the Hetmanate (Sysyn 1992). In the Russian Empire, as in other premodern polyethnic empires, ethnic factors such as language, culture, and religion played a subordinate role to

Figure 4. Map of the expansion of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century (Subtelny 1991, 174).

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 27

political loyalty. Kappeler (2003) charts different hierarchies according to which ethnic groups were arranged (and along which they rose and fell) throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the borders of empire were extended. Official attitudes towards Ukrainians oscillated. They were variously viewed with suspicion (when they were labelled Mazepentsy), as loyal subjects (Malorossy), or as uncivilized peasants (khokhly). Imperial ideology evolved to consider all Slavic people – including ‘Little Russians,’ as Ukrainians were known during the nineteenth century – part of and derivative from the ‘great Russian spirit’ (Shkandrij 2001, 12). The tumultuous events that have taken place on Ukrainian territories since the First World War and the decades-long silences surrounding them during the Soviet era pose a particular challenge for Ukrainians when it comes to generating consensus around a ‘national idea.’ Ukraine was the site of brutal conflict during the revolutions and Civil War of 1917 to 1921 as Bolsheviks, Whites, Peasant Anarchists, and the Ukrainian national movement battled one another. Attempts to establish a Ukrainian state were thwarted, and Ukrainian lands became part of a number of states – mainly the Soviet Union and Poland, but also Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In Soviet Ukraine, the cultural renaissance that was permitted in the 1920s as part of Lenin’s policy of indigenizing communism by supporting national cultures paradoxically led to a situation in which the sense of Ukrainian nationhood was stronger in the late 1920s than it had been at the outbreak of the First World War. This was followed by Stalin’s repression, which claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians, including nearly 80 per cent of the intelligentsia (Yakovenko 2001, 19). In addition, the famine of 1932–3 claimed the lives of at least 3.5 million peasants in Soviet Ukraine alone. During the Second World War, Ukrainian territories were occupied in their entirety by Nazi Germany and Romania; indeed, the war remains one of the most controversial events in contemporary Ukraine. It was perceived in western Ukraine (part of Poland during the interwar period) as an opportunity to free Ukraine of German, Russian, and Polish domination. Many western Ukrainians were mobilized to fight for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and later for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), some factions of which collaborated with the Nazis. The Ukrainian SSR provided the Soviet Army with millions of soldiers as well as recruits for the Soviet partisan movement, the survivors of which tend to view former members of OUN and UPA

28

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

as fascists and traitors. During the occupation, Ukraine was also the site of Holocaust atrocities committed by Germans and Romanians and their local collaborators. As borders were redrawn at the end of the war, Stalin secured western Ukrainian territories that belonged to Poland in the interwar years and embarked on a policy of forced and voluntary population transfers with Poland and Czechoslovakia (Magosci 1996, 642). The return of Soviet administration to German-occupied territories resulted in massive deportations of Tatars, Ukrainians, Germans, and others assumed to be collaborators (see Uehling 2004 on the Crimean Tatars). In 1946–7, parts of Ukraine suffered another famine during which approximately half a million people perished. Zhdanov’s campaign against foreign cultural influences in the immediate postwar years persecuted Soviet citizens for ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Gitelman 2001, 151). Postwar economic reconstruction was undertaken with equal zeal. By the late 1940s, industrial production was double its prewar levels. However, it levelled off in the 1950s and in the 1970s began to decline (Magosci 1996, 656). The political thaw under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev led to the 1960s phenomenon or shestidesiatnyky, part of a broader dissident movement advocating reform in the Soviet Union. The momentum the movement gained was due in part to First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, who sought greater cultural and political autonomy from Moscow. With Leonid Brezhnev’s ascent to power, dissidents across the Soviet Union were arrested, and in 1972 Shelest was replaced by the hard-line Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who remained in this position until 1989 (Nahaylo 1999). The slow growth of a full-blown independence movement in comparison with other republics is often attributed to his occupation of this post well after Gorbachev’s adoption of the policies of glasnost and perestroika. The efforts of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union to promote Ukrainian culture culminated eventually in the formation of the Popular Movement of Ukrainians for Restructuring, known as Rukh, which issued its call for the rebirth of a Ukrainian nation in 1989 shortly after Shcherbytsky was removed from his post. On 24 August, after the Moscow coup, Leonid Kravchuk, then Chair of the Parliament, and subsequently Ukraine’s first president, successfully introduced a resolution declaring Ukraine an independent state. While viewing the past through the prism of national and imperial historiographies conjures up the spectre of states and shifting borders,

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 29

from the point of view of the locality, different temporal horizons and kinds of geographies are apparent that at times reinforce and at times transcend state-centric ones of empire and nation. When stable political regimes have existed and secured access to overseas trade networks, settlements along the Black Sea have facilitated trade between the hinterlands of contemporary Russia and Ukraine and the Mediterranean basin (Herlihy 1986). The ancient Greeks founded colonies along the Black Sea as early as the seventh century BCE, the last of which were destroyed by invading Goths, Huns, and others in the fourth century CE (Dobroliubsky, Gubar, and Krasnozhon 2002, 41). Indeed, recent archaeological research suggests that Odessa was once the site of a large Greek settlement called Borisphen (87). The area served as a transit route for trade during the period of Kyivan Rus.’ Commercial activity flourished again in the area in the thirteenth century when merchants from the ports of Amalfi, Venice, and Pisa established permanent colonies on the Black Sea (Herlihy 1986, 2). In the 1400s, instabilities caused by the break-up of the Mongol Empire and the fall of Constantinople interrupted trade yet again. The first reference to the Tatar settlement Khadzhibei on the site of contemporary Odessa dates from the early 1400s. In the mid1700s the Ottomans decided to reinforce their northern border and built a series of fortresses along the northern Black Sea coast at Khasan-kale (Ochakiv), Yeni Dunia (western shore of the Tiligula estuary), Vosia (eastern shore of the Tiligula), Khadzhibei, and Khadzhider (Ovidiopol) (Dobroliubsky, Gubar, and Krasnozhon 2002, 146). Odessa’s establishment was nearly contemporaneous with a series of significant boundary shifts in the region. Left-bank Ukraine retained a degree of cultural and political autonomy in the form of the Hetmanate until the early eighteenth century. During the war that Peter the Great waged against Charles XII of Sweden in the early eighteenth century, Hetman Mazepa switched sides.12 Viewing this as an act of betrayal, after the war Peter introduced measures to curtail the autonomy of the Hetmanate. In 1764, Catherine abolished the office of Hetman altogether and in 1775 ordered the razing of the Cossack Sich. Some Cossacks were integrated into the Russian military and relocated to the Caucasus as border guards. Some fled to the Ottoman Empire, where they founded the Dunai Sich; others settled in the sparsely populated territories along the north coast of the Black Sea. The lands of the Hetmanate were divided into gubernia, and serfdom was introduced. Catherine also initiated campaigns against the Ottomans and suc-

30

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ceeded in securing lands north of the Black Sea through the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774) and the Treaty of Jassy (1792). Odessa was founded on the heel of these successes in 1794, and later made the administrative centre of Novorossiia. The Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, and 1795) were occurring as the Russian Empire was expanding into the Black Sea area. Besides Ukrainians and Poles, more than half a million Jews were incorporated into the empire, which until then had a relatively small and scattered Jewish population (Rogger 1986, 15). In 1793 the Tsarist government issued a decree that became the basis of the Pale of Settlement; it confined Jews to fifteen provinces in the northwestern and southwestern regions of European Russia (nowadays the territories of Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Bessarabia) (Klier 1992, 5). At times the policies of the imperial authorities aimed to integrate Jews; at other times they singled Jews out for discrimination. The Jewish Statute of 1804, one attempt at integration, allowed Jews to set up and own factories and to buy or lease land in Novorossiia and certain other provinces. However, the state often failed to provide institutional support for these initiatives (Hosking 1997, 34). After 1827, Nicholas I abolished Jews’ exemption from military service and introduced the notorious cantonist laws under which Jewish boys were drafted into the army (Klier 1992, 8).13 The economic rise of Odessa in the nineteenth century was made possible by a favourable mix of geography, government policies, and international and domestic developments (Herlihy 1986). Merchants were attracted to Odessa because it was located near the southern grain-producing regions of the Russian Empire and lay closer to the markets of the Mediterranean and western Europe than other ports on the Black and Azov Seas. The government adopted policies to stimulate the growth not just of Odessa but of all of Novorossiia, a region comprising the provinces of Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, Kherson (in which Odessa was located), and, after 1828, Bessarabia. Incentives were provided to foreign and Russian merchants through generous land grants and tax exemptions. Odessa’s development was also facilitated through statefinanced construction of the harbour and port facilities. Runaway serfs from Ukrainian and Russian provinces were assured their personal freedom, and lease-holding status was promised to peasants resettled in Novorossiia by their landlords. Land was also granted to settlers from western Europe and the Ottoman Empire (Herlihy 1986, 23–34). Municipal authorities were granted considerable powers to develop the local economy while the conferring of free-port status on Odessa in

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 31

1817 by Alexander I (a status it would retain until 1859) catapulted the city into its pre-eminent commercial position. Indeed, the commercial and financial ties between Odessa and foreign markets were so strong that one observer noted that free-port status ‘cut off Odessa from the remainder of Russia, creating, as it were, a state within a state, so that the territory of the Odessa port and today’s municipality had closer ties with the European and Asiatic ports of the Black and Mediterranean Seas than with the rest of Russia or even New Russia’ (Weinberg 1993, 4). In the post-Emancipation period, Odessa’s commercial significance was bolstered even further by the expansion of the railway network, which in the 1860s and 1870s finally linked the city to markets in Russia’s interior and the Caucasus. Like other cities in the Russian Empire, Odessa experienced rapid population growth during the nineteenth century,14 and indeed by the mid-nineteenth century it was the third-largest city in the Russian Empire (Herlihy 1986, 233). Far more than St Petersburg or Moscow, Odessa attracted a population that was heterogeneous in ethnic and national composition. From the outset, foreign merchants from Greece, Italy, Galicia, and other parts of Europe established branches of their brokerage houses in Odessa. Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews migrated to the city. In the early nineteenth century Mennonites, other Germans, Bulgarians, and Moldovans established colonies in and around Odessa and the other Black Sea cities at the encouragement of the Tsarist government. According to the 1897 census, the city was home to people who spoke some fifty-five languages and hailed from more than thirty countries, including most European and some Near Eastern nations, the United States, China, and Japan. Slavic-speaking peoples – predominantly Russians – accounted for approximately 60 per cent of the population while Jews (identified as such on the basis of religion) constituted 32.5 per cent – up from 14 per cent in 1858 (Herlihy 1986, 242–3).15 The proportion of citizens from European states had dropped from three-quarters of the population to 3 or 4 per cent by the end of the century. In other words, by the end of its first century of existence, in terms of its population Odessa had become much more Russian and Jewish than at its inception (Herlihy 1986, 242). However, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Odessa’s elites strongly identified as being European and oriented towards the West (Herlihy 1986; Sylvester 2000). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, industrialization accelerated in Odessa. However, during the ten years prior to the outbreak of

32

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the First World War, residents experienced depression, unemployment, industrial unrest, strikes, and revolutionary agitation that slowed industrial expansion (Herlihy 1981, 187). The city also fell out of favour with the central authorities, for whom it was ‘foreign’ and a ‘nest of conspirators.’ As a result, the police presence in the city was increased and Odessa was denied favourable tariff rates, better railway connections, and an improved harbour (Herlihy 1986, 282). Although the First World War, the revolutions, and the Civil War had a dramatic impact on all subjects of the Russian Empire, the consequences for Odessa were especially acute: trade routes were cut off, and many factories lay idle, while most of the shipping fleet was removed by the White Guards (Hontar 2002, 330). In the 1920s a nationalized shipping fleet was formed, and by 1930 the quantity of goods shipped was roughly 60 per cent of prewar levels. Under the New Economic Policy, Odessa became one of the largest centres of private trade in the Soviet Union (333). Under the first Five Year Plan, Odessa’s factories were reconstructed to build agricultural equipment, cables, and railway cars and to repair ships. The network of sanatoriums was expanded, and some residential housing was built. By the outbreak of the Second World War the city had nearly regained its pre–First World War population level, largely as a result of migration from small towns and villages. According to the 1926 census, 17.6 per cent of Odessa’s population of 417,690 was Ukrainian, 39 per cent Russian, and 36.7 per cent Jewish (Guthier 1981, 166). Since detailed results of the 1939 census were censored, accurate population composition figures prior to the outbreak of the war are difficult to obtain, although it is estimated that there had been a small increase in the proportion of Ukrainians, as was the case in other cities. During the Second World War, Odessa was subject to Romanian administration, as the city had been made part of the Transnistria district, comprising 40,000 square kilometres of former Soviet Ukrainian territory between the Dnister and the Buh (Bug) Rivers, which Hitler had promised the Romanians in compensation for the loss of Transylvania to Hungary. Since the Romanians saw Odessans as future subjects, their administration was considerably less brutal for the non-Jewish population than the German administration in other parts of Ukraine. Romanians continued to operate schools, theatres, and the university, allowed locals to open small businesses and trade, and were easily bribed if problems arose (Dallin 1998). The worst atrocities against Jews and Gypsies in Transnistria – whether they were Soviets or Romanians who had been deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina – were commit-

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 33

ted during the first six months of the occupation, which began on 17 October 1941. During this period, 80 per cent of the 210,000 Soviet Jews who remained after evacuation were killed (Ofer 1993, 138). When a Nazi victory was no longer certain, the Romanian administration changed its policy, refusing to deport the remaining Jews to extermination camps in Poland and allowing Jews to work as hired labourers and aid to reach the ghettos (Ofer 1993, 135). As a result, the survival of Jews in this area was higher than in other areas of occupied Europe. The destruction in Odessa during the Second World War was much less severe than in other cities in Ukraine. In the postwar years, resources were directed towards reviving the economy and rebuilding infrastructure such as factories, hospitals, sanatoriums, and the port. By the mid1950s many new ships had been acquired and the port was handling more cargo than in the prewar period. During the 1960s the city began expanding as residential districts were built at its northern and southern extensions. The southwestern district, commonly known as Cheremushki, has Khrushchev-style five-storey buildings; the newer districts such as Kotovsky and Tairova have mainly large multistorey buildings. Nowadays about 70 per cent of Odessans live in districts and accommodation constructed since the late 1950s (Topchiev 1994, 48). The city’s population grew between 1959 and 1970 largely as a result of migration from the countryside. Odessa had a population of 285,000 in 1945 and 664,000 by 1959. By 1973 its population had risen to 1,000,000, and by 1989 it was 1,970,000 (Shelest 2002, 457). The city had become a major tourist destination within the Soviet Union, hosting more than a million guests annually (ibid., 457). Yet despite this growth, it had fallen from its prewar position as the third-largest city in Soviet Ukraine after Kyiv and Kharkiv, to fifth-largest following Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk. From Textbooks to Talking Streets I arrived in Odessa in July 2001 for sixteen months of fieldwork with the intent of studying how the transmission of contradictory histories and memories in schools and families influenced different generations’ identification with Ukraine. My master’s project in 1999 on the transformation of the school history curriculum and textbooks in Ukraine had unveiled a complicated picture of how the transmission of understandings of historical events relates to individuals’ identification with Ukraine as nation and state. In pursuing these questions further for a doctoral project, I chose to situate my study in Odessa, not only because

34

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

scholars of regionalism had charted more sceptical attitudes towards Ukrainian nationhood and statehood in the predominantly Russianspeaking east and south16 and because little contemporary ethnography had been conducted in the city,17 but also because I wanted to explore the interplay of local senses of place and history with national ones. My project, though attentive to locality, initially placed more emphasis on the issues of nation formation. It posed questions about place but did not presume the salience of locality as a frame of reference. Like many others, I was captivated by claims about Odessa’s multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism but uncertain about their specific nature in the city, given counterarguments that Odessa’s kolorit had long since faded. In very little time, however, it became evident that just as history was central in imagining nationhood, so too was it important in the constitution of Odessans’ sense of place. Over the course of sixteen months, the city moved from background to foreground, until it became, as it has for countless other writers, a central character in the story this book tells. Theories of nationalism attribute considerable power to institutions such as schools in the formation of national subjectivities (Gellner 1983). Under their influence I turned my attention to history education. I attended grade eleven history lessons at a mixed Russian–Ukrainian instruction school in the Soviet-built suburb of Tairova for the entire school year and spent four months joining students in learning history at an elite gymnasium in the city centre. I visited lessons in six other schools, attended special ministry-sponsored events such as the Little Academy of Sciences competition, and interviewed and spoke informally with teachers and students. The focus on history in the upper grades was deliberate. The twentieth century, which was covered in grades ten and eleven, is arguably the most controversial subject for citizens making sense of the Soviet past. By focusing on events in which elderly generations had participated, I aimed to trace the influence of different modes of transmitting the past on young people’s understanding of history and sense of nationhood. Teachers and theorists of nationalism share the assumption that schooling generates the intended national identity. Just as powerful is the notion that families and kin are equally important in transmitting knowledge and identity. During my master’s research, teachers stressed over and over again how they both created and negotiated different kinds of relationships with parents and grandparents as they taught history (Richardson 2004). Following these insights, at the outset I, too,

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 35

sought to trace these influences on young people. However, since the boundary between home and school was difficult to cross in my case, I interviewed and spoke informally with elderly people and their families unconnected with the schools I attended. The difficulties in tracing ethnographically the transmission of knowledge between these contexts coincided with my growing awareness of the salience of the city as a focus of identity and belonging for the Odessans I was meeting. Instead of pursuing in greater depth the interrelations between these two contexts by residing with families, I shifted my focus to the transmission of history in the city and Odessans’ sense of place. At this moment of transition, an architect in the Oblast Bureau for Conservation who had heard of my interest in Odessa’s history and specificity admonished, ‘You won’t find Odessa in schools. Odessa is in the streets.’ Although I did not consciously seek out Odessa’s streets, looking more carefully for venues where the city’s history was transmitted inevitably took me to them. Anna Misiuk, a tour guide, journalist and literature museum employee, offered another piece of advice. When I asked how she had learned about the city’s past during the Soviet period, at a time when a limited amount of literature was available, she paused, looked at me quizzically, and answered as if I ought already to know: ‘The streets speak!’ Although she did not elaborate, I take her as meaning something similar to Julie Cruikshank (2005, 76) regarding the cultivation of the capacity to listen for stories, not just to them (we might add watch for stories, in that details of the pre-revolutionary architecture, though seemingly mute, also tell their stories). One of the best ways to listen and watch for stories, Odessans taught me, is to walk the city’s streets. Walking the city is both a major topic in this book (chapters 4, 5, and 6) and a research method. Increasingly, walking is being employed deliberately as a method of urban ethnography as researchers draw on Benjamin (1979), de Certeau (1988b), Lefebvre (1996), and others to explore how city residents experience the city in everyday life (Lee and Ingold 2006). This interest in walking dovetails with heightened anthropological interest in place and embodiment (Feld and Basso 1996; Csordas 1994). In my case, walking was an accidental method, in that it was Odessans themselves who drew me into their walks. Long-time Odessans have developed techniques of sensing, reading, and narrating the urban landscape that are reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, and they are more astute at employing his methods than I. When I asked Odessans about their life stories, very often they would take me for a walk

36

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

through their neighbourhood. Particular Odessas – Jewish, Ukrainian, and so on – were also narrated on foot. While walking served a particular pedagogical purpose in the context of the Jewish history group and the tours of a Ukrainian collector (chapter 6), for the My Odessa club (chapter 5) it was means of sensing place and sensing history, a way of feeling at home despite experiences of loss and dislocation. During fieldwork then, I followed – to a large extent on foot – the ‘idea of Odessa’ as it was narrated through history and sensed in particular places. My journey began shortly after I arrived in the city at the Odessa Literature Museum, which an Odessan sociologist recommended I visit to understand how local history and legends were transmitted. A kind of shrine to the Odessan Myth, the museum was an introduction to many of the literary texts whose stories circulate widely in written and oral form and frame the interpretations of individuals and events. Moldovanka became a focus of my research when person after person told me that it was a remaining repository of Odessan kolorit, which had been eroded elsewhere in the city. I joined the My Odessa walking group to learn about the transmission of history in the city. I was also invited to join a Jewish history group when its organizer heard of my efforts to understand how different histories were being transmitted. Given the urban nostalgia that animates Odessans’ sense of place, it is perhaps not surprising that walking is such a salient practice, for it enables residents to employ all their senses in interacting with the cityscape and committing it to memory. The walking practices highlighted in this study do not exhaust all the forms of walking in Odessa. In the contexts I examine, walking is employed as a technique for transmitting knowledge about the city’s past that has some features in common with the bodily learning of apprenticeship, albeit with important differences. In studies of apprenticeship, an ensemble of techniques remake, train, and imbue the body with ‘practical knowledge composed of schemata that are thoroughly immanent to practice’ (Wacquant 2004, 59; see also Herzfeld 2004). In the settings this book explores, walking is employed as a technique to transmit cognitive knowledge of stories, facts, personalities, and dates and practical knowledge of how to physically navigate the city and its history. As an urban ethnography of history and place based on fieldwork conducted in 2001–2002 and July 2005, this book departs from studies centred on a particular community (the village in the city, the ethnic city) and on migration, diasporas, and other forms of physical displace-

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 37

ment to and from urban areas (Low 1996; Sanjek 1990). The significance of Jews, Greeks, and Italians in the development of commerce in the city in the nineteenth century and in the imagination of place suggests the importance of migration in the making of Odessa. Since 1991 migration has continued to transform the city, with the emigration of Jews and the emergence of Odessa as a significant node for in-migration from China, Vietnam, the Caucasus, and various Middle Eastern countries. My emphasis, however, is on people who remain in place, who experience displacement without moving, many of whom resolutely establish a sense of continuity and connection to Odessa in the face of overwhelming transformation. Indeed, in a critique of anthropological writing that has sought to denaturalize the link between place and culture, Diana Blank has written that ‘many theorists have gone so far as to think themselves out of place forgetting that for many incarceration precedes ethnographication’ (2004, 356). As an ethnography of the idea of Odessa as a city, this study can add to our understanding of how ordinary city dwellers who are not planners theorize the city as a whole (Weszkalnys 2004). This is a study of the idea of Odessa as a city in relation to other Ukrainian cities, in relation to the countryside and to the political spaces of nation and empire. Cities have many rhythms. Indeed, in an era characterized by speed and travel it may seem odd to attend to marginal rhythms and places where time slows and where the past is the object of reflection. Yet it is in these spaces and practices that other temporalities persist which may arrest dominant ones and in which visions of the past are transmitted that undermine the formation of national times and spaces. My arrival for fieldwork as a graduate student was not my first encounter with or connection to Ukraine. In 1995 I moved to Ukraine for work, propelled by a curiosity about a place my Ukrainian grandparents had left behind in immigrating to Canada, a place that had been part of Austrian Galicia until the First World War, located in Poland in the interwar period, and incorporated into Soviet Ukraine after 1945.18 While living in Kyiv, I was captivated by yearly controversies over competing visions of what had happened during the Second World War, controversies that one year inspired an eight-hour TV marathon to facilitate public discussion. I was moved by the impact of tumultuous events such as war and famine on family and personal histories and by the inextricability of history from interpretations of the country’s fate. My interest in how people could live with profoundly contradictory

38

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

understandings of history and how this past could be represented in ways that might promote some kind of reconciliation propelled me to undertake this project. The reader will note that I have chosen to spell ‘Odessa’ following the transliteration from Russian rather than the Ukrainian variant ‘Odesa,’ which is increasingly common in contemporary writing on Ukraine. Official English spellings of place names and personal names in Ukraine are transliterated from Ukrainian regardless of whether the place name was allocated in Russian or any other language. In some cases a place name has spellings in many languages such as Lviv/Lemberg/Lwow/ Lvov, signifying a centuries-long history of unstable toponymy. Some place names in southern Ukraine in the provinces of Novorossiia such as ‘Odessa,’ were allocated in Russian when they were founded in the eighteenth century. Since the displacement of the Tatar name Khadzhibei, ‘Odessa’ has had a relatively stable nomenclature for more than two hundred years. Odessa has only recently begun to appear on maps and in the Library of Congress system as ‘Odesa.’ I choose to retain the Russian spelling in most of the book as a representational strategy to reflect the language that is used almost exclusively in Odessa, the salience of the imperial past in the present, and the contradictions that inhere in the relationship between particular localities and the Ukrainian state. In closing, I return to the metaphor of kaleidoscope. Besides capturing the constellations of histories as they are narrated and made in particular places, the kaleidoscope metaphor is a useful guide for reading this book. Having retained the jagged qualities of incongruent contexts and the cultural and political geographies that appear at particular locations, I would suggest that reading through the different chapters is something akin to looking through and turning a kaleidoscope. The chapters map my ethnographic peregrinations through different ‘spaces of history’ in Odessa, some of which I went looking for and some of which Odessans opened up for me. Each chapter centres on particular contexts in which different histories and places are narrated, sensed, and made. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on history, subjectivity, nation, and state in different generations. Chapter 2 addresses how young people learn about history and suggests that schooling is only partially effective in disciplining them as national subjects. Chapter 3 explores the interplay of experience, memory, and historical narratives in elderly individuals’ life stories and asks how the impingement of the afterlives of states on the present creates ambiguities in their acceptance of a Ukrainian state. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the interplay of spaces, places, and history in

Kaleidoscopic Odessa 39

the creation of a sense of Odessan distinctiveness. Chapter 4 examines the ambiguous place of the district Moldovanka in the Odessan imaginary – a place that residents feel is uncivilized but that at the same time embodies and generates Odessa’s kolorit. Chapter 5 describes how the walking practices of the My Odessa Club enable participants to sense history and the city – as a whole – phenomenologically as place. Chapter 6 juxtaposes the story of the founding of the Odessa Literature Museum in the late Soviet period with the narration of histories previously hidden in the city by a Jewish history group and by a Ukrainian collector, to examine how Odessa can appear both unique and distinct from Ukraine, and at the same time related to it.

Chapter 2

Uncertain Subjects: Youth, History, and Nation

Many Odessans imagine their city as a ‘state within a state,’ a place that exists outside the nation. Yet they remain ensnared practically and ideologically in institutions that constitute them as citizens and subjects in a Ukrainian state. While Odessa’s cityscape retains material and ideological traces of the different states that Odessans mobilize in asserting their sense of difference, schooling – in particular, history education – engages young Odessans in an intense encounter with the time of the nation. This chapter presents an ethnographic analysis of how the transmission of contradictory understandings of history in schools and homes created uncertainty among young people regarding the historicity of the Ukrainian state. History education situates the nation-state in time and space, linking a collective past to a collective future by soldering together diverse locales with diverse histories. Indeed, the centrality of history education as a technique for inculcating in citizens a sense of nationhood and statehood is evident in the prolific studies of school textbooks and the representation of the past by scholars of nationalism.1 These same scholars concede that the transmission, enactment, and reception of these textbooks in classrooms is important, yet seldom have they actually examined these processes. This is certainly true in the context of Ukraine, where analyses abound of the politics of representing history in textbooks (Honcharenko 1998; Janmaat 2000; Popson 2001; Wilson 1998). Peter Rodgers has researched how teachers in Ukraine’s eastern regions interpret and modify the history curriculum to forge a regional perspective (Rodgers 2006b, 2007), but few have attended to the way young people make sense of what they are taught. While Catherine Wanner’s (1998) account of curriculum change in Ukraine and Fran

Uncertain Subjects

41

Markowitz’s (2000) portrayal of teacher–student interactions in Russian schools address some aspects of these processes, how students engage accounts of history encountered in different contexts has curiously remained understudied. Indeed, the contradictory ways in which Ukraine’s citizens have experienced historical events make the transmission of the past a particularly fraught process, one that highlights tensions in creating commonsense understandings of the past. By focusing on the transmission of history through social relations in which young people are embedded, I explore how uncertainty about meaningful links between shared pasts, presents, and futures produced indifference and ambivalence among many young people in 2002 regarding the existence of a Ukrainian state. The copresence of different pasts in the present – in the form of official texts, teachers’ stories, and family histories – generated an uncertain historicity of Ukraine as nation and state. In formal education systems, young people encounter specific knowledges and social practices that shape them as particular kinds of subjects. Broad historical accounts of nationalism have stressed the role that formal education and schooling have played in generating a shared sense of nation among a population through the cultivation of literacy and knowledge of a common tradition (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). Their assertions resonate with the ideas of other social theorists such as Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1971), and Foucault (1977), who have explored the institutional intersections of knowledge and power in the production of modern political subjects through concepts such as hegemony, ideological state apparatuses, and disciplining. Although not specifically concerned with the reproduction of class inequalities, in examining the effects of history education this chapter probes the extent to which the Ukrainian state-idea had become part of commonsense knowledge – that is, hegemonic – among young people in Odessa.2 Furthermore, adapting Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplining’ to the case of Ukraine, we could say that discourses on the nation and state are transmitted through history education in schools to reinforce particular historical knowledge as ‘truth’ and thus (ought to) ‘discipline’ students to think about the past in a way that constitutes them as national – ‘Ukrainian’ – subjects. However, in contrast to Foucault, who addresses the formation of modern subjects in general and who pays attention to the regimes of knowledge/power embedded in taken-forgranted practices, I am concerned with a very narrow, albeit significant, aspect of subjectivity in which historical knowledge plays a role in

42

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

disciplining national subjects by establishing a sense of historicity of Ukrainian nationhood and statehood. These broad theoretical frameworks, however, leave unexamined social relations within the school, such as the complex interrelations among curricular knowledge, teachers, and students, and relations among school, family, and community. Some ethnographers have focused on student or parent resistance (Willis 1977; McLeod 1995; Reed-Danahay 1996), while others have called into question the rigid distinction between formal and informal learning contexts and highlighted the ways in which knowledge acquired in one setting can undermine that acquired in another (Akinaso 1992; Stafford 1996). In Ukraine there are complex flows of knowledge among different contexts – particularly, but not only, between schools and domestic spaces. School history may be used to contest what is learned at home and vice versa. Knowledge acquired in one setting may reinforce that acquired in another. Alternatively, there may be little flow at all between these contexts. A clear picture of how knowledge of history becomes effective in forming young people’s sense of identification with particular states is therefore difficult to discern. However, the complexity of these processes suggests not only that schooling does not always work as assumed by both state managers and theorists, but also that history is a much more socially dispersed phenomenon than is usually considered in studies of history and nation building. More specifically, different histories and historicities coexist with national ones not only in conventional places such as schools and textbooks, but also in stories, walks, and physical traces in the landscape, features that emerge in young people’s accounts but that will be examined in more depth in the remaining chapters. The indifference and scepticism that I observed in young people regarding the existence of Ukraine as a nation and state is, to a significant degree, a consequence of uncertainty about its historicity. The concept of historicity has been borrowed by anthropologists from phenomenology to explore issues of ‘imagined continuity’ (Lambek 2002, 13) or the ‘ongoing social production of accounts of pasts and futures’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 262). It can facilitate a move beyond the problems created in using a framework of ‘history and memory,’ which reproduces a binary of power and resistance by attributing history to official accounts and memory to individual subjects. In Odessa, I suggest, multiple, contradictory historicities conveying ideas about the relationship between past, present, and future political entities and their

Uncertain Subjects

43

respective geographies are transmitted across contexts and genres that might be characterized as ‘history’ and ‘memory.’ In the contexts I discuss there is an ‘ideology of history’ – an explicit understanding of what ‘history’ is (Stewart 2003, 486). History operates as a commonsense notion that refers to events and processes fixed in time and space that actually occurred as well as the representations of them. This refers to formalized narrative histories written by professional historians that take an omniscient view of an event or period, one that incorporates facts, actors, and information that no one individual could have possessed at the time the event took place. While memory, as James Young has suggested, can be considered part of history itself (2000, 11), in some sense it also remains distinct in that it involves personal experience as well as individual selves and acts (Lambek 1996, 243; Young 2000, 3). By focusing on historicities conveyed in different contexts in the form of what might analytically be called history and memory, I aim to illuminate how uncertainty about continuity – about the relationships between shared pasts, presents, and futures – operated in 2001–2 to produce indifference and ambivalence among youth regarding Ukrainian statehood. In this way I complicate the straightforward, linear progression towards consolidating a commonsense understanding of Ukraine as a state among young Odessans – a progression that is assumed to take place in theories of nation building. I illustrate why and how understandings of history do or do not persuade. Lessons in History Amongst the various school disciplines, history is seen by teachers, historians, students, and officials alike as playing a central role in forming young people as members of a Ukrainian political community.3 History is a compulsory subject for all students in grades five through eleven regardless of their specialization. As in the Soviet period, the study of history is divided into two courses: ‘World History’ and ‘The History of Ukraine’ (which in the Soviet period was the history of the Soviet Union).4 At the time, except in grade five, when an overview of the history of Ukraine was provided, the rest of the curriculum was structured in linear fashion, as it was under the Soviet Union, so that ancient history was studied in the lower grades and modern history in the upper grades. All topics in the curriculum were to be covered, although the teacher had some leeway regarding which ones to emphasize. In lower grades, a variety of ministry-approved textbooks were available for

44

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

teachers to use. However, in 2001–2, for grades ten and eleven, there were only two ministry-approved alternatives available. School 76, a mixed Russian–Ukrainian school with approximately 1,700 students in grades one to eleven in 2001–2, became my primary window onto teaching and learning history in the education system.5 Situated in the suburb of Tairova near a market selling produce and other consumer goods, the school was a three-storey concrete building with a central courtyard, constructed in the late 1980s. I arranged to attend the school after meeting the director at a seminar on civic education organized by the Odessa Oblast Teacher Retraining Institute in the summer of 2001. Locating a school that would permit me to attend history lessons year round proved more challenging than I or my colleague from the Odessa National University expected – a fact that my colleague and some directors explained with reference to the upcoming parliamentary elections. Although many teachers and directors invited me to sit in on one or two lessons, they were not keen on subjecting themselves to the gaze of a long-term observer. While I had the director’s permission to attend lessons at School 76, the teacher whose classes I observed was somewhat more reluctant about my presence, though he never explicitly expressed this.6 Attending lessons on a regular basis provided opportunities for asking students and teachers about a particular event or exchange in the classroom shortly after it occurred. Forming more in-depth relationships with students proved elusive, however, as they alternated between being candid and remaining aloof. Given the difficulties in carrying out extended conversations between lessons, I conducted interviews in the school cafeteria, in nearby cafes, and at my home. Instead of following a single group of students through their schedule, I attended different sections of tenth and eleventh grade history and literature. This provided for a close-up view of teaching history. But even though I attended lessons for three months in a gymnasium and visited lessons at six other schools in addition to School 76, I cannot make claims about ‘representativeness.’ Teachers handle critical events in the classroom in different ways which in turn can affect students differently. The bell rings at School 76. Some students in class 11A, the math class, return to their double-seated desks arranged in three rows facing the front of the history classroom, others continue talking, and the remaining ones straggle in from the corridor and take their seats. It is 9 November 2001 and I have been joining them in their History of

Uncertain Subjects

45

Ukraine lessons for one-and-a-half months. Mykola Oleksandrovych, a historian in his early forties who began teaching at School 76 in 1989 after working many years in the Local History Museum, stands at the front of the class and attempts to get students’ attention in order to begin their lesson. Some days a hush falls relatively quickly on the classroom; on other days the buzz of private conversations and flipping through glossy fashion and computer magazines continues and Mykola raises his voice or bangs his hand on the desk to bring some order to the class. During his lessons Mykola alternated between dictating notes and elaborating on them. Sometimes he used an entire lesson to introduce a topic, mixing explanation, well-known anecdotes, and jokes, as he did when he discussed Brezhnev’s administration. He very rarely assigned homework. On certain days such as Liberation of Odessa Day (10 April) or Victory Day (9 May) he would take his students to the school museum and speak in depth about that particular event. Although Mykola was open to answering students’ queries, he asked students questions rather infrequently. Many students said they respected Mykola. They found him fair and knowledgeable but sometimes felt that his lessons were rather boring even though they enjoyed the jokes he told from different historical periods. Mykola is a Ukrainian from a village near Mykolaiv, another city on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, but has spent most of his life in Odessa. He teaches the History of Ukraine course because he knows Ukrainian, unlike the other history teacher for upper grades.7 During our conversations between lessons it emerged that he supported Ukrainian independence, which, he explained, not all teachers did. Like most other teachers, he was exasperated by the volume of work, low pay, and difficulties dealing with students. When I asked him if he organized discussions or would like to have the time to do so, he answered, ‘These kids don’t know that much yet, right now they need to listen, to learn more.’8 On 9 November, Mykola continues with a topic about Ukraine during the immediate postwar years, and begins dictating his notes in Ukrainian to the students, who scribble them down verbatim in their notebooks: ‘In the second half of 1945 enterprises began to produce some goods. In the Donbas mines began to work.’ Switching to Russian to elaborate on this latter point, he explains that the mines had all been blown up by the Soviets when they retreated after the Nazi invasion, and then again by the Germans when they withdrew. Picking up his lecture again in Ukrainian, he dictates: ‘The production of metal increased ... In 1950 the level of industrial production was 103 per cent

46

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

of the level in 1941. However, the situation in agriculture was extremely difficult. There was not enough labour or equipment.’ In Russian, he explains that there were few men left to work in the fields and that women carried this work out in their place. Returning to his notes, he states in Ukrainian: ‘Agriculture was rebuilt using personal resources.’ Then he asks in Russian: ‘Have you studied the Marshall Plan in World History?’ When the answer is no, he says: ‘Oh yes, that’s because Olga left.’9 In Ukrainian, he states: ‘People worked practically without pay. After the war, 40 per cent of collective farms received 60 kopecks for a workday [trudoden – he stops to explain this in Russian], 12 per cent got up to one karbovanets, and 26 per cent received nothing at all. When they did not carry out the minimum, they were deported from Ukraine. Taxes on private plots were astronomically high. A horrible misfortune occurred – the famine of 1946 and 1947.’10 A student asks in Russian: ‘Was it human-made?’ The class, which usually hums with some quiet conversation, falls silent. Answering in Russian, Mykola explains: ‘Whereas in 1932 and 1933 collectivization was the main cause of the famine, in 1946 and 1947 there was a drought. Khrushchev tried to have the requisition levels lowered, but Stalin raised them. Europe was in ruins. The United States was helping western European countries. Eastern European countries needed assistance, too. Stalin sent 1.5 million tons of grain to these countries. The famine wasn’t the same scale as the one of the 1930s. Only 800,000 or so people died. I’ll read you some documents, just don’t bother me or interrupt me.’ As he speaks, some students listen attentively while others doodle and begin to talk. He pulls out the textbook and reads in Russian an excerpt from Khrushchev’s memoirs about visiting an area hard hit by the famine where there had been acts of cannibalism. Then, suddenly, he thumps his fist on the desk and demands students’ attention. The talking ceases temporarily. He turns to another document printed in the textbook, a letter sent to Poland intercepted by the KGB describing the situation, and explains that the worst period was March 1947, when there was absolutely no food left. ‘Quiet!’ he yells. ‘People would ride on top of trains to western Ukraine to import products from that part of the country. When the trains stopped at various stations en route back, the hungry would climb on top and drag those people and goods off the trains, sometimes killing them.’ ‘Shut up!’ he shouts at the chatterers. He turns to another document in the textbook describing the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and then reads an excerpt from a newspaper from the period

Uncertain Subjects

47

describing the abundance people lived in. ‘Imagine reading this in the papers if you had nothing to eat!’ he exclaims. The lesson continues in Ukrainian, ‘As a result, over a half-year one million people died. The Sovietization of the western oblasts of Ukraine continued.’ In an aside, he muses in Ukrainian: ‘Isn’t history kind – famine, war, repression, famine.’ At the end of the lesson he says in Russian, ‘OK, next time you will have a test. You should read pages 8 to 22 in the textbook.11 Pay particular attention to the section about the church. Incidentally, where is your class journal?’ The bell rings. Students grab their belongings and rush out. This scenario provides a striking illustration of the indifference of a significant number of students to a lesson about an event of a scale large enough to be considered a national trauma, an event that affected the families of several students in the class. Indifference was not something I alone perceived. When I asked Katia, a student from 11A, if she spoke about these lessons with family or friends, she answered: ‘It seems that my whole class could not really care less ... If I do talk to someone, it is only to a close friend. Because if I talk to someone who doesn’t care, it’s rather unpleasant.’ Herzfeld has defined indifference as ‘the rejection of common humanity. It is the denial of identity, of selfhood’ (1993, 1), a definition he introduces as part of a discussion of the puzzle of how political entities that celebrate the rights of individuals are selective in applying them, denying certain individuals and groups benefits and inclusion. The indifference expressed here is to past suffering, not the suffering of fellow citizens in the present. In other contexts the impact of learning about such events is transformative, leading to empathy with suffering in the past and an acceptance of a view of an event that situates it within a national narrative of history (Richardson 2004). It is difficult to assess how this indifference is produced – the extent to which it is based on students’ indifference to the past per se, narratives of the past presented by texts and teachers, or school-based learning in general. The fact that such lessons are not always effective, that students for whatever reason disengage, suggests that by remaining indifferent to the impact of historical events, students do not acquire a sense of Ukraine’s historicity. In the context of multiple coexisting historicities (Soviet, Ukrainian, Russian), this in turn undermines the formation of students’ taken-for-granted acceptance of a Ukrainian nation-state. Mykola’s code switching between Ukrainian and Russian during the lesson might also play a part in the production of students’ indifference

48

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

to history. The recent historical and political context of bilingualism in Ukraine is complex. By 1989, more than half of Ukraine’s schools were teaching in Russian, and except in Lviv, universities were operating in Russian as well. This perpetuated a high/low relationship between Russian and Ukrainian in which the former was considered the civilized language of world culture and the latter the language of peasants (Bilaniuk 2005, 15). In 1989 a new language law was introduced elevating Ukrainian to the ‘state language,’ a status reinforced by the 1996 constitution. Since independence, as part of a nation-building strategy, the Ministry of Education has pursued a policy whereby students are to study in the language that corresponds to their nationality (Janmaat 2000). As a consequence, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians have found themselves enrolled in Ukrainian-language schools. Although President Leonid Kuchma did not introduce Russian as a second state language, as he had promised after his election in 1994, he did operate on the principle that the public use of Russian was ‘as normal as the legal and symbolic primacy of the Ukrainian language in the state’ (Kulyk 2006, 302). During this period the practice of non-accommodating bilingualism emerged whereby speakers continued using their language of preference in conversation. Bilaniuk argues that this practice has helped diffuse some of the tensions surrounding language politics in Ukraine (Bilaniuk 2006).12 However, the non-accommodating bilingualism Bilaniuk describes in TV shows does not capture all of the dimensions of power relations involved in code switching in institutions such as schools in a region where the language of everyday life is Russian. Although teachers accommodate their students by answering their questions in Russian, the course content is delivered in Ukrainian and students must use Ukrainian in their oral state exam.13 Language instruction in schools may not be an issue that provokes organized oppositional politics (Hrycak 2006). Yet the fact that students learn the history of their state in the language of officialdom (which they are not comfortable speaking) despite studying in a Russian-language school might perpetuate a cynicism in those students who are uncertain, sceptical, or indifferent about Ukrainian statehood. Mykola’s lesson on the postwar famine provides a striking case of indifference to dramatic and horrific events. Yet in other situations students may conflict with either teacher or peers over the interpretation of some figure or period.14 One case reflects issues regarding how to establish ‘what really happened’ and the relationship between ‘fact’ and ‘interpretation.’ Mykola had a sharp exchange with one student

Uncertain Subjects

49

from class 11V, the humanities class, over his depiction of the decline and stagnation of Ukraine’s economy in the second half of the 1980s. Mykola’s statement that ‘almost all natural resources, oil from the Carpathians and gas from Poltava, had been drained away to the centre’ incited Volodia to interject: ‘Why are you making such claims?’ Mykola answered in exasperation: ‘You ask me that as if I thought this all up by myself! Moscow used up our gas while we here in Odessa used kerosene burners to cook well into the 1950s!’ After the lesson I asked Mykola about this exchange. Still somewhat agitated, he explained: ‘This student’s father is a military officer and they have a strong antiUkrainian position. They don’t want to hear any criticism of the past. It’s as if everything was good then and is bad now and they say, “Don’t tell me fairy tales about how things were bad then.” I don’t tell them everything was bad then, I just give them some facts.’ During a conversation I had with Volodia a couple of months later in the school museum, he spoke of this incident while commenting that he agreed with ‘about 40 per cent’ of what he was taught in history lessons. In referring to the incident described above, he said he did not agree that Muscovites lived so much better than residents of other cities. He felt that the disparities were not as great as described and insisted that ‘you could always get what you needed, you just had to hustle a bit more [outside Moscow].’ He expressed surprise at how differently facts could be interpreted and often disagreed with the teacher’s presentation of them. Another situation centred on the issue of establishing what is ‘factual’ and puzzlement over shifts in public attitudes towards certain periods or historical figures. During one lesson, Mykola tried to evoke the atmosphere at the time of Stalin’s death for the 11A class by recounting events and telling stories of the period (in Russian) rather than lecturing. These stories were based not on first-hand experience but rather on other people’s reminiscences and on texts he had read. He explained that the exact date of Stalin’s death was not in fact known because no one had wanted to disturb him. One student asked why it was impossible to know for certain about his death: ‘Couldn’t witnesses tell the truth?’ Mykola answered that all witnesses – those of the inner circle – had died. Another student asked whether there was anything in the archives. Mykola answered: ‘Archives, that’s a separate issue, you don’t know what’s there and what’s not.’ After describing Stalin’s funeral in Moscow, during which masses of people died because of the sheer numbers that squeezed into a small space, Nina

50

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

asked a question. Mykola demanded that others be quiet so that he could hear. ‘Why have attitudes towards him changed, if people cried at his death and thought so highly of him?’ Mykola answered calmly that at the moment of his death, most people did not know about what emerged later – that ‘Stalin signed documents sending thousands of people to their death.’ Another female student interjected angrily: ‘He was responsible for the golodomor [artificial famine of 1932–33]!’ Nina’s response was sharp, but I was unable to hear because of the noise. Another female student yelled: ‘Calm down!’ to which Nina retorted: ‘You calm down yourself!’ Mykola did not mediate or seek to elaborate their positions; instead he went on to talk about other issues. Later, in response to my queries about this incident, he said he suspected that Nina’s relatives continued to say that Stalin was a good leader who was not responsible for the horror and that this had influenced her. He had had a debate with her the previous year when the famine of 1932–3 was being covered. She had come to class saying that her grandparents told her the famine never happened. He had shown her documents, and in the end she agreed it had happened but that it was the result of natural causes, not political causes, and was certainly not Stalin’s fault. When I spoke to Nina later in the day and asked her about her question to Mykola, she said she had asked it spontaneously: ‘You know Stalin? When he was alive people liked him, even loved him. Now we see him completely differently, the opposite in fact. I just wondered how that happens that things can so suddenly and drastically change. Our history is all mixed up, the interpretation of the revolution and all sorts of events. There are all these documents but it’s difficult to know what happened in reality.’ The uncertainties surrounding what actually happened in the past and the contradictory interpretations of historical events that young people encounter among teachers, parents, and grandparents may contribute to the ambivalence or indifference they exhibit about grand historical narratives and the political entities they are meant to naturalize. Their questions and queries are embedded in assumptions about the possibility of ascertaining what happened in the past and the centrality of documentary evidence in reconstructing it. Some students, such as Volodia and Nina, were willing to reflect on and wrestle with contradiction. Volodia seemed unconvinced by the interpretation provided at school, whereas Nina’s comment that ‘it’s difficult to know what happened in reality’ was illustrative of the tangible way in which the ‘truth’ of what happened is experienced as uncertain. These stories highlight

Uncertain Subjects

51

the uncertainty in the links students establish between a shared past, present, and future. Indifference can be viewed as an effect of the uncertainty about the capacity to establish a sense of shared continuity. Students’ views about learning history in general as well as their views of the curriculum and textbooks provide other insights into what lies behind their behaviour in the classroom and the production of an uncertain sense of continuity. Many young people I met expressed general support for studying history at school. Students frequently recited the maxim: ‘If you don’t know the past you can’t build a future.’ In the next breath, one male student said that young people should study the history of their country ‘for the general development of our personality and world view.’ Although some found history important for forming their own opinions, particularly since parents could not tell them everything, others considered history completely irrelevant, ‘like art or the army preparation class,’ as Georgy from the gymnasium I attended put it, or as Nina said, ‘not a real subject, [but] the kind you can skip.’ These students took a more pragmatic view of their studies and sought to focus instead on the subjects related to their future specialization. That students think learning history is a good idea does not of course mean that they pay attention in class, do their work, learn what is expected, and remember it later on. Moreover, others (like Nina) who do not think history is important may still engage the problems it raises. Most students, like their teachers, criticized the curriculum for being overloaded. Although a few found this frustrating because they did not acquire as deep an understanding of events as they wanted, many others could not understand what was important and what was not. Others raised the issue of the material’s comprehensibility at a more fundamental level. Katia from class 11A at School 76 made the following remark during an interview over tea at my flat: ‘I stopped really understanding after the ninth class. Before that things seemed more comprehensible, the ancient world, pyramids, Khmelnytsky. And then bang, after that there were such nightmares ... Overall, the history of the tenth and eleventh classes is something that compares with nothing else; it’s incomprehensible, it borders on the fantastic, honestly. Examples of human shortsightedness, stupidity ... I don’t even know how to describe it. So many disturbing moments. Often you sit in class and you can’t understand, did they really not understand, did they not see?’ Although Katia’s incomprehension is perhaps not all that surprising in the context of school history, it does indicate a kind of breakdown of a narrative of national history and the capacity for history education to provide a

52

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

framework that can facilitate a basic level of understanding of historical events and their relationship to what preceded and followed them? In a different vein, Serëzha, a student from School 16, read a lot of history outside class and was highly critical of the content of the curriculum itself. He felt that Ukrainian history was being taught as if what happened had occurred in isolation from the larger states of which it had been part: ‘Ukrainian history can’t really be separated from the history of Russia. Ukraine has always been connected with Russia or Poland-Lithuania ... It’s given to us as separate Ukrainian history, as if it’s independent from everything else – that there was only Ukraine and nothing else. As for occupiers, they talk about everything bad that they did but they don’t talk about the good, for example, the new culture that they brought.’ Serëzha was not the only student to comment on the curriculum in this fashion. He did, however, deconstruct more forcefully than others the primordialism that haunts national histories in textbooks. Students had a variety of views on the veracity of what was presented in their textbooks. Katia highlighted how difficult it was to know whether what was in the textbooks resembled what really happened: ‘There are so many blank spots in our history there are probably some things we’ll never know the truth about ... To assess whether it is true or not, you need to be a specialist. We are amateurs.’ Others, like Roman, Katia’s classmate, were more certain that the textbooks did not present the whole story: ‘The people who write these books from the Ministry of Education haven’t allowed all the truth to be told ... Maybe 25 per cent is the truth ... Why would a state write bad things about itself so that kids think badly about it? ... Not everything is in the textbooks that should be.’ Many young people found the tone and interpretation of events in the textbook too categorical and felt it would be better if the past and present were not painted in black and white. Zhenia, a grade eleven student at School 56, commented that it often seemed as if the textbooks had been written to counter what had been written in the Soviet Union: ‘If in the Soviet Union the members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were bandits, then today they are heroes. The reality is probably somewhere in between.’ Classroom experiences and interviews with young people presented a mixed picture of how schooling, history education in particular, actually works to inculcate an understanding of history and historicity and to generate a sense of identification with Ukraine as an independent state. The situations described demonstrate the complex ways in which

Uncertain Subjects

53

what can analytically be called ‘history’ and ‘memory’ (that of the teacher and relatives) interact and where they are located. Moreover, the young people’s comments reveal an awareness of how what counts as historical truth has shifted since the Soviet period, which can be a perplexing issue for some. Many saw through the black-and-white portrayals of events as presented by Soviet and Ukrainian authorities in their textbooks; more striking was their sense of uncertainty when it came to establishing the veracity of basic facts of what actually took place in the past. Although historians and analysts versed in poststructuralist theory would not find this troubling, clearly some young people had an expectation of the possibility and even necessity of establishing truthful accounts of what really happened. This expectation likely emerged from a strong awareness of overt attempts on the part of the state to conceal knowledge about particular events and radical shifts in interpretation. Their comments on the incomprehensibility of history revealed that a coherent narrative of national history had not been articulated through the textbooks and curriculum. We might say, following Mbembe (2001), that different historicities coexist, none of them hegemonic. It is also clear that teaching and learning history were undermined by the dire situation in which schools, teachers, and students were being made to operate. Young people were raising an issue that will be central to the next section – that is, how a vertiginous sense of the instability of truth is created in part through encounters with the members of older generations at home. Home Truths The production of uncertainty and indifference among many young people regarding the historicity of Ukraine as a state is also related to their engagements with understandings of historical events and narratives in domestic spaces. Here they encounter not only elderly relatives’ recollections of particular events, but also their parents’ interpretations based on Soviet-era history education and Soviet and Ukrainian public representations of history, both of which are often coloured by their responses to the collapse of socialism. The concepts of ‘postmemory’ and memory as moral practice can be used to understand the dynamics of these exchanges and the interactions of contradictory ‘truths’ about history (Hirsch 1997; Lambek 1996). Marianne Hirsch devised the concept of postmemory to illuminate how young generations in a family experience memory and know the past differently from their elders

54

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

who have actually lived through an event. It also captures different experiences of encountering and learning about history among different generations. Meanwhile Michael Lambek refers to memory as a moral practice to highlight how remembering ‘comprises contextually situated assertions of continuity on the part of subjects’ that are ‘based as much on cumulative wisdom and moral vision as on individual interest’ (1996, 248). In different ways both emphasize aspects of a process of transmitting a sense of continuity. When we consider memory part of history and include the moral dimension of remembering, learning history emerges not only as an intellectual engagement, but as a moral and emotional one as well. Although young people’s confidence in the truth of what their relatives claim may be shaken by what is learned at school, in some cases they still adhere to the views encountered at home. One day I sat down next to Sveta in the cafeteria at School 76. Sveta, who studied in the humanities class, was very interested in French language and culture and was one of the top students in her class. She sat at the front of the classroom and was generally quiet and attentive during lessons. At the time her mother was unemployed and her father worked as a sailor on commercial ships, which meant that the family had a comparatively stable source of income. After I answered her questions about my research, Sveta began explaining her own situation: My grandmother is from the Stalinist mould – she loves Stalin. I grew up thinking that the USSR was democratic. For me May 9th was sacred. My grandmother would take me to the parades. I thought that Germany attacked the USSR and the USSR was innocent. I never knew there was any pact between them. Then I read the textbook about the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact and I was shocked. When I told my grandmother about it, she defended Stalin and justified it. After studying about collectivization, the famine, repression, and this pact, my opinion about the Soviet Union has changed.

However, this experience should not be read as a type of ‘conversion’ leading to the wholesale rejection of the Soviet past but rather as the introduction of doubt and uncertainty into her understanding of history. A month later, when I met with Sveta to talk in more depth, she began by stating: ‘History is taught completely differently than before. Before we had communism, now we have capitalism. Then we exalted our leaders Lenin and Stalin, and now we criticize them. My mother

Uncertain Subjects

55

and grandmother say that life was much better under communism than it is now and I think so, too.’ Sveta herself did not remember what it was like to live in the Soviet Union, and thus her view was based entirely on her mother’s and grandmother’s opinions. Even though her grandmother – who is a Ukrainian from a village near Odessa – lived with the family, Sveta knew very little about her as she rarely spoke about her own life. During a conversation with Volodia (the student who contradicted the teacher in the previous section) at the school museum, he articulated a position vis-à-vis the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the current Ukrainization process, a position he backed up partly with statements made by family members.15 He spoke in praise of Stalin’s ability to ‘pick the country up,’ his strength and power, though admitted that his methods were somewhat problematic and excessive. He also referred to the anti-Russian sentiment in western Ukraine. Although western Ukrainians contend that the Ukrainian language and culture were repressed, in Volodia’s view no one stopped people from studying Ukrainian in the Soviet Union. For him, the fact that one-third of schools taught in Ukrainian and that his father recalled how people could study Ukrainian at school was proof that there had been no repression of the language. He was irritated that his father, who was a lecturer in the Polytechnical University, was being pressured to teach in Ukrainian, which he did not know because he had been raised in a military family and had been exempt from learning Ukrainian. Sveta’s and Volodia’s stories illustrate how young people’s relationships with older generations involve moral commitments that may make it difficult or unthinkable for them to adopt opposing views on issues that have deep resonance. In contrast, other young people do take up positions in opposition to their parents and grandparents. However, as Nina (whom we met above) and Pasha (from one of Odessa’s gymnasia) indicated, they generally try to avoid talking about ‘politics’ or ‘history’ at home in order to avoid conflicts. One of the first issues Pasha raised during an interview was how his generation saw things through completely different eyes than his parents’ or grandparents’ generations. According to him, young people ‘liked’ Ukraine, supported independence, and had their own view of the world, although he admitted that this was not true of all of them. He considered himself Ukrainian even though his parents and grandparents were from Russia, and he was optimistic that the situation in Ukraine would improve. According to Pasha, his parents’

56

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

generation, having spent most of their lives under communism, thought that life was better in the Soviet Union – a sentiment he had noticed in his father. He had this to say about the different views he had come across in his own family: I have a great-grandmother – she’s ninety. She lives in Moscow. She spent her youth in Tsarist Russia. If you listen to her views on life, and the views of my grandmother [her daughter], they are completely different ... My great-grandmother’s parents were quite well off. Her grandfather was involved in tractor production here in Russia (u nas v Rossii). She wasn’t that rich, but she thinks she was happy, that there was freedom, people were quite independent, they could do what they wanted, achieved everything by themselves ... Of course there were also a lot of very poor people ... But the poor people then were mostly just lazy or they didn’t want to work. Then, when communism came, she had her own building, she was well off but the communists took it all away. Her grandfather was exiled. My grandmother was born during communism. She is a very strong person. She was also in the Party. She always had important posts. She has completely different views from my great-grandmother. Now, I look at her, and I see that she is also happy, she likes how we live, even though she’s not that well off ... My grandmother very rarely talks about the past. I asked her a couple of times. She doesn’t say anything good or anything bad. She comes from a Stalinist mould, a communist ... She has a fighting spirit, she is for labour, for equality for everyone ... With time she has changed a bit.

His family rarely speaks about the past when they have a gathering: ‘We don’t get together that often. When we do, we seldom talk about political issues, and historical issues even less. We talk about family things, about how things are in Odessa right now. We speak very rarely about politics.’ In moving between talking about himself as a patriot of Ukraine and the different generations of his family, he referred to Russia as ‘here’ (u nas v Rossii), not ‘there.’ This slip is illustrative of shifting attitudes and opinions among young people in Odessa and the ways in which they possess a kind of dual vision as they engage family histories and reflect on new political loyalties. Finally, Pasha’s mention of how, in family discussions, Odessan affairs took precedence over broader political issues, indicated subtle ways in which contradictions of history reproduced the local as a more meaningful frame of reference than the national. When discussing how different generations view Lenin, Nina (11A,

Uncertain Subjects

57

School 76) also noted that when her family met and the conversation turned to history people view differently, she usually tried to change the subject. Nina ‘[did] not accept what Lenin did’ or view it in a positive light, and she thought that for the progress made as a result of the revolution, there had been huge sacrifices in the form of famines, repression, and terror. Her parents did not ‘support’ Lenin either (they did not ‘support’ anyone, she added), whereas her grandparents viewed Lenin positively. In one conversation over coffee in a cafe near the school towards the end of the school year, she commented on her grandmother’s views of the past: When I was little I lived in the village with my grandmother. Once I asked, ‘Why did the Soviet Union fall apart, is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ She said that it was bad. She said, ‘I remember that before you could travel where you wanted to. It didn’t cost that much then.’ Well, I understand that in fact it’s not that bad that it fell apart because there can’t be that many [substate] parts in one state. Maybe if they could work together normally. We have land, somewhere else there’s sand. But there were always problems with products. So I’m glad the USSR fell apart.

When Nina’s comments are considered alongside her classroom encounters and reflections in the previous section, we can glimpse the influence of different milieux and generations on her shifting views. The uncertainty she expressed earlier becomes more comprehensible in light of her description of the different views encountered among kin. She had herself shifted from denying the famine to acknowledging it, and whereas previously she may have shared her grandmother’s views, she had subsequently drawn conclusions that contradicted them. Katia’s stories reveal how the domestic setting influences a young person’s attitude despite a lack of specific engagement with national historical narratives and the forgetting of family history. During our first meeting at my flat, she had stated openly that she and her family were patriots of Ukraine and that it angered her when her fellow students insisted that life in, and everything about, Russia was better than in Ukraine. When I asked her later about these sentiments and why she cared so much, she answered: I just know that my dad is an idealist. There aren’t many people like him. He’s honest. And that’s why till now, the four of us share one room, and don’t own our own flat. If he weren’t so honest, and weren’t fighting for an

58

Kaleidoscopic Odessa idea, he wouldn’t work fourteen hours a day, and we wouldn’t live in this flat. He worked in some department and could have taken a bribe. But he hoped that he could manage things honestly ... My mum is less patriotic. I’m more like my dad ... Probably, my family just wants things to be better in this country as a whole.

Although Katia had some knowledge of her family history, she indicated that it was fragmentary and that neither these stories nor history in general was much discussed at home. Her father’s family was Ukrainian and had settled in Balta (Odessa Oblast) after the Second World War. Her mother’s family was from a small village near Mirhorod in the Poltava Oblast although Katia’s grandmother had also moved to Balta. Katia had had little contact with her maternal grandparents. Her maternal grandmother died before she was born, and she had met her greatgrandmother only once, when she was seven. She remembered hearing stories at this time about how her great-grandmother survived the famine of 1932–3 as well as the Second World War. She wished she knew more, but her mother spoke very little about it: My mum doesn’t really talk about this very much and I don’t feel comfortable asking about it either. I think that maybe it’s not very nice for her if by asking I remind her of things like how her parents divorced and how she grew up without a father. It’s strange. I remember that we used to visit Balta every year and each time we went to see my grandmother’s grave. And it was only when I was older that I started to wonder, ‘Why don’t we go to grandfather’s grave? Where’s grandfather?’ I remember I asked my mum and she answered in a way that made me think maybe it’s not worth asking about this again.

Katia’s reflections illustrate how silences can be created in families not only as a result of certain members’ experiences of traumatic events and contradictory opinions, but also by situations where estrangement, divorce, or other family events may limit or silence the recounting of certain stories or events. Pasha’s, Nina’s, and Katia’s stories complicate the notion of memory as moral practice. In Pasha’s case, family members avoided talking about the family’s past or the past in general for the sake of family harmony, while Nina, who was interested in her family’s history, nevertheless attempted to change the subject when family members talked about history in a more general way. In Katia’s family, it seems that the practice of sharing memories had been interrupted by

Uncertain Subjects

59

parents’ silences while her efforts to fulfil what she felt was a kind of moral obligation to know her family’s history had been abruptly curtailed. These examples suggest that in some situations family members – of elder or younger generations – subvert other members’ claims to remember, while in other situations there seems to be a moral obligation to be silent, possibly to forget, rather than to remember. So far I have stressed the ways in which kin relations imply moral obligations that shape practices of remembering and forgetting. However, family histories can also serve as means for young people to reflect on the contradictions in history more generally and to formulate their own intellectual positions. Inna, a grade eleven student from another of Odessa’s gymnasia, whom I met at the Little Academy of Sciences Program16 and who had a detailed knowledge of her own family’s past, had reflected on such issues: In my family, on my dad’s side my grandfather ... was on the side of Soviet power and he took part in the dekulakization of peasants. On my mother’s side there were those who were dekulakized. Genetically I am obliged not to take a categorical view of historical events. It simply can’t be any other way.

Whereas Inna’s family history inclined her towards a more relativized view of history, Nadia, another participant in the Little Academy of Sciences, had no sympathy for those members of her family who had helped implement Stalin’s repressive policies. She was highly critical of her grandfather’s brother, who had worked as the manager of a collective farm and who had informed on her grandfather, thus bringing about his arrest, exile, and death. Her rejection of the Soviet system was categorical. Her comments also illustrated that the flow of knowledge and understanding does not occur in only one direction, from the older generation to the younger. During a discussion of different opinions about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army,17 I asked her what her parents and grandparents thought. Nadia paused and then said: My grandmother is quite neutral about them because she has never lived in western Ukraine. My parents are ... hmmn ... I have quite a bit of influence on them as a historian so they have quite a positive view of them. During the years of independence people have begun to pay a lot more attention to problems that earlier were not addressed at all. So considering that they don’t know a lot about this, they study history alongside me. So

60

Kaleidoscopic Odessa I often tell them about some topic. Maybe it’s not right, but I form their opinion on issues.

Although some young people were knowledgeable about their family histories (or wanted to be) or carefully navigated contradictory claims, other young people knew or cared to know little about their family’s past. A group of students at a prominent Ukrainian-language gymnasium in the city centre rolled their eyes when I asked whether they talked to their grandparents about their lives or what they learned in school. In fact, they were constantly being asked to talk to their grandparents about various issues and were weary of doing so. One student, Ilia, explained his response: ‘It’s clear enough as it is what happened then. No matter what, though, we won’t be able to feel what it was like.’ These students highlighted issues that Hirsch has captured with her concept of postmemory – in underscoring that they were unable to truly comprehend what their grandparents had lived through. It seems that a teacher’s attempt to valorize grandparents’ memories through constant requests that students talk to their elders may in fact have undermined or modified these relationships and the meanings their memories might have had, given that those memories were now associated with school history. Lena explained that their parents and grandparents could help very little in learning history: ‘They practically didn’t study history. They studied all the Party Congresses, the biographies of the various leaders, Stalin, Lenin. History as such was not really studied.’ The responses of students at another school revealed additional complexities concerning domestic spaces as contexts for learning about the past. In response to my question about what they learned from their grandparents, one student stated bluntly: ‘I don’t have any grandparents.’ Another student answered: ‘Sometimes they start talking and reminiscing by chance. But then after they’ve told me whatever it is, I forget everything. It’s difficult to remember specifically what they said.’ Domestic spaces and kin relations comprise a complicated social milieu in which young people encounter and negotiate contradictory narratives about historical events, family histories, and more generalized understandings of the Soviet past. Both history education and family stories generate a sense of personal and collective continuity. But just how that sense of personal or collective continuity is generated is a more complicated issue. Young people’s relatives’ accounts of the past may be heavily mediated by the experience of having learned history in the Soviet Union, their parents’ memories, and their own experiences of historical events. As these stories suggest, there may in fact be a moral

Uncertain Subjects

61

obligation to forget rather than remember in families, or in fact no one there to remember at all. The interplay of all these dimensions had unpredictable and unexpected outcomes for the young people I spoke to, with some finding greater truth value in school-based accounts than in the home. This in turn had different effects on their sense of identification with the Ukrainian state, with some embracing it while others remained ambivalent or indifferent. How they ascertained truthful accounts of history was related to obligations to respect the experiences of their elderly relatives, not just to academic notions of history resting on documentation and verifiability. On Knowing History: The Holocaust The transmission of multiple contradictory historicities in and across different learning contexts contributes to a sense of indifference on the part of young people as well as to uncertainty about establishing a sense of personal and collective continuity. Commonsense and scholarly assumptions suggest that schools and families are among the most important venues for young people to learn history. However, if the analytical focus is shifted from particular learning contexts to the acquisition of information and understanding of a particular event, the transmission process and the effects of different kinds of learning appear more varied and complex. At the same time, the very idea of what ‘history’ is – as a trace or representation of the past – expands. I choose to highlight the Holocaust because as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, although there is no longer a silence surrounding the Holocaust as there was during the Soviet period, it occupies a marginal place in official historical narratives (Niedermuller 1999, 31). In the Soviet view, the Holocaust – a term that entered public discourse toward the end of the Soviet period – was an integral part of the Nazi murder of civilians and the consequence of racism and capitalism. Thus it was submerged in the greater tragedy of the death of some 27 million Soviet citizens. The suffering of Jews was downplayed in part because Stalin adopted an explicitly anti-Semitic policy in the immediate postwar period. Furthermore, in the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany began to play a more prominent role as the legitimating myth of the Soviet Union. Drawing attention to the suffering of Jews might have diminished the suffering and heroism of others and raised the issue of collaboration during the war (Gitelman 1994, 141–2). The young people I spoke to mentioned traumatic events such as the

62

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

famine of 1932–3, Stalin’s purges, and the Second World War in response to questions about events that left an impression on them. Rarely did anyone mention the Holocaust. In the school history curriculum, the Holocaust was covered as part of the Second World War and focused on German atrocities at Babyn Yar in Kyiv. Coverage of the topic varied from school to school. Some teachers skipped it. Others spoke about Babyn Yar, as Mykola indicated he had done. A friend told me about a school located next to a Holocaust memorial where students commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day by placing flowers at the monument. I missed the lesson due to illness and used this as a pretext to ask questions. My discussions with most young people on this topic were instigated by me. Thus, although silence no longer enveloped the event, there was certainly a ‘hush.’ At the same time, my exchanges with young people revealed how learning about the Holocaust in different ways and contexts – novels, films, traces in the urban landscape, in addition to textbooks, teachers, and relatives – affected the event’s resonance, the understanding that young people acquired, and their capacity to relate it to the history of Ukraine, Odessa, and their family. When asked about the Holocaust, Roman and Pavel from class 11A at School 76 referred to the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy and attempts to destroy the Jews, while registering horror at the death camps ‘in Germany.’ In response to my question about whether the Holocaust also happened in Ukraine, they were quiet for a moment. Roman answered that it did not because ‘Ukrainians were tolerant people and got along with other nationalities.’ Pavel agreed. They had not attended the lesson at school. Katia, from School 76, who was introduced earlier, had a similar reaction: TR: Did you study the Holocaust at school? Katia: I think there was a lesson. TR: What did you talk about? Katia: I don’t remember. They talked about the genocide. I don’t remember concretely. TR: Was it in world history or in the history of Ukraine? Katia: I don’t remember really. TR: Have you read anything about it or seen any films? Katia: Yes, I’ve read a bit. I’ve seen lots of film. There’s a book by an Odessan author. It’s about a concentration camp ... It’s a small book but it leaves an impression. I read some things, yes. I’ve also seen some documentaries.

Uncertain Subjects

63

TR: Did you also see some about Ukraine? Katia: ... You know, I actually never thought about that before. I’ve seen Western, and even some Russian films about the Holocaust. They showed what it was like. But no, really, I haven’t seen anything about Ukraine in particular. I haven’t thought about that.

In contrast, Nina (11A, School 76) did not seem to understand what I was asking about but had detailed knowledge about what happened in Odessa. TR: Was there a lesson about the Holocaust [Kholokost]? Nina: What? TR: Holocaust. Nina: Kolhoz? [collective farm] TR: Holocaust, it happened during the Second World War. Nina: Golod [famine] maybe? TR: It happened as a result of the Nazi ideology that all Jews should be exterminated. Nina: Oh yes ... When [Hitler] came to power, he began to hate Jews ... I don’t know why he hated Jews. It’s awful. When you watch documentaries in black and white, when there’s some sort of academic program, they show those concentration camps where Jews were. It’s awful. TR: Did they say anything in the lesson about what happened in Ukraine? Nina: I know that many Jews were burned to death in Odessa. Even my boyfriend – his great-grandfather lived in Odessa at that time. He was an academic. He had some sort of academic connection with Germany. When the Germans entered Odessa, all his Jewish relatives left. They asked him to go, but he didn’t because he said, ‘These are my friends. I’m not going to leave.’ He was burned with many others at the first station on Lusdorf Road. TR: You found this out from your boyfriend? Nina: In history we didn’t talk about it that much.

Sasha (humanities class, School 76) understood the term Holocaust and had read about it independently in the textbook, although it appears he did not attend the lesson: TR: Did you have a lesson about the Holocaust? Sasha: Yes. That’s what they did against the Jews, right? TR: Yes. Do you remember what was said? Sasha: In Germany, they killed Jews by the thousand. It was targeted

64

Kaleidoscopic Odessa aggression against Jews. Hitler came up with this. He didn’t like Jews. He thought that Germans were better than everyone else. TR: Did the Holocaust also happen in Ukraine? Did Jews in Ukraine suffer, too? Sasha: Jews during the war? I think yes, they suffered. I don’t think I was at that lesson either. TR: Did you find out about the Holocaust from your lessons? Sasha: I knew about it before that. I read about it. TR: Where? Sasha: In the textbook. At the back there’s a glossary. I read about it there.

Alla, another student from 11A at School 76, is Jewish on her father’s side and Bulgarian and Gagauz on her mother’s side. She had heard about the Holocaust from relatives and commented on what she learned at school: TR: In the history course do they talk about the Holocaust and what happened? Alla: Yes. ... TR: What do they talk about? Alla: They talked about what Germans did to Jews, not about how Russians suppressed Jews. They talked about how people and villages and towns were burned. But they talked about the bad things that Germans did. ... TR: Did you know about the Holocaust before you studied it in school? Alla: Yes. TR: How did you find out about it? Alla: My mum told me about it. My dad talked about it. My grandmother talked about it – about the side of the family that’s Jewish. My mum, especially, talked about it a lot with me. TR: What did she tell you about? Alla: She talked about how they killed people for nothing. How they burned villages, towns, killed children and women. About the brutality with which it was done.

Compared with other students, Inna, the grade eleven gymnasium student mentioned earlier, was exceptional in the depth of her knowledge. The year I met her she had prepared a research paper about the Holocaust in Odessa for the Little Academy of Sciences. She is of mixed

Uncertain Subjects

65

ancestry – German, Austrian, Russian, Polish, and Jewish (her paternal great-grandmother) – and by her own account ‘looks Jewish.’ When I asked her about how it was taught in the school program she referred to the 2002 exam preparation booklet and mentioned that it was just a subpoint that received little attention. Her teacher did not cover the topic in class either. She explained: Maybe it’s connected with the issue that before, they tried not to raise the Jewish question. I told you about the anti-Semitic policy [of the USSR], so they tried not to raise it. Besides that, the teacher is an elderly woman, ‘from the old mould,’ as we say. Maybe out of inertia she didn’t want to raise it. When I brought her the topic of my essay in October she said, ‘You won’t be able to do it.’ And I said, ‘Let’s see.’

Inna had learned about the Holocaust before doing her research through films such as Life is Beautiful, texts such as Valentin Kataev’s Otche Nash (Our Father), which has an episode about a Jewish woman and her son who are trying to flee Odessa, and the local Jewish newspapers her grandparents received. Her grandparents had once told her about some of their acquaintances who were Holocaust survivors. She also recalled an experience walking with her father through town as a student in the first grade: On Aleksandrovskii Prospect – you know where the Kyiv Restaurant used to be, near Grecheskaia [Greek] Square – there’s a memorial plaque that’s been there for about eight years. I had to get to school by walking through this park. When I was in grade one my dad used to take me to school. He told me: ‘About five thousand Jews were hanged here.’ It was 1991 and ... in principle, he still should have been afraid to say such things. I was a little girl, seven years old. But I already understood the seriousness of what my dad told me, that I was responsible for what he said, too, and that I shouldn’t tell others about it. He told me that on those trees – well maybe not those exact trees – there were wooden blocks attached where people were hanged from. It was the first time I heard about the Holocaust. Later, when I started researching this topic I found confirmation of what my father told me. But in 1991, my dad wouldn’t have been able to read it anywhere. I understood that someone must have told him about this, my grandparents’ friends, perhaps.

These examples complicate earlier discussions about the transmis-

66

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

sion of history and historicity in schools and domestic spaces by highlighting other intricate ways in which knowledge about the past is acquired. Although all these young people knew about the Holocaust, what they knew, and how this resonated with them, varied in significant ways. Those who knew that the Holocaust also happened in Ukraine tended to learn this through accounts shared by kin or close friends. Yet even when stories shared in such a manner generate a vivid and immediate sense of history (as in Nina’s case), the relationship of the event to broader issues of politics and history can remain absent. At the same time, in Inna’s case, the narration of past events was triggered by material traces of history in the urban landscape – a plaque and trees on a particular street. History as taught to these students in school proved only partially effective in conveying knowledge and understanding about this event in general as well as the specifics of what occurred in Ukraine. While there was some awareness among these students regarding how the Holocaust affected Ukraine’s Jews, there was little on how it affected Roma, some 35,000 of whom were killed in Soviet territories (Crowe 1994, 186). Documentaries and books filled the gap to some degree, but, like school history, did not always convey an understanding about the relationship of these events to Ukraine. The ‘hush’ surrounding the Holocaust and its separateness from ‘national history’ was being reproduced through knowledge practices across contexts. The Holocaust remained suspended outside the circulating historicities. Talking History, Talking Politics Often a discussion of learning history at school flowed into a discussion of politics – namely, the type of political regime Ukraine should have, its geopolitical orientation, regional differences, and language. In discussions of politics, young people articulated visions of the future, of the continued existence of a Ukrainian state and the type of state it ought to be. History education therefore was about linking not only the past to the present but also the present to the future. The young people I met engaged with public debates in different ways: some articulated clear ideological views about national debates; some eschewed politics al-together; for some, ideas about politics and political behaviour were formed by their understanding of being Odessan. Besides providing a snapshot of young people’s views in the spring and fall of 2002, my discussions with young people highlighted the interplay of an explicit en-

Uncertain Subjects

67

gagement in ‘the political’ with the subtler sets of power relations in which they were enmeshed at school and at home. They also highlighted the ways in which Odessan discourse influenced their take on politics and nationhood. Towards the end of our conversation in the museum at School 76, Volodia shifted from his discussion of history to the contemporary political situation in Ukraine: If things had improved after 1991, with the introduction of democracy and capitalism, I would support it. But they haven’t. Now there are goods but few can afford them. Before, people could afford to buy goods. The reason there weren’t enough goods was the fact that people had money and could buy things up and factories couldn’t produce enough. So I support communist ideas ... . Ukraine should find its own way. But there is a deep divide between east and west in Ukraine as [parliamentary] elections showed [April 2002] – the west voted for [Victor] Yushchenko [a national democrat with an explicitly pro-Western agenda], the east for the communists.18 Even though the Cold War is over, notions of east and west are still strong and Ukraine is still caught between them.

Commonsense notions of a divide between eastern and western Ukraine have become more or less politically salient at various junctures over the past two decades. This divide resonates strongly and is used to stir up powerful antagonistic sentiments for political expediency. Domestic and foreign (mainly Russian) politicians play on fears of extreme nationalism associated with western Ukraine or on Russophilism and the abolition of Ukrainian statehood associated with eastern Ukraine. Scholars of Ukrainian regionalism assert that the cleavages are more complex than the east–west distinction allows; even so, Volodia’s comments demonstrate the resonance they have in everyday life as categories for understanding intracountry differences. Alla, the School 76 student we met earlier during the discussion of the Holocaust, moved quickly into a discussion of her views on the political relationship between Ukraine and Russia in response to a question about whether the history of Ukraine should be studied at school (in January 2002): I think that the Slavic peoples, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were together for so many years and that together they can be a strong state. But separately, Russia may be a strong state, but Belarus and Ukraine are absolutely

68

Kaleidoscopic Odessa nothing in and of themselves ... I’m for joining the states especially since a good leader has emerged in Russia. What I like about Putin is that he ... says things as they are ... and in any case he’s helping his country as opposed to our president.

Dima was a student at a school in the Kotovsky District who was born in Odessa but whose father came to the city in the 1960s from Siberia. He also said that along with many young people he knew, he hoped that some day Ukraine would ‘return to Russia.’ His views echoed Alla’s, but he went further in explaining the political ideas he supported: I’ve always thought that our country needs a strong person around which our people cohere. First it was the Tsar, then it was the General Secretary of the Party, and now it’s the President. But we always need a strong leader who does something for the country. But all these parties ... there’s so many of them I don’t understand anything ... I’m not for the political system that a president introduces but for the concrete reforms he brings in. The personality [lichnost] is really important ... But if such a person is called a democrat and the country is in total ruin, what do we need democracy for?

What Dima was expressing has been described by other analysts as a constellation of ideas more typical of Russian political culture. But as his comments revealed, these ideas certainly prevailed among citizens of Ukraine as well. However, his best friend, Serëzha, whom we met earlier, had quite different views. He was not interested in the reunification of Ukraine and Russia and was critical of ‘strong leaders.’ He explained that his views likely resulted from knowing about the persecution of some of his relatives who had been members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. At the same time, he was no supporter of ‘democracy’ either: Our strong leaders for the most part destroy their own people ... In general, I’m against democracy as well. I am for technocracy. It’s the only true system. I think that nowadays gradually things will develop into a technocracy no matter what because today nothing can exist without science ... Only cosmopolitanism and technocracy are capable of uniting the world.

Alësha, a classmate of Volodia at School 76, was a supporter of the ‘radical right’ (pravo-radical). A few days before the Victory Day celebrations (9 May 2002), we spoke after I expressed interest in a cartoon he

Uncertain Subjects

69

had drawn for two female students caricaturing the political situation in Ukraine. He planned to attend the event at the 411th Battery near the school and invited me to go. While walking around the grounds waiting for the parade to begin, Alësha explained: ‘I used to be a communist. My mum had told me how much better things were in the Soviet Union. Then two years ago I changed my views – I became a supporter of the radical right.’ To him, this meant that every people should live in its own homeland – a comment he directed most aggressively at Russians: ‘If Russians want to stay here, they should be prepared to learn the language and history of Ukrainians. If they don’t, if they hate Ukrainians, they should go back to Russia.’ He told me that his change in political views had occurred through studying history, especially through reading textbooks and other books. He noted that although other supporters of radical-right parties rejected the Victory Day holiday, he felt it was important ‘because Hitler tried to destroy and dominate Slavs’ and that ‘people fought for survival, for their motherland [rodina] not for some communist ideology.’ Volodia, Alla, Dima, Serëzha, and Alësha had staked out and elaborated political positions. Others were less clear and frequently eschewed politics altogether. Sasha (also from School 76) articulated a position vis-à-vis the mayor of the city (all levels of elections are held at once) but was more vague regarding national politics: TR: Why would you vote for him [Bodelan]? Sasha: [Fumbles] You can’t say this person is good and that person is bad. Nowadays there’s no good and bad people. They’re all stealing money. Some more, some less. TR: Would you vote for some bloc or party [in the national elections]? Sasha: They’re all the same, really. There’s no good one. Everyone wants money. Power is used to make money.

In a slightly different vein, Inna’s comments indicated how local ideas about being political can capture the imagination: You know what I like about Odessa – we’re not interested in politics. The most important thing for us has always been to have your loved one, your children and parents. That’s the most important thing ... Most of us are democrats. And not so much democrats as liberals... Live and let live – they follow this principle ... Odessa is the only city that is very difficult to mobilize politically.

70

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

That Odessans ‘are not political’ is part of the local imaginary. ‘Not being political’ formulated this way means staying out of partisan politics and not getting involved in specific political projects. Indeed, Inna had originally wanted to be a politician and had been elected president of her school. However, during our last conversation before I left, a few months after she began university (studying philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of culture), she seemed to have taken inspiration from this ‘Odessan’ ideal in deciding to withdraw from an involvement in ‘politics’: After, at the end of the summer, I decided to turn away from my involvement in politics [otkazatsia ot svoikh razvlechenii v politike] even though it is very difficult because everyone knows, even in university, that I was the president of my school. It’s like it’s written on me that I am a person who is active in public life and so it was really difficult to get over this ... If I want to help my people ... I could do it through politics. But politics is too dirty. People could respect me, hate me, but they will never love me ... I can take a different path, through culture. Culture in the broadest sense ... forming some new ideology or a cultural paradigm. I’m more attracted to this because to be a politician is too great of a responsibility.

During my meeting with a group of students at a supposedly patriotic gymnasium with intensive Ukrainian-language instruction, their comments about Odessa immediately raised issues about the city’s relationship to Ukraine, contrasting it with ‘nationalistic’ western Ukraine. TR: Many say that Odessa is a special place. What makes it special? Vika: The people. You won’t find people like you have here anywhere else. TR: What do you mean? Ilia: If you go to western Ukraine, you’ll feel the difference. Vika: But I don’t recommend it. [Laughing]. Liuba: I wouldn’t recommend it either. Odessa is different from the rest of Ukraine. People say it’s like an independent city. Unlike any other. Not like Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv. Vika: Lviv is an awful place. Dasha: Foreigners and Russian culture have always had a major influence on Odessans. Here culture is for the most part not Ukrainian. Liuba: Yes, that’s really true. It’s mixed. Dasha: It’s an international [internatsionalnyi] city.

Uncertain Subjects

71

Anna: There’s a festive mood. It’s upbeat. Vika: Here people are more free-spirited, happy [veselie], they understand a joke, and they don’t get offended. They’ll always help you out. Liuba: They’re well-meaning. In Lviv, they get offended – they’re even mean. Because when I went to Lviv, I wanted to speak to them in Russian. No one answered me. They turned away and walked on. Vika: It’s terrible. To speak Russian there in western Ukraine – Dasha: It’s really dangerous, if you say one word in Russian, they’ll practically beat you up. Vika: When we went to Lviv with our school for the Olympics. The Odessan delegation – we had a great time. We walked along the streets singing songs about Odessa. In Lviv they don’t like Odessa. Some man stopped us: ‘Enough of your singing, you’re interrupting my thoughts’ ... We interfered with his thinking because we were walking along the street singing. Lena: They treat us like we treat them. Dasha: In Odessa it doesn’t matter which language you speak. Nationality here doesn’t have any significance. Everyone is treated equally.

These students were articulating facets of the Odessan discourse on distinctiveness and using it to position themselves within the Ukrainian state. What is interesting is the way in which they set themselves apart and in opposition to Lviv, in western Ukraine, thereby reproducing a south/east versus west divide. Like many groups of students I spoke to, they were enthusiastic about Odessa and emphatic about its uniqueness. We might think that these students, who knew Ukrainian well, having studied at this particular school, would have related to Lviv (nowadays considered to be a heartland of Ukrainian culture) with a more open mind – if indeed schooling were effective. Instead, they were deliberately provocative by speaking Russian. They found confirmation for strongly held ideas in Odessa that Lviv is ‘nationalistic’ and ‘meanspirited,’ and they reproduced the east–west distinction that Volodia referred to in electoral politics. Their comments that ‘nationality doesn’t matter’ and that ‘everyone is treated equally’ were variations on Inna’s comment that Odessans ‘live and let live.’ They were not claiming a ‘politics’; indeed, they presented themselves as just going about their business, yet in the behaviour they described they were reproducing politically salient divisions within Ukraine. Some young people’s uncertainty about historical truths at times created indifference and ambivalence regarding their political identifications; other young people did express quite clear views about their

72

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

politics. These young people’s range of attitudes and their level of engagement were perhaps not much different from those of their contemporaries elsewhere. Yet in the context of Ukrainian politics, the ways in which they presented their views suggested how they related to understandings of the historicity of the Ukrainian state and the relationship of particular localities to it. Considered against the backdrop of pre–Orange Revolution Ukraine, at a time when authoritarian tendencies were deepening and when foreign policy was drifting more towards Russia, the attitudes of these young Odessans suggested a far from overwhelming commitment to Ukrainian statehood. Young people in Odessa acquire knowledge of history and a collective past in different learning contexts. History education has been deployed as a way to discipline subjects as ‘Ukrainian’ and to make hegemonic the idea of the Ukrainian state. However, schooling seems to be only partially effective in constituting national subjects and in generating acceptance of the long-term existence of the Ukrainian state at the commonsense level. My interviews and conversations with young people revealed an unclear picture: some young people seemed indifferent or ambivalent about the links between personal and collective pasts, presents, and futures. Young people’s uncertainty about historical continuity emerged in their movements between the schools and domestic spaces as well as from the different practices of transmitting knowledge about the past. Their sense of the instability of the truth about what happened in the past and their scepticism about the ability to establish it contributed to this uncertainty. Some young people had difficulty questioning what might seem like spurious truth claims made by their parents and grandparents about events because of the ways in which the transmission of the past was intricately linked to moral obligations to remember and forget. While many young people had an uncertain sense of the historicity of Ukraine as nation and state, in official narratives and in public discourse more generally, the Holocaust remained an event outside and unrelated to the historicity of the nation. Michael Lambek describes historicity as that which is ‘located in the spaces prised open between history and memory’ (2002, 13). In tracing the transmission of national histories and their intersection with family memories in the urban context of Odessa, this chapter, too, has suggested that it is uncertainties in the imagination of continuity that perplex many young people in Odessa and that complicate the consolidation of the idea of Ukrainian statehood among them. As Raymond

Uncertain Subjects

73

Williams notes: ‘The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes’ (Williams 1977, 13; emphasis in original). Given the way in which ‘Russia’ and the ‘Soviet Union’ as state-ideas – sometimes distinguished and sometimes conflated – have significant effects in Odessa, we could characterize the situation as one in which different historicities associated with different state-ideas coexist simultaneously, similar to the postcolonial situation that Mbembe describes. It is unclear which, if any, was hegemonic in Odessa in 2001–2, as young people’s comments on their political views and behaviour made apparent. The indifference of many young people to national traumas and at times to politics and Ukrainian statehood was in part an effect of the operation of power in Kuchma’s Ukraine. It both resembled and was distinct from the practices of engaging with ‘authoritative discourses’ that Alexei Yurchak (2005) has adeptly theorized for the late-Soviet period. Indifference is a strategy of disengagement that differs from the performance of authoritative discourse that Yurchak describes, where Soviet citizens performed the rituals and speech required of them while simultaneously partaking in a multiplicity of forms of life that were uncontrolled. Indifference suggests a more cynical stance, one in which there is non-engagement with official ideologies and discourses, such as those relating to national history. The persistence of such practices is a countervailing force to the formation of new hegemonies and serves to expose the teleological assumptions of many theories of nationalism and nation building and political change more generally. The next chapter shifts from young people’s experiences learning history to older people’s life stories. Young people’s uncertainty about history and their political identification may also be linked to the fact that older people do not always provide a unified and uncontested account of the past, but may themselves be uncertain about how to formulate a narrative of their past. These ambiguities will be explored in chapter 3 on living history.

Chapter 3

Living History and the Afterlives of States

By presenting the life stories of elderly Odessan residents born between 1918 and 1939, this chapter explores how personal experience, memory, and historical narratives interweave to constitute persons as ‘living history.’ The notion of ‘living history’ captures first, how elderly individuals’ narration of life and family histories can be considered a form of making history, and second, how history ‘lives’ through them – that is, how the past is ‘immanent’ in them (Birth 2006) – in the influences that meanings, experiences, and practices of previous historical periods have on their responses to present transformations. The first part of the chapter presents the life stories of particular individuals, while the second part addresses stories about the Second World War to illustrate differences in how individuals embody and relate to the projects and policies of states to which they have belonged. By considering elderly people’s forms of making history, and the way in which the past is immanent in the present, I underscore the continued influence of the various state-ideas and their corresponding historicities, suggest that states do not have clear-cut ‘births’ and ‘deaths,’ and thereby challenge the teleological assumptions informing the theory and practice of nation and state formation. ‘Living history’ is an oxymoron if the conventional definitions of history are considered, in which the past is considered wholly separate and divorced from the present. It is also often used to describe museums and enactments of past events in the present (Handler and Gable 1997). I use the term in a different manner and for different purposes. First, it offers a way of collapsing for analytic purposes the problematic dichotomy between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ and complicating the relationship between public and private, subjective and objective (Lambek

Living History and the Afterlives of States

75

2003, 207). Second, in contrast to the concept of ‘collective memory,’ it captures how the past can be embodied and interpreted differently by individuals sharing the same context. Concepts such as cultural or collective memory imply a level of coherence and unity in practices and narratives that did not seem to exist among the people with whom I conducted fieldwork in Odessa. This is not, however, to say that life stories are completely individualistic creations, only that there seems to be great variation in the narrative techniques employed to make sense of personal and shared history. Third, ‘living history’ conveys a sense of the coexistence of different historicities – the complicated ways in which the past and present interact and intertwine – that helps us understand the effects of the afterlives of states of which the narrators were once part. The act of narrating life stories does, however, involve memory, which ‘implies a self or subject who perceives the memory or does the remembering’ (Lambek 1996, 243). In turn, the close relationship between memory and subjectivity raises the issue of ‘experience.’ Scott (1994) has suggested that in constructing subaltern histories, scholars have taken ‘experience’ for granted. She argues that experience is largely constituted by discourse and that therefore the conditions of possibility which produce it must also be examined. Similarly, recent writing on Stalinist, late Soviet, and post-Soviet subjects also considers the discursive conditions of possibility for thought and action in those periods (Hellbeck 2000; Oushakine 2000; Yurchak 2005). These discourse-centred theoretical models provide compelling accounts of how individuals of particular generations were subjectified in the Soviet Union. However, they leave out the temporal dimension of experience, the effects of intergenerational transmission and relationships, and how actors themselves subsequently reflect on their experiences of state power and their sense of agency. Using a Lacanian notion of subjectivity that encompasses ‘conscious narratives as well as forgotten episodes and hidden discourses’ in discussing the political subjectivity of women activists in Northern Ireland, Aretxaga points out how experience can ‘exceed’ discourse (1997, 18). This resonates with the contexts I examine, given the challenges elderly individuals may face in narrating their experiences, and given that shared moral, historical, and political frameworks for interpreting lives are contested and in a state of flux. In weaving together memories and historical narratives, life stories offer insights into the ways in which people conceive and narrate a sense of personal and collective continuity across radical historical rup-

76

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ture and change. Although the states in which they were once citizens have disappeared, their geographies do not simply vanish; they remain powerful imaginative and emotional reference points for actors. Discussing ‘life stories’ therefore connects with issues of subjectivity, personhood, and temporality. In arguing for the similarity between autobiographical and historical memory, Bloch stresses that such recalling ‘defines the person in relation to time by invoking, or not invoking, notions of a past interaction with an external world which contains truth and falsehoods, permanent and impermanent elements, which is, or is not, in a state of continual, creative, dialectic flux.’ At the same time, these ways of remembering create ‘the imagined nature of the actor in the past,’ which when seen as a predecessor ‘refers also to those living in the present’ (1998, 81). Although Bloch suggests that different societies have different concepts of being in history (81), individuals who occupy a shared context may have different concepts as well, particularly in places undergoing large-scale transformation. ‘Living history,’ therefore, draws together experience, memory (minds and selves), and history (events, transformation, and the sense of moving through time diachronically). My use of ‘living history’ differs, however, from that of Halbwachs, who draws a sharp distinction between collective memory and history. For Halbwachs, living history mediates between memory and written history and is ‘a living and natural framework upon which our thought can base itself to preserve and recover the image of its past’ (1980, 69). It is to be distinguished from ‘written history’ (57, 64), which he equates with ‘national history,’ which in turn is ‘too remote from the individual for him to consider the history of his own country as anything else than a very large framework with which his own history makes contact at only a few points’ (77). He states that ‘general historical conceptions play only a secondary role’ (59), while ‘memory will ground itself on this lived past, much more than on any past learned from written history’ (ibid., 68). Orta (2002), meanwhile, in his study of Aymara ritual practice, maintains the distinction in order to mark different genres of cultural practice. In contrast, the concept of ‘living history’ is used in this chapter in order to explore the entanglement of memory, personal experience, and narrative history. It captures how the past is immanent in the present and thus unsettles linear notions of time and development. Contrary to Halbwachs’s insistence that people rarely connect their life stories with national history, the people I spoke to not only were deeply affected by the historical events around which their histor-

Living History and the Afterlives of States

77

ical narratives unfolded, but also used historical events and chronologies as reference points in their life stories. Their stories suggest that narrators’ location of the self in history can differ radically, which creates different senses of continuity, rupture, and positioning in relation to the time-space of particular states. This chapter moves from life stories to stories of the Second World War to capture the complex interplay of public and private, licit and semilicit, ideological and idiosyncratic in narratives and the effects of this interplay in generating the afterlife of defunct states. However, in contrast to scholarly accounts that focus on people of a particular age cohort who have experienced a certain traumatic event or period (Daniel 1996; Merridale 2000; Skultans 1998), I did not systematically interview people of a particular age who had experienced a particular event. Instead, I spoke with an array of individuals of different political beliefs, ethnicities, social status, and geographical origin whose paths I crossed in the course of fieldwork. This kind of approach leaves it open to the narrator to frame chronologies, critical events, and formative experiences, some of which fit dominant frameworks for a life and others which do not. Sometimes stories were recorded; other times they were not, either because the individual did not want to be recorded or because the stories were told spontaneously. They cannot be called oral history, given the different conditions in which the material was collected and my choice not to seek out information on a specific period or event or to reconstitute the past (Rosaldo 1980, 98). Moreover, this text does not illuminate the ‘social life of stories’ as it does not capture the shifting meanings of stories as they were told in different contexts over a long period of time (Cruikshank 1998). Rather, these stories depict a range of narrative strategies employed by individuals to make sense of their lives and large-scale events such as the Second World War in a present where shared meanings attributed to different historical epochs are in a state of flux. When we consider these individuals’ accounts as a form of history, we see the different ways in which continuity, discontinuity, agency, and repression are interpreted. Remembered Lives, Remembered History The life stories of Elmira Brodskaia (b. 1939), Olga Bezgrebelnaia (b. 1926), Nadia and Stepan Kushchevy (b. 1923 and 1918 respectively), and Rimma Ovcharenko (b. 1920)1 represent a range of ways of interpreting a life and weaving together the past and the present rather than

78

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

particular types of narratives. Although their stories appear to have a fixed form when presented as a text, ‘a life history is a living thing ... a work in progress, in which narrators revise the image of their own past as they go along ... the story they have been telling is open-ended, provisional and partial’ (Portelli 1991, 61). The narrators’ stories are set against the backdrop of major critical events that affected twentiethcentury Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Although these events formed a chronological scaffolding for the stories, the narrators shuttled back and forth across time while telling them.2 Comparing certain features of these stories, such as reflection on engagement with state institutions, the narration of domestic and public life, and narrators’ consciousness of themselves as subjects or objects of history, offers insights into the creativity of narrators in finding ways to live with burdensome history as well as how past states are made manifest in and influence the present. Elmira Brodskaia Elmira’s stories centred on experiences of school, university, marriage, motherhood, and her work in a daycare.3 I met with Elmira on two occasions to record her life stories on tape. She reflected on her naivety and belief in the official version of reality in the Soviet Union and attributed this to her upbringing. Her negotiations – past and present – of being Jewish and her experiences of anti-Semitism were a central theme in her stories: I am a native Odessan ... I was born in ’39. 19 that is! I was born and grew up in Moldovanka – it’s an old part of the city – on Stepovaia Street which used to be called Mizikevich but the old name has now been returned. I was born into a military family. My father was a career officer of the Soviet Army. In his time, he was specially selected from the Polytechnical Institute and placed in a military college from which he graduated as an artillerist. My mother worked in the jute factory – the technical fabric factory – before the war. My dad was killed in 1943 – he died on the Leningrad front in Pskov Oblast. I was evacuated with my mum and grandmother. We left Odessa because the fascists attacked and the city was surrendered. We were in Baku. That was Azerbaijan. Now it’s a separate republic. We lived there and my mum worked as a cashier in the port. In 1944, we returned to Odessa from Baku. Re-evacuated, as they say. In April, the 10th, Odessa

Living History and the Afterlives of States

79

was liberated. On the 6th of October we returned to our native Odessa ... to 46 Stepovaia Street. To flat 37 ... my mum was born there in 1904; I was also born there.

In these passages Elmira fused personal and historical narrative, placing herself very precisely not just in a city but in a particular neighbourhood, street, and building. She asserted continuity in the face of historical change by flagging shifting historical epochs through the changes in street names as well as in state borders. The events of her childhood and the loss of her father were placed within the broader chronology of the events of war – the occupation, evacuation, and liberation – as they affected Odessa. She would not have been aware of all these details – such as dates – as a child but would have learned them later from her mother, written historical narratives, and the commemoration of the war. She identified herself as Odessan at the outset, noting not only the district where she lived but also the building and flat where both she and her mother were born. She continued: I graduated from School #99 – a Ukrainian-English school in Moldovanka – it was 1956 ... I tried to get into the Medical Institute but I failed physics ... I got into the geography department and graduated in 1965. My diploma says ‘Economics and geography. Geography teacher.’ My daughter was born in 1964 – I got married as a student in 1963 – so since she was less than one year old we were able to remain in Odessa. I tried to get on the list in the district education department but there were no places. I got a job in a bank. I left and ended up working in a daycare in Moldovanka for twentytwo years. My mum really wanted me to study at an institute – it was her dream and I got in. But my children! My daughter said, ‘What did your higher education give you?’ She started studying in the institute, then had her son and left after the first year. It had lost its meaning. Maybe it was because I was unable to realize myself in my specialization. I ended up in a daycare. I tried to get other work. Once, when there were capital renovations going on, I went to the Institute for City Planning. The woman said, ‘You have to study more.’ Obviously, my nose didn’t fit.

Elmira’s account of schooling, higher education, and her career was interwoven with the issue of family expectations and obligations between generations regarding self-realization and professional aspira-

80

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

tions. Her emphasis on education and employment reflected Soviet policies on these issues. Her father was able to advance in the Soviet Union in ways that would have been impossible in Tsarist Russia. Her mother, a factory worker, dreamed that Elmira would get an education, a dream she fulfilled. Elmira was disappointed that her children did not pursue a higher education, which she attributed to the fact that she could not realize herself owing to the pervasive anti-Semitism in official institutions, colourfully put in her expression ‘my nose didn’t fit.’ Elmira reflected a great deal on her family members’ experiences of being Jews in the Soviet Union: I grew up far from Jewish traditions but thanks to my Mum there was never discord between my Jewishness and something else. I grew up with a firm understanding that I am a Jew, that the Soviet administration gave me an awful lot. The revolution destroyed the Pale of Settlement, let Jews serve in the army and work in any institution ... From childhood I had a sense of my own dignity. I grew up feeling that there is nothing shameful that I am Jewish – and I have my mum to thank for this. So if anyone tried to offend me, I defended my rights with my fists. In my courtyard some boys – Ukrainians and Russians – called me zhidovka and I sorted it out with my fists. So I felt no split in myself. Grandmother and Grandfather ended up in Odessa in 1904 after the pogrom in Kishenev. Grandfather worked in the wine and cognac factory in Kishenev and in Odessa, too. In 1921, my grandfather became ill and died in the hospital. That was a difficult year for the Soviet Union – there was no heating, there was famine ... My grandmother was left alone with five kids. And that’s where all observances stopped. Later it was not welcomed and then banned altogether. That’s why when I grew up – I was the third generation – I grew up in an absolutely non-religious environment. And the only holiday I knew was Purim. I think my mum might have told me about Purim, but I don’t remember. Recently, when I went to the synagogue with my grandson – he now studies in a Jewish school – I saw how they read about Esther who saved the Jews from the evil of Haman. When my grandmother was still around, I only knew that grandmother baked these sweet triangles that are called amanaushki. They just baked these things. I grew up in a Soviet milieu. Daycare, school, Octobrists, Pioneers. There were no grandfathers around. Grandmother’s children went to work in Soviet institutions. My uncle in an institute, my mum’s younger sister, too. And so there was no discussion about religious or other traditions ... Dad’s parents lived separately – on Bulgarskaia [Bulgarian] Street. My

Living History and the Afterlives of States

81

grandfather’s name was Samoil and Grandmother’s – Gitel ... They had sons – the oldest Benson, then my dad Leon, then Misha. The older brother – Benson – graduated from the Medical Institute. He was an ophthalmologist and worked in Filatov’s clinic. My dad was an officer. And the youngest, Mikhail, he was a politrabotnik in the army. In 1937 he was arrested and sent to Kolyma. He spent ten years there. Then he lived in Vinnytsia because he was not allowed to return to Odessa. That’s where my cousin Lialia was born, who now lives in Israel. My grandparents died here in the ghetto. They weren’t able to get the train. Their oldest son and his family were evacuated – Benson, Zhanna, Elizaveta – his wife. They were evacuated to Ufa but my grandparents remained here and perished in the ghetto. They were to be evacuated with the Medical Institute. But it was difficult for trains to travel. They were all at the train station ready to go and then my grandparents went home to bathe. The train came and my aunt and cousin left.

Elmira’s stories illuminate the entanglement of personal experience, the fates of family members, and historical events: her maternal grandparents ended up in Odessa as a result of the pogrom in Kishenev; her paternal grandparents perished in the ghetto. Elmira did not experience these events but they were nevertheless salient for her. When she spoke about her own experiences of being Jewish, she shifted vantage points. Sometimes she spoke from the perspective of the past – her positive sense of being Jewish and identifying with what the Soviet Union had provided her as a Jew. Her mother’s role in forging her sense of self as Jewish was significant and was based on a specific interpretation of certain historical events, particularly the fact that the revolution abolished the Pale of Settlement and discriminatory policies against Jews. Later Elmira seemed to shift to a vantage point of the present, when she conveyed a sense of regret in that she had been unable to learn about Jewish traditions – a fact she felt required detailed explanation. She attributed the loss of traditional knowledge to Soviet policies, to the absence of male elders – their untimely deaths after the revolution and during the war – and to the engagement of family members in Soviet institutions. Her description of Purim illustrated her shifting point of view as well as how memory of a tradition can be implicit knowledge embodied in a practice such as baking of certain sweets and later become explicit knowledge shared with a grandson. Later in our conversation, Elmira shared some thoughts about living in Ukraine and her view of the present situation:

82

Kaleidoscopic Odessa My grandmother mainly taught my mum Russian because she was afraid if she taught both Russian and Yiddish, then she wouldn’t know either well. I studied at a Ukrainian school and can speak it quite well ... One time, I was walking in Odessa along Deribasovskaia Street and was near a book table. I heard someone next to me say, ‘Ha. Again that barnyard language.’ Someone was looking through a book about the Ukrainian language. In the Ukrainian SSR! I felt as if someone beat my ears – and I am Jewish in body and spirit. But I didn’t have my own language and I didn’t feel it then. I told you that on the census form I filled out, my native language is Russian, and my nationality is Jewish. My second language – Ukrainian. This is difficult to understand. These were the attitudes in an internationalist state raised in the spirit of friendship of peoples. What was it worth? This was the Soviet Union. Ukraine in which Ukrainians forgot their own language ... When they called people to vote for Ukrainian independence I went – I voted for it – I wanted something new. I wanted to see how things could be done differently. That’s what I felt. I went to vote, and got my kids to go and vote for independence ... I don’t regret it ... Maybe I am stupid and naive but it is my Pioneer upbringing. I said to them, ‘You can’t live with your head turned backwards. You have to look ahead.’

In these passages Elmira once again expressed her consciousness of being Jewish from the vantage point of the past and the present. Although in the past she had not felt a loss in not knowing Yiddish, by the time she spoke to me she did. She remembered how the experience of overhearing negative comments about the Ukrainian language resonated at the time, despite not sensing a loss. Her experience at the book market had dovetailed with her current sense of having been denied the opportunity to learn about Jewish traditions. This reinforced her view of the hypocrisy of Soviet policy on the equality of nationalities, as well as her generally favourable disposition towards the political changes ushered in with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Elmira’s view, attitudes she had acquired from participating in the Pioneer Organization had compelled her to look to the future instead of tying herself to the state in which they originated. In shifting vantage points, Elmira opened up a space to reflect on the ambiguities and contradictions in her life stories. A vivid example of her reflexivity emerged when she was describing what she called her ‘komsomol truth’ attitude in the past. Her cousin had asked her to listen to a broadcast of Solzhenitsyn’s work, which she had criticized for not

Living History and the Afterlives of States

83

being ‘real literature.’ Elmira commented: ‘At that time I didn’t realize what a colossal work he had done, rationing paper, documenting what happened ... I also believed what they wrote about Sakharov – that he was a person opposed to peace. I recently read a book that describes that situation and remember my reaction and think – what an idiot I was. I am what I am though. You can’t get away from it. I grew up like that.’ Olga Bezgrebelnaia Olga Bezgrebelnaia, born in Novorossiisk in 1926, moved to Odessa in 1934.4 Now retired from a career with the Black Sea Shipping Fleet, she lives in a spacious apartment in a suburb of Odessa, a city she loves and would not leave ‘even for Paris.’ I was introduced to her at the Little Academy of Sciences and recorded her life stories in writing over the course of seven meetings, held mainly at her home, but once while walking around the neighbourhood where she grew up. When narrating stories, she emphasized personal success and heroism. She expressed no sense of victimization or deprivation, although she was frustrated that she was not able to rise in her career and reach her full potential living in a socialist system – a sentiment that informed her acceptance of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Olga began with stories about her mother’s side of the family, underscoring the determination and strength of character of the women in her family. Her great-grandmother, born into a noble family in Khmelnitska Oblast (Ukraine), fell in love with a serf and left the comfort of her family to marry him and live in poverty. Their child, Maria, married and had three children. When Maria discovered that her wealthy relatives were using her daughter as a servant instead of educating her as they promised, she decided to move her whole family to Odessa. Olga described with pride her mother Iulietta’s successes at school and her participation in Russia’s women’s gymnastics team, which competed in Europe. Subsequent stories were framed by events such as the First World War, the revolution, and the Second World War. She described how her mother met her father Alexei, originally from Kursk (Russia), at a theatre performance in Odessa. After he was conscripted to fight in the First World War, her mother travelled to the front to marry him. He joined the Red Army when the revolution began, and Iulietta remained with him throughout much of the revolution and Civil War, during

84

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

which she participated in theatrical performances to entertain troops. Alexei was acquainted with Nikolai Shchors, a key revolutionary figure in Ukraine, and assisted him in establishing the School of Red Commanders in Chernihiv (Ukraine). When Alexei was demobilized, he became involved in establishing the Soviet port system and shipping fleet. In 1934, the family – Olga’s parents and their three daughters (among whom Olga was the youngest) – settled in Odessa. She made no reference to the famines or various waves of repression – perhaps because her family, according to Olga, suffered no ill effects. Accounts of the Second World War occupied a central place in Olga’s life stories. She narrated them in great detail during our first meeting and again on subsequent occasions. They illustrated the complex merging of documentary evidence, memory, and historical narrative – of the immanence of the past in the present. Olga was fourteen when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Her war stories addressed her attempt to evacuate, the defence of Odessa, the occupation, participating in the underground and outwitting Romanian officials, joining the Soviet Army when Odessa was liberated, and taking part in the liberation of various countries from Nazi occupation. She narrated this period as a series of adventure stories that highlighted her cleverness, brazenness, patriotism, and heroism. She had honed these stories and narrated them many times. At times they corresponded with a Soviet historical narrative – such as when she emphasized patriotism and the fight against ‘the enemy.’ Yet she also highlighted the ambiguities of occupation and her view that not all Romanian officials were oppressors – a view that she would likely not have shared in Soviet times except among intimates. She also fleshed out her stories with details learned from reading and from archival work she conducted for her great-granddaughter’s essay about partisans in Odessa. Olga’s stories were striking for their strict separation of personal and public life into distinct narrative spaces. Among the narrators, her stories corresponded most closely with Fitzpatrick’s (2000) observation that Soviet women – in the period 1917 to 1941 – tended to stress their involvement in public life and often formulated their stories as testimonials. Indeed, Olga dwelt much more on the public and professional part of her life. In meticulous detail she described her work in the port after the war ended and her realization that if she did not finish school, someone more qualified would take her position. She also dwelt on entering Odessa’s Institute of Foreign Languages, completing a degree in English, and securing a job dealing with foreign accounts with the

Living History and the Afterlives of States

85

Black Sea Shipping Fleet. Regarding her career, Olga stated: ‘I went as far as I could without joining the Party. I could have gone a lot farther, but I realized that I might have had difficulties because I can speak sharply and tend to speak my mind. I knew I could slip up and if I did, that would be the end of my career.’ However, she stressed that she was always able to arrange her affairs on her own terms. For example, she was provided with a flat (which she did not have at the time) when she moved to Novorossiisk and when she returned to Odessa. She stressed personal agency and underplayed family connections that may have facilitated her success. In contrast, stories of her marriage and children were brief, and were narrated separately and in such a way that they were difficult to fit into the story of her education and career. Although she mentioned briefly that she had been married during our first meeting, it was on a separate occasion, during our third meeting, that the story of her marriages emerged.5 Olga’s and Elmira’s stories are interesting to compare for the ways in which the narrators constructed themselves as ‘persons in history’ (Bloch 1998) – that is, for the contrasting ways in which they sensed themselves as objects and subjects of history. Both women attributed importance to education and self-realization in a profession, but Elmira stressed how her efforts to advance had been thwarted by the system, whereas Olga underscored her personal triumph in ‘getting what she wanted.’ Olga’s stories of war and professional life illustrated a strong sense of being able to influence events – having the power to control her own destiny – in the face of danger and uncertainty. The two women differed in how they responded to constraints imposed on them and in retrospectively constructing themselves as historical subjects. As persons in history, these women differed in another way. In contrast to Elmira, Olga was not reflexive about her past and present selves. Instead she blended the events of family and personal history into a coherent narrative that submerged moral or political contradictions. She narrated the achievements of family members in various epochs – in Tsarist Russia, in the Soviet Union, and even in independent Ukraine – with little or no explicit commentary on the shifting political context, commentary that was present in stories of most other people I met. She spoke with pride not only about her mother’s achievements as a gymnast in Tsarist Russia, but also about her father’s involvement in the revolution, his close association with a Ukrainian revolutionary leader, and his involvement in establishing the College for Red Commanders. With equal reverence she showed me a journal that had been

86

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

in her family since 1915 that discussed various issues such as religious holidays and news of the First World War, and a biography of Stalin she kept during the occupation even though she could have been arrested for possessing it. She narrated how she had listened enraptured to her nanny, who told her about her life in pre-revolutionary Russia as an ambassador’s wife, and to her father’s friends as they told stories of their participation in the revolution. In showing me a photograph of her grandmother Maria, she expressed pride in her noble looks even as she explained that her mother had hid the picture in the 1930s and that she had learned about this relative only in the 1950s. Olga’s incorporation of these seemingly contradictory elements can be understood in light of her account of a man she found exemplary. The man, whom she learned about on television, had been separated from his family and persecuted during Stalin’s regime. However, he did not complain about his fate but made peace with his past and was intent on enjoying life in the present. By incorporating the successes and heroic acts of her relatives through time into a coherent family story, Olga established a sense of continuity through the drastic ruptures that successive historical events had wrought on her life and those of her relatives. Nadia and Stepan Kushschevy In contrast to Elmira and Olga, who had spent most of their lives in Odessa, Nadia and Stepan (b. 1923 and 1918 respectively) were originally from Rivne Oblast in western Ukraine and moved to the city in 1994 from Kazakhstan. I was introduced to this couple by their son, an oceanographer working as a taxi driver, whom I met by chance, and spoke with them at their flat several times, recording their stories most often in writing. Their receptiveness to me was conditioned by my Ukrainian background. They lived through the same periods described by Elmira and Olga, but their experiences differed significantly, not only because they came from a different region, but also because they were from a village rather than a city. Their lives had been radically disrupted by events such as collectivization, arrest, and imprisonment, and they had experienced persecution and alienation as a result of being Ukrainian. Unlike both Olga and Elmira, Nadia and Stepan had always resented Soviet rule and had a pervasive sense of being displaced for much of their lives – including the present. When I met Nadia and Stepan for the first time, they insisted on iden-

Living History and the Afterlives of States

87

tifying their homeland – the village Nahirne in Rivne Oblast – and situating their experiences within the shifts in state borders in Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Stepan pointed out that in contrast to Galicia, which had belonged to the Austrian Empire, Rivne had been located in the Russian Empire until after the October Revolution, when it became part of Poland. After the Second World War this area was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. They remarked on living under different administrations: Poles’ negative attitudes towards Ukrainians and the limited educational opportunities;6 the deceptively pro-Ukrainian German administration; and later the crackdown and violence of German soldiers and administrators. Their most bitter criticism was reserved for the Soviet Union. Like other narrators, they situated their lives very explicitly within a narrative of historical events of the twentieth century, although they framed their stories unambiguously within a national narrative of Ukrainian history. Indeed, most of their stories made some political claim against Soviet policies or the dire situation of the present. Nadia and Stepan wanted to clarify why they, as western Ukrainians, had moved from Kazakhstan to Odessa beyond the immediate purpose of being nearer to their son and daughter. Stepan returned to the Second World War, and he and Nadia alternated as they told their shared story about rupture and persecution. Stepan explained how he had been taken prisoner by the Nazis and transported to Germany to work in a factory as a forced labourer. He managed to escape while being transported between camps. In 1950 he was arrested by the NKVD and labelled an ‘enemy of the people’ because of ‘anti-Soviet’ comments and the period he had spent in a German camp. He spent time in prison and then was shipped to a camp in Siberia, where he remained for six years until he was rehabilitated.7 Nadia described the difficulties she experienced when left alone with a child in the village in 1950. She had no living relatives; her husband’s parents had also died. The collective farm had been formed, and the system of state zaims had been introduced – a system whereby the state ‘borrowed’ money from citizens to finance the postwar reconstruction. She spoke emotionally about how the women worked all day in the fields, often eating only an apple. The zaim representatives came to villagers’ houses each night and terrified them with demands for money they did not have, given that the wage at the collective farm at the time was five kopecks per day. To survive, she made vodka from sugar beets, which she traded for a goat, which in turn provided food for her and her young daughter. Nadia stated indignantly:

88

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

‘The Soviets took everything from the village and sold it in the towns. There you could get food. Once in a while a train would come by the village and people could go out to it and buy a loaf of bread.’ When Stepan was rehabilitated, he was not permitted to live in Rivne. After returning to his village for five days to visit Nadia, he decided to leave for Kazakhstan. Nadia eventually joined him with their daughter Miroslava. They found work in Kazakhstan, Stepan as a school janitor and Nadia as a supervisor of a brigade of prisoners building a railway line. Despite spending nearly half their lives there, what emerged from their descriptions was a sense of displacement and alienation. Nadia commented: When we went to Kazakhstan, our children were called banderivtsi.8 If you spoke Ukrainian, that is what they called you. There were lots of different people there – Ukrainians, Tatars, Chechens, Latvians. For a long time, my daughter Miroslava refused to say what her nationality was because she thought that if she said she was Ukrainian she would be taken away.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, their position became increasingly vulnerable. Nadia continued: They began to make a lot of noise about us – they called us brod [ruffians from elsewhere]. But there used to be only one railway route there. When they built the second one they used prisoners’ labour. People died making it. There are bodies buried along the way ... How did Kazakhstan stand on its feet? It was steppe, empty. They say that if they didn’t have all those prisoners to work there Kazakhstan wouldn’t be able to stand on its feet. Germans built the factories. The railway tracks were built by prisoners. I worked in such a brigade.

Here, Nadia was speaking the language of Soviet modernization – with its nesting orientalisms – in discussing Kazakhstan, something she and Stepan resented when applied to their own homeland. Nadia and Stepan viewed Ukrainian independence positively, having been committed to the idea and having suffered for it during their adult lives. It was, however, a bittersweet achievement, given that their pensions were minuscule and that they could make ends meet only with their children’s help and Stepan’s compensation from Germany for having been an Ostarbeiter (forced labourer). In their view, the overwhelming influence of the communists and the old nomenklatura on politics

Living History and the Afterlives of States

89

was the root of the country’s problems. Their longing for home – their village in western Ukraine – was still acute; Odessa felt very foreign to them even though it was part of Ukraine. ‘Ukraine’ in the form of Odessa had been an alienating experience. Nadia commented: Odessa is not Ukraine. There is no Ukrainian spoken here. People have forgotten who they are. Take our son Volodia’s wife. She’s Ukrainian but she speaks Russian and doesn’t speak to me at all in Ukrainian. I asked her why and she said: ‘That’s what I’m used to.’ It’s the same with our neighbours. Volodia’s daughter, who goes to a Ukrainian school, once said to me, ‘Grandmother, don’t speak to me in Ukrainian. Speak to me in Russian.’

Nadia and Stepan’s stories were more explicitly about a sense of victimization than those of the other narrators. As living history they differed from Elmira and Olga most strikingly in the sense that they seemed to be plagued by a sense of discontinuity and displacement. In contrast to Elmira, they did not display the same kind of reflexivity about themselves as subjects who transform and change perspective. Rather, their stories conveyed a sense of a consistent political commitment to the dream of Ukrainian statehood – a dream they had maintained throughout their lives despite being persecuted. In contrast to Olga, they had a coherent ideological frame within which to situate the events of their lives. Yet the stories Nadia and Stepan told seemed haunted by a longing for home, for familiar language and customs. Their apparent inability to establish a meaningful link between past and present may have arisen from their sense of being out of place in Odessa or from their uncertainty about the political future of their country – underscored, perhaps, by their granddaughter’s rejection of their language and customs. Rimma Ovcharenko Like Nadia and Stepan, Rimma (b. 1920) was not originally from Odessa. She moved to the city in 1975 with her husband. Rimma was introduced to me as a Muscovite by a youth worker, and indeed she often stressed her affinity for Moscow. Usually her stories were shared in a group setting over tea or at her monthly commemoration dinners for her husband in her flat in Odessa’s suburb of Tairova. Only on one occasion did she share her stories exclusively with me. Her stories contrasted with Nadia’s and Stepan’s in the meaning she attached to move-

90

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ment through Soviet space and in her reflections on her origins. She often repeated that she had always been ‘lucky with people’ – a phrase that expressed her good fortune at emerging unharmed from situations that might have proved disastrous. In contrast to Olga, a love story occupied a central place in her life narrative; the personal, the political, and the historical were woven together rather than separated. Her second husband, Pëtr Petrovich Mamontov, whom she met when she was forty, had passed away in April 2001. She spoke of her life in terms of ‘pre-Pëtr, Pëtr, and post-Pëtr epochs.’ Nadia and Stepan had been forced to leave their native village and had experienced the vastness of Soviet space through arrest, deportation, and displacement. In contrast, Rimma had experienced the same space positively through her work as a geologist. In her career she had moved from Moscow, to Novgorod, to Tiumen, and to Odessa in connection with Pëtr’s work. Both of Rimma’s parents were originally from Ukraine. Yet it was only some months after our first meeting that she mentioned that her mother was ethnically Ukrainian, when she described her as a typical dark-haired, dark-eyed khokholka – a derogatory word for a Ukrainian – who came from ‘Gogol country,’ that is, from somewhere near Mirhorod in Poltava Oblast. In 1920, after the revolution and during the Civil War, Rimma’s mother Alexandra was working at a soup kitchen for the poor near Mirhorod. One day she looked up and saw a tall, attractive man with pince-nez, dressed in a black suit standing in front of her. She said: ‘What, you consider yourself poor?’ To which he answered: ‘Without you, I am the poorest man here.’ Three days later he whisked her away to Moscow. Rimma’s father also came from a poor family. Prior to the revolution, however, he had worked as the guardian of a boy from a rich family, with whom he was sent to Switzerland. He studied alongside the child he was looking after and completed one degree in Switzerland, another at the Sorbonne. Afterwards he returned to Russia to take part in the revolution. Having taken Rimma’s mother to a flat on Tverskaia Street in Moscow (in an old part of the city centre), he promptly disappeared, leaving her to fend for herself. Nine months later, Rimma was born. Another resident, who knew Rimma’s father, helped her mother find work in a nearby hospital. Rimma saw her father once as a child but did not hear from him again until she was about to finish school. This story of attraction and seduction set against the backdrop of the end of Civil War was a kind of origin story for Rimma. It was the personal drama, quite apart from history, that resonated with her, perhaps because of the centrality of a love story in her own life.

Living History and the Afterlives of States

91

Rimma’s school experience formed the basis for another set of stories. The district komsomol head took a liking to her, as a result of which she was adopted as the ‘school daughter’ of School 25. Children of the political elite – Stalin, Beria, and future communist leaders in Eastern Europe – studied at this school. Rimma had fond memories of her school years: close friendships, studying, singing, and dancing. She recalled Stalin’s daughter Svetlana and Klement Gottwold’s daughter Marta, a classmate, who ordered wine in cafes, which shocked her fellow Soviet students. Rimma reminisced about the enthusiasm with which she and her classmates participated in marches on Red Square for May Day and the thrill of catching a glimpse of Stalin. She reflected on being caught up in the atmosphere of the times and remarked that it was not until she read Solzhenitsyn’s work in the early 1950s that she reconsidered her attitude towards Stalin and his policies. In sharing these reflections, she paused for a moment to recount an incident at school when a classmate was told that her parents had been arrested. Shivering, Rimma recalled how this woman went pale and clutched her hand, but later denounced her parents and became a komsomol activist. If Rimma’s stories about her parents are quasi-mythical, her stories of schooling intertwine with the historical. Rimma’s stories have an aura of history – or historicality – about them that is different from those of other narrators because of her encounters and interactions with prominent historical figures of the Soviet elite. Like other narrators, Rimma talked about the Second World War during our first meeting in the fall of 2001. She had been evacuated and had worked in Kazan as a railway dispatcher. Indeed, it was in this context that she first stated that she had always been ‘lucky with people.’ At a critical moment in the Battle of Stalingrad, the wrong train – one carrying minor parts rather than tanks – was allowed to pass. That night, when Rimma had asked the supervisor to confirm that they were permitting the correct train to pass, the supervisor had insisted it was not necessary to check. Rimma was held accountable for the error, and a tribunal was held. When the situation came to light the supervisor blamed Rimma. A woman who witnessed the scene told the investigating NKVD officer what had really transpired. Another NKVD officer vouched for Rimma, and in the end the supervisor was fired instead of her. With this story, Rimma illustrated her good fortune and the ambiguities of power in a totalitarian regime – specifically, how not all NKVD officers were sinister characters. Here the historical and personal were woven together again: a historical event, the Battle of Stalin-

92

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

grad, provided the context for a personal critical event. In commenting on her own luck and on the ambiguities of power, Rimma may have been making a subtle critique of people who take a categorical view of Soviet power as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as often happens in the present. Rimma spoke at length about her relationship and travels with her second husband, Pëtr Petrovich. She had married her first husband, who was originally from Ukraine, during the evacuation. After the war they moved back to Moscow, where their two children were born and where Rimma studied geology and found work in a lab at Moscow State University. After seventeen years together, Rimma learned that her husband had previously been married. After sustaining a workrelated injury, his former wife ‘remembered’ that she was married to him in order to secure additional compensation. Soon after, while on assignment from the Geology Institute at Moscow State University, Rimma met Pëtr. She left her husband and moved to Novgorod with Pëtr, where they stayed three years to avoid scandal. They were then invited to Tiumen (in western Siberia) to work on the development of oil drilling and lived there for ten years. In 1975 they moved to Odessa, where Pëtr had been offered work in an institute affiliated with the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Rimma spoke fondly and at great length about her and Pëtr’s many expeditions and travels to other Eastern European countries. In narrating these stories she exemplified living history in another way. Now that the Soviet Union no longer existed and this kind of travel was no longer possible, especially for people in the ex-republics, her travel stories amounted to traces of the expansiveness of the Soviet Union, the stability of life in the 1970s, and the privileges of a professional geologist in the Soviet Union. Her experience of movement through the vast geography of the Soviet Union contrasted with the forced displacement of others such as Nadia and Stepan. Like Nadia and Stepan, Rimma was sometimes dissatisfied with living in Odessa, albeit for different reasons. After her husband’s death she decided to remain in the city instead of returning to Moscow to stay with her children. This was not only to retain her independence, but also because of her many friends in Odessa. Yet in her view, Odessa was ‘provincial’ compared to Moscow and even Tiumen. She found Odessans flashy and irresponsible (‘They are always late!’), and she was tired of their incessant ‘odessism,’ a term she used to capture Odessans’ tendency to boast and self-aggrandize. With some hesitation, she had become a Ukrainian citizen. She had delayed this procedure until the last minute and cried when she did. When a woman in her twenties vis-

Living History and the Afterlives of States

93

ited her and asserted that the border between Russia and Ukraine was ‘getting in her way,’ Rimma concurred: ‘The border gets in everyone’s way!’ Rimma’s travel stories had a salience for her now that she felt confined and cut off from her homeland. The presence of the past in narrators’ lives, in all its complexity, has been addressed in two main ways in this analysis: through how these people were affected by the policies of the states in which they lived; and through the interplay of idiosyncratic, individual tropes for interpreting a life, such as ‘I’m a hero,’ ‘I was lucky,’ ‘I was duped,’ ‘I was a victim,’ with broader historical chronologies and narratives. Although the states in which these individuals and their families lived have been extinguished or undergone border shifts, they continue to have an afterlife. This afterlife can take many forms, the effects of which I have traced here through the continued resonance of state-ideas and the corresponding historicities through which people attempt to establish a personal sense of continuity. The contrasting ways in which these individuals situated themselves in historical time, felt they had agency, emphasized rupture or continuity in their lives, and wrestled differently with moral and political contradictions, convey a sense of people in a place in flux. ‘Everyone had their own war’: Remembering the Second World War in Odessa The Second World War was a critical event in different ways for all of the narrators and for most people of their generation whom I met. The significance of this event in life stories was due to its cataclysmic nature, but it was also the consequence of the elaborate monuments and rituals developed in the Soviet Union from the late 1960s onward to commemorate the Great Patriotic War. Scholars have demonstrated how commemorative rituals generate shared understandings of the past that are central in reproducing communities (Anderson 1991; Connerton 1989; Gillis 1994). This section focuses on stories and commemorative practices connected with the Second World War that narrators shared while speaking about life and family histories. Shifting the emphasis to reminiscences about the Second World War illuminates how remembering and commemorating this event has sustained the afterlife of the Soviet state. Reminiscences about the war in Odessa are ambiguous and tend to reproduce the distinctiveness of Odessa. Taken together, the war stories I was told pointed to how difficult it is to gen-

94

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

erate shared meanings about the Second World War in a way that could contribute to the reproduction of a Ukrainian state-idea. Having been downplayed in Soviet official discourse until the mid1960s, when Brezhnev came to power, the Second World War became the focus of a commemorative ritual that was key to reproducing a sense of being Soviet among many citizens in the postwar period (Tumarkin 1994). Tumarkin argues that the cult failed to generate a respect for the war and veterans. Her evidence for this, however, is contradictory, in that she cites individuals for whom it was the only meaningful Soviet holiday. Catherine Wanner (1998) confirms this in her own discussion of the fragmentation of the meaning of the event in Ukraine in the early 1990s. She maintains that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9 May remained a significant date for many Ukrainians. The meaning of the Second World War in Ukraine is fractured precisely because it is one of the most controversial events, given the radically different ways in which Ukrainians in different parts of the country experienced the war. Indeed, even the official interpretation of the event remains ambiguous. In other former socialist states in Central Europe and the Baltic, the war is commemorated on 8 May as it is in Western Europe. In Ukraine, however, Victory Day is still celebrated 9 May. It is a national holiday to which considerable attention is devoted at all administrative levels (Wanner 1998; Hrynevych 2005). The nomenclature itself remains unstable: officials alternate between ‘the Second World War’ and ‘the Great Patriotic War.’ On the one hand, veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought for Ukrainian independence, are not eligible for the benefits that the veterans of the Soviet Army receive and are marginal in commemorations in central and eastern Ukraine. Yet in the official narrative of Ukrainian history – as presented in textbooks – they were freedom fighters. On the other hand, during official ceremonies, Soviet veterans have been increasingly portrayed as having fought for Ukraine rather than for the Soviet Union (Y. Hrytsak, personal communication, 20 February 2004). Meanwhile, the Soviet veterans form a large and powerful lobby group that opposes any recognition of the veterans of the UPA and that continues to reinforce a Soviet-centred understanding of the war (Hrynevych 2005). The reminiscences of Nadia, Rimma, and Olga on or shortly after Victory Day in 2002 revealed ambiguity in the war’s meaning in everyday life as well as how the war carried the salience of the Soviet state and its geography into the present. When I visited Nadia on 9 May she made

Living History and the Afterlives of States

95

no mention of the fact that it was Victory Day until I asked her whether it was an important day to commemorate. She felt that the day was worth commemorating, although in her view ‘Russians think it’s their holiday’ and ‘forget that much of the war took place in Ukraine and that many Ukrainians fought and suffered.’ She remembered how the Russians in Kazakhstan had called her and other Ukrainians ‘enemies of the people.’ My question prompted her to tell other stories about the war. She continued reminiscing about her village in Rivne at the end of the war: ‘UPA continued fighting in the forests through the fifties. They lived in the forest and people helped them out. I helped them out too ... There were lots of them but they were no match for the Soviet Union.’ She recalled how Soviet agents dressed as UPA and asked for clothes and later arrested and deported the people who helped. These were terrible times, and she preferred not to recall them. Olga, on the other hand, had long participated in veterans’ events. Usually she went to Tenth of April Square9 for the parade and ceremonies. Commemorative events took place at other war monuments as well, such as the Monument of the Unknown Sailor and the 411th Battery. Afterwards she would organize a large meal for family and friends in her home, where stories would be shared until late in the evening. Usually she watched the films about the war that were shown in the lead-up to 9 May, which resonated deeply with her. When we met a few days after 9 May for a walk through her old neighbourhood, I asked her whether the significance of the event had changed at all for her. ‘No it has not,’ she said. ‘There was so much grief, it was such an awful thing. For me, the meaning is unchanged. It was the clash of fascism against socialism. Fascism was defeated and will never exist again ... No one wants that. Who wants the camps and ovens?’ Rimma, by contrast, was keen to point out that the war was not all about heroism. She was highly critical of the Soviet military leadership. When I visited her in the afternoon of 9 May, she had been listening to songs on the radio all day. She had cried a lot, something she rarely did. She explained how her brother’s class of grade nine students had been taken out of Moscow along the road to Smolensk to build a sandbag barrier. When the army officers in charge heard that the Germans were attacking, they abandoned the young people. Her brother and some other students succeeded in returning to Moscow on foot. A little while later, as Rimma continued to reminisce, two of her friends – Rita (early forties) and Nefimata (early sixties) – stopped by for a visit. Rita asked Rimma whether the war films captured the essence of

96

Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the period. In contrast to Olga, Rimma did not like to watch the films because they did not convey what the war was like. She paused to reflect: ‘Everyone had their own war. Its meaning is ambiguous [neodnozhachno] – it did not mean the same thing for everyone.’ During the meal, Rita proposed a toast: ‘To our independent country – Ukraine. Let’s be thankful that there has been no war and that we are free to travel around.’ After drinking, she reflected: ‘It’s strange though, to think that Ukraine is a separate place. When I see what’s happening in the Baltics, or Russia, I still think somehow, that’s still us.’ Nadia, Olga and Rimma’s reminiscences and comments indicated that commemorating the Second War World in Odessa connected individuals with geographies extending beyond Ukraine and resurrected the space of the Soviet Union. Rita pointed out how thinking about the war in the present drew her attention to the strangeness of the fact that Ukraine was now a separate state. Although Nadia’s story referred to the UPA and a more Ukraine-centred account of the war, given the outcome of the war and her stories of later persecution, her account also reproduced the Soviet political space in the present. Moreover, in contrast to life stories, where individuals were able to avoid direct engagement with political issues, narrating war stories implicated individuals in state ideologies and projects much more directly. Olga continued to see the war in terms of a battle of ‘socialism against fascism’; clearly she was not influenced by dissident writers such as Vasily Grossman, who saw the Great Patriotic War as a battle between two totalitarianisms and who equated communism with fascism (Tumarkin 1994). Rimma took issue with official representations of the heroism of the war and insisted on highlighting the ambiguities and contradictions in the behaviour of people so often represented as heroic. Nadia’s stories arose out of the Ukrainian resistance to Soviet forces. Recollections shared on Victory Day illustrated the variety of political projects and ideologies that intersected with remembering the war and that in most cases did not clearly connect with an image of Ukraine or consolidate a commonsense understanding of Ukrainian statehood. Stories narrated by individuals who lived in Odessa during the war indicated how locality remains a powerful frame of reference for experiences and commemorations of the war. Odessa was designated a Hero City in the Soviet Union for its citizens’ role in fending off Romanian and German occupation of the city for seventy-three days. The Soviet commemorative project highlighted the Defence of Odessa, the partisans in the catacombs, the underground movement, and the liberation

Living History and the Afterlives of States

97

of Odessa. These events still resonated among many Odessans and were commemorated annually. Yet there was also a strong narrative circulating among many Odessans who lived through the occupation that can be summarized as ‘life wasn’t so bad under the Romanians.’ Stories of this sort were shared with me at home, on the street, at a market (see chapter 4), at a book launch, and as part of a walking group (see chapter 5). This narrative about the occupation as well as the less evidently heroic aspects of war were more muted in public discourse. Around commemorative days, the media tended to present a more typically Soviet patriotic version of defending the homeland against the enemy.10 Finally, members of the Jewish community pointed out the blindness of both narratives to the experience of Jews. Juxtaposing the different narratives of occupation in Odessa not only presents the different meanings and interpretations of this period that circulate in everyday life but also how those interpretations tend to reinforce a sense of local specificity in the context of a Soviet wartime experience. Sergei Korolenko’s stories were striking for their ambiguity and ambivalence and for the way they wove together personal memory, historical narratives, and shifting political loyalties. Sergei was Ukrainian but identified as Odessan first and foremost. During the 1930s both his parents moved to Odessa, where he was born in 1938. At the beginning of our first conversation at a Russian film festival he was promoting, and several times subsequently, he asserted that Odessans had lived better under the Romanians than they had under the Soviets.11 He pointed out that the Romanians had allowed individuals to open businesses and restaurants, had administered theatres, schools, and institutes and could be easily bribed in exchange for providing certain services. Yet when I spoke to him more in depth about this period over tea at his home, he also recalled scenes of killing and the threat of forced labour. He narrated his experiences of the occupation of Odessa in fragmented and impressionistic episodes, shifting between childhood memories and explanations he would have acquired in adulthood: I don’t know where my mum worked during the occupation. I was young ... My dad came periodically to visit ... Once my mum left me standing at the Starokonnyi Bazaar (Old Horse Market) with a bag while she went to the market to buy things. I was sitting there on that bag. It was summer and warm. It was on Serovaia Street – there is a kindergarten on the corner. I remember I heard shrieks, and saw how the Romanians picked up a guy

98

Kaleidoscopic Odessa who was about twenty. Two soldiers and an officer. They beat him up terribly because he was a thief. Even though the Romanians were so thieving themselves ... My mum met my father, who was with my step-mum, and they spoke. She said it was difficult to support me so dad took me home with him ... My dad obviously was earning decent money. He worked under the Romanians here, on the railway, and made good money. It was the freight station. She handed me over to him – it was probably 1942, I was four. They lived at 4 Zhukovskaia Street ... I lived with them till 1943. Materially things were much better. Suddenly, they got a notice that they were supposed to go to Germany to arbeiten, shmarbeiten. It was 1943, my dad was thirty-one, and my stepmum was about twenty and this paper came that they should go to the police office and from there, they would be sent to Germany to work. We had relatives in Krivaia Balka (just outside Odessa). They knew partisans – they were here during the war in the catacombs. They were there for eleven months and my stepmother didn’t see light until our soldiers liberated Odessa on the tenth of April ... My dad took part in an operation against the Romanians. In his group one person died. And when they went to the catacombs my mum took me back to where she lived on Knizhnyi Lane, near the Pryvoz Market. And the tenth of April I greeted our soldiers near Preobrazhenskaia Street and Knizhnyi Lane. They came on new green trucks ... For some reason, that’s what I remember. I remember Germans dead on the ground, and our people taking everything they could off them, and Romanians hanged near the railway ... After my dad came out of the catacombs, he went back to the freight station and began to travel to Bucharest because our people went to Romania to liberate them. They brought back stuff the Romanians had stolen from us. My dad ... bought Leshchenko’s records and nice dishes. We had a beautiful tray ... a gramophone ... I wound that gramophone myself and we listened to Leshchenko’s records.12

Sergei narrated this account without addressing moral ambiguities such as his parents’ employment – particularly the fact that his father, who had a job as a prison guard before the war, worked for the Romanians on the railway. He did not comment on the moral ambiguity of the fact that his father and stepmother joined the underground movement only when they were called up to go to Germany for forced labour. Nor did he reflect on how, after the war, his father went to Romania as part of the Soviet effort to bring back property that Roma-

Living History and the Afterlives of States

99

nians had removed and had brought back Leshchenko’s records and Romanian porcelain. Sergei’s account illuminated a less rosy side of the occupation. In general, he alternated between insisting that the Romanian regime was better than the Soviet one and berating the Romanians as ‘the enemy.’ He spoke mainly about personal, everyday details and did not reflect on political issues such as collaboration or switching sides. These stories reflect what Karel Berkhoff has argued was the norm in occupied Ukraine, and indeed more broadly – that the majority of people were bent on surviving, rather than engaging in open resistance or collaboration (2005, 5). It also suggests that these experiences were not always reformulated or narrated within the morality and narrative frames provided by subsequent state commemorative projects. Sergei’s account of the occupation also illustrated blindness towards the victims of the genocidal policies of the occupying regime – a blindness common among those who asserted that ‘life was not that bad under the Romanians.’ An account of how his mother shifted flats during the occupation provides one example: When the war began in 1941 I was living with my mum. You know where we lived? Near Cheremushki where the Christian cemetery is and the former Jewish cemetery.13 Our flat was in the first corner house on the second floor. We lived in that flat before the war, and for some time during the war. When the Romanians came, they disbanded the labour colony [where my mum worked]. My mum took me – I remember this – I think it was in 1942, in the spring – we went to my godmother’s place. They lived in Knizhnyi Lane. There was a room there. Many Jews had been evacuated, so there were many free flats. There was a room – eleven metres, and another that was eight metres, and a kitchen. It was a two-storey building.

His comment that ‘many Jews had been evacuated so there were many free flats’ and the date were significant. Many Jews had been evacuated. However, many had not been. He attributed the available flats to the absence of Jews in particular and not to the absence of Odessans in general. In this way his narrative concealed the fact that by 1942, Jews who had not been evacuated would have been evicted from their homes, many already killed. Sergei’s account of his war experiences was ambiguous and ambivalent, and his interpretations were alternately based in a Soviet patriotism and Odessan localism. In contrast, Yelena Malakhovskaia, a Holocaust survivor, situated her story as part of the general experience

100 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

of Jews in Europe during the war and was critical of both the occupying regime and the local collaborators. She began reconstructing her experiences in the early 1990s when she moved to Israel, where she lived for ten years.14 While there, she participated in interviews for Spielberg’s project of creating a Holocaust Archive. Yelena’s memories of that period were fragmentary, partly because she was so young (b. 1936) and partly because she, her mother, and her sister did not speak about their experiences when they returned to Odessa. They feared being arrested, since Stalin viewed all those who had survived the occupation as traitors. Her mother and sister died during the early 1950s, just as Yelena was finishing art school. She had one surviving uncle, an accountant who had retrieved Romanian documents from the caretaker of her building that proved that her family had been evicted. Those documents later helped Yelena obtain the formal status of a ghetto survivor, which made her eligible for compensation from the German government. Yelena’s family did not evacuate because one of her uncles had studied in Munich before the revolution and insisted the Germans were civilized and that life would be better than in the Soviet Union. When the Romanians issued a decree requiring all Jews to register, her family tried to hide in their home. She recalled lines of Jews on a road out of the city to the Slobodka ghetto. A neighbourhood teenager turned them in, an episode Yelena remembered vividly. They tried to resist, but the police beat her mother. While she and her relatives – parents, sister, aunts and uncles (the uncle who survived had been mobilized to fight in the Soviet Army) – walked to the ghetto in Slobodka, one of her uncles was shot. In the Slobodka ghetto they were able to obtain false passports and escaped to a village in Vinnytsia Oblast – Lybidska – still in Romanian occupied territory, although she did not remember how they actually got out of the ghetto. At first they lived among Ukrainians, but once again they were betrayed and forced to move to the ghetto in Chechelnik. There she watched her father die of hunger. By converting to Christianity, she and her mother and sister were able to live again among Ukrainians. In this way, they were able to survive the war. Besides recollecting her own experiences, Yelena commented on the war and the occupation more generally. She directly addressed the issue of collaborators: During the war masses of people died on the front. Women lost husbands and sons. Here in the occupied territory they collected young people and

Living History and the Afterlives of States

101

sent them to Germany to work ... But this tragedy, World War Two, affected Jews more than anyone. Russians also suffered, but not everyone suffered during the occupation ... Jews were thrown out of their flats – their flats were robbed in front of their eyes ... I don’t want to blacken things, but many people adapted to the conditions [of occupation]. I have my own observations as a child how many Russians and Ukrainians were traitors. Many served the police to survive. Young women worked as typists, cleaners, translators. Romanians allowed private enterprise and so many opened stores, sewed clothes and baked goods and sold them.

Yelena’s comments contested claims that Soviet citizens suffered the most losses as a result of Nazi aggression as well as the invisibility of the distinctiveness of Jewish suffering in Soviet accounts. She criticized those who took advantage of the Romanian regime to get by as they could, but she was even more sharply critical of people who worked in Romanian administrative offices or who actively betrayed Jews. Her stories were set within a narrative that highlighted the uniqueness of Jewish experience and suffering during the war, a narrative she perhaps assimilated in Israel, especially through participation in the interview project. Yury Illarionovich Smetanin whose mother was Jewish, could have suffered the same fate as Inna and her relatives. Yet in contrast to Inna, who minced few words on the subject of the occupying regime and local collaborators, Yury’s stories of arrests, betrayals, and escape – carefully crafted and narrated to anyone who would listen – explored the ambiguities of the Romanian occupation and were distinctly antiSoviet. Although arrested many times, Yury insisted that the Romanian administration had its positive sides and in some ways was better than that of the Soviets. The former landlord of their building, who was also a resident, accused Yury and his family of being partisan and informed on them to the Romanian authorities in the hope of regaining ownership of the building. They were arrested, but Yury’s mother managed to extricate them from the situation. When they returned, the landlord informed on them a second time, but again, they extricated themselves from this difficult situation.15 Yury’s mother suggested that they move to the ghetto to avoid further conflict with the landlord, not understanding the full implications of this decision. En route, she learned more about the situation there, and when Romanian soldiers released the women’s column, his mother found Yury and his brother and instructed them to show their pass-

102 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ports indicating that they were Ukrainian, and to leave. When they returned to their building, they found that their flat had been robbed by neighbours. Realizing that they could not remain there, Yury’s mother decided to use the landlord’s suspicion that they were partisans to her advantage. She invited him to her flat and stated: ‘Well it’s true. We are partisans. And you know, those who turn partisans in will be killed.’ She said she would leave the building, but only if he helped her with the bureaucracy and documentation. He agreed, and a friend helped them find a flat in another part of the city. Yury’s stories highlighted the slippery, contingent circumstances he and his family navigated. They did not connect neatly with any overarching historical narrative; rather, they reinforced a very local, Odessan experience of war. The ambiguities of power in an occupying regime emerged most clearly in a key episode in Yury’s story – the arrest of Yury, his mother, and his brother by German SS officers. One of his mother’s former colleagues had informed on her and accused them all of being partisans. Yury’s experiences in the German-run prison left a strong impression on him, particularly how well they were treated: they had separate rooms and were given food, water, and washing facilities. After they were cleared, his mother’s colleague accused them of being Jews. Curiously, the Romanian administration rather than the German SS was responsible for such issues, so the SS transferred them to a Romanian prison. They were thrown into a large cell containing many people. By befriending thieves through expressing their anti-Soviet sentiments, they were able to secure food through an elaborate system in which the thieves robbed new prisoners and used those gains to bribe guards to get food. Through a complicated series of events, which involved the goodwill of a Romanian official and a bribe, they were cleared. Yury’s distinctly anti-Soviet attitudes emerged most strongly when he narrated his experiences relating to the return of the Soviet Army. When the Soviet administration was re-established in Odessa, his mother was arrested by the NKVD, held, and interrogated because they had found documents indicating that she had been arrested by the Romanians. Her crime was the fact that she had remained alive. However, according to Yury, during the interrogation she told her story in such a compelling manner that the officer forgot to undermine her claims and in the end let her go. The NKVD’s intention to arrest his mother for surviving, coupled with his knowledge of how brutally the NKVD treated prisoners, led him to conclude that although both the Nazi and Soviet states were brutal, the Soviet system corrupted and

Living History and the Afterlives of States

103

dehumanized people to a much greater extent: Soviet prisoners would never be treated as he and his family had been in the German SS prison. The stories I was told about Odessa during the occupation illustrated additional complexities in the relationship between the experiences of occupation in Odessa and the tropes available for their interpretation. Some Odessans painted a picture of ‘the good life’ under the Romanians, in contradiction to Soviet claims that the occupation was a time of hardship, deprivation, and suffering – claims embodied in public monuments and disseminated through the media. Stories such as Yury’s contradicted the Soviet narrative of liberation and of the return of justice to people who had lived in occupied territories. Finally, Jews whose relatives perished, or who themselves survived camps and ghettos, contested the blind spots in Soviet narratives and the notion that under the Romanians ‘life was not that bad.’ By examining the interplay of experience, memory, and historical narratives in life stories and war stories, this chapter has conveyed how the past lives in the present and complicates the formation of political communities and individuals’ sense of personal and collective continuity. In presenting the life stories of Elmira, Olga, Nadia, Stepan, and Rimma, I have used a concept of ‘living history’ in order to emphasize how historical narratives are combined with idiosyncratic tropes to interpret lives characterized by rupture, displacement, and discontinuity. By considering how the past is made immanent in the present in the way in which the narrators reflect on and narrate their experiences of the Soviet state, I have contended that states have afterlives that create ambiguity and uncertainty and that subvert attempts to establish new hegemonic narratives. A concept of living history is effective because it does not posit the coherence and unity implied by the term cultural or collective memory. Although it is not my intent to suggest that the life stories presented are purely individualistic creations, my material contrasts with Skultans’s Latvian ethnography in that the narrators did not seem to be drawing on common tropes from ‘national culture’ to construct a sense of self after the experience of rupture. Shifting the focus to stories about the Second World War made the point that war stories, though personal, were more entangled with state ideological projects and more strongly influenced by commemorative practices than other episodes from individuals’ lives. At the same time, war stories indicated that despite Soviet efforts to generate shared meanings through a commemorative event, and the current efforts by

104 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the Ukrainian state to do so, the meanings of this event for ordinary people in everyday life were still fraught with ambiguity. Indeed, Rimma’s comment that ‘everyone had their own war’ captures both the total nature of the event and the vastly different ways in which it was experienced and is now understood by the participants. Rimma’s comment also suggests how war experiences connect individuals with specific places and geographies. In Odessa, the narration of war stories tends to resurrect the time-space of the Soviet state or a very distinctive, localist experience of war, which reinforces notions of Odessans’ exceptionality. War stories highlight how hard it is to create an interpretation of war through which Ukraine can be reproduced as a political community. They also illuminate how the past resists easy reformulation into a new national frame, and how it is not easily ‘forgotten’ in the process of nation formation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.16 The impingement of the afterlife of the Soviet state on the present has contributed to the uncertainty and instability of the commonsense acceptance of Ukrainian statehood. Older people’s experiences have not been suddenly and easily reconstituted by new discourses. Experience is resilient and ‘exceeds’ old and new discursive formations. This was evident in the different ways that individuals tried to establish continuity between past and present. Elmira engaged her contradictory, discordant sense of past and present selves, while Olga seemed to be trying to iron out contradictions in order to construct a smooth, consistent narrative. Finally, the uncertainty and ambiguity created by this ‘excess of experience’ and by the impingement of the afterlife of the Soviet state on the present sheds further light on the uncertainty encountered among youth regarding the idea of the Ukrainian state. Although the elderly people in this chapter and the youth of the previous chapter are not related, juxtaposing their accounts illustrates the kinds of contradictory experiences and historical narratives that young people are likely to encounter. This in turn may reinforce their uncertainty about the political order of things and undermine attempts to generate new hegemonies. Chapters 2 and 3 focused on the interplay of coexisting historicities and state-ideas. They addressed the construction, transmission, and contestation of different forms of history among young people in schools and domestic spaces and in life stories of elderly people. I sought to illuminate how uncertainty about historical narratives and truths and the impingement of the afterlives of states on the present has undermined

Living History and the Afterlives of States

105

attempts to generate hegemonic understandings of Ukrainian statehood. In the next three chapters I turn the readers’ attention to spatial discourses, practices and places in Odessa through which the city is produced as a locality distinct from Ukraine.

Chapter 4

On Odessa’s Kolorit and the Place(s) of Moldovanka

There are several Odessas. It’s like a federation. The centre is one Odessa. Moldovanka is a second. Peresyp is a third. Slobodka, a fourth ... Moldovanka is the direct opposite of the centre. Poverty abounds. But this is an extraordinarily koloritnyi part of the Odessan federation. – Leonid Utesov

On my second day of fieldwork my landlady was explaining the importance of reading the stories of Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel in order to ‘understand Odessa.’ Her voice dropped as she glanced over at the older women in her kitchen preparing food for her stepmother’s funeral: ‘You should listen to the way they talk and the stories they tell. They’re from Moldovanka – they’re real Odessans.’ On another occasion, Alexandra, a lawyer in her late forties of mixed German, Polish, and Russian ancestry, took me to the courtyard in Moldovanka where she had lived as a child. Nearly all the residents had moved away from the crumbling nineteenth-century buildings. After reminiscing about residents’ capacity for sharing and the lack of plumbing and poor heating, she explained: ‘Many of the buildings should be torn down since they can’t be restored. But there are plans to make a heritage park. After all, without Moldovanka, there’d be no Odessan legend.’ Despite Odessa’s transformation from the fourth most prominent city in the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century and a key node in Black Sea trade routes, to a more marginal Soviet and now Ukrainian seaport, Odessa is still viewed as ‘special’ and ‘distinct’ across the Russian-speaking world. Odessans’ special qualities – a sense of humour, a southern temperament, entrepreneurial spirit, a unique dialect of Russian, and being apolitical – are captured in the shorthand notion of

On Odessa’s Kolorit 107

kolorit. Kolorit, which can be glossed as colour, character, carnivalesque, or an exotic quality, has supposedly been eroded since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many Odessans, however, claim the ‘real Odessa’ and its kolorit can still be sensed in Moldovanka, a neighbourhood in the historic centre of the city that was the setting for Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories about the Jewish criminal underworld. Yet the same district is also reviled as a place of ‘darkness’ and a ‘lack of civilization.’ This chapter begins an exploration of how the interplay of spatial practices, the circulation of stories, and history making generate residents’ sense of Odessa’s distinctiveness, a distinctiveness inextricable from the idea of Odessa as a city. Here I address the ambiguous place of Moldovanka in the Odessan imaginary, as a place that residents feel is ‘uncivilized’ but that at the same time embodies and generates Odessa’s kolorit. By examining Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, the practices of courtyards and a flea market, and their evocation in walking tours, I trace how kolorit expresses a multilayered nostalgia by means of which successive generations have made sense of the changes and losses caused by the October Revolution, Stalinism, the Second World War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas Babel’s stories articulate a longing for pre-revolutionary Odessa, contemporary descriptions of kolorit express nostalgia for the kinds of sociality and sociability formed under socialism that are found in Moldovanka’s communal courtyards and Old Horse Market. Cultural practices of nostalgia have shifted the district’s relationship to local high/low cultural distinctions since the pre-revolutionary period and its significance in the cityscape as a locus of Odessanness. The convergence of different ‘performatives’ in Moldovanka – types of verbal exchanges and a sense that the district is an open-air theatre – creates Odessans’ sense that the district actually produces their city’s uniqueness. Odessans’ view of Moldovanka as the location of Odessa’s uniqueness has been produced through the constitution of places of different scales and the relationships among them. Although some scholars insist on attending to cultural flows, practices, and relations that are not isomorphic with place (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997), it remains important to understand how people themselves see places as productive of sociality and meaning. Place is a process (Harvey 1993, 21), a historical production constituted by the interplay of the material, the perceived, and the imagined (Lefebvre 1991, 110); it is ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations’ rather than a bounded entity (Massey 1994, 155). In other words, places must be understood in terms

108 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

of how they are constituted in relation to other places and spaces (Appadurai 1996, 183; Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 7, 17). As philosopher Edward Casey writes, ‘places concatenate with each other to form regions of things’ and ‘particular places tell us how a region is ... they are that region’s condensed content’ (Casey 1996, 32). Although Casey asserts that places do not ‘form hierarchies of increasing abstraction,’ (ibid., 30), in some ways ‘Moldovanka,’ ‘courtyards,’ and ‘the Old Horse Market’ do represent places of different scales and levels of abstraction. Relationships among places of different scales can be conceived using Michel de Certeau’s notion of walking as a rhetorical practice that expands and contracts space through actions resembling synecdoche and asyndeton: ‘Synecdoche expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a “more” ... and take its place. Asyndeton, by elision, creates a “less,” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics’ (de Certeau 1988b, 101). Although de Certeau theorizes the unconscious effects of non-reflexive walking practices in generating urban landscapes, his insights point to the ways in which some places not only represent places of a much larger scale, but also are considered to produce them. This chapter brings together certain stories through which place is narrated (Basso 1996; Blank 2004; Stewart 1996) with cultural practices of nostalgia to uncover how Moldovanka is constituted as a ‘special’ place productive of Odessanness. Anthropological discussions of place have echoed Casey’s observation that ‘time and space come together in place’ by examining how memory inheres in and constitutes landscapes (Casey 1996, 36; Gordillo 2004; Mueggler 2001). As Susan Stewart has written, nostalgic desire is ‘desire for desire’ (1984, 23), a desire that ‘subsists in the insistence on an unbridgeable distance between the subject and ostensible object of desire’ (Ivy 1995, 10). The frame of meaning created in ‘positing a “once was” in relation to a “now”’ goes hand in hand with modernity and the historical ruptures and sense of irrevocable change it generates (Stewart 1988, 227). However, whereas some practices of nostalgia articulate a longing for what preceded the onslaught of modernity, urban nostalgia in places such as Odessa and Petersburg does not mourn the losses ushered in by modernity in the way that Marilyn Ivy (1995) describes in the case of Japan. Rather they articulate a longing for other forms of modernity, be they pre-revolutionary or Soviet. Nostalgia has become a major category of description and analysis in the post-socialist world (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004). Anthropologists working in postsocialist contexts have tended to focus on how desires, sociabilities, and consumer items

On Odessa’s Kolorit 109

index the juxtaposition of a socialist ‘once was’ with the postsocialist ‘now’ (Stewart 1988; Berdhal 1999). Though outwardly similar, these practices of nostalgia articulate with different political projects and contexts (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004). However, analysing cultural practices of nostalgia only in terms of the loss of a particular socialist past can miss not only the historical dimension of certain nostalgic categories such as kolorit, but also how certain expressions of nostalgia articulate a longing for multiple pasts simultaneously (Bissell 2005). The category of Odessan kolorit has a longer genealogy and articulates a multilayered nostalgia and multiple moments of loss and rupture. Moldovanka’s ambiguous place in the Odessan imaginary is partly the outcome of local processes of constructing high/low cultural distinctions and mapping them onto the cityscape. A slum in pre-revolutionary Odessa with a reputation as a ‘city of thieves’ (Sylvester 2001), the district has been geographically, socially, and economically marginal in relation to the city centre for much of its history. While marginality is a relational condition whose meaning shifts when viewed by individuals from inside and outside the margins (Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1999), the social definition of marginal places and spaces is often closely related to the categorization of objects, practices, ideas, and social relationships ascribed to ‘low culture’ (Shields 1991, 5). The politics of the process of symbolic exclusion involve positioning the ‘high’ in a whole series of relationships with the ‘low’ without it ever ‘losing the upper hand’ (Stallybrass and White 1986, 5). However, the high/low binary has been questioned in postmodern theory, not only for its elitism but also for its failure to capture the subtle interplay of forms categorized as ‘high’ and ‘low,’ ‘elite’ and ‘mass,’ through which hybrid forms are produced (Huyssen 2002; Traube 1995). Although anthropologists often steer clear of Culture, viewing it as part of a more inclusive notion of ‘culture’ (Handler 1992, 818), social stratification and hierarchies of meaning drawing on such distinctions do exist. In Odessa, local discourses mobilize the notion of ‘culture’ as ‘high culture’ in articulating distinctiveness vis-à-vis the Ukrainian nation-state and marginalizing certain behaviours and areas of the city as ‘uncivilized.’ A high/low distinction can therefore be used productively as a heuristic device to track local processes of generating hierarchies and meanings of place (Huyssen 2002, 368). History in Place Moldovanka developed as a suburb beyond the 1824 boundary of

110 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Odessa’s free port, a boundary still marked by the large boulevard known as Staroportofrankovskaia (Old Free Port) Street (Herlihy 1986, 273). Two competing versions of the establishment of Moldovanka exist among local historians (Dontsova 2001, 15–24). One version posits that the settlement predates Odessa by about thirty years and asserts that Moldovans who worked for the Ottomans in building the fortress Yeni Dunia (New World) settled in the area in the late 1760s. This version is based on evidence suggesting that the fortress was erected within the bounds of what is now the city of Odessa – near the settlement of Khadzhibei on what became the Primorskii Boulevard. The second version argues that Moldovanka was settled between 1797 and 1802, after Odessa was founded, by a contingent of Moldovans, Greeks, and Albanians who were fleeing the Ottomans. This version relies on evidence that Yeni Dunia was not located near Khadzhibei but farther away and that the place Moldovanka came to occupy was uninhabited at the time Odessa was founded. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the territory that became Moldovanka consisted of two settlements: the Bulgarian settlement Bulgarka, later called Bugaevka; and Novaia Slobodka (New Settlement), where Moldovans were given relatively small plots, on which they built village-style houses and cultivated vineyards and gardens. Mikhailovskaia Square was the centre of the Moldovan settlement and the site of the first Orthodox church (1820) outside the city centre as well as of a cemetery. Nearby were military barracks and the country houses of the city’s wealthy residents, including the dacha of Richelieu. In the first third of the nineteenth century Moldovanka emerged as the dominant settlement. Dontsova muses: ‘What was the secret advantage of this ordinary settlement among other apparent equals? Maybe it was the presence of the only Orthodox church in those outlying areas. Was it perhaps the correct selection of an expressive, tasty name? This name, in contrast to other forgotten and half-forgotten city names immediately entered the vocabulary of Odessans for the long term’ (Dontsova 2001, 21). Architects who designed buildings in Odessa’s central district (such as Boffo, Torichelli, and Dalakva) also played a role in planning Moldovanka. When the 1835 general plan is compared with a contemporary map, it quickly becomes evident that the grid-like network of Moldovankan streets, squares, and lanes has remained largely unchanged (74). Once Moldovanka was included in the general city plan, it had to have ‘approved facades,’ which were the responsibility of the city architects. Although the blueprints for the homes of ordinary residents

On Odessa’s Kolorit

111

were neither complex nor highly varied and the builders had only a few models to follow, a ‘comfortable district with character was constructed that at least two or three generations of residents fondly recollect’ (80). Churches, civic institutions, and the more cumbersome multiflat buildings that appeared later on blended in with the existing single-storey dwellings without diminishing their value (80). Thus, after 1835 the suburb gradually transformed from a conglomerate of village-like settlements that included a few large plots held by wealthier landowners to a suburb more urban in form. As the nineteenth century progressed, the population became more multiethnic. Although Bulgarskaia Street was originally settled by Bulgarians in the 1830s, by the end of the century the street’s residents comprised Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Germans, Greeks, and Roma. There were many churches (including a Roman Catholic cathedral) of architectural interest in Moldovanka, most of which were blown up in the 1930s. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews were a significant part of the district’s population, as can be seen by the presence of eleven prayer houses and the relocation of the Jewish Hospital (founded in 1801) to the district in the 1820s during a cholera epidemic. Dontsova’s work confirms Herlihy’s assertion that ‘in spite of its concentration of Jews, Moldovanka was in no sense a ghetto – a district where Jews were legally obligated or willingly chose to reside’ (1986, 274). The notion that Moldovanka is a spatially and socially distinct area persisted despite Soviet planning interventions that aimed to level inequalities by building factories, schools, and clinics. In the late 1930s, when a friend’s mother was offered an apartment in the centre, she decided instead to remain in Moldovanka: ‘What would we do there with our simple faces?’ In the 1960s and 1970s, behaviour and styles of dress in movie theatres in Moldovanka differed from those on the other side of Staroportofrankovskaia Street; the audiences were boisterous and adults would often bring wine to the theatre. Although located on the geographical edge of Odessa as late as the 1940s, nowadays, given that Odessa has expanded considerably to the north and south, Moldovanka is spatially a relatively central district. Moldovanka at the Margins and the Centre Although Moldovanka is exalted as the locus of kolorit, Odessans express a profound ambivalence about the district. Kolorit is evoked to describe positive qualities of the district, whereas words such as ‘dark,’ ‘depressing,’ and ‘unenlightened’ are used to express disdain. The

112 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Odessan dialect and boisterous conversation captured by kolorit tend to be attributed to the lower classes and diasporic nationalities and therefore are considered attributes of social or ethnic marginality. More specifically, during my fieldwork the kolorit of the city was associated with Jews – particularly those whose families migrated from shtetls, who spoke with Yiddish-inflected Russian. Indeed, just before leaving for Odessa from Kyiv an acquaintance remarked that Odessa’s kolorit had faded on account of the emigration of Jews. Local residents often made this connection as well. One acquaintance even mentioned how he’d read a poster during the April 1st Humorina Festival that read ‘Jews, come back! It’s boring here without you! If you can’t come back, take us with you!’ Considered against the backdrop of a history of violence and repression, this kind of statement might be read as an expression of what Renato Rosaldo has called ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ the longing for what one has been complicit in destroying (1989, 69). On the other hand, images of ‘darkness’ and ‘lack of civilization’ can be traced back to public attitudes about the district that were prominent in pre-revolutionary Odessa (Sylvester 2005, 51). However, the sense that the district both signifies and produces Odessanness is a more recent phenomenon produced through the circulation of stories and cultural practices in which nostalgias generated by postsocialist transformation converge with dramatic changes in earlier historical periods. The high/low distinction surfaces in Odessan discourse in different forms. Odessa is conceived as a bastion of ‘culture’ (high culture) and ‘civilization’ in contrast to the backward, peasant Ukrainian countryside. Moreover, central districts are considered the locus of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ in contradistinction to the less enlightened Moldovanka. Moldovanka’s kolorit – its distinct forms of the urban sociability – also contributes to setting Odessa apart from the Ukrainian countryside and other Ukrainian cities. Thus, local discourse mobilizes a distinction between peasant ‘folk’ and urban ‘learned’ and between the urban working class and urban elites, reflecting polarities that run through theorizations of popular and elite culture from Herder to Adorno (Traube 1995, 130). Although boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms are porous, locally marked high/low distinctions have material and symbolic effects on the cityscape in that they render places marginal or central. Isaac Babel and Moldovanka Babel’s image of Moldovanka as a poor, crime-ridden district with

On Odessa’s Kolorit

113

larger-than-life characters is part of the core of the Odessan Myth. In the 1920s this ‘Odessa text’ was further elaborated by those Odessan writers – including Babel – who were labelled the ‘southwest’ or ‘Odessan’ school by Victor Shklovsky (Karakina 2004; Stanton 2003, 118). Babel’s stories are central to understanding the production of nostalgia and the mapping of Moldovanka as a place of kolorit. In addressing how literature – Isaac Babel’s stories – generates a nostalgic sense of place, I will be tracing the circulation of images and stories in everyday life rather than reading practices or literary artefacts (Reed 2003, 111). Isaac Babel, like the city he hailed from, was an enigma. In her preface to a recently published volume of his works, Nathalie Babel captures how her father eludes classification as an exclusively Soviet, Russian, or Jewish writer: ‘As a Soviet writer, he shows and experiences a profound dichotomy between acceptance of the ideals of the revolution and repulsion for its methods. As a Russian writer, he expresses both nostalgia for the old world and desire for the new. As a Jewish writer, he was well versed in Hebrew and the Talmud. Yet he wrote in Russian. His world reveals ... a “Jewish sensibility.” However, when he used the typical Jewish themes found in Yiddish literature, they were always interwoven with Russian cultural archetypes’ (Babel 2002, 20). Babel’s writing needs to be placed in the context of pre-revolutionary Russian-Jewish writing and Soviet Russian writing after the revolution (Markish 1987, 175). He has been considered ‘the first Jewish writer to write from within Russian literature and to give the Jewish milieu colour and depth’ (Sicher 1995, 72). Prior to Babel, ‘even if a RussianJewish writer succeeded in attracting the attention of the Russian reading public ... he still remained outside the bounds of Russian literature proper, perceived as an alien or exotic phenomenon’ (Markish 1987, 173). Although Babel’s attraction to marginal figures such as criminals as subjects for his works may have been part of a broader Soviet literary interest in the criminal underworld and trickster-like figures such as con men (Falen 1974; Fitzpatrick 2002; Markish 1987), he may have partly identified with them as marginal people (Rubin 2000). The figure of the criminal provided a way for Jewish writers to question certain social hierarchies. At the same time, the criminal served as a kind of model of their own activity: ‘Active “knee-breaking” or “blackmarketeering” their way into an exclusive literary canon, they are outcasts and rebels who still “do business” with the system – and indeed they need to, and must demand their right to do so’ (Rubin 2000, 8). On the one hand, then, Babel was a writer who contributed to the production of ‘high culture’ by appropriating ‘low culture’ through his repre-

114 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

sentations of Jewish bandits in Moldovanka. On the other hand, as a Jew, he was himself marginal at first in Russian cultural circles. His depiction of Jewish criminals in high cultural form catapulted him to fame and allowed him to count as a member of a literary elite. At the same time, he created images of Moldovanka that became central to representations of Odessa. Babel is best known for his short-story collections Odessa Stories and Red Cavalry, the latter based on his experiences riding with the Cossacks of the First Cavalry during the Soviet–Polish War of 1920. The four core works of Babel’s Odessa Stories – ‘The King,’ ‘How It Was Done In Odessa,’ ‘The Father,’ and ‘Liubka Cossack’ – were published between 1921 and 1923 and are interrelated through their characters, themes, milieu, and narrative tone (Falen 1974, 62). Other stories set in Odessa featuring the same characters include ‘Justice in Brackets’ (1921), ‘The End of the Almshouse,’ ‘Sunset,’ and ‘Froim Grach’ (1934). These stories depict the Jewish criminal underworld in Moldovanka in the period following the 1905 Revolution. The later stories are about confrontations between the bandits and the Soviet police. ‘The King’ introduces Benia Krik, the ringleader of Moldovanka’s gangsters, depicting his marriage to the rich Eichbaum’s daughter and describing how his men forestall a police raid during the wedding of Benia’s sister by setting fire to the police station. ‘How It Was Done In Odessa’ recounts how Benia became ‘The King’ through his handling of the robbery of the wealthy Jewish merchant Tartakovsky and the accidental killing of Tartakovsky’s clerk. ‘The Father’ describes Benia’s marriage to Basia, the rotund daughter of the redheaded, one-eyed gangster Froim Grach, and the uniting of two bandit families. The fourth story, ‘Liubka Cossack’ depicts the formidable madam Liubka Schneeweiss, nicknamed ‘The Cossack’ for her size, strength and ability to run an inn. Although some critics view the tales as ‘primarily a phenomenon of style and tone ... masterpieces in the use of colourful language,’ another has demonstrated how the gangster raid served as an organizing structure into which events of Jewish communal life such as a wedding (‘The King’) or a funeral (‘How It Was Done In Odessa’) were incorporated (Briker 1994, 117; Falen 1974, 63).1 Babel’s critics underscore the relationship of his stories to the quality of kolorit. Rachel Rubin writes that ‘Babel’s colourful Odessan gangsters loom larger and wilder than life’ (2000, 15). Soviet dissident writer and literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky commented that ‘Babel’s Odessa is a fairyland where local images and national traits are surrounded by a halo of legend,’ while James Falen has noted that ‘his fictional Moldo-

On Odessa’s Kolorit

115

vanka is the direct antithesis of all that is lifeless or grey; its bizarre people live in a carnival world, in an atmosphere of lurid colour’ (Falen 1974, 75; Sinyavsky 1987, 92). Critics have alternately referred to ‘Babel’s Moldovanka’ and ‘Babel’s Odessa,’ which along with Babel’s title Odessa Stories suggests how Moldovanka has come to stand for the whole of Odessa. Further, Falen has written that: ‘he forces his reader to view the commonplace through a topsy-turvy kaleidoscope, or to use one of his own images, through a pair of magic spectacles’ (Falen 1974, 73). Victor Shklovsky, a contemporary of Babel, noted that he used ‘the same voice for talking about stars and gonorrhea’ (Shklovsky 1990, 367). Finally, Konstantin Paustovsky, another of Babel’s contemporaries, described the foreign nature of this world for the cultural elite reading his stories: ‘“The King” dealt with a world completely outside our experience. The characters, their motives, their circumstances and their vivid, forceful talk – all were strange to us. The story had the vitality of a grotesque’ (Paustovsky 1987, 113). Babel thus transformed ‘low cultural ways’ attributed to a marginal place into something alluring and exotic for the Soviet literary elite. The repeated use of words such as ‘colour,’ ‘carnivalesque,’ and ‘national traits’ underscores the link between Babel’s stories and the shorthand concept of kolorit. Babel wrote about Odessa from Moscow with palpable longing for a lost place and time. Along with other writers of the Odessa school, he expressed nostalgia for a city that arguably no longer existed at the time of writing – a response, perhaps, to what had been lost in joining the revolutionary movement to build socialism (Stanton 2004, 57). The Odessa School label was not long-lived; Shklovsky had to retract his statement almost as soon as he made it.2 Babel was arrested in 1940 and his works banned. His stories were republished in the early 1960s during Khrushchev’s Thaw and, though not included in the school curriculum, were actively read in the city and the Soviet Union more broadly. Along with the works of other Odessan writers, they played a part in piquing interest in pre-revolutionary Odessa among local residents – especially the intelligentsia. While Babel himself expressed nostalgia for a disappearing world in his writing, his works made subsequent generations long not only for the pre-revolutionary world he wrote about, but also the 1920s – the era in which Babel himself was writing and which is associated with a time when people of Odessan origin produced ‘high culture’ that mattered. In this way kolorit signifies a kind of double nostalgia – a conflation of longings for pasts produced by dramatic ruptures and rapid transformation.3

116 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Babel’s high cultural distillations of quirky characters from the social margins of Moldovanka surfaced in a range of everyday settings. A Jewish couple in their fifties considered members of the intelligentsia nicknamed their cat ‘Cat-And-A-Half’ when she gave birth to a single kitten, after the character Tartakovsky, whose nickname was ‘Jew-AndA-Half.’ Mark Naidorf, a lecturer at the Polytechnical University, also described how, in the early 1960s, a group of students at his school in central Odessa would meet after class to read Babel’s stories. At my friend Natalia’s weekly beer night at her home, her guest, Roman, once played a series of songs about Babel’s Moldovankan characters on the guitar. While visiting my friends’ dacha, their guest, Grisha, an engineer who works for a small firm, referred offhandedly to how he had brought his book of Babel’s stories to work that day to settle a friendly dispute with his boss about whether in a certain story Babel had written ‘eat and drink’ or ‘drink and eat.’ Victor Feldman (b. 1915), an archivist who grew up in a Moldovankan courtyard (see below), repeated lines from Babel’s stories without citing him. On one occasion, to illustrate his grandmother’s misfortune in being married off to a man who owned an inn where bindiuzhniki (draymen) stayed, he said: ‘What does a drayman think about? About drinking ... and punching someone in the face’ – a quote from ‘How It Was Done In Odessa.’ Babel’s highcultural distillations of quirky characters and customs from the social margins of Moldovanka blur distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Babel’s stories circulate – cited and not – in ways productive of Moldovanka and Odessa as distinct places. ‘More Odessan Than Odessa Itself’ Unlike other tourist guidebooks from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the first volume of a new journal for tourists about Odessa has a feature on Moldovanka that includes pictures of quaint, run-down Moldovankan courtyards and folkloric statues at the Odessa Literature Museum (Gubar, Golubovsky, and Aleksandrov, 2002). Although churches, synagogues, the Institute for Noble Maidens, the Old Horse Market, and famous people are noted, more space is devoted to stories about the famous brothels on Zaporozhskaia Street, a famous criminal and his wedding banquet, and the kolorit of neighbours gathered in a courtyard. The text describes the communal life of courtyards, their multiethnic composition, the ethnic tolerance of their inhabitants, and the Odessan language that emerged from there. After listing various

On Odessa’s Kolorit

117

professions at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the author dwells on the world view, customs, and laws of bindiuzhniki (the Ukrainian word for draymen that Babel popularized) – a now vanished profession vividly described in Babel’s stories. Finally, after describing various wine cellars, musicians, and songs the author concludes: ‘Today you hear different music in Moldovanka. There are new supermarkets, firms, Internet providers, garages, advertising agencies ... But Moldovanka remains in these decorations, in your ears, in life because it is a unique phenomenon of morals, norms, lifestyle, and melancholic memories – in short it is more Odessan than Odessa itself’ (Gubar et al. 2002, 44). These images mirror Babel’s stories and perpetuate a particular view of Moldovanka in which its exotic marginality becomes symbolically central. The appearance of these images in a guidebook for the first time in 2002 signals a new layer in nostalgia about the district that is a response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dark, Dangerous, and Down and Out Whereas some Odessans romanticized Moldovanka, others looked down on it. Yelena Malakhovskaia, an artist born in 1937, remarked: ‘I don’t like going there because it is dark, depressing, and culturally backward.’ Leah, a psychology student at the Odessa National University, grew up in the centre but lived in Moldovanka for a few years with her husband, who was from the district. She noted: ‘It’s really closely knit and I was always an outsider. I don’t find anything enlightened in the communal courtyard life.’ Mark (see above) said: ‘I grew up in the centre of Odessa and all my friends were there. I had no reason and no interest in going to Moldovanka.’ Furthermore, when I sought to rent an apartment there, several people cautioned against it, saying that the district was full of alcoholics and drug addicts and that I might be robbed there. Many Odessans who grew up in Moldovanka considered the centre of the city more interesting and prestigious. Galina Maksimenko was born in Moldovanka in 1937 but left in the 1950s. A masseuse by training, she worked on a Soviet cruise liner for twenty years. When she was a university student, her boyfriend lived in a central district; when they married, she moved to his apartment in a more prestigious district near French (Frantsuzskii) Boulevard and ‘forgot’ about Moldovanka. The characterization of Moldovanka as ‘dark’ and ‘uncultured’ situates it at the city’s symbolic margins and indicates the persistence of the pre-

118 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

revolutionary discourse in which Moldovanka represents everything the bourgeois centre is not. ‘Cultured’ Moldovanka In her book Moldovanka, Dontsova set out to expand Odessans’ understanding of the district by presenting its pre-revolutionary history. After a period of archival research, she discovered to her surprise that Moldovanka was a ‘genuine terra incognita on what appeared to be the well studied map of Odessa’s history’ (Dontsova 2001, 4). She explains why: There are two reasons: the repression of local history as a science4 ... and the works of Isaac Babel ... In reading Odessa Stories the public began to perceive Moldovanka as an outdoor theatre ... which continued to play the tragicomedies from the life of its exalted inhabitants ... Understandably Soviet propaganda, which presented this area – called Ilichevskii District – as reborn from the poor of this working class area, paled beside the magic of Babel’s prose. The many years of the coexistence of official and mythical Moldovankas can be felt to this day. More than one generation of Odessans, not to mention readers of ‘Moldovankan exotica’ from other cities, has grown up with the deep conviction that ‘it was, is, and will be like that forever.’ (4)

Dontsova does not aim to negate the mythology but rather to present previously unknown facets of the district’s history. She asserts that although Moldovanka may have been home to many poor residents, it also had schools, cultural institutions, and charities. In focusing on cultural organizations, her account contrasts with the marginal criminals that figure in Babel’s stories and the popular imagination. Dontsova’s book articulates an argument for considering Moldovanka part of the historical ‘centre’ on the terms of the ‘centre’ itself – that is, by underscoring the contribution its institutions have made to the cultural and economic development of Odessa. Babel’s stories illustrate how nostalgia shifts local high/low distinctions, which in turn transforms understandings of the urban landscape. The nostalgic concept of kolorit collapses the high/low distinction, enabling Moldovanka to stand for all Odessa. Yet ambivalence about the district reveals the salience of local high/low distinctions, which perpetuate the district’s marginality. Although Moldovanka is the ideal

On Odessa’s Kolorit

119

district for gentrification given its central location and unique architecture, more buildings are being torn down than restored. Planners say that many buildings have major structural damage because they have not undergone major renovations since they were built in the midnineteenth century. Furthermore, because Moldovanka is now part of the city centre, new apartment blocks that can accommodate more people are more profitable than reconstructed low-rise structures. Restoring buildings often costs more than constructing new ones, and most buildings in Moldovanka, though charming, ‘are not of architectural significance.’ Meanwhile Moldovanka enthusiasts do not command the resources to buy up and restore the buildings. In the fall of 2002 there were plans to make a museum of Moldovanka by reconstructing a ‘typical’ courtyard. By July 2005 they were on hold, and the demolition of old buildings continued apace. Nostalgia, then, has not yet been mobilized in political and economic decisions about the district. Courtyards and Markets as Places of Kolorit Residents consider Odessa’s unique cultural ways to have been produced through the cohabitation and intermingling of people of different nationalities, religions, and professions in the marketplaces and communal courtyards (dvory) in the pre-revolutionary part of the city. These two kinds of place are characterized by an intense sociability – one a place of dwelling, domesticity, and familiar faces, the other a transient public place of fluctuating relationships and commerce. Although marketplaces and courtyards have long been ubiquitous features of Odessa, nowadays the courtyards and the Old Horse Market in Moldovanka are increasingly considered to be places where Odessa’s kolorit can still be felt. Elsewhere, according to many Odessans, this character had been muted due to emigration, the privatization of apartments, and obtrusive advertising. By sustaining forms of sociability, these places have condensed experience and meaning into shorthand theories about what makes Odessa distinctive. Courtyards More than a hundred years ago it was remarked that Odessa had the charms of both the capital and the province. Her streets are like the capital and her courtyards like the province. – Yelena Karakina

120 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Courtyards in various locales around the Mediterranean have attracted anthropological attention for their centrality in residents’ and ex-residents’ memories of home and reflections on change (Bahloul 1996; Mitchell 2002). Likewise, the courtyard was central in framing Odessans’ memories of family, home, and neighbourhood whether they continued to live in one or had moved into a single-family apartment in a new district. Although each Moldovankan courtyard is unique, a ‘typical’ one comprises two-storey buildings that house a mix of communal and single-family apartments arranged around a small square with galleries on the upper floor. This southern European style of residential architecture – suitable for Odessa because of its mild climate – was widespread throughout the city during the first half of the nineteenth century (Topchiev 1994, 214). Most courtyards are closed spaces entered through a central passageway with gates of iron or wood, although some have passageways to adjacent streets and have the special designation of prokhodnye dvory. In the centre of the courtyard there is often a large tree with benches underneath. A water source and toilet were typically located in the courtyard itself, although many buildings now have indoor plumbing. Many of Moldovanka’s apartments have convoluted interiors created during the introduction of plumbing and the subdivision of space. Laundry is hung in the courtyard, and while it is rare to find domestic animals and gardens, as was common in the past, most courtyards are home to a brood of cats (See Figures 5 and 6). Some Moldovankan courtyards have a haphazard appearance because of the construction of makeshift, semi-official housing on the sites of bombed or collapsed buildings in the decades after the Second World War. On account of this and the fact that living spaces in these buildings were much smaller and more modest, there was a greater mix of communal and individual family flats than in the city centre. In Odessan courtyards residents were strangers from a variety of backgrounds who ended up living together under circumstances similar to those characterizing a communal apartment (kommunalka). Communal apartments were carved out of multiroom middle- and upper-class residences in urban areas after the October Revolution in an attempt to address the housing shortage and put revolutionary ideology into practice (Boym 1994, 124). Under Stalin, communal apartments were ‘everywhere in daily life and nowhere in its official representation’ (129). Moldovankan courtyards date primarily from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but courtyards also became important in Soviet urban planning, which sought to redesign

Figure 5. Courtyard at the corner of Malaia Arnautskaia and Utesev Streets.

122 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Figure 6. Courtyard on Balkovskaia Street near Dalnitskaia Street.

On Odessa’s Kolorit 123

living spaces to eliminate the conditions for individualistic and petty bourgeois behaviour (Buchli 1999; Humphrey 2005). Soviet courtyards – much larger than the typical Moldovankan courtyard – were semienclosed spaces created by constructing multi-storey apartment blocks where children played and neighbours socialized. By the late 1970s, however, this model for courtyards had been abandoned by planners as massive blocks of apartments were placed in open areas (Humphrey 2005, 53). In the Soviet period, Odessan courtyards were incorporated into the state through courtyard committees; like communal apartments, they were a tool for surveillance (Boldetskaia and Leonhardt 2005; and see Arkady Lvov’s novel Dvor for a fictionalized account). A distinct form of communalism existed in Moldovankan courtyards that was a product of Soviet ideologies, pre-revolutionary architecture, and residents’ improvisations in the face infrastructural limitations. In the fall of 2002, Yelena Nezdoiminoga, one of the architects responsible for Moldovanka, provided an enthusiastic description of the communal nature of courtyard life: In Moldovanka, the smaller the courtyard, the more exotic and full of kolorit. You have your Aunt Sonya and Aunt Dusia who are keeping an eye on everyone. I grew up when you could feel it really strongly. I was born in 1955. You could feel this everywhere until 1960. On holidays we set up a table in the courtyard and had a huge meal together. If someone got married we celebrated in the courtyard. In the evenings it was one big courtyard where adults played dominoes or chess and children played around. If my mum went to work, someone would make sure that I got to school. The whole courtyard was keeping a look out ... There were people who on their own initiative organized activities for children and looked after them. It was one big family. There was a lane with twelve courtyards. Children from those twelve courtyards played together. If someone lost their child, they usually found him with a grandmother from the neighbouring courtyard. The kolorit that existed then is disappearing. But times change.

Anna Kerpel, a correspondent for the news agency Ukrinform in her late thirties, also grew up in Moldovanka. Although Anna still lives in the district, her apartment is in a 1970s multi-storey apartment block. In elaborating on some of the ‘traditions’ that made Moldovankan courtyards distinct, Anna explained that the organization of games, cooking, and festivities was less common in the centre, where people were ‘more isolated from one another.’ She stressed that the people who lived in the

124 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

district were ‘simple’ folk and that she had become aware of the district’s distinguishing features from friends who visited from the centre: Courtyard residents always considered the courtyard part of their home. That’s why it was acceptable for women to go around in a housecoat and men in pajamas. They would often stand around talking on the street in front of the building with friends from neighbouring courtyards after garbage collection ... Because everyone knew each other, the residents of old courtyards hardly ever had curtains in their windows. Everything would become known anyway ... It was usual to speak to people from wherever you were standing – sometimes from a window when you had to call kids, or speak to someone in the courtyard. A woman might bargain with a seller in the courtyard from her window. One other difference between Moldovanka and the centre was the ease with which you could communicate [obshchatsia] with people. Our apartment had a window that opened onto the street. We often played our music in that room. We noticed that outside the window some men were standing around who lived nearby. I thought that maybe this was their gathering place. One day when the window was open, one asked me to turn up the music. So this group formed on account of us – they began to gather there and discuss their affairs.

Yelena’s and Anna’s descriptions of the kinship-like relationships among neighbours and the communal use of courtyard for leisure and festivities capture the ‘provincial’ quality that Karakina evokes. Yelena’s invocation of the courtyard as a ‘large family’ repeats a widespread idiom that underscores a sense of solidarity, cooperation, and moral obligation (Boldetskaia and Leonhardt 2005). At first glance, the accounts of these women resonate more with accounts of village life than with the qualities that classical urban theorists have attributed to cities, such as indifference and lack of empathy for other city dwellers, which were also common among communal apartment residents, or the impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental quality of relationships (Gerasimova 2002, 224; Simmel 1969, 48; Wirth 1969, 152–3). The distinctive communalism of Moldovankan courtyards comes into sharper relief when we compare it with accounts of communal apartments in Petersburg. The understandings of space generated within and between Moldovankan courtyards through the interplay of built form, social relationships, and styles of communication are more

On Odessa’s Kolorit 125

intimately connected to ‘personal’ or ‘private’ spaces of the home than to the corridors and kitchens of communal apartments (Gerasimova 2002, 219). Accounts of courtyards in Petersburg underscore their role in the formation of child, youth, and criminal subcultures (Utekhin 2001, 186); by contast, Yelena’s and Anna’s descriptions suggest intense quasi-familial relationships across generations. Moreover, in Moldovanka there was more ‘purposeful common activity’ – for example, funerals and birthday parties – than in Petersburg’s courtyards (see, for comparison, Gerasimova 2002, 215). A climate that allowed residents to go outdoors from early April to mid-October made for greater interpenetration of interior and exterior spaces, which likely contributed to the centrality of dvor in framing Odessans’ memories of childhood, family, and community. The relationships generated by the use of the physical spaces of the courtyard have a striking affinity with Oleg Kharkhordin’s reflections on the ways in which during the late Soviet period ‘public’ and ‘private’ were subsumed by the ‘social,’ which resembled an overgrown family (Kharkhordin 1997, 359). Courtyard narratives also highlight the cohabitation of people of different ‘nationalities’ and how the courtyard operates as a trope and theory of Odessan distinctiveness. Victor Feldman, who lived in Moldovanka from the time he was born in 1915 until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, described his courtyard as follows: I lived on the corner of Bazarnaia [Market] Street and Trekhugolnaia [Triangle] Street – the boundary between Moldovanka and the city ... The courtyard was very unique. There were two main categories of people. First there were those who worked for the Jewish Funeral Brotherhood, which was located in our building, one of the first civic organizations of the Jewish community in Odessa. This brotherhood collected money and buried the poor – of which there were many – free or nearly free of charge. They collected money from the rich for funerals. The organization was quite harsh. If they considered that a family had not given them enough money, they might not let them enter the cemetery ... The second category was workers. Many worked in the port – stevedores ... A stevedore never drank vodka with anyone from the Funeral Brotherhood. They said: ‘They eat their bread from others’ grief’ ... The composition of the courtyard was very international. Among my friends there were Greeks, Germans – Pavel Gauk – his family were colonists, and Bulgarians. I think there were about fifty to seventy families in the courtyard. And at least five different nationalities ... In courtyards, peo-

126 Kaleidoscopic Odessa ple for the most part lived on friendly terms. I don’t remember serious scandals with the exception of those times when one of the stevedores came home very drunk.

Courtyard residents were not the only ones to speak about communal life. Gevork Martirosian, an Armenian who came to live with his uncle after the earthquake in 1989 to finish high school, illustrates how courtyards have become part of an explicit theory of Odessan distinctiveness: Why do they say that an Odessan is a different type of person? Because as a child he became accustomed to living in a multiethnic courtyard. He could be a Jew but his neighbour might be Bulgarian or Moldovan and he grew up with them. He doesn’t feel a difference. He’s not raised in the spirit of his own nation ... Maybe it is there a bit. But there is a high degree of assimilation.

Courtyard residents described how people of different ethnic backgrounds resided together and intermarried. They illustrated this phenomenon by proudly reciting their own or their neighbours’ genealogies. The communal apartment has been invoked to describe Soviet nationality policy in the sense that each room was occupied by a different nationality (Slezkine 1994). The courtyard, with its more intense space of interaction, suggests that Odessan practices may have exceeded the limits of Soviet policy. That is, courtyard sociality enabled the merging of peoples (slianie narodov) envisaged under Brezhnev to a greater degree than the logic of the policy suggested. The diversity that Victor described may no longer be the norm. Yet as Gevork’s account indicates, Odessans use the architectural metaphor of courtyard and the sociality it represents to explain why they are different from the residents of other Ukrainian and Russian cities. At one time, courtyards throughout the city were thought to have generated Odessanness; now it is only in Moldovanka that these conditions are still seen to exist, though even there they are thought to be vanishing. Some former residents’ accounts of courtyard life were infused with nostalgia. Others, however, highlighted negative features of communal life. Maria Maslak was born in Moldovanka in 1911. Her Ukrainian parents had moved to Odessa from Chernihiv. Except between 1939 and 1942, when she lived with her second husband’s family on Pirogovskaia Street in the city centre, she lived in Moldovanka until 1983:

On Odessa’s Kolorit 127 Moldovanka. What kind of life was that? Awful conditions! A toilet in the courtyard. Water in the courtyard ... I did my laundry there – but you had to watch what you hung out there because there was so much stealing ... Later the flat began to fall apart. I remember one neighbour, Natasha. Her grandmother came over once to make a scandal. She was angry that I threw her kids out and didn’t let my daughter help them with their homework. I said why should they bother her, she has to study too. She’d be studying and they’d come round and distract her by asking for help.

Maria’s account stressed the conflicts with neighbours over attempts to enforce a private space for the family and the violation of the obligations implied by the notion of ‘big family’ such as stealing. Other former residents shuddered when recalling the close proximity in which they lived, how there was nowhere to hide, the difficulties in sharing a toilet, the discomfort of having the water source and toilet in the courtyard, and scandals among neighbours. While a distinct form of communal life existed in Moldovankan courtyards in the Soviet period, residents’ concern for privacy highlights how these living conditions conflicted with emerging Soviet subjectivities, for whom privacy was desired despite its official repudiation (Kharkhordin 1999). The consciousness of change that surfaced in virtually all narratives of courtyard life signalled a break that made possible nostalgic relationships to the past. Elderly residents sometimes discussed the traumatic effects that the Second World War and the Romanian occupation had on the district and how this changed the composition of courtyards and the relations within them. Vladimir Rechister (b. 1923) described his courtyard as a ‘big family’ that included members of different nationalities; yet his stories also provided a chilling account of the brutal ways in which the war transformed the social fabric of the district. His family and one other Jewish family were evacuated and learned what happened when they returned after the war. Some Jewish neighbours who remained behind had been shot, while others had perished in the Slobodka ghetto. His Bulgarian childhood friend had turned in Jewish residents across the street, who were subsequently shot. Residents more often compared their present with the more recent past – the 1960s and 1970s. Some noted the emigration of Jews and the in-migration of villagers and ‘new’ nationalities from Asia and the Caucasus over the previous decade. Valentina, an elderly resident of a second-floor apartment in a courtyard on Bulgarskaia Street, com-

128 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

mented that although people lived on friendly terms ‘before perestroika,’ now everyone tended to keep to themselves. When exchanges took place, they were now often sharp, reflecting underlying tensions over appropriate moral behaviour and differences in socio-economic status. Reflecting on these changes, one resident noted that under socialism a person received a salary regardless of how hard she worked. Nowadays, if a person ran a business ‘he got out what he put in,’ which left far less time for hobbies and for socializing with neighbours. Changes to building exteriors and courtyard spaces reflected increasing interiorization of space and distance in social relations. Many open balconies had been enclosed; fences were being erected in courtyards to prevent neighbours from parking their car next to one’s window; and metal bars were being attached to windows to deter burglars. Large-scale political and economic changes were transforming the material conditions and temporal rhythms that had once produced the intense quasi-familial sociality of the courtyard. Moldovanka’s courtyard life has become the object of reflection and elaboration into a theory of distinctiveness. Like houses, courtyards embody and generate sociality (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). The importance of courtyards in articulating theories of distinctiveness can partly be explained by the ubiquity of this form of dwelling up until the 1960s and by the dramatic shift to single-family apartments in Sovietbuilt districts. Many Odessans who grew up in pre-revolutionary buildings consider the postwar Soviet districts ‘not Odessan’ and incapable of generating an Odessan person. The uniqueness of courtyard life is viewed as Odessan as distinct from Soviet, yet that same uniqueness is inflected with the meanings of Soviet communalism. In contrast to Caroline Humphrey’s account of the historicity of the courtyard as a Soviet architectural and social form, my discussion of courtyards in Moldovanka highlights forms of urban communal life that existed before Soviet interventions, that were transformed by those interventions and then persisted after courtyards were abandoned as an object of planning intervention. Given the prominence of ‘internationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in distinguishing Odessa from Ukraine, the significance of intimate, domestic spaces such as courtyards in the local imaginary may seem surprising. However, Odessa’s multiethnic composition, communal practices, and ‘tolerance’ are viewed as distinguishing it from what are perceived to be more homogeneous Ukrainian cities (particularly Lviv) and the ‘nationalism’ of their residents.

On Odessa’s Kolorit 129

The Old Horse Market The liveliest theatre can be found at the market. – Leonid Utesov The Old Horse Market is more than a market – it’s a condition of the soul. – Vadim Evodokimov

Although a market has operated at the Old Horse Marketplace (Starokonnyi Bazaar) since the 1830s, it has undergone many transformations in both size and the nature of goods sold.5 Today the market has two parts: the market square, which has small warehouses, stalls, and kiosks where vendors sell pets and goods found in other markets; and a flea market spread out for blocks along the streets outside the marketplace. It is the latter that residents consider ‘special.’ Along sidewalks, vendors from across the city sell second-hand clothing, used books (mainly postwar Soviet publications, although occasionally something older), and Soviet goods such as lamps, busts of Lenin and Stalin, dishes, radios, pins, and LPs. Sections of the street market specialize in Soviet-made car and appliance parts. Selling on the sidewalks is technically illegal, though tolerated (see Figures 7 and 8).6 In a piece titled ‘My Old Horse Market,’ Mikhail Poisner evoked the unique qualities of the market: Everyone has their own Old Horse Market. I would even say that every age and character has its own Old Horse Market ... Everyone is looking for something here. I also was searching for something – I always sought obshchenie [conversation]. Without exaggerating, you can meet half of Odessa at the Old Horse Market ... Typical Odessan scenes, typical Odessan conversations ... If you hover around the pigeon keepers, the fishermen, the plumbers and other ‘specialists,’ you can hear tales that even Krylov and Anderson would applaud if they overheard. (Poisner 2001, 26–8)

In a newspaper article about the Old Horse Market, local journalist Vadim Evdokimov highlighted similar themes and asserted, like many other residents, that the market was one of the few remaining places where the ‘real’ Odessa could be sensed: There are few places left in our city about which you can say: ‘Here you can

130 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Figure 7. Street vendors at the Old Horse Market on Petropavlovskaia Street.

Figure 8. Street vendors on Rizovskaia Street.

132 Kaleidoscopic Odessa feel the spirit of Odessa, this place smells of Odessa.’ This Odessan kolorit is given not so much by the external appearance as much as by the atmosphere of obshchenie, or the aura, that predominates. These are the feelings aroused in us by the intoxicating air of the Old Horse Market, which for Odessans, is simultaneously a zoo, a workshop, an interest club and an open-air museum. (Evdokimov 2001)

Although the exchange of outmoded commodities makes the market ‘special,’ much more important is the exchange of stories, ideas, jokes, and performances independent from or alongside the transaction of goods. Odessans’ glowing descriptions of the Old Horse Market contrast with those in other postsocialist settings, where markets are viewed with contempt and suspicion as purveyors of immorality (Mandel and Humphrey 2002). However, the emphasis on obshchenie provides clues as to why Odessans value this market. Having the same root as obshchii (common), obshchenie ‘is both a process and a sociality that emerges in that process, and both an exchange of ideas and information as well as a space of affect and togetherness’ (Yurchak 2005, 148; Pesman 2000, 165–71). Obshchenie became particularly intense and ubiquitous in the late socialist period and a dominant pastime in all strata (Yurchak 2005, 148). The fact that kolorit is associated with obshchenie highlights not only the way in which Odessanness is performative in that it is produced intersubjectively through particular speech-acts, but also how the communicative practices of the market are inflected with Soviet experiences that resemble the communalism of courtyard life. I witnessed the market’s intense sociability when I joined my friend and vendor Evgeny Kokorsky on Saturdays during the fall of 2002. Evgeny is a retired engineer born and raised in Odessa whose vocation is writing short stories and local history. He has attended the market for several years and mainly sells CDs, videos, and his own book, though occasionally he has old postcards, journals, books, or pictures of interest to collectors.7 Evgeny stressed that he did not attend the market because he needed the money. Rather, it was a way to see friends regularly, meet new people, and arrange deals. He often visited fellow vendors and purchased their goods. In other words, he sought obshchenie. Scenes observed or conversations overheard became material for Evgeny’s stories, while relationships formed with vendors and clients yielded information for his own writing projects. Ivan Zherebkin, born in 1920, a vendor who lived nearby and who had worked in the Odessa film studio, told Evgeny about directors and old movie theatres in

On Odessa’s Kolorit 133

Odessa. Alexander, another elderly resident, whose family had been in Odessa for generations, shared what he had learned about the city from elderly relatives. Evgeny’s relationship with Ivan and Alexander illustrates the non-commercial kinds of exchanges that occur at the market and how the circulation of stories and knowledge reproduces a sense of the city’s distinctiveness.8 One Saturday, Evgeny’s acquaintance – a ‘typical’ flamboyant Odessan – stopped for a chat. He showed Evgeny a black mug with his zodiac sign that he had purchased together with a coin, allegedly from seventeenth-century Russia. Then he asked who I was and said: ‘I can tell she’s not an Odessan.’ He began flattering me. Pulling out a picture, he said, ‘I’d introduce you to my son, but he’s married already.’ Then he reeled out a series of stories from his own life. He spoke about his work as a pilot, skipped to his high school graduation night, and then told a story about how he learned to kiss properly: ‘I used to sell cups of water at the Pryvoz Market for five kopecks. With the money I bought a tomato ... I bit it and sucked till there was nothing left. Then once at a movie, I was so anxious to try it out that I grabbed the woman next to me kissed her, felt her up, and then she passed out from shock.’ In parting, he kissed my hand and wished me health and happiness, after which Evgeny said: ‘You see, typical Odessan. You’d never experience something like that in Canada, would you?’ This vignette brings to mind Leonid Utesov’s comment that the ‘liveliest theatre can be found at the bazaar,’ Tatiana Dontsova’s reference to Moldovanka as an ‘open-air theatre,’ and analyses of the interrelations of the ideas of theatre and market in Anglo-American thought (Agnew 1988, 40).9 However, in contrast to the interconnections between the institutions of theatre and market in medieval England, in the Old Horse Market, relations seem founded on the idea that both vendors and buyers perform Odessanness in everyday exchanges for the enjoyment of other Odessans and non-Odessans alike. Performativity in the linguistic sense converges with performance as a framed event set off from the everyday (Bauman 1977). Alaina Lemon’s study of Russian Gypsy performers’ negotiation of being categorized as ‘performers’ underscores the complicated ways in which the two senses of ‘performative’ merge and diverge (Lemon 2000a, 25). While certain kinds of verbal exchanges at the market constitute ‘Odessanness,’ the market provides a loosely framed context for particular kinds of display that are locally marked as having the quality of theatre or spectacle. Narratives of courtyard life and the market articulate a nostalgia for

134 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

forms of sociability considered uniquely Odessan that are unravelling in the postsocialist period. The longing for sociability expressed by kolorit articulates disillusionment with new forms of individualization and inequality ushered in by the collapse of the Soviet Union similar to the way in which Evenk women’s longing for the kollektiv formulates a critique of neoliberal practices in post-Soviet Russia (Bloch 2005, 534). The fluctuating relationships of the Old Horse Market differ from the kin-like relationships of courtyards, yet the idealized images of both places share an emphasis on connection, communication, and community – perhaps as a way to imagine transcending newly created social, economic, and ethnic differences (Herzfeld 1991, 66–7). Intense forms of sociability imbue both kinds of place with meaning. As metaphors for the city, they are perceived as having the capacity to reproduce Odessa’s uniqueness. The relocation of Odessans from courtyards to singlefamily apartments in Soviet-built districts along with the collapse of socialism has produced conditions for the proliferation of nostalgic representations of the district as a place of kolorit. Odessans’ reflections on change in turn abstract the experience of places into a local theory about the production of a sense of distinctiveness, a theory in which Odessans themselves articulate a performative understanding of place and identity. Touring Moldovanka and the Performativity of Place Visitors can now take walking tours of Moldovanka on themes such as ‘criminal Odessa’ and ‘Jewish Odessa.’ Walking tours create explicit connections between places through the contraction and expansion of time and space (see chapter 5). But a tour differs from the non-reflexive walking that de Certeau (1988b) describes in his essay on walking in the city. A large body of scholarship analyses tourism as a global system whereby an expansive economy is constantly appropriating and constructing new experiences and places and homogenizing them in the process (MacCannell 1976; Urry 1995). However, as Simon Coleman and Mike Crang note, many authors have retained a distinction between places as authentically experienced by locals and as simulated and staged for visiting consumers and have focused on events occurring in fixed locations between discrete actors (2002, 4). Instead of targeting issues of authenticity and performance, the focus can be shifted to the performativity of place rather than performance in place (10–11). Tourism can therefore be seen as an ‘event that is about mobilizing and

On Odessa’s Kolorit 135

reconfiguring spaces and places, bringing them into new constellations and therefore transforming them’ (ibid., 10). In this way, they suggest, the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, producers and consumers, hosts and tourists are challenged in contexts where audiences can be both local and distant, and where hosts are themselves tourists. Anna Misiuk, a researcher at the Literature Museum who is Jewish, offers walking tours about ‘Jewish Odessa’ to German tourists travelling via the Berlin Tourist Bureau as well as to groups from Israel and North America. One part of Anna’s tour focuses on Moldovanka. I joined an informal tour she offered two German tourists, her husband (who had never joined her tour before), and some of her course participants from the Jewish Self-Education Centre. She began by highlighting the physical markers of the district as we stood at the Old Free Port boundary. Describing the district as ‘half urban, half rural,’ she underscored the large numbers of Jews who moved to the area because of the lax registration practices and the lucrative trade in contraband goods. At Prokhorovskaia Square we stopped at the Holocaust Memorial commemorating the Road to Death10 and the Odessans who had helped save Jews. On Miasoedovskaia Street, Anna pointed out an administrative building that had once been a prayer house and took us into a small, ‘typical’ courtyard, where she described the relationships among neighbours of different nationalities and the convoluted interiors of the buildings. After directing our attention to the Jewish Hospital, we turned onto Bulgarskaia Street. With Tatiana Dontsova’s book in hand, Anna located an old courtyard where a veterinarian operated. She pointed out a building on the other side of the street where one of the wedding banquets in Babel’s stories had taken place, and shops that sold water and ‘eastern sweets.’ Walking back to the centre through Ilichevskii Park, where the first large cemetery in Odessa had been located, Anna explained that it had contained Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sections but had been levelled by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s. Anna’s tour connected visible monuments such as the Holocaust memorial with newly rediscovered but as yet unmarked places such as the prayer house using a technique of indexing – mixing fiction and fact to imbue physical space with meaning (Rojek 1997, 53). Although she highlighted ordinary places such as the courtyard, the places that guided her narrative were ‘significant’ because of their connection to Babel’s stories or Jewish history and culture in the city. Places with disparate temporal, social, or spatial relationships were linked together in traversing Moldovanka to create a multifaceted but nevertheless objec-

136 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

tified sense of a place. Although we did not traverse the whole district, linking these places together generated an image of, and connection to, the larger district of Moldovanka. That an outsider to Moldovanka such as Anna was conducting such a tour for her husband (an Odessan from the centre), her course participants (Jewish Odessans), German tourists, and an ethnographer showed the complicated ways in which locals and non-locals interact in producing the place. Anna’s tour objectified the district for outsiders; even so, a story she told about an unplanned encounter between tourists and residents presented a Moldovankan twist on the complex interrelations of locals, guides, texts, and tourists in the production of place. During a meeting with university students training to be guides, Anna sought to convey a sense in which the kolorit of the district remained. She described escorting a group of German tourists into a small courtyard near the Old Horse Market to see where the wedding banquet in Babel’s story ‘The King’ took place. As the German guide read out the story, some residents emerged onto the gallery in housecoats and slippers and peered down at the group. Gesturing at Anna, one woman remarked: ‘I’ve seen her here before, I wondered what she was doing.’ Having ascertained what the guide was reading, they began talking among themselves. The Germans asked Anna to translate. One resident continued, ‘Yes, I remember my great-aunt talking about that banquet’ and proceeded to add details that Babel had missed. The Germans were wide-eyed with wonder, surprised perhaps by the unstaged quality of this performance. Similar to the market, different ‘performatives’ converged in this event, by means of which both a local non-resident of the district and tourists transcended the ruptures of history to enter the mythic time of Babel’s stories. This spontaneous, unplanned encounter blurred the boundary between drama and life, between fact and fiction, reinforcing the sense that Moldovanka is ‘an open-air theatre’ and a place of kolorit. Moldovanka has been produced as a distinct place that at times signifies the whole of Odessa through urban folklore, the circulation of Babel’s stories, the attribution of productive powers to courtyards and the Old Horse Market, and the harnessing of these images and performances in walking tours. Kolorit has become a defining quality of Moldovanka in contemporary Odessa through the affinity of courtyard and marketplace sociability with the archetypes of Babel’s stories. The concept of kolorit illustrates not only how longing for past times is ex-

On Odessa’s Kolorit 137

pressed in relation to particular places, but also that the sentiment and cultural production of nostalgia need to be historicized. This means something different from the presentist conceptualizations that see nostalgia as an ever shifting relationship between a single present and a vanishing past. Nostalgic categories and the practices that sustain them should be considered in relation to a series of historical ruptures and senses of the past they have produced – not simply in relation to the most recent historical break. That is, while it may be true that nostalgia tells us more about the present than the past, it is nevertheless important to pay attention to the relationship between past and present forms of nostalgia. This is particularly important in postsocialist contexts, where the immediacy of the recent collapse of socialism leads social scientists to concentrate on nostalgia for socialism, overshadowing more complex genealogies of this sentiment and related cultural practices. The nostalgia indexed by the term kolorit has a complex history in the interpretations and reinterpretations that Odessans have made over generations of discontinuities caused by the October Revolution, Stalinism, and more recently the collapse of the Soviet Union. Addressing the experience of a series of breaks with the past and the genealogy of the concept of kolorit helps us understand why Moldovanka has become the object of intense longing as well as central to theories about Odessa’s distinctiveness. Although kolorit is evoked during tours and in spontaneous conversations to convey Moldovanka’s distinctiveness to outsiders, ambivalence persists about the district locally. This is evident in its frequent identification with ‘the dark’ and ‘the uncivilized.’ This ambivalence has been produced by positioning Moldovanka in relation to ‘high/ low’ distinctions and their spatial correlates of ‘centre’ and ‘margin.’ Babel’s nostalgic literary portrayal of marginal characters has in part blurred high/low distinctions and allowed the district to appear as the symbolic centre of Odessa. Even so, the persistence of marginalizing discourses has contributed to a situation where the levelling of buildings is outpacing restoration efforts. Nostalgia, therefore, has not had the transformative effects on the physical fabric of the district – by catalysing gentrification or conservation – that it has in other urban contexts. Finally, the reference to the place(s) of Moldovanka in my title was meant to capture the ways in which complex material and metaphorical relationships among places of different scales play a part in generating local discourses of Odessan distinctiveness. But it may be more than a

138 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

matter of semiotics. In serving as metonyms or metaphors, places can expand to encompass – or stand for – much larger spaces and to articulate theories of self and community. Experiencing the part may also in fact be a kind of experience of the whole, in the way Sarah Green suggests in her discussion of the fractal (a fragmented geometric shape that displays the quality of self-similarity due to the fact that parts of it are complete replications of the whole and the whole a version of any of the parts) as a way of producing place in one region of the Balkans (2005, 134–5). The condensing of Odessans’ experiences of the spaces and sociability of courtyards and the Old Horse Market is an effect of such relationships. In contrast to nationalist discourses, which assert that distinctiveness arises out of blood and connection to land, Odessans articulate a performative – processual rather than organicist – understanding of identity through emphasizing styles of interaction and the capacity of places to produce distinctive forms of sociality and sociability. This chapter has addressed how a particular part of the city and places within it have become central to the practice and imagination of the city as a special place. The next chapter, on the My Odessa walking club, continues this theme by considering how certain kinds of movements in the city and certain history-making practices enable residents to experience their city phenomenologically as a whole.

Chapter 5

Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa

Every Sunday, between twenty and thirty residents, most of them elderly, gather on a street in ‘Old Odessa,’1 the area built prior to the October Revolution of 1917. With their guide, Valery Netrebsky, they ramble for two or three hours down their chosen street, stopping frequently to be transported to past epochs by Valery’s layered account of the history of a particular building, empty lot, or courtyard. They discover hidden parts of streets, such as an overgrown block of Champagne Lane. They enter courtyards and speak with residents, as on Kanatnaia (Cable) Street where walkers, some of them Jews, debated one day with a Jewish resident the pros and cons of emigrating. They ponder the connection of certain places with well-known landmarks, as when Valery explained how the fish fountains on the Pushkin Monument were made in the Jewish Labour Association’s technical college at the corner of Bazarnaia and Kanatnaia Streets. They use motifs from Odessan authors’ works in describing their environment, as Yelena did in noting how a new metal balcony reminded her of Bezenchyk’s coffin in the novel Twelve Chairs. Walkers express wonder when discovering new places, outrage at the poor upkeep of architectural landmarks, irritation when previously accessible buildings are fenced off, and amusement at participants’ jokes and interjections. The walks of the My Odessa club, which I joined from August to November 2002, are about sensing Odessa as place. Sensing Odessa as place as these walkers do is intricately related to sensing history and the experience of sociability. Although the group is relatively small and not overtly political, in that it does not lobby the local administration, through these walks a sense of the urban landscape is transmitted in which Odessa is conceived as Russian, cosmopolitan, cultured, distinct from Ukraine, and more connected with Russia and the outside world.

140 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

The group’s practices are influenced not only by Soviet Odessan concepts of urban space and the formation of a post-Soviet public sphere in which informal groups can organize, but also by the pre-revolutionary architecture and geography of the city. Place is ‘experienced most robustly’ when it becomes an object of reflection and awareness (Basso 1996, 54). Phenomenologists argue against the Cartesian notion of space as a pre-existing plane in which places are created. Rather, they suggest that places, as centres of activity, human significance, and emotional attachment, are ontologically prior to space (Casey 1996). Place, in this view, is the most fundamental form of embodied experience, the site of a powerful fusion of self, space, and time (9). Anthropological studies of place are often situated in small communities (Feld and Basso 1996; Stewart 1996; Mueggler 2001), perhaps because the practices and understandings of place are more easily captured when considered on this scale. It may therefore seem surprising to claim that Odessans sense their city as a whole as place, given its size, complexity, differing urban milieux, and the association of ‘wholeness’ with the vision of planners (Rabinow 1989). Like London’s enthusiasts (Reed 2002), when My Odessa members walk Odessa’s streets, they sense and make their city as place. How the cityscape unfolds for the walkers, enabling them to sense Odessa as place, may be understood, following Hirsch (1995, 4), by viewing the landscape as a cultural process created through the articulation of movements between poles of foreground and background, place and space, inside and outside, and image and representation. However, in contrast to Londoners who walk the city alone, the Odessans enjoy walking as a group, listening to Valery’s accounts, sharing stories with one another, and interacting with local residents. Thus, this chapter illustrates how sociability and dialogue are central to experiencing and making place similar to, but distinct from, the tourists described by Harrison (2003). The club’s practice of sensing place is inextricable from a process of sensing history. Anthropologists have explored how narratives of memory and history relate to the formation of identities, as in the case of Ballinger (2003a) on the exiled Istrian Italians, and Brown (2003) for Krusevo residents in Macedonia. Yoneyama (1999) has unravelled the politics of historical knowledge about Hiroshima in urban planning debates and survivors’ testimonies, while Herzfeld (1991) has detailed struggles between residents and bureaucrats over monumentalizing history in a study of historical preservation efforts in Rethemnos, Crete. Heatherington (1999) has addressed the ways elderly women and

Walking Streets, Talking History

141

young men laid claims to spaces and history through cultural tactics appealing to the senses in Orgosolo, Sardinia. Other anthropologists have turned their attention to the way people sense history, pasts they have not themselves experienced, through dreams (Stewart 2003) and spirit possession (Lambek 2002). In a similar vein, walking is a means of sensing history. During walks, history is encountered in buildings, objects, ruins, monuments, stories, and other traces of the past in the urban landscape. Participants see, touch, and smell places as they listen to stories about the city’s past. At these moments, history is a diffuse feeling that may evoke or mingle with memories rather than the fixed form of a narrative. It is also a dialogic process in which, during discussions, the past is experienced as concrete and intangible, known and unknown. Edward Casey writes that ‘the living-moving body is essential to the process of emplacement’ and that bodies and places interanimate one another (1996, 24). Some anthropologists have related movement and the creation of spaces, places, and landscapes (Meyers 1991; Munn 1990; Pandya 1990), but a discussion of the meanings and forms of movement that make place is often only implicit (e.g., Reed 2002). However, Mueggler (2001) has analysed walking in the context of ritual practice in Zhizuo, in southwest China, while Stewart (1996) has described Appalachians’ encounter with history through roaming the hills. The experience of the city as place can occur through movement, for to walk is to ‘lack a place’ (de Certeau 1988b, 103), meaning a point in a grid, rather than the existential, meaningful experience Casey (1996) describes. Meanwhile for de Certeau space is ‘practiced place’ (1988a, 117). Although de Certeau and Casey appear to have contradictory understandings of place and space, they actually point to different aspects of the experience of place: it can be located and created through movement; it can be existential and social. Walking as a place-making practice in Odessa raises the issue of emergent social forms in the postsocialist context. Analytical insights for this context are suggested by Mbembe’s (2001) reflection, relating to the African postcolony, that the present ‘is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures’ (2001, 15–16). Mbembe’s observations can be used to illuminate how different temporalities and historicities are present in and constitute walking as a place-making practice in Odessa. This chapter examines the spatial concepts underlying walking, as well as the ways in which history is implicitly and explicitly entangled with the making of Odessa as place.

142 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

The My Odessa Club The My Odessa club was formed in 1995 by residents who participated in a local television program called ‘Where’s That Street, Where’s That Building?’ This program was sponsored by a successful local real estate firm and aired at the time of the celebrations of Odessa’s 200th anniversary in 1994. After seeing the shows, the head of the Association of Youth Clubs invited Valery Netrebsky, the winner of the final game, to form a club under this umbrella organization. At first the club met on the premises offered by the association in a basement on Pushkinskaia Street. Then, after a conflict between the head of the association and Valery, and because individuals expressed interest in walking the streets, the group began to meet outside on Sundays. During the walks, Valery does most of the talking and presents research published in newspapers or in the form of handwritten notes copied from documents. The participants come from a variety of backgrounds. Most, though not all, were born and have roots in Odessa. They include engineers, lawyers, artists, architects, the head of the Memorial Society,2 tour guides, and occasionally a student, professions that are considered to make up the intelligentsia. Some have been interested in Odessa’s history all their lives, whereas others developed an interest in it later in life. Although individuals in their twenties or thirties occasionally joined the group, most participants were between fifty and eighty. They have walked the entire pre-revolutionary part of Odessa several times. Some individuals have participated since the group was formed. Others stopped attending regularly while new people joined. Dubbed the gorodskie sumashedshie (the city’s crazy people), they appropriated this name for themselves. Valery explained: Some of my friends say, ‘We’ve known that you’re not normal for a long time. But what’s with this group of idiots that crawls around the streets with you? OK, we understand if you sit in the basement at that club and tell them something interesting about a street, but to walk around in the winter, in the rain?’ So it indicates one more time that there are always different kinds of people.

Valery is a professional tour guide. Born in 1946 in Odessa of a Jewish mother and Russian father, he studied history, graduated from Odessa State University, and has worked in the state tour bureau in Odessa since 1968. He has had an interest in ‘Odessika’ (history, literature, art,

Walking Streets, Talking History

143

and lore about Odessa) since he was a child, an interest that allegedly began with stories about the Second World War, although his family did not talk much about the city’s history. Valery explained: In those years [the early 1950s] there was no local history [kraevidcheskaia] literature. I still have an old map my aunt gave me. The maps in the Soviet Union were awful right up until it broke up. They were maps in name only. They were afraid of revealing information to foreign spies. So there were these rudimentary outlines which didn’t match the reality, like whether there was a turn or a parallel street. It was absurd. But at first we didn’t have even those kinds of maps ... So my friend Slava and I would pretend we were going to school so our parents wouldn’t suspect and instead we went somewhere like Zhivakhov’s Hill ... We didn’t rest until we had walked through [all the streets on the old map].

Besides the old map, the family’s pre-revolutionary guidebook provided inspiration. Later, Valery obtained a copy of Alexander de Ribas’s well-known book Old Odessa (1913), and read works about Khadzhibei and those of Soviet Odessan writers when they were republished in the late 1950s. Since the early 1990s, Valery has written articles for local newspapers about Odessa’s history. A small local publisher began reproducing his articles in 2001 in a series of tiny books about Odessa’s streets called Walks in Old Odessa. Valery’s story also illustrates the effects that unique objects and texts can have in transmitting the past. Objects seem to have a kind of agency in that they pique interest and act as clues to pursue knowledge of the past by different means (Gell 1998). The club’s name, My Odessa (also the name of a song), reifies the city as an entity to be walked. The possessive ‘my’ implies ownership and at the same time suggests the existence of multiple Odessas, as if each participant has his or her own city. Yet the existence of a dominant narrator also suggests an effort to persuade or create a common sense of Odessa as a place. Walking the Streets of Old Odessa The introduction to Walks in Old Odessa describes the club’s excursions: Every Sunday for six years regardless of the weather, a tall, heavyset man arrives at 9 a.m. at a previously agreed place. Between twenty and thirty people await him. He greets them and invites them to follow behind him.

144 Kaleidoscopic Odessa They walk along the street (agreed upon in advance), enter the courtyards, the entrances to the buildings, cross from one side of the street to the other, the person leading them in front all the while speaking continuously in a booming voice so that everyone can hear. They stop, people ask questions and then they go further, this lasting more than two hours. At first glance it may seem that there is nothing special here – an ordinary excursion in the city. But when they stop at a building, his speech unfolds in such an interesting manner that it seems the shadows of those who once lived, walked and suffered here are also present and listen to the story about themselves. Names, surnames, forgotten place names are cited and the listeners are involuntarily immersed in a world long gone. Like the stalker in Tarkovsky’s film, the storyteller leads those who have gathered into the ‘room of happiness’ where he is forbidden to go alone. A spell of beauty is attendant throughout the walk, yes, a walk, and not excursion ... Once everything has been said about a particular building, everyone walks further so that at the next stop once again they become immersed in the world of the past. When the excursion has finished people leave carrying this beautiful, possibly rainy, snowy or unbearably hot and humid Sunday morning in their consciousness. The storyteller receives no honorarium – this happens thanks to his enthusiasm. He leaves, but the buzz of conversation continues as people retell the stories and add pieces that have been missed.

Some prosaic details can be added to this lyrical description of a walk. At the beginning, Valery usually provides a thumbnail sketch of the kind of district in which the street was located – an elite dacha district, a merchant’s district, an aristocratic district, a red-light district – and how it transformed. He reads out the different names the street possessed. Sometimes he shows copies of maps from different periods as well as his own hand-drawn maps of particular streets listing the names of building owners. Often, he reads from a pre-revolutionary guidebook or a newly written history and refers to literary texts, films, or conversations with residents concerning a particular place. He almost always reads excerpts from his own articles. Valery frequently intersperses his accounts of the past with stories about how, through his ingenuity, good fortune, or personal networks, he acquired documents, maps, or clues leading to the resolution of a particular puzzle before other historians were able to do so (see Figure 9). Valery’s accounts feature stories about famous writers, actors, artists, musicians, political activists, and prominent individuals in the city’s

Figure 9. Valery Netrebsky and the My Odessa club in a courtyard on Stepovaia Street.

146 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

history. They include Eduard Bagritsky’s flat at 3 Bogdanov Street, where Odessan writers such as Isaac Babel and Yury Olesha would have cavorted until late, often disturbing the neighbours. However, besides highlighting remarkable places and people with illustrious pasts, he also points out ordinary places, such as the location of perfume and cable factories or where bakeries and wine cellars operated. Sometimes, in front of a particular building, Valery merely recites the names of the various owners, knowing little about their fate. Since many of these names are Jewish or Russified Jewish names, participants (many of whom are Jewish or have Jewish relatives by blood or marriage, such as Alexandra and Yelena) often note with some pride how Jewish the city once was. Between stories, Valery or a participant often underscores how a particular feature in the city illustrates the uniqueness of Odessa and its superiority over Kyiv, Petersburg, and Moscow. Exalting the high culture of the city in the past, Valery often laments the current state of affairs, the loss of the intelligentsia, and the incursion of ‘uncultured’ villagers into the city. In this way, conversations about the present and evocations of the past perpetuate features of a local discourse about the distinctiveness of Odessa. For participants, the Odessa of the past, which was more cultured, cosmopolitan, and pre-eminent, is more authentic than the Odessa of the present, a place eroded by villagers and unfavourable state policies. When Valery stopped to talk about a particular place, many participants listened attentively, scribbled notes, and took pictures. Some preferred their own conversations, although often they were asked to be quiet by those who wanted to listen. Several people told me to take Valery’s sometimes sweeping generalizations with a grain of salt. Once when I was scribbling down an inflammatory remark about villagers, a few people looked at me and said, ‘Don’t take him too seriously.’ Individuals thus accepted Valery’s version of the past and present to differing degrees. Odessans are reputed to appreciate eccentricity and flamboyance, qualities Valery exhibits. Indeed, many participants said they enjoyed listening to and conversing with Valery because of his characteristically Odessan behaviour and speech, and not just to learn about history. The walkers often would erupt into laughter at a story, joke, or comment that Valery or some other participant shared. Once as we walked along Balkovskaia (Ravine) Street, Valery paused to tell us a story about writing two articles.

Walking Streets, Talking History

147

I have this article [about Dalnitskaia Street] where I describe how I spoke with this old Odessan woman. This old woman told me about her neighbour: ‘In the morning she read your article with her own surname in it, and then in the evening she died!’

The group burst into laughter. And there’s a sequel to it. I was writing an article about Sredniaia Street. I was on the corner there. This very old man was walking by. I started talking with him and it turned out he was a well-known lathe operator, a former member of the Oblast Committee of the Communist Party. His surname was Jewish, by the way. An interesting one, too. Pasternakevich.

Again, peals of laughter rose from the group. So I strolled for a while with this Pasternakevich. Finally, some months later my article came out. It turns out that our Natasha is the niece of this Pasternakevich. She told us that he read my article about Sredniaia Street in the morning with his name in it, and then died in the evening!

The walkers gasped with a mixture of horror and amusement. ‘And so we shouldn’t read your articles in the morning!’ one man called out. This vignette illustrates Valery’s proclivity for telling stories and his central role in animating the group. It also illuminates the intricate ways in which he interacts with the urban landscape and its residents. He approaches local residents and gathers stories from them, which he then uses in his articles. In the walking practice of the club there is continuity with, and elaboration on, practices that existed under socialism. Even though during the Soviet period Odessa, according to Literature Museum researcher Anna Misiuk, was a kind of ‘repressed city’3 with respect to the production of historical knowledge, information about the past percolated through various texts, objects, and stories. In the postwar period, an old map or guidebook, casually passed on, piqued interest and inspired young people to walk the streets and gain a familiarity with place that official representations attempted to conceal. This created a practice that made the city into an object known differently from the prewar and pre-revolutionary periods. However, although individuals could wander and explore streets prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, or join an official tour, an informal group like the My Odessa club could not

148 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

have existed. The formation of such a group became possible only after 1991. The walks resemble neither the everyday, embedded, unreflexive practices that de Certeau (1988b) theorized nor the self-conscious but aimless rambling of Baudelaire’s flâneur examined by Walter Benjamin (see Gilloch 1996, 151–7). In contrast to the flâneur, who wanders the city alone, aloof, without any particular objective, to enjoy the shocks and stimulation of the crowds, noises, and sites, these Odessans not only walk as a group and actively communicate with residents, but also deliberately choose a street, which they then walk systematically. In their intensely social nature, the My Odessa club’s walks bring to mind the qualities of the Italian passeggiata, and gulianie, the Russian equivalent where friends walk the city for pleasure or leisure without a particular aim or destination. However, the display of the body through clothing and make-up is not central for these Odessans as it is in the passeggiata or gulianie (del Negro 2004). Although somewhat akin to Lemon’s (2000b) discussion of commentaries about social change on the Moscow Metro, the Odessan walkers may be distinguished by the regular, planned, ritualistic quality of their walks and by their deliberate focus on history. As the publisher of Valery’s book asserts, walks are not formal tours. A tour weaves together stories of disparate, usually visible, ‘extraordinary’ sites (Rojek 1997, 52) into a formalized, repeatable, coherent narrative. A tour compresses time and space to convey a sense of place aimed mainly at neophytes and outsiders, whom a guide encounters often for the first time. In contrast, the Odessan walks are directed at insiders who possess knowledge of Odessa and who meet regularly, and involve a relatively systematic movement along a street determined in advance to encounter different epochs present at particular places. In other words, to tour, se flâner or guliat, and to walk as this group does, form different chronotopes in which time and space are compressed differently (Bakhtin 1981). Mapping History, Making Place During the walks, the club participants encounter places in the city they would not normally visit because they are out of the way, invisible, dilapidated, or appear uninteresting. While listening to and telling stories about buildings, their occupants, events, and the transformation of the site, participants sense places in the city. Even if one does not remember all the details of the account, the memory of places on a

Walking Streets, Talking History

149

street remains. In walking more and more streets, participants’ knowledge of places expands, which contributes to the sense of Odessa as a distinct and special place in a new national space that had relatively little meaning for a number of participants. The group’s practices are like some aspects of Benjamin’s (1979) engagement with the city. Like Benjamin, the Odessa walkers interpret the cityscape through traces, objects, and ruins that remain from previous epochs. In walking and talking about the past, they evoke, imagine, and reassemble it, which enables them to sense history. The experience of sensing history is shared (as participants hear the same stories and see the same places) and personal (as memories of individuals’ own experiences mingle with what they hear and see). Furthermore, similar to the way in which Benjamin was searching for a future-oriented, redemptive history, the participants’ nostalgic readings of the past articulate a critique of the present, enabling the imagination of a different future. Yet the members’ stories and practices differ in that they lack the deeper critique of modernity and historicism that Benjamin (1968) elaborates. While on the one hand the group is engaged in sensing the city through interpreting various traces of the past, on the other it is mapping history (Boyarin 1994). Boyarin employs the idiom of mapping history to imply a Cartesian notion of abstract space when discussing how states map history onto territory. Mapping history can be nuanced with Gell’s (1985) understanding that people everywhere have both abstract and embodied ways of understanding space. Thus, mapping history through traversing a street and locating all known places and their histories bears similarities to the creation of a map of abstract space. However, since Valery’s maps do not always match the terrain, participants move through the city partly by feel as well, as the following account illustrates. One late summer day, the group explored Pionerskaia Street. The street received this name after the revolution when an orphanage was set up where the Pioneers, the state-run children’s organization, ran camps. Part of the street was formerly called Sharlatanskii (Charlatan) Lane, a name it allegedly acquired because it was originally a poor district where prostitutes and stevedores lived. The other part was called Lazar Lane, after the person who owned the land, although some maps designate the whole lane Charlatan. The street is close to the edge of the pre-revolutionary boundary of the city, and most of the buildings in the area were constructed after the Second World War. The group discussed

150 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

a new church under construction on the corner in honour of the daughter of the Head of the Law Academy. Valery led the group behind a building on the opposite side and pointed to a car park where once stood the residence of Boris Lesanevich, a mountain climber whose ancestor helped Russian troops storm Khadzhibei, and who spent many years in Nepal, where he died. Walking back to Pionerskaia Street, Yelena, an artist (see chapter 3), stopped to point out the location of artists’ studios where, in the 1970s, posters were painted for the October Revolution and Victory Day holidays. She explained, ‘I always chose to paint Lenin so I could avoid painting all the medals on our other leaders.’ Responding to Yelena’s description of her paintings of Lenin, Valery said, ‘It sounds as if you painted Lenin during his Switzerland period, not during the October Revolution!’ Back on Pionerskaia Street, Valery spoke about the First Comintern Children’s Village on the other side of the street, which functioned from 1922 until the outbreak of the Second World War. It was the largest orphanage in the Soviet Union, with some forty buildings that housed children of different nationalities. He noted, ‘In those days, though, it was easier to set up such a place and work with children because many of them were cultured, educated, and from good families. Today’s homeless children are degenerates!’ Only a few buildings of the orphanage remained intact, some of which had been occupied by a school. Some of the orphanage’s buildings had been knocked down when the building occupied by the Law Academy was constructed. Behind the Law Academy, down the cracked and overgrown remains of Klenovaia (Maple) Street, Valery pointed out one remaining residence from the Children’s Village. After lingering, the walkers crossed the street to sit in a shaded area next to a single-family home built in 1913. Valery transported the participants to the end of the Second World War, as he read a letter written by the owner of the house describing the retreat of the Romanians and Germans. As this cursory description shows, Valery escorts his audience from epoch to epoch, from the present, to the early twentieth century, to the 1920s, to the Romanian occupation, as he leads from place to place. Although the walk, as a type of chronotope, fuses time and space, during these walks space rather than time is the organizing principle. At the same time, the walk along Pionerskaia Street illustrates a complex spatio-temporal process of making the cityscape: the juxtaposition of encounters with new places (such as the church), ruins (Klenovaia Street, no longer in use), traces of the past (a remaining building of the

Walking Streets, Talking History

151

Children’s Village), and memories of the more recent use of buildings (such as Yelena’s account of painting posters for Soviet holidays). Valery also created places out of absences, as with the Balkovskaia Street area.4 Along this ‘ditch,’ as locals called it, Ukrainians and Moldovans had settled and cultivated vineyards prior to the founding of Odessa. Prerevolutionary maps recorded ponds and a river. In Odessa’s early days, this ravine was called Cossack’s Ravine after the Cossack settlements nearby. Valery shifted to the more recent past in recalling that there had been a Roma settlement on the other side of the street that had been cleared away in the 1960s. Walking further, and in anticipation of Diukovskii (Duke) Park ahead, Igor recalled the long queues for an exhibition in 1970 about tourism in the United States. The year 1970 provoked Alexandra’s and others’ reminiscences of the cholera epidemic and quarantine that year: ‘I remember not being able to take my vacation. The trains weren’t running at all.’ Then Valery took a path between a 1970s-style multistorey administrative building and a studio for making moulds for plaques and sculptures to show the one remaining building from the ‘sailor’s village,’ settled a few years after the founding of Odessa. Painted pink, it was being maintained. While walkers were elated to see this remnant from Odessa’s early history, they were disappointed when the resident knew nothing about the building. Some members had heard of this place; for others it was a revelation. Later in the walk, Valery pointed out the supposed birthplace of Isaac Babel (the original building is no longer there), mentioned the controversies surrounding whether he was born in Odessa or Mykolaiv, and headed for the site of the oldest synagogue in Odessa. In this way, buildings that seemed insignificant or remained hidden from view were incorporated into an understanding of Odessa. Ordinary buildings emerged as noteworthy through Valery’s revelations and recollections. On entering a small courtyard with a gallery on Kanatnaia Street, Valery asked if anyone recognized it. The walkers looked around, puzzled, searching unsuccessfully for some clue. He explained that this was the courtyard where the Soviet film The Heroic Deed of Odessa was shot, a film about the defence of Odessa in 1941 that all of them had seen. ‘How surprising! I never would have recognized it!’ one woman exclaimed. Others shared her surprise. Another woman noted, ‘I’ve walked by this place so many times, but I never would have thought this had some special significance.’ The face of an eminent local Pushkin scholar lit up with recognition. The walkers around her listened as she recollected: ‘During the Romanian occupation, my par-

152 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ents brought me here occasionally. We came to see some friends here who helped us out with food and medicine.’ As Valery spoke, the participants employed their senses of sight, touch, and smell as they walked the streets and examined courtyard structures. On Malanov Street, some walkers noticed metal signs on a courtyard wall. Brushing the dust off, they deciphered a sign produced in the 1950s admonishing residents not to use the courtyard as a toilet. They launched into an exchange of stories about eccentric residents of their own courtyards. On a hot day in June, participants noticed the scent of the linden trees in bloom as they waited for the group to gather on Stepovaia Street, a central street in Moldovanka. This prompted a participant to remark, ‘There is always a scent in the air in Odessa.’ Her interlocutor recalled the scent of acacia trees (for which the city is famous), which had bloomed earlier in the spring. When we entered a courtyard farther down Stepovaia Street, Boris, a retired chauffeur known for his collection of signs, bricks, and other paraphernalia from ‘Old Odessa,’ spotted some loose ceramic roof tiles on top of a one-storey building. He moved a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and brought the tiles down. Participants moved closer and reached out to touch the inscription on the tile as he read out the name of the Marseilles-based French firm that had produced them (see Figure 10). Boris and some other participants took some tiles home. These descriptions of walks illustrate various facets of the urban landscape as process and its creation as place for the participants. During these walks, histories and places were encountered, sensed, and mapped. Participants sometimes took interested friends or relatives to a ‘hidden’ place. Spaces became places, past epochs came to life, absences became presences as streets frequently or infrequently walked were incorporated into a sense of the city as place. Significantly, it is the pre-revolutionary part of Odessa that is mapped and made meaningful. Like the London enthusiasts, these Odessans did not visit the suburbs, as they did not consider them part of the ‘real Odessa’ – a view that resonates with perceptions of the English town of Milton Keynes as a bland city with no history and little sense of place (Finnegan 1998). According to these Odessans, there is ‘no history’ connected with the new districts except for the construction of the suburb on top of a preexisting village. The walking practices of the My Odessa group combine practical and sensual learning with cognitive learning. Indeed, ‘walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body

Figure 10. Participants examine a pre-revolutionary roof tile made in Marseille.

154 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

and the mind with the world’ (Solnit 2000, 29).5 The ways in which participants learn about the past by navigating the city on foot with Valery involve the practical learning described in ethnographic accounts of apprenticeship (Herzfeld 2004; Wacquant 2004). However, the My Odessa participants do not explicitly discuss the corporeal aspects of their activities even though walking – as a technique for learning and knowing the past – implicates the body and senses. Rather, they emphasize the cognitive aspects of learning, such as acquiring information about Odessa and socializing with other participants. Nevertheless, my participation in the excursions revealed that participants’ senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell are activated during the walks. David Sutton has suggested that the union of the senses in synesthesia is ‘an embodied aspect of creating the experience of the whole’ (2001, 102). The sensual, corporeal aspects of walking in combination with storytelling and socializing enable participants to experience the city as a whole. These walks illustrate Mbembe’s (2001) point about how different temporalities coexist in a place-making practice. The city of the pre-revolutionary period is made present through a focus on what remains from this period. At the same time, the group moves back and forth across time imaginatively from the late eighteenth century to the present. De Certeau’s (1988b, 108) observation that ‘places are fragmentary and inward turning histories ... accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state’ captures the essence of walkers’ practices and gives flesh to Mbembe’s observations about the present as a composite of different temporalities and historicities. Disputing History Although it may appear that people commune with unproblematic pasts, presented mainly by one person, history was not infrequently disputed during these walks. Sometimes this concerned factual issues, such as who may have lived in a building, when, and what it was used for. Other times a dispute was more acute and concerned the interpretation of major historical events. At such times, history became a dialogic process where meanings were open and gaps in knowledge tangible. Yet the idea of Odessa was capable of encompassing the fragments, disputes, and gaps. Valery and Yury had ongoing, sometimes sharp exchanges regarding

Walking Streets, Talking History

155

the Romanian administration of Odessa during the Second World War. Yury had lived through the occupation as a teenager and with his brother and mother had escaped arrest by the Romanian police and the German SS several times (see chapter 3). Despite hardship, Yury insisted that life under the Romanian administration had been much better than in the Soviet Union and was unrelenting in his criticism of the Soviet system and leaders, particularly Stalin. Valery, who was born after the war and whose father fought in the Soviet Army, refused to acknowledge Yury’s position. Yury talked about his experiences during a walk on Koblevskaia Street near the New Market. At the end of the Defence of Odessa in October 1941, when Soviet troops were withdrawing, he heard explosions and came to see what had happened. People were staggering out of the market wounded, while others lay dead in the street. A woman yelled, ‘It was our planes that bombed us!’ He used this story to illustrate his view of the insidious nature of the Soviet administration and to inject ambiguity into the heroic Soviet narratives of war, which still have widespread currency in Odessa. Another episode illustrates contested views about the interpretation of the events of the Second World War. One Sunday, the group was near the New Market where the bombing Yury described had occurred. In a spacious courtyard, Valery explained that before it was bombed, it had a garden, four buildings, and a theatre. He had found this out from the daughter of one of the servants, who had lived in a small shed in the back of the courtyard. Yury came in and said, ‘We’ve just met a woman who witnessed how the Soviets bombed this street when they retreated.’ Valery turned away, clearly not interested. Cutting Yury off, he derided live witnesses, saying that they could not be relied on to give accurate accounts. Yury muttered to himself, ‘This is really crazy. Somehow, he just can’t understand.’ Later in the walk, Yury said that he was not surprised by Valery’s reaction, since he was aware of his general position. Yet he was taken aback at Valery’s categorical refusal to pay attention to this particular incident and to an eyewitness. He planned to go and record this woman’s testimony together with a member of the Memorial Society. Yury is Jewish, so it is rather striking that he would express a view that tends to be more associated with non-Jews who themselves or whose relatives lived through the occupation. Many declare that life was better under the Romanians. Other participants hold to the Soviet interpretation of events, which vilifies all occupiers. Valery, born after

156 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the war, categorically rejected Yury’s experiences and oral testimony on the basis that it contradicted his own understanding. Yet curiously, a connection to place, to Odessa, holds people together even though they possess widely different views of critical events. Sometimes disputes emerged over the interpretation of large-scale events; at other times the walking group served as a forum for discussing and debating the merits of other recently published articles or books about the history of Odessa. Valery often challenged the accounts of other local historians. For example, on Balkovskaia Street he contested the date for the founding of the oldest synagogue in Odessa, a date cited by a local historian in a new book about the district of Moldovanka. At the original Balkovskaia Street, which few people knew, the group entered a courtyard with crumbling buildings in search of the site of the synagogue and was greeted with hostile barks from a pack of stray dogs. Valery described his encounter in the early 1990s with an old woman who lived in the courtyard; then he read the entry from the Odessa Cicerone, a pre-revolutionary guidebook, which cited the founding date as 1792, whereas the new book gave the date as 1797. He then argued that this author had likely cited the late 1790s as the date because an earlier one did not fit the book’s argument that Moldovanka was founded after Odessa, a position he also challenged. After some participants expressed disbelief, Valery read from his own article: I wanted to tell you how I described this: ‘The Odessa Cicerone says that the Balkovskaia Synagogue is located at 133 Balkovskaia Street and is the oldest in Odessa, built in 1792. I spoke with some old residents of Balkovskaia Street and searched for the place where this oldest place of worship in Odessa was located. I found that it was located in the block between Razumovskaia and Sredniaia Streets. It probably stood deep in the courtyard. It was disassembled stone by stone during the Romanian occupation. Evidently, it was on Balkovskaia Street that some of the first Jews of Odessa lived before the founding of the city ...’ Now I’ll read you what [the author] wrote: ‘The place of worship known as the Moldovanka community synagogue located on 133 Balkovskaia Street was built at the end of the 1790s.’ For the sake of those who don’t believe me let’s look at her reference for this: footnote #17. ‘See Odessa Cicerone 1914, p. 17.’ Here the date 1797 is cited. What do you call this?

The discussion continued with some people from the group playing devil’s advocate. Most people had seen or read the book about Moldo-

Walking Streets, Talking History

157

vanka, and many had enjoyed it. Valery continued to criticize the book and claimed that the author, like most Odessans, had been unable to find the site, not knowing that the original Balkovskaia Street was a small side road rather than the main road currently in use (See Figures 11 and 12). Valery explained the difficulties in locating buildings and properly identifying institutions that had been housed in them. Sometimes the numbering on streets had been reversed. Sometimes the buildings had been destroyed and the street renumbered, which misleads researchers. Other times, institutions or organizations had relocated several times. He mentioned a recent case in which some historians wanted to mount a plaque on a building to commemorate the college where Leonid Utesov, the Odessan jazz musician, and Sergei Utochkin, an early Russian aviator, allegedly studied. Valery said that the college had changed location several times, so it was not clear whether these men had studied in that very building. Engagements of this sort with other historians’ work confront participants with the slippery nature of the past and the difficulties in fixing dates and connecting institutions with certain buildings. Like the disputes over the interpretation of the Romanian administration, discussions about the merits of historians’ work create another layer of meaning in these Odessans’ understanding of their city as a place. Odessa as Courtyard On practically every walk the participants had discussions with residents about certain buildings and the people who once lived there. Sometimes they knocked on doors. Other times they struck up a conversation with someone in a courtyard. Thirty people could walk boldly, uninvited, into a tiny courtyard, the entrance to a building, chattering away, while Valery boomed out his story (see Figures 13 and 14). They were usually warmly received, but sometimes residents viewed them with suspicion and, on the rare occasion, hostility. The only hindrances were locked gates, vicious dogs, and surly residents. These practices reveal additional dimensions of history’s dialogic and dispersed qualities and its social life beyond narratives inscribed in written texts. They also reveal an implicit understanding of the relationship between public and private spaces underlying the group’s movements through the city, as the following anecdotes illustrate. One hot, sunny day in July, on the lower end of Belinskaia Street, the

Figure 11. The original Balkovskaia Street.

Figure 12. The courtyard at 133 Balkovskaia Street.

160 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

group walked towards the sea in search of Wagner Lane through the shaded grounds of the old evangelical hospital, now a tuberculosis clinic. Wagner Lane was at the end of French Boulevard close to Shevchenko Park, where in pre-revolutionary times the wealthy built their dachas. Using Valery’s copies of old maps and hand-drawn street outlines, the group located the lane only to hear Valery explain that in fact there appeared to have been two such lanes. The group set off in search of the second lane, now called Uiutnaia (Pleasant) Street. After entering the courtyard where the NKVD chief of Odessa had lived, Valery read from his article about flat number two, where Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik feminist, and her second husband had lived. Then he turned and addressed a man in his forties who was cleaning a car in the yard. After being told that they were a group of local historians interested in the first residents of the building, the man explained that his wife’s mother was the great-granddaughter of Kollontai. A few members of the group crowded around, telephone numbers were exchanged, and some members agreed to talk to the woman at a later date. Just as the group was preparing to leave, another woman emerged from the building at the back of the courtyard. On learning who the interlopers were, the woman said that her husband was the grandson of Kiriak Kostandi (1852–1921), a well-known impressionist painter from Odessa who had painted the city and its environs and taught at the Odessa Art College. She informed them that a book of recollections about him would soon be published, and once again numbers were exchanged. Farther down this street, the group entered an open gate and approached the side entrance of a house that was once the dacha of a wealthy family. The walkers had come to see the open staircase with murals on the walls. In small groups the participants ascended the narrow staircase to have a closer look. Some residents gave the strange interlopers inquisitive looks, but no objections were raised. Sometimes the members or Valery would knock on doors of people they had spoken to previously. Once, at the bottom of French Boulevard, Valery yelled through the open window of an elegant, two-storey, single-family dwelling and asked for Irina. The group was afraid to enter the yard because a vicious dog was growling at them from the other side of the fence. Irina came out and was happy to see the group, some members of which she evidently knew. The participants began to talk about the house and the family that had lived there when it was

Figure 13. The My Odessa club in a courtyard on Bogdanov Street.

Figure 14. Members of the My Odessa club speak with a local resident on Stepovaia Street.

Walking Streets, Talking History

163

first built. Valery told the woman a few things he had uncovered and included in an article: there had been four children in the Sotianov family; the Soviet Odessan writer Evgeny Petrov had been friends with one of the sons, Ivan, who later became a victim of the repressions for serving as a naval officer in Tsarist Russia; and one of the daughters had been the first love of Valentin Kataev, another Soviet Odessan writer. In this exchange, group participants expanded the local resident’s knowledge of the history of the building. Residents also viewed members of My Odessa with amusement and suspicion. Sometimes passersby were surprised that people would take such an avid interest in buildings and places that seemed ordinary and insignificant. Sometimes residents would anxiously try to discern if the group were inspectors from the Gas Bureau intending to shut off their supply, or from the Architecture Bureau to inform them that their building would be knocked down. Most residents were welcoming, but not all. One woman angrily shouted at the group to leave her courtyard and threatened to call the militia. A member retorted, ‘You must be from Slobodka!6 Have you paid for your gas? Bugger off!’ The processes of exchanging knowledge while walking into what seem to be private spaces are likely related to a conception of the Odessan landscape as a communal space accessible to all Odessans to be viewed and enjoyed. This understanding of space has pre-revolutionary and Soviet roots. Courtyards are a ubiquitous feature of the pre-revolutionary architecture of Odessa. Prior to the revolution, there was likely a much greater contrast between courtyard life in the central elite districts and in poor areas such as Moldovanka. After the revolution, the Soviet authorities nationalized property and attempted to cultivate the ethos of collectivism (Bater 1984, 139). The luxury flats of Odessa’s central districts were turned into communal flats, settled by people of different social backgrounds. The notion of bolshaia semia (large family) is used to describe the ideals of courtyard life, as I discussed in the previous chapter, and indeed Odessa as a whole (Boldetskaia and Leonhardt 2005). Among other things, this concept conveys the sense in which everyone in the city knows everyone and talks to anyone as if he or she were a relative. The courtyard may serve as a metaphor for an Odessan form of sociality and for an understanding of urban space as communal, neither private nor fully public. These features of the courtyard also tie in with the notion that in the Soviet Union, where the state tried to abolish the ‘private,’ ‘public’ was better understood as social, neither public nor private but resembling an overgrown family (Kharkhordin 1997,

164 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

343). If Odessans are considered one big family and the city as a whole is conceived as a courtyard, what might be considered public and private spaces are presumed to be accessible to all. The hostile reactions of some residents indicate that not everyone shares the group’s spatial understanding of the city. Indeed, those who are hostile are characterized by the group as being uncultured, probably from a village, and therefore not ‘really Odessan.’ Transforming Cityscape, Transforming Society The introduction to Valery’s book suggests that these walks are mainly about voyaging to the past. However, while talking history was certainly a major part of a walk, the present always intruded, and indeed, encounters with the past were also encounters with aspects of present social transformations. Walkers’ comments were often framed by a narrative of decay, loss, and degradation. A few members, like Valery, were nostalgic for the Soviet Union, in which there had been order, a ‘higher level of culture,’ and a better standard of living for the average person. Many others, while recognizing some of the merits of the previous system, were not as nostalgic. However, everyone was critical of the current state of affairs and of many changes that had occurred since 1991. Some remarks addressed changes in practices of the population at large and the demographic changes in Odessa – namely, the increased presence of rural people. In one incident, on discovering that the grass had been paved in a courtyard on Kanatnaia Street, Valery launched into one of his tirades against the Zhek (Housing and Utilities Committee) and the yard keepers. A member chimed in, ‘The yard keepers are barely literate. This one certainly couldn’t be an Odessan. An Odessan would never have allowed the paving to occur!’ One excursion took in the oldest health resort in Odessa, dating from the 1820s. Many of the buildings from the mid-nineteenth century were in disrepair, which deeply dismayed the participants. Yury expressed his exasperation strongly: ‘Look at how they’ve let those buildings run down. Now they are beyond repair. It is absurd that they have not been kept up and used to attract tourists! Any other country in the world would pay attention to this, but not this regime.’ Yury and many others expressed anger at the current regime of Leonid Kuchma, whose handpicked successor was defeated in the fall of 2004 after a powerful opposition movement successfully challenged attempts to rig the elections. Others articulated a more generalized frustration with the ‘Ukrainian

Walking Streets, Talking History

165

authorities’ at all levels, whose officials, they thought, ‘were incapable of governing.’ During another walk along Chornomorskaia (Black Sea) Street, the walkers discovered that some luxurious old mansions there had been newly renovated and closed off by high fences. One had housed the American consulate in pre-revolutionary days and now supposedly belonged to the mayor’s daughter. Much to the disgust of the group, she had tastelessly, and in disregard for the original style, added a mansard roof. In response to the high fences and the takeover of these buildings by the new elite, one person sighed, ‘That’s democracy for you.’ The walkers’ reactions registered frustration with the privatization of property and changing uses of buildings and spaces in the city. Increasingly, certain buildings and grounds that were once publicly accessible are being enclosed for the enjoyment of a privileged few. The walkers’ comments dovetail with anthropological accounts critical of the ways in which the erection of walls and fences undermines the promise of democratic citizenship in cities such as Sao Paolo (Caldeira 2001). While participants may subscribe to the ideals of ‘democracy,’ they reject how the local operation of the market has generated neoliberal forms of public/private demarcations in the urban landscape. These transformations undermine the My Odessa participants’ concept of urban space as social space, neither fully public nor private, and consequently the conviviality they expect from strangers in their city. Considered alongside changes in the communal ethos of courtyard life described in chapter 4, the walkers’ conflicts with residents illustrate how the impact of political and economic change on the physical structure of the city has transformed norms of urban sociability as well.7 These comments also highlight other readings of post-Soviet social and political changes among certain age groups and members of the intelligentsia. Key themes included the ‘loss of culture’ (in the sense of declining reading practices); the influx of villagers and outflow of intelligentsia; the privatization and enclosure of property; the emergence of new inequalities; and the negligence of the Ukrainian authorities. On the one hand, some aspects of the walkers’ critique reproduced distinctions between people of different social backgrounds that emerged in pre-revolutionary Odessa as part of the articulation of a bourgeois identity (Sylvester 2005). On the other hand, their criticism of the enclosure of what is perceived as public property seems to stem more from an understanding of urban space that was created during Soviet times. These walks can be read in part as a response to disenchantment with

166 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

the present and as a momentary escape to the times and places of a past idealized as more meaningful and authentic. That is, they are a chance to experience Odessan sociabilities and a forum to register discontent about current transformations. Walking the City, Making the Self Participants take distinct pleasure in these Sunday walks. That they are an important part of the participants’ weekly routine suggests that they are a significant self-practice. One elderly man was concerned that the younger generations no longer knew much about Odessa’s past: ‘Who will remember when we’re gone?’ He seemed to fear that this knowledge would be lost or play a less significant role in the lives of the young than it did for the members of this group. Tatiana, who works as a guide, expressed enthusiasm, saying, ‘Odessa is such an interesting and unique city. I enjoy finding out more and more about its history. Valery Petrovich knows so much. We appreciate that he shares his knowledge with us.’ Alexandra, a lawyer in her late forties, has a degree in history. A native Odessan, she has always been interested in the city, and read as much as she could about it. She had worked as a tour guide during the summer while studying at the university. She and her husband had been members of My Odessa for several years before I joined. Her husband said that he and others needed to join the walks, just as Valery needed to tell his stories, although when asked why, he struggled to articulate reasons and mentioned his and others’ interest in and love for the city. When she misses a walk, Alexandra feels ‘something is not quite right ... that a natural rhythm has been disrupted.’ Both often commented on the transformation of the city, noting that many of their friends had emigrated. Alexandra also enjoys walking in certain parts of the city on her own, such as the Third Jewish Cemetery or French Boulevard. The cemetery makes her feel peaceful, and the large dachas along French Boulevard, including the legends and stories associated with them, capture her imagination. She does not enjoy walking in Moldovanka where she grew up, a part of the city inhabited mainly by the poor prior to the revolution. ‘I find it gloomy. The living conditions here are very bad: poor plumbing and heating. Many people are crammed in a small space. There were some pleasant aspects, like when we all watched TV in the courtyard, but there were also squabbles.’ She prefers ‘a more beautiful,

Walking Streets, Talking History

167

enlightened part of town ... French Boulevard.’ Different places of the city evoke different feelings for Alexandra because of personal experience. At the same time, feelings transmit understandings about the social geography of the city from pre-revolutionary times. Yelena, an artist, was born in 1937 in Odessa and is a generation older than Alexandra. She is a ghetto survivor and emigrated to Israel with her son in the early 1990s. In 2000 she returned, partly because of the financial difficulties she faced in Israel, but mainly because she missed her homeland, particularly Odessa. Before emigrating, she hadn’t known much about Odessa’s history. After she returned she became interested in the city’s past and wanted to forget about her wartime experiences. She joined the group and has attended regularly. The club participants teased her that she had to leave in order to understand the value of what she left. Like Alexandra, she feels she has missed something important if she does not join a walk on Sunday. The experience of walking could be both pleasant and painful for Yelena. She knew that her relatives had owned buildings in Odessa prior to the revolution, but she had specific knowledge only about the one in which she had lived as a child. During one walk, Valery listed the owners of a particular building and she heard the name of her relative. It was a startling but pleasant revelation. Like Alexandra, Yelena did not enjoy looking at the run-down, dilapidated courtyards in Moldovanka: ‘I find this part of town depressing, dark, lacking in culture.’ When Valery took the group on a tour of Jewish Odessa and stopped at the Holocaust monument marking the Road to Death, Yelena left the group and walked away by herself. In his discussion of the interrelations of people, stories, and landscape in Apache practices of acquiring wisdom, Basso (1996) illustrates how places are often part of the process of ‘working on the self.’ This dovetails with aspects of the concept of ‘technologies of the self,’ ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’ (Foucault 1988, 18). Alexandra and Yelena’s comments illustrate that walking is a practice, even a ritual, that renews or restores a sense of self through an intimate engagement with history and places in Odessa. Personal memories and more diffuse ideas about the city’s social geography influence the meanings attached to different places. Sociability is also part of this

168 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

experience of place. Although neither woman laments the passing of the Soviet Union, both women seem to find something in the walks that displaces or overcomes the feeling of loss that pervades their sense of themselves and their city. Alexandra’s friendships and social networks have been disrupted. Yelena’s sense of loss is informed by a regret about the transformation of the city and by the experience of genocide during the Holocaust. The walks and the group may be part of an attempt to cultivate a connection to and establish continuity with a place that she rejected and that at one time brutally rejected her, yet a place to which she nonetheless returned and calls home. Walking is not the only or even the most important practice of self for these people. But for them, walking the city and sensing history generate a sense of self that is ‘Odessan’ through the cultivation of a detailed knowledge of history and place. This sense of self differs from those who, often knowing little about Odessa’s history, claim to be Odessan by referring to tropes of local discourse. It is also significant that mainly people aged fifty to eighty participate in these walks and find them meaningful. In their youth, the details of Odessa’s bourgeois, tradeoriented, cosmopolitan, and aristocratic past were a kind of illicit knowledge. Given Soviet attempts to impose social and architectural uniformity in order to undermine connections to locality (not only ideologically, but also through providing incentives for people to move away from their birthplace), it is possible that learning local history in a place such as Odessa was a way of finding meaningful activities beyond, but not necessarily in opposition to, the hegemonic forms that prevailed under socialism (Sezneva 2002; Yurchak 2005). The interest in Odessa’s history that re-emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s paralleled the emergence of other practices that subverted and coexisted with Soviet hegemony. Thus on the one hand, the significance of walking and learning local history illustrates the persistence of practices formed in the late Soviet period. On the other, efforts to cultivate a connection to Odessa through walking may be a response to the disintegration of old, if problematic, Soviet certainties, as well as to discontent with the policies and ideologies of the Ukrainian state. The walking of the My Odessa club is a particular local practice of making a city as place. In walking the city, sensing place and sensing history are practically inseparable. The participants sense history through traces of the past embedded in buildings, signs, old streets, ruins, and monuments in the pre-revolutionary part of the city. The walks, which

Walking Streets, Talking History

169

are distinct from tours or the practices of a flâneur, enable participants to see, touch, smell, and discuss features of the urban landscape and thereby sense Odessa as place. Sensing history and sensing place occur also through conversing and interacting with their guide, Valery, other walkers, and local residents. The centrality of sociability to the walkers’ experience of place is underscored by the conception of urban space that informs the group’s movements through the city. This can be captured by the notion of Odessa as a courtyard with its communal space and ‘large family’ form of sociality. The walkers thus illustrate that while sensing place is linked with perception, feeling, and consciousness, dialogue and interaction with other people play an equally important part in making and mediating the experience of place. Considering the walks as a place-making practice disrupts the before/after frame of the narrative underlying analyses of postsocialism as they bring Soviet and pre-revolutionary pasts to bear on the present. Although the group could only form in the post-Soviet period as a result of the transformation of the public sphere, the practices can be traced to the late Soviet era, when walking the city with old maps created the city as an object to be known and remembered in a particular way, partly through practices of nostalgia. Yet it is the pre-revolutionary part of the city that is walked and made as place, and the histories that are conjured in Valery’s stories are primarily related to the pre-revolutionary period. The My Odessa club’s walking practices – indeed, the very formation of such a group – subvert Soviet spatiality by uncovering repressed history and spaces hidden by Soviet maps. Soviet Odessan understandings of urban spaces as communal are recreated in the present through the group’s insistence on entering all nooks and crannies of Odessa, and transgressing where possible the growing demarcation and enclosure of public spaces since 1991. Temporalities and historicities are generated in the practices of making histories and making place that undermine state-sponsored attempts to map the time and space of the nation onto localities. Finally, the urban landscape and sense of place created is not entirely innocent and inclusive. The group maps a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) and exclusive conception of what and who is really Odessan, a conception in which Odessa is imagined as a Russian/cosmopolitan island of urbanity and culture that is distinct from the surrounding countryside and a Ukrainian national space. Although the combination of walking and talking history is in part a continuation of a Soviet-era practice, it now also serves to articulate a sense of being Odessan that

170 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

responds to, and registers a critique of, economic and social decline in the city resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the policies of the Ukrainian state. There is a trend in the anthropology of cities to address transnational spaces and flows of people and the metropolis as a site of economic rupture and political contestation with ‘global forces.’ While the focus on the transnational is undoubtedly important, the My Odessa club reminds us of local efforts to establish continuity and generate a sense of place in the city, and of the need to refrain from letting the ‘transnational’ overdetermine what we examine in urban spaces. In an era described so often as one of diaspora, displacement and deterritorialization, ‘even the apparently most global phenomenon is continuously emplaced as it reaches its new destination’ (Englund 2002, 268). The walking practices of the My Odessa group illuminate just how past and present experiences of the global become embedded in a particular sense of place.

Chapter 6

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial: Spaces of History and the Place of Odes(s)a

On one side Odessa is washed by the sea, on the other, by the steppe. The steppe is Ukrainian while the sea is of many tongues. – Lev Slavin

These lines, penned by Lev Slavin, a writer of the Odessa School, evoke an image of the city as an island influenced by tides both terrestrial and maritime. The steppe, depicted as homogeneously Ukrainian, connotes both the rootedness and agricultural labour of peasants and the nomadic movements of Cossacks. The sea, on the other hand, with its ‘many tongues’ signifies the hybridity, fluidity, and openness typically associated with cosmopolitan seaports. Whereas Slavin acknowledges the influences of both sea and steppe on the city, contemporary Odessans stress that their city is ‘international,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘multi-ethnic,’ but ‘not Ukrainian,’ in ways that portray a city with its back to its hinterland and its face to the world. They emphasize, in other words, an orientation to the sea and the world rather than to the steppe. This chapter examines how members of Odessa’s intelligentsia have articulated competing claims about the city’s identity through the narration of various histories in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In juxtaposing the story of the founding of the Odessa Literature Museum in the late Soviet period with the narration of previously hidden histories by a Jewish history group and by a Ukrainian collector, I examine how the cosmopolitan/provincial opposition operates to position Odessa in relation to the geographies of nation and empire. In making certain Odessas visible and invisible, imaginable and unimaginable, the narration of history in these particular contexts constitutes the city as a local-

172 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ity positioned differently in relation to wider cultural and political geographies. The notion many people have across the Russian-speaking world that Odessa is distinct resonates with Michel Foucault’s ideas about ‘other spaces’ or heterotopias. He used this term to describe sites that ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (1986, 24). Foucault also writes of how a heterotopia juxtaposes ‘in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (25) and that these sites in turn are linked to different slices of time forming heterochrony (26). Although he had in mind specific sites such as museums, libraries, and cemeteries, Odessa as a whole, I want to suggest, has functioned at particular times as a heterotopia. In the nineteenth century its rapid development, Mediterranean atmosphere, ethnic diversity, and commerce were a mix that appeared novel and exotic to observers from the imperial metropole. It was a kind of non-place, a space of overcomplexity that exceeded the cultural frames available for interpretation (Augé 1995; Abbas 2000). But the concept of heterotopia also captures the qualities of borderlands more generally – the ways in which different spaces and times are juxtaposed. Their heterogeneous spaces and populations at times form countersites to the homogenizing impulses of modern political regimes. The notion of heterotopia opens up a way of analysing how Odessa can be considered both distinct from and typical of something characteristic of the historical experience of the lands that comprise contemporary Ukraine. To interpret how it is possible to consider Odessa both distinct and typical, I propose a way of reading history, indeed histories – if we consider what until recently have been distinct historiographical traditions – as they intersect in the city. By drawing insights about the interplay of time and space in narrative formulated by Bakhtin (1981) in his notion of chronotope, it is possible to analyse historical narratives for certain spatial relationships that they articulate both implicitly and explicitly. The claims that Odessa is internationalist and ‘not Ukrainian’ can be understood when considered in relation to shifting political spaces, demographic and ideological relationships between country and city, and the politics of generating and defining high and low culture. Considering history through this kind of framework helps pinpoint the cultural politics through which the commonsense understanding of Odessa as urban, cosmopolitan, cultured, Russian, Jewish,

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

173

and not Ukrainian is produced as well as the city’s Ukrainian connections. While historical narratives naturalize particular spatial relationships and broader geographies, the narration of hidden histories while walking the city reconstitutes the urban landscape and Odessa as a place. The material forms of the city – its scale, layout, and extensive treasure trove of pre-revolutionary architecture – have facilitated the emergence of a range of ways of walking the city and narrating history. Chapter 5 featured a group that systematically walked all the streets of old Odessa. In this chapter, very specific histories – Jewish and Ukrainian – are narrated and reinserted into the cityscape. By looking at the way narrating history in the city enables residents to imagine features of Odessa’s past in the present, we see how particular senses of place and geography are created. Spaces of History Odessa’s founding was nearly contemporaneous with a series of significant boundary shifts in the region at the end of the eighteenth century, which is often referred to as Russia’s ‘westernizing century.’ In the aftermath of Peter the Great’s defeat of Sweden in 1709, Russia obtained the designation ‘Russian Empire.’ A new concern with territory emerged as Peter adopted theories of governance that ‘turned the state into a master of an underexploited universe’ in his pursuit of a pre-eminent place in European politics (Sunderland 2007, 36). The last decades of the 1700s were a high point in Russian imperial expansion, which was most dramatic in the south and west. Russia’s borders with Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate changed a total of six times between 1772 and 1795 as a result of wars and annexations. As discussed in the introduction, during this period, Catherine II launched campaigns against the Ottomans and secured lands north of the Black Sea through a series of treaties. Odessa was founded immediately after these events, in 1794. The partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, and 1795), which incorporated Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and others into the empire, coincided with Russian expansion into the Black Sea region. Catherine refined techniques of government adopted by Peter to further ‘optimize’ the relationship between population and territory (Sunderland 2007, 45). One consequence was the territorial reforms of 1775 – which sought to rationalize administration – during which the Hetmanate was abolished. Meanwhile, colonization became an instrument

174 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

for increasing and redistributing the empire’s population (50). In the late eighteenth century the vast southern steppe was defined as largely unpopulated except for small groups of steppe nomads (including Cossacks), who were considered backward and politically insignificant. Catherine and her grandson Alexander I pursued policies to attract Germans, Jews, and Ottoman Christians, as well as Ukrainians and Russians, from the interior, to populate the steppe and port cities. In the early years, Greeks and Italians played a prominent role in Odessa, establishing trade houses and shipping companies that enabled the grain trade to flourish, given their links throughout the Mediterranean (Herlihy 1986, 5, 23). Odessa was therefore founded at a time when borders were shifting and peoples were migrating in the context of imperial expansion. The shifts in political boundaries corresponded with changes in the demographic and ideological relationship of different ethnic groups to city and country. Raymond Williams’s (1973) detailed study of how changes in English notions of the ‘city’ and ‘country’ over the centuries related to broader socio-economic transformation also helps us understand claims about Odessa and its relationship to Ukraine. Anthropologists have explored variants of these themes in the Zambian copperbelt (Ferguson 1997, 1999) and among the Gorale in Poland (Pine 2002). Whereas in these cases residents of rural and urban areas share the same ethnic background, Odessa is constructed as a culturally Russian, cosmopolitan urban enclave situated among masses of ‘backward,’ predominantly Ukrainian, peasants. In the early twentieth century, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, a Zionist activist from Odessa, commented that it was impossible to ‘avoid the fact that Odessa was an islet in the midst of a Ukrainian peasant sea, an environment that exerted direct or indirect influence on the social and cultural life of the city’ (in Kleiner 2000, 2). A parallel can be drawn with Dalmatia, a province of the Venetian Empire in the eighteenth century and the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth that is now part of Croatia. Enlightenment categories of ‘civilized’ and ‘barbaric’ were mapped onto Venetian and Slav, and city and country, respectively (Wolff 2001, 7), distinctions that still haunt Istrian regionalism (Ballinger 2003a). In the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians in fact remained a minority in many cities throughout the nineteenth century and as late as the Second World War. The majority of urban dwellers were Russians, Poles, or Jews (or others). Indeed, as Roman Szporluk has written: ‘In popular perception – and in sociological fact – Ukrainian ethnicity came to be identified with village ways of

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

175

life, values and styles, and Poles and Russians in Ukraine became associated with the city and the world of high social, cultural and economic life’ (1981, 182). The correlation of ethnicity with city and countryside intersects with the issue of the relationship between conceptions of high and low culture. Russian literature and high culture1 became closely implicated in the construction of ‘Russia’ as nation and as empire, a process that intensified throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in overt Russification policies (Hosking 1997). Despite fierce restrictions Ukrainian high culture did develop, although it has been positioned in quasicolonial ways in relation to Russian culture in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. In both polities Russian culture was considered ‘world culture’ and ‘universal’ – hence cosmopolitan – while other literatures were considered more local, parochial, and provincial, when they were allowed to exist at all. Jews were also subject to the assimilation policies of the Russian Empire but developed different strategies of engagement, one of which was to embrace assimilation into Russian culture. It was during the nineteenth century that a concept of specifically ‘Russian Jewry’ emerged as Jewish cultural actors interpreted their experience of imperial policies and western European Jewish Enlightenment movements (Nathans 2002). Odessa occupied a peculiar place in this process as Jews integrated into life there, and as they became more ‘modern’ – that is, more assimilated and secular – than perhaps anywhere else in the empire (Zipperstein 1985). Odessa’s founding and its rapid growth – the basis of the oft cited local historical narrative – were thus part of the expansion of the Russian Empire into borderlands such as the Ukrainian steppe, places that were viewed as ‘wild’ and in need of enlightenment and development. Odessa flourished initially because of strong government support and the trade in (mainly Ukrainian) grain. During the nineteenth century Ukrainian lands acquired the designation ‘Little Russia’ and were no longer considered a frontier but part of the core of empire, distinguishable from Russia proper only by the dialect and curious folklore of its peasants. At the same time, the westward expansion of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century redefined political and cultural space for Jewish communities in eastern Europe. Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement and subject to ever-changing discriminatory policies; some of them, however, acquired new opportunities by moving to cities such as Odessa and by engaging in a new – Russian – cultural space (Nathans 2002; Zipperstein 1985).

176 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

The Odessa Literature Museum On a sultry day in August 2001, one month into my fieldwork, I made my way past the Odessa Opera Theatre, nineteenth century manors, and the Maritime Museum (the English Club in pre-revolutionary times) to the Literature Museum located in the Palace of the Gagarin Princes. There I met Tatiana Rybnikova and her two colleagues in the book gallery, called ‘Treasure Island,’ which she had founded on the museum premises. As we sipped Turkish coffee, she underscored the museum’s significance in the cultural life of the city as a monument to the Odessan Myth. Founded in the late 1970s under Brezhnev’s rule, the museum was a place where, according Tatiana, ‘people could learn about the cosmopolitan, multiethnic past of the city in a way they could not elsewhere. Original publications from different periods were on display and people could read for themselves about the way things were. From these texts they could see the truth about what a special place Odessa was.’ Nevertheless, the creators had to fit their vision within certain acceptable ideological frames. Taras Maksymiuk, a Ukrainian collector, pointed this out when showing me part of an exhibit dedicated to the founding of the museum in the spring of 2002. Drawing my attention to the initial letter of request, Taras explained that in listing the authors, Ukrainian writers were presented in a subordinate position, reflecting the quasi-colonial hierarchies within which the ‘cultures’ of the Soviet Union’s nationalities were placed. The museum’s creation story and exhibits reveal the possibilities for and constraints on narrating Odessa’s past in the late Soviet period; they also illustrate the active construction of an institution that was subtly subversive of the official vision of the city’s location in time and space. Prior to the founding of the Literature Museum in 1977, Odessa had two main museums that addressed the history of the city: the Local History Museum (Odesskii kraevidcheskii musee); and the Archaeological Museum, which had been founded before the revolution.2 Archivist and local historian Victor Feldman explained that in the late 1970s the museum displays at the Local History Museum emphasized the role of Russian generals, such as Gregory Suvorov, in the storming of the Ottoman fortress at Khadzhibei and in founding Odessa. Omitted was the part played by Europeans such as Joseph de Ribas and Armand Emanuel duc de Richelieu, among others, in establishing and developing the city. The museum’s key exhibits were devoted to the revolutionary organizations in the city during the nineteenth century, the Potemkin

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

177

Uprising of 1905, and the Defence of Odessa in 1941. In the late 1970s, up until the establishment of the Literature Museum, public representations of Odessa’s past underscored the identity of the city as culturally Russian; no references were made to Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles, and other nationalities while little reference was made to the economic history of the city. According to Anna Misiuk, a senior researcher at the museum who was involved in its establishment, the idea for a literature museum in Odessa emerged in the 1960s during Khrushchev’s Thaw. During the Thaw, Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiographical Time of Great Expectations with its episodes about Odessa was published, paving the way for the republication in large print runs of the works of the Odessan School written in ‘an era long forgotten.’ In describing the founding of the museum, Misiuk insisted that it was essential to understand the special place of Odessa in the Soviet Union: ‘Odessa was like a wonderland [volshebnaia strana] where you could relate to Soviet power differently. The city was viewed as an oasis of the private individual [chastnii chelovek], an idea conveyed in books, songs, and anecdotes. The republished books were full of irony and satire and were like wine for the people.’ During the 1960s there was an economic upturn in the Soviet Union accompanied by Soviet expansion into the developing world. Since Odessa was one of the main Soviet ports, the feeling of foreign lands was in the air – atypical for Soviet cities. Anna explained that it was from this sense of openness in Odessa that the idea for the museum emerged. The crackdown that followed under Brezhnev’s rule was felt acutely in Odessa. Yelena Karakina, another museum employee, described the climate of the times in one article in her series about the museum in honour of its twenty-fifth anniversary: The creation of the Literature Museum at the end of the seventies was practically a miracle. After a short period of breathing easy during the Thaw, the city, like the whole country, felt the lead hand of militant dullness at its throat. The end of the seventies in Odessa was a time when the windows were closing and those who were suffocating were leaving. Mikhail Zhvanetsky was pushed out of Odessa. Victor Ilchenko and Roman Kartsev were sent away.3 World-class film director Kira Muratova was not able to make films. Humorina was shut down ... The authorities in the capital sought to deprive Odessa of her uniqueness ... and willful-

178 Kaleidoscopic Odessa ness, and make Odessa an average gray city ... Much was annihilated and stifled at that time in the city. Thrown out through the door and the window, the soul of Odessa seeps through the cracks ... But there was one very lively activity going on. Sensational even – the Literature Museum. (Karakina 2002f)

According to Anna, the idea for the Literature Museum came ‘from below’ – by which she meant from members of the local intelligentsia rather than any administrative structure – and was born ‘out of love for the city.’ Originally, the intelligentsia sought to create a museum about literary Odessa during the 1920s, but since this was not possible they developed a project for a museum built around the school literature program. The first person to publicly express the idea for the museum was Professor Andrei Vladimirovich Nedzvedsky of Odessa University. Through his conference presentations, newspaper articles, and radio and TV interviews he was able to get the necessary decision on the part of the authorities to create a literature museum in Odessa (Davidova 2002, 79). According to Anna this was due to three factors: first, the expansion of the museum network in the Soviet Union (see Zlatoustova 1991); second, the fact that the Oblispolkom (Oblast Executive Committee of the Communist Party) moved to new premises, freeing up the Palace of Count Gagarin, a building constructed in the mid-nineteenth century; and third, the fact that another key individual and the first director, Nikita Brigin, was an ex-KGB officer and thus knew how to frame a request for, and communicate with, the authorities. In 1977 the Central Commission of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR issued a decree calling for the creation of a literature museum on the premises of the Palace of the Gagarin Princes. The acquisition of these premises was itself no small feat. Brigin, with the support of the Oblispolkom, ‘achieved the improbable’ in extricating the palace from the Black Sea Shipping Fleet, one of the most powerful organizations in the city (Davidova 2002, 79). Not surprisingly, many struggles ensued in the five years it took to open the museum. Indeed, after the first year, Brigin was fired and a retired general called in to replace him. Yelena writes about a tense year and a half when a contingent of employees attempted to save the museum: [The General] had to put everything in its place ... and take away all that Odessa-Jewish half-dissident shumuru from the radiant walls of a Soviet

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

179

museum ... All that Babel-Shmabel, Bagritsky-Shmagritsky, dubious Olesha-Paustovsky, and that good-for-nothing Bunin who, in the words of the General, guzzled champagne in Odessa with White Guard assholes while we were having our blood spilt ... It’s not difficult to understand that with the General’s assumption of the directorship, the museum was supposed to die, not having yet been born. (Karakina 2002g)

However, a significant number of the employees were not prepared to stand idly by: ‘They had something to fight for ... in the end it was a fight for life. For life – against routines and falsh, for Odessa, for literature. The war declared by the General and his employees lasted a year and a half’ (Karakina 2002g). Instead of looking after the renovations of the building as he was supposed to, he constantly intervened in the conceptual work, impeding the progress of those hired to do the work. When he left for two months of convalescence he threatened to fire everyone if they did not produce a plan for the museum on his return. They worked day and night for two months, received positive reviews from the Academy of Sciences, and presented him with a four-volume plan of the museum on his return (Davidova 2002, 80). After a fierce fight at a trade union meeting, the General was fired for professional incompetence. One obstacle was out of the way, but many challenges remained, including renovating the building and finding the materials with which to create the exhibitions. Most museums are founded on the basis of an already existing archive or collection; in the case of the Odessa Literature Museum, it was the reverse. Researchers travelled across the Soviet Union to collect artefacts and documents for the museum. Ideological battles ensued over how to create specific exhibits. One struggle revolved around attempts to show as much of literary Odessa as possible. When employees tried to focus exclusively on Odessa they were accused by their monitors of mistnichestvo, a pejorative term meaning ‘giving priority to local interests.’ But the museum eventually opened, and the first event was a lecture about Isaac Babel.4 Yelena describes this in the following way: ‘In the Golden Hall, once again words resounded, words that had not been heard for a very long time – a time when the Literature and Art Society5 gathered in the very same hall. And it was clear that finally the original purpose had been restored to the Gagarin Palace’ (Karakina 2002g). The Palace of the Gagarin Princes, built in the mid-nineteenth century, is an elegant two-storey building that combines classicism with

180 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

baroque and empire styles. Its interior curved-marble staircases lead to a balcony that serves as the entrance to the ballroom (see Figure 15). I visited the museum many times over the course of my fieldwork for book launches and lectures, to meet with Tatiana, to look for books, and for a few meetings of the Jewish history group (discussed later in the chapter). I attended the tours of three guides and walked through several times on my own. The exhibition begins in the ornate ballroom with the activities of the Literature and Art Society in Odessa in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. One wall features Russian authors Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Leo Tolstoy, together with the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.6 The opposite wall displays four key figures in the development of Ukrainian theatre in the nineteenth century – Marko Kropyvnytsky, Mykola Sadovsky, Ivan Karpenko-Kary, and Mykhailo Starytsky. The museum exhibition extends through twenty additional rooms of various sizes and is arranged chronologically, beginning in the late eighteenth century.7 The displays are dense, and layered with meanings that can escape the casual observer.8 Books, journals, correspondence, photographs, artifacts, and paintings are arranged to depict a setting evocative of the period represented. The Odessan connections of writers such as Pushkin, Konstantin Batushkov, the Decembrists, and the Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz – who, like Pushkin, was exiled to Odessa – are presented in a room resembling a literary salon of the 1810s and 1820s. Gogol and the prominent Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky appear in a exhibit made to evoke a reading room, while the works of the 1870s, including those of ‘other’ nationalities such as Jews, Latvians, Armenians, and Ukrainians – are presented in window frames in a room styled after an art exhibition. Additional halls are devoted to the 1890s and the early twentieth century and feature journalists and writers such as Vlas Doroshevich, Alexander de Ribas, Alexander Kuprin and Ivan Bunin, who popularized the image of Odessa. Other major Russian writers such as Kornei Chukovsky, Anton Chekhov, and Maksim Gorky, and Ukrainian writers Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, are displayed against the backdrop of the 1905 revolution.9 The ‘corner room,’ now dedicated to the Silver Age of Russian literature, is the one that has been altered most radically since 1991. At one time it was decked in red and called ‘the years of reaction’; now it displays visits to the city by Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont, and Leonid Andreev, and features Anna Akhmatova, who was born in Odessa (Karakina 2002k).

Figure 15. Entrance hall in the Odessa Literature Museum (photo by Georgy Isaev).

182 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Extensive exhibits in two rooms are devoted to writers of the Odessa School: Eduard Bagritsky, Yury Olesha, Valentin Kataev, Isaac Babel, Konstantin Paustovsky, Vera Inber, Ilia Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, and Volodymyr Sosiura.10 A tiny room resembling a railway car, symbolizing the departure of most writers for Moscow or Kyiv in the 1930s, features displays devoted to the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna and the secessionist artist Mykhailo Zhuk. An exhibit about theatre and film in Odessa during the 1920s and 1930s presents Ukrainian dramatists and directors who worked at the Odessa Film Studio, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Oleksandr Dovzhenko.11 In the ‘Spanish Room,’ as the next room is informally called, the background display – a collage of war photographs and works by Picasso, Goya, and El Greco – overpowers the individual exhibits on writers such as Maiakovsky, Mikhail Koltsov, and Semën Kirsanov. The final room on the second floor highlights 1960s and 1970s editions of books already encountered against a backdrop of photographs of the Odessan scenes that inspired the writers. Additional rooms focus on the literature of the Great Patriotic War (i.e., the Second World War) and Bulgarian writers. In a room dedicated to the early history of Odessa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the tension between representing local history and conforming to the Soviet narrative emerges as intertwined with the problem of ‘beginnings.’ A recently produced cd-rom titled ‘The Odessa Literature Museum’ (2003) refers to it as the ‘folklore room,’ which situates these texts outside both literature and history in a timeless realm (Kaneff 2004). Half of the exhibit depicts the region prior to and immediately following Russian expansion; the other half shows the early history of the city (see Figure 16). On one side, Tatar and Turkish place names are printed on a large map resembling a ship’s sail. Poems from Bulgarian and Ukrainian folklore are displayed in one case, and Ivan Kotliarevsky together with a copy of his work The Aeneid in another. A Ukrainian chumak poem is etched in the glass.12 The display opposite the map is set behind old window frames, which are meant to represent Odessa as the empire’s southern window to Europe. Books and journals published in both French and Russian are displayed, including a poem by a certain P.F.B. that is considered key in the development of the city-text (Naidorf 2001). The museum’s creators were seeking to counter the Soviet portrayal of Odessa as primarily ‘Russian’ by drawing attention to the European presence in the city. According to Anna Misiuk, the room came under harsh scrutiny and was almost scrapped; the authorities contended that the museum’s nar-

Figure 16. Room dedicated to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in the Odessa Literature Museum (photo by Georgy Isaev).

184 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

rative should begin with Pushkin, Odessa’s first connection with ‘great’ (i.e., metropolitan) literature, and not with local history that hinted at the city’s cosmopolitan, trade-oriented character. The contest over the beginning of a narrative indicates how a point in time is also a point in space that naturalizes particular cultural and political geographies as the most relevant ones for the city’s present. It should therefore come as no surprise that given the altered political context, the tossle over beginnings continues. The bifurcation in the room allows guides to begin their narrative at different points and thereby situate the city as they see fit in relation to Ukraine, Russia, and Europe. The tours I attended during fieldwork tended to focus on the Russian and French publications and stressed Odessa’s connections to Europe. By contrast, the cd-rom insists that the motifs of Odessan literature begin in Ukrainian folklore and situate the origin of the Odessa legend in Ukrainian territory. One guide engaged these claims directly pointing out the dispute over whether the territory around Odessa was to be called ‘south Ukraine’ or ‘Novorossiia’ and mused that if anyone had a claim to being the original inhabitants it was the Crimean and Nogai Tatars. Besides highlighting the tensions over where to begin a historical narrative about Odessa, the room about Odessa’s early history also raises the issue of textual traces and the Ukrainian presence in the museum. The works of Ukrainian writers are displayed in many rooms but by no means all. When the exhibits were being designed, a certain percentage of Ukrainian material had to be included where available, given that Soviet cultural policy allowed for the representation of the ‘national culture’ of a given republic in the literary narrative of the Soviet Union, albeit in a subordinate position. In the exhibit depicting the region prior to Russian expansion a Ukrainian presence is evoked through a bandura (folk instrument), folklore, and Ivan Kotliarevsky’s work; but that presence is missing in the other part of the exhibit representing the early history of the city. One of the creators explained that at the time, difficulties were encountered in drawing Ukrainian connections because there were few written sources in Ukrainian from that era – a problem for certain later eras as well. The paucity of Ukrainian texts produces a similar effect to the one that Gable describes in the Colonial Williamsburg Museum. There, the thin documentary record of the African-American presence has meant that Black history has been interpreted as ‘conjectural’ rather than ‘factual’ (as it is for white histories), which makes that presence somehow less ‘real’ (Gable, Handler and Lawson 1992, 798). Given that traces of the past are sought primarily in

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

185

written texts from Odessa and its surrounding region, of which there are fewer in Ukrainian than in Russian, and given that literary images of the city are a central focus of the exhibition, Odessa can be (and tends to be) interpreted as a place more firmly embedded in Russian cultural geographies than in Ukrainian ones. The focus on literary and journalistic textual traces re-creates the imperial context and quasi-colonial relationships of the context in which the Ukrainian works displayed were produced. For those familiar with the Jewish cultural history of Odessa, my brief review of the museum exhibits reveals a conspicuous absence of Jewish writers from many, though not all, displays. Although some Jewish writers were included and others referred to obliquely, many were completely absent. The room about the Golden Age of Russian literature in Odessa, for instance, could not present a book in French by Jewish writer Joachim Tarnopol called The Jews of Odessa (Karakina 2002i). Sholom Aleichem and Mendele Moikher Seforim are highlighted in a few small frames in an exhibit about ‘peoples of the Russian Empire’ during 1870–80, a period of intense literary activity among Jews in Odessa. Large numbers of Jewish writers were not included because of their participation in the Zionist movement, which was vilified in Soviet ideology in the postwar years. Certain Soviet Jewish writers like Bagritsky and Ilf could be displayed because their Jewishness had been largely ignored by the Soviet literary establishment.13 Babel’s status was more ambiguous because he did write explicitly about Jews and was seen partly as a Jewish writer.14 Since his work could not be the subject of a stand-alone display, four window frames were allocated as part of a larger exhibit about Konstantin Paustovsky – whose volume Years of Hope of the autobiographical series Story of a Life contained descriptions of Babel – and the newspaper Moriak that he described (see Figure 17).15 Significantly, Babel, Ilf, and Bagritsky are considered part of the Odessa School and played a major role in elaborating the Odessan Myth (see chapter 1). Although in quantitative terms texts by Ukrainian authors may have a greater presence in the museum than texts by Jewish authors, the latter have played a much more significant role in elaborating the Odessa city-text. The story of the founding of the museum is itself part of the literary story of Odessa. It contains key elements of the Odessan works it features. The founding of the Literature Museum is considered a miracle. Its origin story mirrors the story of the founding of the city and illustrates the ability of Odessans to outwit the authorities and make the

Figure 17. Display dedicated to the works of Isaac Babel and Konstantin Paustovsky (photo by Georgy Isaev).

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

187

impossible happen – in this case the creation of a museum in the face of overwhelming ideological and institutional pressures. Its creators consider it to have been the achievement of historical justice and the reclaiming of places for their rightful use. For them, the museum provided evidence of the immortality of the Odessan soul that survives and ‘seeps through the cracks’ even in the harshest conditions. Yet despite this insistence on continuity, the museumification of literature signifies a discontinuity, a death or decline in a living tradition, one that was ruptured by Stalinism. In creating a museum in this building and providing the opportunity for alternative views on Odessa’s past, the museum itself became a kind of heterotopia – an ‘other space’ subtly subversive of the normal order of things – which perpetuated a discourse about Odessa as a whole as an ‘other’ space in relation to the Soviet Union. Though narrated in the early 2000s as a story of resistance against the Soviet bureaucracy, it is perhaps mistaken to conceive of the founders’ activities entirely in such terms. Alexei Yurchak is critical of the binary of power and opposition as applied to late Soviet society and contends that Soviet citizens neither actively resisted nor submitted to Soviet power. By cultivating a connection to the European, worldly, cosmopolitan past of the city, the museum creators were participating in practices productive of what Yurchak has called the ‘imaginary west’ and the ‘deterritorialization of late socialism’ (2005, 126, 158). Although Yurchak describes the appropriation of symbols of the contemporary West, in the case described here, the intelligentsia’s excavation and cultivation of knowledge about the illicit Western influences on the city was a way of finding the West in situ – elsewhere in time rather than in space. In the late Soviet period, Odessa was in a certain sense a heterotopia in the Soviet Union, a status created by certain of the city’s ‘cosmopolitan’ qualities, both Russian Imperial and Soviet. In the aftermath of the First World War, the revolution, and the Civil War, Odessa was obviously not the bustling port and trade centre it had been in pre-revolutionary times. But it nevertheless can be considered to have had a kind of limited cosmopolitanism. According to Caroline Humphrey (2004), the official negation of the outside world encoded in the Soviet campaign against kozmopolitizm in fact created rather than curbed the desire among citizens for objects and ideas from outside the Soviet Union. As a major Soviet port, Odessa represented an opening through which the outside world could and did enter. That Odessa was considered Jewish and home to other ‘dangerous’ diasporic nationalities like Greeks and

188 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Poles added to its unofficial status as a cosmopolitan place. Attempts by the local intelligentsia to convey the city’s nineteenth-century imperial cosmopolitanism via its connections with Europe in the Literature Museum can be read as subversions of official ideology and policies to negate and close off the outside world by imagining the West in place. If the city functioned as a diffuse, sometimes material and sometimes imagined heterotopia, the museum was a very concrete Odessan-made one that enabled visitors to glimpse alternative ways of seeing Odessa, history, and literature and that contributed to residents’ and non-residents’ sense that the city itself was an ‘other space.’ A Jewish Capital in a Provincial Town Anna Misiuk invited me to attend her course on the history of Jewish Odessa at the Jewish Self-Education centre after she heard of my efforts to understand the transmission of history in schools. After finishing her literature degree in the mid-1970s, she began working at the newly created Literature Museum. In the late 1980s she became actively involved in the movement to revive Jewish culture and community institutions. She and her husband decided to remain in Odessa rather than emigrate, as they felt they could lead a fuller public life – that is, contribute more to their community and society – by staying in Odessa. Anna has focused her efforts on uncovering and popularizing the cultural history of Jewish Odessa. In addition to her work at the library and museum, where in the summer of 2002 she was involved in creating an exhibit about Jewish culture in Odessa, Anna conducts tours about Jewish Odessa and writes for Shomrei Shabos and the Migdal Times. She was also involved in setting up the Museum of Jewish History of Odessa. Since 1991, Jews across the former Soviet Union have been actively reviving communal institutions and reflecting on what it means to be Jewish in their respective countries and communities. In the Soviet period, contact with Jews elsewhere was extremely limited. Since the late 1980s, these contacts have expanded exponentially: American Jewish and Israeli organizations have run active programs to support communities on the ground, while the massive emigration that followed the collapse created new diasporas and transnational networks. Considerable ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty surrounds the revival of these communities, given the general socio-economic context in which they operate as well as the dramatic decrease in Jewish populations owing to emigration (Gitelman et al. 2003). Nevertheless, a large

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

189

number of Jewish institutions have been formed, just as Jewish identities themselves have been transformed (Gitelman 2003). Although communities across the former Soviet Union face similar issues, significant differences exist depending on national and local contexts (Horowitz 2003; see also the ethnographic studies of Golbert 2001a; Goluboff 2003). Communal institutions have formed in Odessa similar to those Horowitz has outlined as typical in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine (2003, 122). Two orthodox religious communities, Chabad and the Litvak Orthodox Community, operate synagogues and run daycares, schools, university programs, and newspapers. The Migdal Community Centre, the Jewish Self-Education Centre (which operates out of the Jewish Library), and the Jewish Museum have become centres for more secular cultural programming. The variety of organizations suggests that one cannot speak of a singular ‘Jewish community’ in Odessa.16 It is not my purpose to detail the complexities of the formation of Jewish identities and communities in contemporary Odessa (see Sapritsky 2007) but rather to focus on how the Jewish history of the city is being articulated and transmitted by a member of the intelligentsia at the Jewish library, a secular organization. Nevertheless, a major cleavage – particularly in relation to attention to Odessan history – seems to run along religious/secular lines. Some Odessan Jews who grew up in the Soviet Union and who did not emigrate have argued that the deeply religious communal life that is becoming increasingly dominant is in fact foreign to the city and to their own idea of what it means to be Jewish. Migdal and the Jewish library have continued efforts begun in the late 1980s to reclaim a history and presence in the city that the Soviet authorities rendered invisible. Community organizations have lobbied for the return of buildings such as synagogues to the community and for plaques to be mounted to commemorate individuals whose association with the city was long forgotten by residents, such as the Odessan-born Zionist activist and writer Vladimir Zhabotinsky. The Israeli Cultural Centre in Odessa has sponsored plaques commemorating Jews who were from Odessa or who lived there, such as the Hebrew poet Chaim Bialik, Meir Disengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Leon Pinsker, a doctor and early Zionist who wrote the book Autoemancipation in 1882, and Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), who laid the foundation for Russian-Jewish historiography. Other memorials have been built to commemorate the sites of Holocaust atrocities.

190 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Yet until the summer of 2002, when a standing exhibit entitled ‘The Odessan Pages of Jewish Culture’ opened in a refurbished room of the Literature Museum, there had been no permanent exhibition about Jewish life in the city since the 1930s. Since the exhibits in the Literature Museum were created as an integrated whole, to meaningfully incorporate Jewish writers would have required large-scale renovations, which were unfeasible because of lack of funds. A separate exhibition was therefore created to address the silence about Odessan Jewish writers. The introductory text to the exhibit highlighted the fact that Jewish writing flourished in Odessa in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian with each tradition producing well-known writers and literary works. The exhibition itself was fragmentary owing to lack of space and the scarcity of objects (Misiuk 2002a, 2002b). It addressed not only classics such as Sholom Aleichem and Mendele Moikher Seforim, but also Soviet Yiddish writers such as Note Lurie, Irma Druker, and Isaac Guberman.17 Although the exhibition on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Odessan Jewish writers compensated for their previous absence, it underscored their separateness rather than their integration into cultural and social processes in Odessa, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. This tension between articulating both separateness and integration reflected a tension that surfaced in Anna’s course and that exists in the revival of the Jewish community more generally – one that has a long history in the Russian Empire beginning in the mid-nineteenth century (Gitelman 2001; Nathans 2002; Zipperstein 1985). In 1997, Anna organized a course at the Jewish Self-Education Centre to teach university students about the history and culture of Jewish Odessa. She began a second course in December 2001 with the more practical goal of teaching the participants how to give tours about Jewish Odessa. This course, which I attended from March to June 2002, was structured around weekly lectures and walks attended by five to fifteen university students. Several sessions on public speaking were held by theatre director Samuil Imas to help participants develop their abilities as storytellers. Using the physical landmarks of the city, Anna mapped the Jewish past for her participants. In contrast to the My Odessa club (see chapter 5), where space was the organizing principle for narrating the past in all its layers and details, Anna focused on narrating a particular absence – that of the city’s Jews. Her technique of linking the past to particular physical features in the urban landscape generated understandings of larger spatial relationships between Odessa and its polity and Odessa and the world. By inserting a Jewish past and present into

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

191

participants’ understanding of the city, Anna’s course engaged tensions involved in asserting Jewish distinctiveness from, and connections with, a Russian cultural milieu. It also highlights generational differences regarding the importance of knowledge of Odessa’s Jewish culture to contemporary Odessan Jewish identities. A theme in Anna’s presentations at the library and during her walks was the uniqueness of Odessa’s Jewish community in contrast to Jewish communities elsewhere in Russia and Ukraine. She underscored the secularity and worldliness of many Odessan Jews and their integration into social, economic, and cultural life in pre-revolutionary Odessa. She often illustrated this point with a story about the city administration’s request that the community build a ‘respectable’ synagogue because until the mid-nineteenth century, the Jewish community had focused its efforts on building hospitals, clinics, schools, and shelters. On our walk along Primorskii Boulevard, she pointed out the Pushkin statue – the first built using funds from private individuals – and its four decorative fish fountains, which had been donated by the Jewish Labour Society, founder of a technical school for poor Jews. On another walk she paused to speak about the North Hotel, located behind the main row of buildings on Teatralnyi (Theatre) Lane. Empty and disintegrating at the time (though now restored), it was once the place Shalom Aleichem stayed and held a meeting with a group of Jewish writers in Odessa, including the well-known Hebrew writer Saul Chernikhovsky. She also pointed out the location of the editorial offices of the paper Odesskii Novosti on Lanzheronovskaia Street, where Zhabotinsky worked as a correspondent, as well as the cafe he frequented on Yekaterininskaia (Catherine) Street. Another time, while walking down the lower part of Deribasovskaia Street, she stopped to show us the building where lived the Jewish writer Semën Iushkevich, author of popular novels in Yiddish-inflected Russian in the early twentieth century about lower-class Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Odessa. By highlighting these places Anna illustrated not only the multifaceted character of Jewish life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Odessa, but also a point she made in her formal tours: there was no Jewish ghetto – in the sense of a place where Jews were obliged to live – in pre-revolutionary Odessa, and Jewish life was not insulated from the surrounding world as it had been at other times and in other places (see also Klier 2002). During our walks, Anna inserted a Jewish presence into the cultural and historical fabric of the city by expounding on Jewish personalities and other non-Jewish figures of renown in Odessa. As we walked along

192 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Pushkinskaia Street she noted building #5, in which a large communal flat served as the meeting place of a secret organization for the study of Hebrew in Soviet times until the leader, Isaac Purits, emigrated to Israel in 1983. She also noted the plaque to Pëtr Stoliarsky, the famous Soviet Jewish music teacher in Odessa, after whom a music school was named. The city residence of the Odessan merchant Gregory Marazli, an Odessan Greek who was elected head of the city administration in 1879, was highlighted. She pointed out the gymnasium where Zhabotinsky and his good friend Kornei Chukovsky, a prominent Russian literary critic and author of children’s books, may have studied. The Brodsky Synagogue, a reformist synagogue built by the wealthy Galician Jews who settled in Odessa in the mid-1900s, was the subject of an extensive commentary. This synagogue was renowned for its concerts and functioned as much as a music hall as a place of worship. She referred to famous people who visited the synagogue: writers such as Babel, Bunin, and Maiakovsky, as well as composers such as RimskyKorsakov and Mussorgsky. Besides the synagogue, Anna noted the first non-religious Jewish college, founded in 1831, where Count Vorontsov himself is said to have taken part in examinations, and the location of the committee to help Jews emigrate to non-European and non-Asian countries, namely the United States and Argentina. In walking the streets and narrating history, Anna presented Russian and Jewish cultural actors as occupying the same spatial and historical context – sometimes going about their activities separately, sometimes together. Her enunciation of Jewish histories while traversing the old city transformed material features of the city into mnemonic landscapes on which participants could draw in constructing their own tours. Anna’s walks cultivated a sense of the different layers of the Jewish pasts in the urban landscape; Samuil sought to develop participants’ storytelling techniques by having them link the past with their present understandings of the city. During a meeting held at the Jewish Library, Samuil introduced an exercise aimed at eliciting jokes from participants about Jewish Odessa to encourage them to explore their relationship to the city and what made it unique. In an aside, he discussed the extent to which Jews perceive themselves and are viewed by various funding agencies as integrated into the society in which they live: ‘the Russianspeaking world.’ He wanted them to tell a joke about Jewish Odessa, with the following qualification: ‘It doesn’t necessarily have to be about Jewish Odessa. Our directors have the idea that we are to be first and foremost Jewish. In fact we are also part of the Russian-speaking world.

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

193

But if they [representatives of a funding agency] come in, make sure it’s a Jewish joke.’ Samuil was underscoring the mixed, fluid identities of contemporary Jews who have grown up in Russian-speaking environments. This resonates with a point made by Gitelman and Horowitz: Jews in Russia and Ukraine often feel Russian as much as they feel Jewish (and often designate themselves Russian Jews). Indeed, Samuil seemed to be suggesting that the agencies funding the program were operating as if Odessan Jews were essentially different and separate from the people they lived among. He also omitted reference to Ukraine when he referred to Jews’ relationship to a Russian cultural space. Jews elsewhere in Ukraine (and perhaps in Odessa as well, though this is not clear from his comments) have a relationship to Ukraine as a cultural and political space, even if it is somewhat ambivalent, and often consider themselves different from Russian Jews, as Rebecca Golbert maintains (1998; 2001b). However, both Anna and Samuil emphasized the idea that Jewish Odessa has historically been more strongly connected with Russia and Russian culture. The jokes the participants told and the points they made did not in fact always refer to Jewish Odessa but rather to the uniqueness of Odessa as a place. Familiar themes and contexts emerged: exchanges in public transport, Odessans’ pride in their city, beautiful women, the amazing variety of goods at the Pryvoz Market, Odessa as the centre of the universe, the hold the city has on its inhabitants when they leave. One participant could not think of a joke, so Samuil asked her if she had ever left the city, and what she had seen or imagined about Odessa while away. She explained that she had once gone to Kyiv and while there had climbed up the bell tower at the Cave Monastery (a major spiritual centre of Christian Orthodoxy). While up in the tower, she had an image in her mind of Odessa’s city plan as it would appear in an aerial photograph. Some participants suggested this revealed that Odessa never leaves you. Samuil added that although he did not consider himself a local patriot, whenever he left Odessa he always dreamed of the city. In picking up the Jewish theme, one woman recounted a story about her time in the Crimean city of Simferopol. One day in January she went to work on a Christian holiday when the employees had a day off. Eventually she found someone who told her it was a holiday, adding, ‘Didn’t you know?’ and then, ‘Oh, you’re from Odessa!’ Samuil noted that this illustrated the commonly held notion that Odessa is still the

194 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Jewish capital even though ‘there are not that many of us.’ Following on from this, another participant, told the following joke: ‘Rabinovich emigrates to Israel. Some people there ask him how he likes it. “Yes it’s fine,” he says, “but you know, I did it for my children so they could have a better life.” “Where are your children?” they ask him. “In Odessa!”’ The joke inverts a common phenomenon: children leaving their parents behind in Odessa in search of a better life in the United States, Canada, or Israel. Through this inversion it underscores the merits of living in Odessa. Overall, the jokes conveyed a sense of the city as a unique place whose inhabitants have a distinct world view and way of conducting their affairs. This difference was juxtaposed with the Jews’ presence in the city, conveying a sense of how the special character of Odessa – its distinctiveness from other Russian and Ukrainian cities – has been produced by its Jewish residents. Although, like Samuil, Anna often underscored the links between Jewish and Russian cultural history, she sometimes stressed distinctly Jewish experiences such as the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day she narrated the events as they occurred in Odessa and discussed the memorial sites around which a tour could be constructed. At the time, three memorials existed in Odessa to commemorate Holocaust atrocities. A memorial in Prokhorovskaia Square in Moldovanka marks the start of the ‘Road to Death.’ During the winter of 1941, this was a gathering point for Jews before they were marched out of the city to camps in the Odessa Oblast; thousands perished in the bitter cold. A recently built memorial on Tolbukhin Square marks the death of twelve to fifteen thousand Jews who were burned to death in ammunition barracks. A third monument, a plaque, on Aleksandrovskii Prospect commemorates the hanging of a few thousand people – mostly Jews – by the Romanians, although the monument refers to ‘Soviet citizens.’ Anna mentioned other unmarked sites: the prison at 12–13 Evreiskaia (Jewish) Street where at least three thousand Jews were imprisoned in the first few days of the Occupation before being hanged; a small, shortlived ghetto near Plague Hill (Chumka); and the ghetto in the cloth factory in the Slobodka district that operated for some months in the fall of 1941 as a holding place for Jews before they were sent to camps in Odessa Oblast. She gave statistics on the losses, with the qualification that the exact number of deaths was difficult to determine, partly because the census data about the city before the war had been censored and falsified. She commented: ‘But what does this actually give

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

195

us – a route to take? A sense of the reality? An attempt to make the humiliation and destruction meaningful? Is that really possible?’ Echoing some of the issues that Young has raised about the unstable relationships between memorials, memory, and understanding (1993, 13–14), Anna wondered whether monuments such as the large one planned for Odessa at the former Second Jewish Cemetery could actually made people aware of the Holocaust and facilitate greater understanding of it. Tensions surrounding shifting social boundaries between Odessa’s Jews and the city at large were vividly revealed during one discussion about Vladimir Zhabotinsky. Anna referred to a document recently uncovered by a colleague which revealed that Zhabotinsky had attended an Orthodox Christian wedding. She asked the participants what their religious leaders’ position would be on this. Alëna, who had recently begun observing the Sabbath and who was attending a course offered by the Rabbi of the Lithuanian Orthodox Community, declared that she would not attend a Christian wedding. She noted that a fellow student in her course had asked the same question and had been told that it was not advisable. Anna expressed ambivalence about this trend, commenting that in contrast to the nineteenth century, the Jewish community today seemed to be developing ‘much more in isolation.’ For Anna, as a member of the intelligentsia, knowledge of Jewish history and culture (art, music, and literature) and its links with Russian and European culture was a central part of being Jewish. To her, literary, artistic, and musical production signified a vibrant community. Her ambivalence perhaps stemmed from her perception of the emergence of more rigid boundaries between Jews and non-Jews in the city, something encouraged by religious leaders, and her sense that this hindered rather than facilitated the development of culture. For Anna, Zhabotinsky’s cosmopolitanism, his knowledge of languages, his erudition, travels, and worldliness, offered a more compelling model for Jewish life than the model proposed by Orthodox Judaism. The different meanings the course had for participants suggest generational shifts in some Odessan Jews’ relationship to being Jewish, Russian, and Odessan and the importance of Odessa’s history and culture for their sense of self. Oleg, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish, was in his late twenties. He moved to Odessa in 1975 with his family from Izmail. He had a diploma from a commercial college, was working hauling supplies for a local firm, and intended to apply to do a candidate’s degree in geography. Exposure to members of the local

196 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

intelligentsia and learning about Odessa’s Jews made Oleg feel connected to the city and had set him on a path of self-exploration and discovery, which inspired him to conduct his own research. In contrast, Alëna and Leah – both in their mid-twenties – were born in Odessa, as were their parents and grandparents. At the time, Leah was completing a degree in psychology; Alëna had finished a program at a teacher’s college and was working as a secretary at one of the religious Jewish schools. Although they found the classes interesting, the history of Odessa – even its Jewish dimension – was not as important to them as they had anticipated. While conducting a tour, Leah realized that she did not really care that much about the history of Odessa, because, as she put it, ‘Odessa is now an ordinary provincial city, a dying city. It is dying because the talented people that still lived here in the 1980s, after all the turmoil, the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, have left ... Odessa will crumble away with the soft limestone bricks of the buildings.’ She did not want to remain in Odessa, and thus felt that the particularities of its history were irrelevant. For her, the general history of Jews, and perhaps the history of Moscow – where she thought she might remain after studying Hebrew and English at a religious school – were more significant and could give her knowledge that might help her ‘realize herself.’ Alëna had similar feelings and asserted that knowledge about Jewish history, traditions, and religious practices was more relevant for her than Odessa’s Jewish history. Oleg shared Anna’s interest in local Jewish history and culture and its relationship to Jewish history more broadly; this knowledge was considerably less meaningful for Leah and Alëna. Anna herself observed that the history of Jewish Odessa and Jews more broadly seemed less important and to have less impact for the second history group she organized than for the first. She attributed this to fewer experiences of anti-Semitism and discrimination. The differences in the young people’s views can also be interpreted in light of Golbert’s findings on the multiple and shifting local, national, and transnational identifications of Jewish youth in Kyiv (Golbert 2001a; 2001b). Continuing Golbert’s insights, we might think that being Jewish in post-Soviet countries offers a specific kind of bi-or tri-focal vision (to borrow from Peters 1997). Oleg was focused on the near or the local; Alëna and Leah were focused on a more distant horizon and entering a more transnational or universalist Jewish cultural sphere that would open up opportunities for movement and self-actualization beyond the local.18 Alëna and Leah were participating in, and finding meaning in, new cosmo-

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

197

politan practices rather than staying in what they felt to be a ‘provincial city’ and cultivating a connection with the cosmopolitan past of the prerevolutionary city. Odessa’s cosmopolitan past once offered a way of imagining an alternative to Soviet realities; in the post-Soviet period, opportunities have opened up, allowing people to be cosmopolitan by moving beyond their local context rather than imagining another world in place. Efforts to reclaim and commemorate Jewish history in Odessa are part and parcel of the Jewish community’s efforts to stake a claim to a presence in the city despite that community’s small size in comparison with even the recent past. In establishing this sense of continuity, Odessan Jews are uncovering and making visible the dense and multifaceted character of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Odessa and the early decades of the Soviet Union – a character that was subsequently erased or hidden. In the post-Soviet period, Odessan individuals and organizations that played an important role in the development of Israel have become important in the community’s self-representation and are connecting the past and present city to a transnational Jewish space. In representations of this history, the prominence of Russian language, culture, and imperial historical narratives in Odessa is neither questioned nor contested. In the context of narrating the history of culture, Jewish–Ukrainian connections often remained hidden. Thus, implicitly, contemporary representations of Jewish Odessa reinforce the idea that Odessa is situated in Russian cultural geographies but not Ukrainian ones. Anna’s course highlighted the tensions that exist in the process of reclaiming history and transmitting it to younger generations. For some young people, particularly those drawn to a religious life, knowledge of Jewish culture and history no longer plays such a pivotal role in identifying as Jewish as it did for Jews who grew up in the Soviet Union. Contemporary cosmopolitan practices and transnational connections made possible by the collapse of the Soviet Union and by opportunities to emigrate appear to have become more salient in constituting personal identities among youth than cultivating a knowledge of culture and history. Ukrainian History in a ‘Non-Ukrainian’ City When my Russian teacher found out that I knew Ukrainian, she told me the following joke about Ukrainians and Odesa: ‘Two villagers, Petro and Pavlo, go to Odesa for a day. When they return, a fellow villager

198 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

asks Petro: “Why do you look so happy and Pavlo so dejected?” Petro responds: “Because he was cheated and robbed at the beginning of the day and I only at the end!”’ Ukrainians, in other words, are naive country folk unwise to the cosmopolitan ways of the city. Although by population ethnic Ukrainians make up a majority of the city’s residents, they are often perceived as being foreign to the city. In the mid-1990s the local administration under Mayor Eduard Gurvits renamed streets and erected new monuments; after Ruslan Bodelan was elected in 1998, these initiatives subsided. Gurvits’s administration sponsored the construction of a major monument to Ataman Holovaty, who led the Cossack troops in the storming of Khadzhibei and Izmail, in order to commemorate a Ukrainian contribution to the founding of Odesa; under Bodelan most new city-sponsored monuments were dedicated to Odesan themes. Although Ukrainization programs have been pursued most rigorously in the areas of language and education policy, their practical application varies in different parts of the country on different issues (Janmaat 2000; Pirie 1996). In Odesa, street signs, store signs, and advertisements are sometimes mounted in Ukrainian, sometimes in Russian, and sometimes in both. City administrators speak in Russian at public events, although Oblast and national-level bureaucrats generally speak in Ukrainian. Russian is also the language of most local media.19 Although the effects of Ukrainization policies in Odesa were evident in state bureaucracies (where documentation must be submitted in Ukrainian), educational institutions, and certain other cultural institutions such as libraries and museums (which organize conferences and exhibitions on Ukrainian themes), and in the celebration of national holidays such as Independence Day, non-state Ukrainian cultural and political organizations in Odesa in 2002 were fragmented and weak. Against this background, I consider the activities of one individual – Taras Maksymiuk – a collector of Ukrainian Odesan publications and art who has attempted to raise awareness about Ukrainian history and culture in Odesa through exhibitions and in his role as director of the Odesa Oblast Branch of the Ukrainian Culture Foundation. Taras came to Odesa in 1960 from a town near Mykolaiv. When he first arrived in the city, he spoke Russian (although his family was from western Ukraine and spoke Ukrainian) and was interested in ancient history. Through his wife, who is Jewish, he met a Ukrainian poet and began speaking Ukrainian again. He began collecting objects of Ukrainian culture and literature that fell outside the official Soviet historiographical

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

199

framework in the 1960s and now has one of the largest private collections of Ukrainian publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has collected books, periodicals, and newspapers, particularly from pre-revolutionary times, as well as photographs, documents, manuscripts, and folk and fine art. Although he has focused mainly on Ukrainian publications from Odesa and some Ukrainian-Odesan artists such as Mykhailo Zhuk (1883–1964), Ambrosio Zhdakh (1855–1927), and Yury Korolenko (a contemporary Ukrainian artist in Odesa), he also collects items about Russians, Poles, and Jews, as well as Ukrainian publications in foreign languages. In addition to collecting, he has written about his documents and objects, attended conferences, and taken part in hundreds of exhibitions. Taras conducted a tour about Ukrainian Odesa for me because none was offered by any tour agency or organization; in fact, I was the second person for whom he had conducted such an excursion. He wanted to develop a formalized tour of Ukrainian Odesa as well as a small guidebook for visitors. Rhetorically, his tour was framed as a kind of argument that Ukrainians had always lived in Odesa and had contributed to its development, as if this were something he needed to prove. He not only contested claims that there have been few if any significant Ukrainian contributions to the development of Odesa, but also criticized those narrowly focused, dogmatic members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who ignore or denigrate Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-language Ukrainian publications on Ukrainian themes. Finally, he challenged the idea that Odesa is exclusively a ‘Jewish city:’ ‘The myth that Odesa is purely a Jewish city is created in literature and by people in general. It’s a myth. I don’t think there was any such myth up until World War I. But the cohort of Russian writers from Jewish families – like Babel – they made this the basis of their works and the myth about Odesa as a Jewish city emerged.’ Here, Taras was trying to expand the definition of ‘Ukrainian’ by defining Russian-speaking Ukrainians as Ukrainian; nevertheless, he operated on the assumption that ‘Ukrainian’ means ‘ethnic Ukrainian.’ This also informed his sense of Odesa as a ‘Jewish city,’ which he took to mean Jewish in ethnic rather than cultural terms. The notion that Odesa is a Jewish city because everyone is a bit Jewish in outlook and behaviour regardless of their ethnic background would not make sense within this framework. Taras’s refutation of Odesa’s ‘Jewishness’ highlighted an exclusive understanding of the categories ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Jewish,’ an understanding haunted by a primordialism at the heart of

200 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

both Soviet and nationalist ideologies. In his account of the history of culture in the city, Jewish and Ukrainian narratives engaged RussianJewish and Russian-Ukrainian practices and identities respectively, but not Jewish-Ukrainian ones even though in everyday life there have been intermarriages and intermixings, as Taras’s own family illustrates. At the beginning of his tour, Taras addressed the underclass of Ukrainians in the city, the hidden Ukrainian presence in other professions and the contributions these people had made to the development of Odesa. He pointed out the difficulties in establishing the number of Ukrainians in Odesa in the nineteenth century because of how census data were collected. He first drew attention to peasants and labourers, noting that before the serfs were emancipated in 1861, many of them escaped to Odesa, where they were guaranteed their freedom. Taras asserted that most would have come from nearby areas – Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kherson – and hence would have been Ukrainians, noting that the material culture from surrounding areas attested to this (see Herlihy 1986, 24–5). And while the percentage of foreigners in the city was high, ‘all the surrounding areas, Nerubaiskii, Peresyp, Usatovo, Dalnik and a lot of Moldovanka, were settled by many poor Ukrainians who escaped from their landlords. People forget that the city needed to be fed and that Ukrainians played a large part in that.’ Continuing, he underscored how Ukrainians from surrounding villages had worked at the port and on the construction of the railway, both of which were vital to the development of the city. Ukrainians were invisible not only because they belonged to the lower classes, but also because of linguistic assimilation. He noted that Russian was the lingua franca in Odesa and that everyone who came to the city learned to speak it. Thus, well-off Ukrainians who settled in Odesa – ethnic Ukrainians who worked in administrative positions – quickly adopted Russian. He had found Ukrainian names at the beginning of the nineteenth century among landowners in Odesa (Odesskoe gradonachalstvo), building owners, and graduates of the Richelieu Lycée, although there were few Ukrainians in the merchant class, the administration, and the aristocracy. His identification of Ukrainians on the basis of their surnames is illustrative of the ethnic conception of Ukrainian he operates with. This was curious, given that these Odesans may not have considered themselves ‘Ukrainian’ at all. Moreover, while peasants may have contributed to building a cosmopolitan city, they themselves were hardly likely to have themselves been ‘cosmopolitans.’ After introducing the problem of a Ukrainian presence in Odesa,

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

201

Taras turned to other issues: the founding of the city, the city’s borders, and the relationship between the city and nearby villages. At the Port Museum, located in the city centre near the Literature Museum and Customs Square, he charted the history of the Ottoman presence in the area, highlighting where Cossack barracks would have stood along the ravine and noting that Cossacks received the right to settle in Odesa as a reward for their role in storming the Ottoman fort. At our next meeting, at his office, he laid out some maps from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Odesa and the surrounding area. He explained that two villages, Nerubaiskii and Usatovo, which had been settled in the 1770s by Cossacks who had fled after the destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich, were part of the administrative district of Odesa. He also drew attention to the district of Peresyp and discussed the settlement of many Black Sea Cossacks in the area after the founding of Odesa. However, he pointed out that even before Odesa’s establishment, during Mazepa’s times (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), Cossacks had come to the area to fish and collect salt from the Kulianik estuary and had also suffered a military defeat in the area. Summing up, he told me: ‘So Peresyp and the area around it is part of the history of Ukrainian Odesa. Today, these two villages are part of another administrative district, but before the revolution they were part of Odesa.’ Using these maps, he contested the conventional wisdom that the city’s history began in 1794 by referring to its pre-revolutionary boundaries, and made an argument for including the contributions of Ukrainian villagers in the history of Odesa. In reinterpreting the relationship between city and countryside, he was resituating the city in relation to its hinterland in a way that connected it with a Ukrainian nation and state. Continuing the Cossack theme, Taras dwelt at length on the figure of Ataman Holovaty as we approached the new monument in the Starobazarnaia Square on Aleksandrovskii Prospect. He viewed the construction of this monument as a major event for Odesa and agreed with the choice of Holovaty because of the important role he had played in the military campaigns and economic life of the region: ‘He was one of the most active representatives of the Cossacks. He was a military judge and then became an Ataman. He was in the upper echelons of the Cossack leadership. He was involved in a campaign in Iran and took part in the storming of Izmail and Khadzhibei. There are also many documents that remain, such as his reports and letters to Potemkin.’ In emphasizing the documentary basis for Holovaty’s involvement

202 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

in Odesa, Taras was countering a widespread notion among many Odesans that the Ataman never actually spent time in the city. However, images of Cossacks do not fit easily within the logic of cosmopolitanism and cultivation (kulturnost) that dominates commonsense understandings of the character of the city. Like Anna, Taras emphasized Ukrainian involvement in the making of famous landmarks in Odesa – landmarks that have become widely circulated images of the city. In the same terms as Anna pointed out the Jewish contribution to the Pushkin monument, Taras spoke about the monument to the duc de Richelieu, one of the first monuments built in Odesa: And who created it? The Ukrainian sculptor, Ivan Martos.20 He was from a Cossack family. His surname – Martos – is quite well known. When I was in Moscow, and we were taken to Red Square on an excursion, the guide said: ‘This is the Vasily Blazhenov Church. And this is a monument to Minin and Pozharsky – saviours of the homeland [spasiteli otchestva] – which was created by your Ukrainian sculptor Ivan Martos.’ She mentioned his other work, including Richelieu in Odesa. At that time, I never thought about who made the monument to Richelieu ... But if the creator were French or Russian or Jewish then everyone would know. I want to underline the fact that one of the first monuments in Odesa was created by a Ukrainian sculptor and it became one of the three visiting cards of Odesa – a visiting card which was created for Odesa by a Ukrainian sculptor. That’s my approach to it anyway.

Taras also addressed the issue of assimilation and the complications connected with claiming figures as ‘Ukrainian.’ While discussing a nineteenth-century Ukrainian printing house on the corner of Rishelevskaia (Richelieu) and Bolshaia Arnautskaia Streets, which continues to work as a press today, he insisted on the need to recognize Russian-speaking Ukrainians as contributors to Ukrainian history and Ukrainian Odesa. The press had been founded by Yeftim Fesenko, a descendant of the Chernihiv Cossacks. Fesenko came to Odesa on foot in the 1870s, worked initially in a printing house, and eventually established his own small printing press on Grecheskaia Street. He found his niche in religious literature and printed coloured icons, images of monasteries all over Ukraine, and images of the saints, these last produced by the thousands. With the money he made, he built himself separate premises on Rishelevskaia Street. He printed some Ukrainian books

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

203

and supported the Ukrainian theatre in Odesa. Raising the issue of language, Taras referred to Fesenko’s memoirs, which were written in Russian: ‘This was characteristic of many Ukrainians in the nineteenth century, and today for that matter. I am Ukrainian but I speak Russian. We have to reconcile ourselves to this.’ He discussed his plans to have the printing press renamed after Fesenko and for a plaque to be put up in his honour. Just as Anna narrated Jewish individuals and organizations as part of a Russian cultural and linguistic milieu, so too did Taras in terms of Ukrainians. However, the issue of situating the activities of ‘assimilated’ Ukrainians as part of a Ukrainian narrative is complicated by the fact that they tend to be viewed as Russians by Russians, while Ukrainian nationalists view them and their contributions as not ‘really’ Ukrainian. In claiming assimilated Ukrainians as Ukrainian, Taras was prying open both Russian and Ukrainian national ideologies in order to create a discursive space in which to claim a connection between Odesa and Ukraine. A final theme in Taras’s tour was the significance of Odesa as a milieu for the development of Ukrainian high culture. Stopping in front of the Russian Drama Theatre, Taras discussed Ukrainian Theatre in Odesa in the nineteenth century and its positive reception in the city. He sketched out the formation of the theatre in the context of the growth of the Ukrainian national movement, which gathered momentum after 1861 with the abolition of serfdom. Marko Kropyvnytsky, born in 1840, came to Odesa in 1871 to get involved in theatre. After working for Ukrainian and Russian troupes, Kropyvnytsky and Mykola Sadovsky founded a new group in 1882 – the Korofeev Ukrainian Theatre – which they were able to accomplish because Kropyvnytsky was from a noble family. The original actors included Kropyvnytsky, Starytsky, Karpenko-Kary, and Sadovsky. Citing Kropyvnytsky’s memoirs, which he had acquired for his collection, Taras described how the troupe was hugely popular wherever it performed, including in Odesa’s City Theatre (now known as the Opera Theatre). Although the troupe was banned from performing in the empire’s provinces of Kyiv, Podillia, and Volhyn, the actors could still perform in the southern provinces of Kherson, Yekaterinoslav, and Tavria. In 1918, Kropyvnytsky created the Odesa Ukrainian Drama Institute, which later became the second most important theatrical institute in Soviet Ukraine. In 1920 what is now called the Russian Drama Theatre was given to them as a base. By situating the development of Ukrainian culture in the city in the context of the emergence of a Ukrainian national movement, Taras was articulat-

204 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

ing a historical argument that Odesa is part of a Ukrainian cultural space. Taras’s tour of Ukrainian Odesa revealed narrative strategies for claiming a Ukrainian presence in Odesa’s history that reinterpreted spatial and temporal relationships. Using maps, he resignified the relationship between city and countryside in a way that included Ukrainians within an Odesan narrative and Odesa within a Ukrainian national space. Temporally, he emphasized Ukrainians in pre-revolutionary Odesa, likely because the claims that Odesa is not Ukrainian emphasize the absence of Ukrainians in the pre-revolutionary period, a period which tends to be viewed as a golden age. By highlighting Ukrainians and their contributions during that era, Taras was making them part and parcel of the city in its heyday of cosmopolitanism. Yet in emphasizing the countryside, Cossacks, and Ukrainian culture, his narrative turned the city away from the sea and towards its hinterland even while he stressed the cultural contributions of Ukrainians to Odesa’s ‘golden age.’ In other words, there was a fundamental contradiction in his assertions of a Ukrainian claim to the city in that he was situating the city within the narrower geography of nation rather than in the broader ones of empire and the world. His narrative had the effect of provincializing the city rather than cosmopolitanizing it. In situating Odessa between sea and steppe, Lev Slavin offers us an image of the city swept to and fro by tides both cosmopolitan and provincial. Although there have been dramatic ruptures in the economic, social, and political life of Odessa since its heyday of imperial cosmopolitanism, the image captures ongoing tensions in the intelligentsia’s attempts to define the city’s identity, relationship to power, and location in broader geographies. The narrators in this chapter imaginatively reconstituted spatial relationships by narrating history. I have employed a similar strategy by juxtaposing their accounts to demonstrate how different narratives reveal and conceal particular peoples, relationships, and spaces. The Odessan Myth was born in and describes a multiethnic imperial port city, a city that was ‘full of the world,’ a city oriented to the sea. Odessa’s cosmopolitanism in the pre-revolutionary period – its multiethnic brew and its orientation to the world through trade – was enabled by the imperial context (even as it was in tension with it). The Soviet state, by comparison, provincialized the city by curtailing its connections with the world and by undermining its cultural institu-

Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial

205

tions. Nevertheless, as a major port with a large shipping fleet in the Soviet Union, the city had a kind of limited cosmopolitanism (understood as openness to the world). It was also ‘cosmopolitan’ in the negative Soviet sense because of its large Jewish population and contacts with ‘the world,’ however circumscribed. While its position as a port and (rather illicit) status as ‘Jewish’ contributed to the sense that Odessa was a kind of ‘other space,’ the intelligentsia cultivated another dimension of this cosmopolitanism in the Literature Museum by presentating texts and settings evocative of the imperial grandeur and Europeanness of the pre-revolutionary city. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, themes from the Odessan Myth – generated primarily in Russian literature – have become part of a publicly articulated image and ideology of place. Although many histories hidden during the Soviet period are being excavated and narrated, this chapter has focused on two – Jewish and Ukrainian – that have been in tension not only with Russian imperial and Soviet narratives (albeit in contrasting ways) but also with each other (Aster and Potychnyi 1990). Indeed, images of Odessa as ‘cultured,’ Russian, and Jewish elide in opposition to the culturally different – that is, largely Ukrainian – ‘backward’ countryside. Articulating a Jewish history in the city has involved inserting actors, organizations, and events into Russian cultural and historical narratives of the city’s past as well as a shifting emphasis on interconnection with, and separateness from, a Russian cultural milieu. Although this cultural history buttresses notions of Odessa as cosmopolitan and offers people like Anna a sense of continuity, some members of the younger generation nevertheless perceive the city as provincial and find contemporary cosmopolitan practices more meaningful than forging a sense of continuity with the past. Despite Odessa’s affiliation with a national state, local laments about provincialization and Ukrainization mean that narratives of Ukrainian Odesa such as Taras’s are not widely known or appreciated. In the intellectual work of connecting Odes(s)a to Ukraine, arguments have been made to demonstrate that Ukrainians’ contributed not only to the development of Odes(s)a as a distinct place, but also to the development of the Ukrainian national movement and culture more generally. As Taras demonstrated, for this to occur, the narrow Ukrainian nationalist discursive framework needs to be expanded to include ‘assimilated’ Ukrainians in the pantheon of Ukrainian Odesan heroes. His narrative attempts to revalue and resignify the relationship between

206 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

city and country and to make historical actors out of peasants and Cossacks – people associated more with the steppe than the city, trade and culture. Many concerned with commemorating the city’s cosmopolitanism and orientation of the world perceive these efforts as parochial and provincializing. These specific examples of narrating history demonstrate the friction encountered when different localities and regions are ‘soldered together’ as part of a nation. In spite of the technologies available for governing and imagining nationhood, and despite attempts to resignify a national territory through reference to history, residents of many localities such as Odessa retain a strong sense of place. Local landscapes are palimpsests layered with histories that residents draw on in different ways to articulate meaningful senses of home and world that do not connect neatly to the nation. Though in many respects Odessa is no longer a cosmopolitan port, the trope of cosmopolitanism continues to play a key role in distinguishing the city and setting it apart from Ukrainian cultural and political geographies. Finally, juxtaposing the different histories narrated in place conveys how Odessa’s distinctiveness can be both unique and typical of borderland histories and experiences.

Epilogue

Anthropologists working in former socialist states must confront issues of time and history in relation to their own work (Ries 1997; Wanner 1998). Chronic instability and the rapid pace of change in all realms of social life mean that ethnography in postsocialist places quickly becomes ethnohistory, a document of a particular moment in time. Two years after I finished fieldwork, Ukraine was engulfed in the events of the Orange Revolution, the outcome of which shocked even many long-time Ukraine observers. While commentators might dispute its revolutionary character, it was a historic event, one that transformed Ukrainians’ sense of individual and collective agency. The massive involvement of Ukrainians in these events not only transformed citizens’ sense of their capacity for collective action, but also shifted their sense of having a place in the world and the world’s sense of Ukraine as a distinct place within it. No longer will airline agents ask at the boarding gate, ‘Do you have your visa for Russia?’ as I was asked when I travelled from London to Kyiv in December 1999. Although Ukrainians have been disappointed by the intrigues and indecisive actions of postOrange governments as they have witnessed their country lurch from one political crisis to the next, the Orange Revolution remains a symbol of collective action and national identity. The ethnography presented in this book is based on fieldwork conducted in 2001–2 and is a document of that time. Then, in the aftermath of international condemnation of the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze and the sale of the Kolchuga radar system to Iraq, Ukraine’s government faced international isolation. As a consequence, its geopolitical orientation seemed, despite its official multivectoral policy, to be turning eastward. Authoritarian rule was intensifying, while the opposition

208 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

remained weak and fragmented. Until the Orange Revolution, some have observed, the long-term existence of Ukraine as a state seemed tenuous, given Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions, its encroachments on Ukraine’s sovereignty during the Tuzla Straits crisis, and its heavyhanded interventions in the presidential election campaign. Odessans’ claims about being ‘closer to Russia’ had different implications and resonance in that geopolitical climate. I was not present in Odessa during the Orange Revolution but returned to the city for a month in July 2005. Overall, Odessans had supported the status quo during the 2004 elections and voted for Kuchma’s chosen successor Victor Yanukovich. Although support for Yanukovich was strong, it was not as overwhelming as it was further east as significant numbers in Odessa and parts of Odessa Oblast voted for Victor Yushchenko. However, when the spectre of separatism emerged, Odessa’s mayor, Ruslan Bodelan, joined governors in eastern Ukraine in threatening to declare Odessa Oblast the autonomous republic of Novorossiiskii Krai. Most people I met in 2005 described witnessing sharp arguments and debates among friends and relatives who supported opposing camps. Vladimir Chaplin, an employee of Odessa’s Jewish Museum of mixed Ukrainian and Russian ancestry, who both advocates and criticizes local discourses, saw this as further evidence of Odessan diversity. If Lviv was ‘orange’ and Donetsk ‘blue,’ in his view the widespread nature of debates between the two demonstrated how Odessa was a ‘multicoloured place.’ This is not to idealize Odessa. The same kinds of machinations and threats of violence occurred there as elsewhere. However, Vladimir saw Odessa as a microcosm of Ukraine, a place where both sides had their adherents, a place where they converged. The return of Eduard Gurvits to the position of mayor was undoubtedly the most significant result of the political changes for the city. Gurvits, a businessman and political outsider, was elected mayor in 1994 and then ousted in 1998 by Bodelan, the oblast head and former Communist apparatchik, after a dirty and violent campaign. However, through a dubious court case held in Kirovograd, the results were annulled and Bodelan was appointed mayor. Gurvits was elected to Parliament in 2002 as part of the Our Ukraine bloc, a key player in the organization of the Orange Revolution. Buoyed by the changed political climate after Yushchenko’s victory, he launched a court challenge in the same way Bodelan had, won, and was thereby reinstated as mayor. Although Gurvits was an ‘orange’ candidate and his return to power

Epilogue

209

controversial, he was viewed positively by people who had voted both blue and orange. The city, these people felt, had been neglected and abused by Bodelan: roads were in disrepair; the face of the historic centre had been damaged by the construction of ungainly buildings; the sanatoria lining Odessa’s famed seaside had been privatized; and access to the beaches was subject to fees. Concern for the city could unite at least some blue and orange supporters. I offer here some impressions from discussions with friends in Odessa regarding how the Orange Revolution had shifted their perceptions of Odessa, Ukraine, and Russia. Anna Misuk and her husband, Mark Naidorf, are native Odessans. Mark is a lecturer, and Anna is active in the city’s Jewish community. When I visited their home during 2001–2, they almost always watched Russian TV channels and underscored this point to me. As Russian speakers, they were anxious about being forced to speak and work in Ukrainian and concerned that the venues for the development of Russian culture in Ukraine were being curtailed. Mark once mused that if Ukraine were part of Russia his institute would fund an annual trip to Moscow to access the libraries and expertise there. He and Anna also wondered how Ukraine could continue to exist, given its marginal economy and vulnerable position between Russia and the European Union. When I returned in the summer of 2005, they were eager to comment on the events of the previous year. One of the first things they pointed out was how they watched Ukrainian TV almost exclusively because they found Russian TV ‘Soviet.’ Indeed, they had been glued to Channel 5 – the only independent TV channel – during the elections. They explained that they had voted for Yushchenko even though they were worried about the impact that a continued program of Ukrainization would have on their lives. Both had been active in the Soviet dissident movement, and the deepening of authoritarianism in Russia and Ukraine’s own authoritarian drift overrode their concerns about involvement in a Russian cultural sphere. Political events had caused them to disaggregate their relationships to Russia. In 2002, cultural and political loyalties had been conflated; as a result of the election campaign, these two dimensions had been separated. Galina, who is ethnically Ukrainian, worked as a masseuse and is now receiving her pension (chapter 4). In 2002 she had been highly critical of Kuchma’s regime and held distinctly anti-Soviet views, partly on account of her mother’s experiences during the famine of 1933 and her own during the famine of 1946–7. She voted for Yanukovich out of a

210 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

concern for stability, and because he had raised pensions and promised to reduce tariffs for heat and rent. She had nothing positive to say about the changes that had taken place since the Orange Revolution; in her view they had only resulted in increased prices for basic goods. As we walked through the city centre, she professed her love for Odessa and remarked on the brilliance of its early European administrators. Odessa, she said, was a European city, and with Gurvits back at the helm it would begin to look more like one. I asked about where she saw Ukraine vis-à-vis the European Union and Russia. ‘Who are we to Europe?’ she retorted. ‘It’s naive to place any hopes on Europe or the United States. We are all Slavs, after all. You can’t give the finger to Russia. How will we get our gas anyway?’ She offered interesting insights into the relationships among Europe, Russia, Odessa, and Ukraine. Odessa might once have been a European city, and should look like one, but that did not mean – to her – that Odessa and Ukraine could be or ought to be located in contemporary Europe. In her view, Europe of the nineteenth century and the Europe of the twenty-first century had radically different meanings in relation to Odessa and its location. This book has presented a kaleidoscopic ethnography of history in the city of Odessa as a way of expanding our understandings of the contradictions of nation formation and place-making in contemporary Ukraine. While it may seem self-evident that Odessa is located in the contemporary state of Ukraine, for many residents, ex-residents, and even some scholars of the post-Soviet region, linking Odessa and Ukraine – particularly with its Ukrainian spelling ‘Odesa’ – is problematic and controversial. The problem of Odessa’s location relative to the geographies of Ukraine, Russia, and the world beyond lies at the core of this ethnography. The questions of where Odessa is and when its history begins are central to contests over whose city Odessa is and who can claim a place in it. By examining the co-presence of different historicities and temporalities in particular institutions, groups, lives, and urban landscapes, this book has illuminated not only how Odessans’ sense of distinctiveness has been created and re-created in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, but also how Odessa can be considered both distinct from, and typical of, a broader Ukrainian experience. The particulars discussed here intersect with discussions in anthropology and history about cosmopolitanism, place and historicity, and nation formation in a European borderland. Although many Odessans eschewed connections to the nation in

Epilogue

211

2001, their claims about the city’s distinctiveness were articulated in opposition to what they perceived to be a homogenizing, Ukrainizing state. School education – and particularly history education – has been one of the key sites of nation building in the country. Although many scholars attribute near magical power to textbooks in implanting new narratives of national history in young people’s minds, closer inspection reveals that among youth, history education has had unpredictable and contradictory effects in generating a sense of Ukraine as a state because of the transmission of different historicities among kin, friends, and the urban landscape. The complicated effects of the co-presence of multiple, contradictory pasts is evident in the way elderly people combine historical chronologies, biographical events, and idiosyncratic tropes to make sense of their own lives and historical events. War stories – which are significant for the entire elderly generation – underscore Odessa’s distinctiveness and narrators’ connections to the Soviet state and broader geographies. Taken together, the stories of the young and elderly reveal the salience of the geography and history of Russia and the Soviet Union in forming a sense of self and location relative to new and defunct states. Odessa’s distinctiveness is imagined and created in relation to particular places inside and outside the city and the social and ethnic groups associated with them. Indeed, for many residents, the qualities Odessa possesses by virtue of being a city, and a particular kind of city, do much to foster the perception that their city is a cosmopolitan place, one that is distinct and ‘separate’ from the nation. Odessa’s cosmopolitan qualities distinguish it not only from what is perceived to be the parochial Ukrainian countryside but also from ‘nationalistic’ Lvivans and ‘pretentious’ and ‘upstart’ Kyivans. The once marginal neighbourhood of Moldovanka has become symbolically central in imagining Odessan distinctiveness through the continued circulation and resonance of Isaac Babel’s stories and the capacity of courtyards and the Old Horse Market to signify and produce Odessan sociality. Babel’s stories convey the sense that Odessa is a Jewish city while stories about courtyards and the Old Horse marketplace are emblematic of its multiethnic past and communal sociability. Deeply nostalgic, contemporary stories of Moldovanka register a critique of postsocialist social dislocations while forming an additional layer in a longer history of articulating longing and loss in relation to the district. Odessa’s uniqueness is also cultivated in the walks of the My Odessa club. Besides underscoring the multiethnic composition of the city and the prominence of its Jewish

212 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

community, the My Odessa participants stress the worldliness, high culture, and innovativeness that were found in the city prior to the October Revolution. In sensing and narrating the city’s cosmopolitan past, they critique what they see as the homogenizing and parochializing consequences of Odessa’s location in a Ukrainian state. Finally, while stories of Moldovanka and the walks of the My Odessa club offer insights into how residents generate a sense of Odessa as a distinct place, juxtaposing different accounts of the city’s history as presented in the Literature Museum, a Jewish history group, and the walks of a Ukrainian collector reveals not only the cultural logics and oppositions through which Odessan distinctiveness is created, but also the city’s Ukrainian connections. This ethnography differs from many studies about Ukraine in that it begins with the question of where rather than who – with location rather than identity. Although many studies have mapped and modelled Ukraine’s regionalism, in everyday life there is a much more complex interplay of understandings of time and space involved in constituting senses of place and their relationships to broader cultural and political geographies. Attention to how senses of place and history are transmitted in everyday life and particular localities helps us understand why place remains such a powerful frame of belonging in contemporary Ukraine. Attending to the production of locality can cut across the reification that occurs when the construction and content of ‘identities’ are foregrounded. As Handler (1994) has indicated, although theorists attempt to address the interplay of multiple identities, the concept is inextricable from singularity and boundedness. My claim about particularity and place is not intended to expand the debate over whether there are one, two, or many Ukraines (Barrington and Herron 2004; Riabchuk 2002; Szporluk 2002; Zhurzhenko 2002). Although my ethnography can be read as a cautionary note to those who would construct such models, it is meant more as a statement about a kind of complexity that is typical of Ukraine as a whole and more broadly typical of borderland regions with histories of shifting state regimes. In accounting for the discourse on Odessan distinctiveness, it is important to remember that the Odessan Myth emerged as part of the expansion of the Russian Empire. At its inception this myth was the product of an exoticizing gaze from the imperial metropole (Stanton 2004), a ‘view from the north’ (Naidorf 2001), a gaze that above all compared Odessa to Petersburg and Moscow. In the early nineteenth century this gaze overlooked the particularities of lands now part of

Epilogue

213

Ukraine, which were seen as Little Russia, an integral part of the empire. Contemporary localist discourses contrast Odessans’ cultivation, cosmopolitanism, Jewishness, and vibrant ethnic mix to a homogeneous and homogenizing Ukraine. Yet European connections and the intermixing of peoples were characteristic of Ukraine’s western borderlands, not only in cities such as Lviv and Chernivtsi, which had vibrant urban cultures, but also in smaller towns. Considered in the context of a history that takes a territorial approach, Odessa, though unique, has much more in common with this region than localist discourses and imperial narratives would have us believe. In insisting on their uniqueness, Odessans are in fact manifesting something that has been observed elsewhere in Ukraine – namely, the cultivation and power of local senses of place (Blank 2004; Riabchuk 2000). The contradictory intersection of histories in place is not unique to Odessa, though the particular patterns of history that can be observed are. Places are produced historically through the interplay of broader economic, social, and cultural relations of different scales. As Lefebvre has written, ‘no space ever vanishes utterly, leaving no trace’ (1991, 164). Although, as a palimpsest of borderlands, Ukraine has been subject to the modernizing regimes of several states, its histories leave physical and discursive traces that influence the present in surprising and contradictory ways. I would like to offer a cautionary note about borders and borderlands. Ukraine is now being studied as an example of a ‘borderland society’ and a terrain of shifting frontiers. This borderland experience is seen as productive of the ‘ambivalence’ of contemporary Ukrainian national identity. When using the concept of borderland in speaking about Ukraine, it is important to attend to the relationship between a particular place and its past and present locations in relation to borders as well as to the different ways in which borderland experiences affect the present. It is also important to pay careful attention to the ways in which people themselves are conscious of living on the border or frontier and the consciousness of being ‘central’ or ‘peripheral.’ When Odessa was established, it was located on a frontier. However, it quickly became vital to the political economy of empire. Local consciousness places the city at the centre of things, not at the periphery or on the border, even though the analytical concepts of borderland help situate the production of Odessa’s distinct urban ways and their strong sense of place. If Odessans’ strong sense of place is in fact typical of something

214 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

Ukrainian, Odessans’ claims to a multiethnic, cosmopolitan ethos manifest a pan-European trend in their intersection with discourses on multiculturalism (Ballinger 2004; Stolcke 1999). Residents of many cities around the Mediterranean and beyond are excavating and invoking past forms of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism as part of political projects and identity politics (Haller 2004; Ors 2006). However, the specifics of each case are important to consider, since the ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ that urban dwellers long for were the products of different empires and different policies on nationalities. In the case of Odessa, for example, during the Soviet period the sense of local uniqueness came to be articulated in terms of ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnos’ mirroring the category of ‘Soviet person’ – a Russian-speaking person created through the merging of peoples. This is now in tension with discourses of multiculturalism. It also coincides with the revival of distinct ethnic communities in the post-Soviet period. Vladimir, employee of the Odessa Jewish Museum referred to earlier, offers interesting insights into these tensions. Vladimir ‘lived the Odessan Myth’ – that his nationality was Odessan – and tried to enter university declaring so. When he was forced to choose an official nationality, he chose to enter as a Jew. After reflecting on this experience and the revival of the Jewish community, he told me he thought that the idea of an Odessan nationality was artificial, ‘a wall behind which people hide to pretend they have no nationality ... a tree without roots.’ He does, however, continue to see Odessa as unique because ‘to this day people of all the different confessions and nationalities live here and have a place in this city.’ Odessa, he now feels, is a place that allows differences to coexist rather than assimilating them. This appears to mirror a discursive shift from ‘internationalism’ to ‘multiculturalism.’ Although Vladimir celebrates this, discourses of multiculturalism operate with different logics of exclusion (Ballinger 2004; Stolcke 1999). In tracing how Odessans cultivate a sense of their city as a cosmopolitan place, I aimed to bring together questions about cosmopolitanism and place in anthropology. Most research about cosmopolitan cities focuses on issues of fluidity, hybridity, and transnational connections as effects of the new globalism. I traced instead how the cosmopolitan can be embedded in the particular. Drawing on insights from phenomenological approaches to place – those which stress the convergence of time and space – I showed how the cosmopolitan past manifests itself in the present in structural relationships, material traces, and particular practices, and as a tool of the social imagination. First, although

Epilogue

215

Odessa’s trade links were cut off, its status as a port meant that it remained an opening to the world through which goods and the city’s residents passed. Second, the city’s architectural heritage, though damaged and allowed to decay, has remained largely intact from pre-revolutionary times and is markedly different from the standard forms of many Soviet towns. The material forms and sociabilities of its courtyards and streets meant that Soviet policies had unexpected effects regarding the forms of sociality they generated. Third, textual traces – that is, literary texts by Odessan authors – provided evocative images of the pre-revolutionary city, which, because the urban fabric remained intact, allowed for the mapping of older social and cultural geographies by the city’s intelligentsia during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Contemporary Odessa is not cosmopolitan in the way it was in the late imperial period, when it was an important modern metropolis in an expansive empire. Yet after-effects of these historical experiences persist in the present, both in practices and as tools of the social imagination. This study adds to the anthropology of history and historicity in European contexts. In their engagements with ‘history,’ anthropologists have borrowed historians’ methods of archival research to produce historical ethnographies. Alternatively, they have explored history’s many forms (oral, textual, performed, material) and mobilizations in social and political life. Although anthropological studies of European contexts have emphasized textual and discourse analyses of oral and archival materials to track local responses to broad political transformations (Ballinger 2003; Brown 2003a; Karakasidou 1997), increasingly they are addressing popular forms of historicity – the ways that ordinary people sense, know and represent the past – forms that cannot be reduced either to history or memory (Stewart 2003; Stewart 1996). Following on from this work, I have focused on a range of manifestations of ‘history’ in social life and how the understandings embodied in these manifestations have been implicated in constituting or contesting ‘Ukraine,’ ‘Russia,’ and ‘Odessa.’ This ethnography has considered history lessons, elderly people’s life stories, museum exhibits, places, and walks as forms of history making. Moreover, I have argued that to understand the complicated and contradictory ways that the past affects the present in Ukraine, history should not just be considered in terms of narratives abstracted from texts and political platforms but rather in relation to the social contexts in which history is narrated and the geographies it invokes. The metaphor of kaleidoscope captures the insepa-

216 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

rability of space and history as well as the effects of the co-presence of different, seemingly incommensurable pasts and historicities not only in Odessa, but also in Ukraine more generally. My ethnography can be used to critique certain teleological assumptions about nation building held by theorists and practitioners. Scholars of nationalism point out that not all nationalisms result in the establishment of a state for a given nation, yet they implicitly assume that once a nation has attained statehood, state institutions such as the education system are effective in generating a taken-for-granted acceptance of a given state’s existence. My school ethnography illustrated how the generation of a hegemonic state-idea has been complicated not only by the circulation of different bodies of historical knowledge on which the state no longer has a monopoly, but also by the complex relationships between home and school which may reinforce or undermine this knowledge. As an ethnography of history, this study can also be used to critique the implicit teleological assumptions of scholars’ assertions that the nation, with its putative ‘national memory’ or history, is based more on what is forgotten (Renan 1990) or invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) than on what is remembered. While undoubtedly ‘forgetting’ is a significant part of the formation of community identities, pasts are not infinitely malleable (Appadurai 1981) and epochs do not always neatly succeed one another in sequential, linear fashion. Indeed, my ethnography bears some resemblance to Mbembe’s description of the African postcolony in that ‘existing time ... is neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it to the point where a single age exists within society’ (2001, 16). In other words, various temporalities and historicities coexist in the present in complicated ways. More specifically, the states of which ‘new’ nation-states were once part have afterlives that influence the present and that undermine attempts to generate new hegemonies. Thus ‘pasts retain ... a power to haunt. They are a play of the visible and the invisible; they partially resist discursivity the same way that pain resists language’ (Chakrabarty 2002, 46). Although the Orange Revolution strengthened commonsense notions of Ukraine as nation and state, the fault lines that run through this country have not disappeared. These tensions regarding the country’s location and orientation are signified by the ongoing struggle over foreign policy between President Yushchenko and his former archrival, Yanukovich, who became prime minister after the parliamentary elections in

Epilogue

217

the spring of 2006. Meanwhile Ukraine is still haunted by the same ghosts of the past as it was prior to the Orange Revolution. The commemoration of the Second World War and the Parliament’s recognition of the artificial famine of 1932–3 as genocide have stirred controversies and heated national debate. But here I would point to a plural vision of historical times and geographical location that one encounters in everyday life. There are of course plenty of people and groups who would map a unified singular vision of history – one that would exclude certain pasts and peoples – onto all Ukrainian citizens. We need only think about the odious activities of the Inter-Regional Academy of Public Administration (MAUP) in disseminating anti-Semitism (Rudling 2006). But other Ukrainians acknowledge seemingly incommensurable pasts and want them acknowledged officially. In closing, I offer three vignettes to illustrate this plural vision. The first is from a conversation that took place in March 2002 in Odessa over a meal at a friend’s house. Masha was visiting Rimma (chapter 3). A discussion about ‘Ukrainization’ turned to the issue of renaming streets. She was angered at the renaming of streets for the way in which it erased history: ‘In my view, the street signs should now give all the names that a street has had so that the history of this place is visible. On the sign for Preobrazhenskaia Street, people should also be able to read ‘Soviet Army Street,’ and the name it had under the Romanians. This is a more honest and truthful way of relating to the past.’ The second vignette originates in an exchange about commemorating the Second World War that took place in October 2006 at the University of Toronto between university students visiting from Ukraine and a Ukrainian-Canadian historian. The historian argued that commemorating Victory Day on 9 May perpetuated Soviet war myths and ‘imperial ties’ with Russia rather than articulating a European orientation. In his view, Ukrainians should commemorate the war on 8 May as in other European countries, and its name should be changed from ‘Victory Day’ to ‘Remembrance Day.’ In responding, one student explained, ‘Our elders who fought in World War Two think of it as the Great Patriotic War and find meaning in the date of 9 May. They speak the Soviet language and their minds will not be changed even if the government changes the date. Out of respect for them and their experiences, this date should be retained.’ Then another student spoke up. ‘For the time being,’ he said, ‘it could be a dual holiday with two names – Victory Day/Remembrance Day.’ This double naming, he explained,

218 Kaleidoscopic Odessa

could be used for the short term to signify where they had come from and where they were going, the meaning of history for the older generations, and the meaning they would like history to have ‘for our children,’ one that located Ukraine alongside Europeans. A final vignette concerns the controversy surrounding the raising of a statue of Catherine II in Odessa in 2006 and 2007. A statue of her unveiled in Odessa in 1900 was dismantled twenty years later during the October Revolution. What remains of this monument was eventually moved to the courtyard of the Local History Museum. A monument commemorating the uprising on the battleship Potemkin was erected on the site of the Catherine monument in 1965. In June 2006 the city council passed a resolution to move the Potemkin monument to Customs Square and to erect a monument to Catherine in its place. Representatives of centre-right parties and the Ukrainian intelligentsia rejected the need for the statue on the grounds that Catherine was a brutal figure who repressed Ukrainians. They perceived the rebuilding of the monument as an intervention meant to undermine Ukrainian statehood by strengthening residents’ identification with Novorossiia, an intervention supported by the Russian Federation as it pursues its neo-imperialist ambitions (Valovych et al. 2006). On the night of 24 June 2007 the Potemkin monument was removed and on 27 October, a monument to Catherine II, incorporating remnants of the original, was unveiled. What Ukrainian patriots and Russian neo-imperialists overlook is the fact that many Odessans support Ukrainian statehood and the erection of the Catherine monument. Alexandra, a Russian-speaking Odessan of mixed ancestry, had voted for Yushchenko in 2004 because she was deeply concerned that Ukrainian elites were adopting the authoritarianism of the Russian Federation. Yet she fully supports the monument to Catherine, given her role in founding the city to which she is deeply attached. Some commentators label this plural vision ‘ambivalence,’ a term that has become a key trope in describing Ukraine. In Ukraine ‘ambivalence’ is mapped onto aggregate populations that have divergent views as well as onto people who combine what appear to be incommensurable perspectives in their world view. Usually, the people who apply this label do so with some impatience and imply that Ukrainians ought to make up their minds about past and present, east and west. For these observers, ambivalence implies indecisiveness. Ambivalence is often attributed to the condition of being in between. For the populations inhabiting these lands, the condition of being in between has

Epilogue

219

sometimes resulted in excessive violence and sometimes in coexistence. Masha, Alexandra, and the university students, I would hazard, are not ambivalent. They can – must, perhaps – look in different directions at once. To inhabit the present in Ukraine, then, is to acknowledge and live with conflicting, contradictory, and incommensurable histories.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

1. Kaleidoscopic Odessa 1 Some of the political achievements that earned Catherine the title Catherine the Great resulted in the loss of political autonomy and freedoms for certain segments of the Ukrainian population. Because she is a controversial figure in contemporary Ukraine, I use the more neutral designation Catherine II. 2 Roman Szporluk (2000, 364) criticizes the use of the literal meaning of Ukraine’s name as an interpretive frame for the way in which it reproduces the country’s peripheral status in relation to metropolitan and imperial centres – a status that Ukrainian nation builders have long striven to overcome. 3 Contemporary Odessa is visually striking for the extent to which the historical centre has remained intact from the pre-revolutionary era. Although some buildings date from the early nineteenth century, the majority of those that remain were constructed after 1860. The original city plan, in which two grids intersect each other at a 45-degree angle, was drawn up by the Dutchman Franz de Voland in 1794 on the location of the existing Ottoman fortress. This plan was retained and extended as the city continued to grow. Although few buildings have survived from the earliest period, a number remain from the 1820s along Primorskii Boulevard, one of Odessa’s signature streets, which extends along the bluff overlooking the port. The Opera Theatre, a grand construction modelled after Vienna’s opera house and built in the 1860s, is one of the city’s most prominent architectural landmarks. 4 Migration transformed Odessa noticeably in the 1990s. Like the population of Ukraine, which shrank from 52 million in 1989 to just over 48 million in 2001, Odessa’s population fell from 1,097,000 in 1989 to 1,029,000 in 2001

222 Notes to pages 20–1 (www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/regions). The multiethnic character of the city has also changed. The emigration of Jews, that began in the 1970s intensified in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many Germans and Armenians also emigrated. According to official data from 2001, 62 per cent of Odessa’s population are ethnic Ukrainians, 29 per cent Russians, and 9 per cent belong to other nationalities. Among these other nationalities the largest groups are Bulgarians (13,331) and Jews (12,380) (www.misto.odessa.ua/index .php?u=gorod/stat). 5 The Soviet Union was founded in an age of nationalism on the terrain of the multiethnic, multiconfessional Russian Empire. In response to confrontation with strong national movements during the revolution, the Bolshevik leadership adopted a policy on nationalities that inscribed the forms of nationhood onto the administrative–territorial structure of the Soviet Union (Hirsch 2005, 5). Soviet policy on nationalities in the 1920s has been characterized as an ‘affirmative action’ program in that it promoted the national identities of the various subject peoples in the Russian Empire by indigenizing communism in local languages while downplaying the role of Russian culture (Martin 2001, 17). During the 1930s the Soviet policy shifted toward the view that nations possess a primordial essence and are not modern constructs (Martin 2001, 443; Slezkine 1994). This was institutionalized through measures such as the inscription of nationality in internal passports. In the late 1930s the principle of ‘friendship of the peoples’ gained pre-eminence; this granted Russians, Russian culture, and the RSFSR a primary role in the forging this ‘friendship’ without implying the formation of a Russian-dominated Soviet nation (Martin 2001, 432). The terms ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnos’ emerged in the process of typologizing and categorizing the various peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union. The term ‘ethnos’ was introduced into ethnographic practice in the mid-1930s but was more fully elaborated and became common in popular usage in the mid-1950s (Hirsch 2005, 197). The notion of an ‘Odessan ethnos’ likely emerged at this time, reformulating an already existing notion of Odessans as a distinct people. 6 Relationships among ethnicities, claims about Odessa’s identity, and discourses of nation and empire surface throughout this study. Although Odessa is and has been inhabited by members of many different ethnic groups, in the contests over articulating locality and nation in contemporary Odessa, Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish ethnic categories were the most salient in the discussions I witnessed in 2001 and 2002. However, I analyse neither interethnic relations nor the construction of particular ethnic identities. Sharing Handler’s (1994) concern about the singularity and

Notes to pages 21–4

223

boundedness that ‘identity’ implies, I avoid using it as an analytical term in combination with ‘Jewish,’ ‘Russian,’ and ‘Ukrainian’ because of the risk of reifying and conflating categories that seemed to be in flux. I detail how these designations interacted to constitute hegemonic and counterhegemonic ideas about nation, place, and history in Odessa. 7 In socialist contexts where the state had a monopoly on the production of historical knowledge, ‘memory’ mapped easily onto individual subjects and ‘history’ onto official representations (Watson 1994). Much of the work conducted in the aftermath of socialism has focused on remembering the ‘repressed’ past and on the rewriting, memorialization, and contestation of a new official past (Grant 2001; Lass 1994; Nadkarni 2003; Ten Dyke 2001). 8 As Yekelchyk (1997) has pointed out, debates within Ukrainian historiography suggest parallels with other postcolonial situations in that historians attempt to account for difference from European master narratives be they liberal or Marxist. See Velychenko (2004) for a critique of postcolonial theory and its relevence for Ukrainian history. 9 There are three schools of historical interpretation about the Kyivan Rus’ inheritance. The first is the Russian national theory, which was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by historians such as Tatishchev, Karamzin, Solovev, and Kliuchevsky. This approach rests on the ideological claims and political-judicial theories formulated in Muscovy between the 1330s and the late 1560s. It is based on the transfer of the ecclesiastical institution of the Kyivan Metropolitan See from Kyiv to Vladimir and then to Moscow, on the uninterrupted dynastic continuity of the ‘Riurikides,’ and on the Kyiv–(Rostov-Suzdal)–Vladimir–Moscow translatio theory. The second is the Ukrainian national theory advanced by Ukrainian national historiography between the 1840s and the 1930s summarized most clearly by Mykhailo Hrushevsky in his Istoria Ukrainy-Rusy. This theory had its own line of continuity–Kyiv–Galicia-Volynia–Lithuanian-Rus’– Cossack Ukraine–and utilized mainly territorial, ethnodemographic, social, and institutional arrangements to justify its argument. The third was the Soviet theory, which was first articulated in the 1930s before being elevated to official state doctrine in 1954. According to this doctrine, the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian peoples stem from one root, the Old Rus’ nationality formed in Kyivan Rus’. These three East Slavic peoples were formed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at a time when the Russian people played the most important role in guarding the Kyivan tradition – a role they continued to play for the next two centuries (Pelenski 1992, 3–4; Isaievych 1995). See Kuzio (2005) for a discussion of the contemporary politics surrounding the claiming of this heritage. See

224 Notes to pages 24–31

10

11

12

13 14 15

Plokhy (2006) for a recent in-depth account of the medieval and early modern identity-building projects of the Eastern Slavs. Cossacks were essentially frontiersmen (mainly Orthodox Christians) who escaped serfdom in Poland and attempted to colonize the steppes east of the Dnipro River, lands that had remained sparsely populated owing to their vulnerability to raids by nomads and Tatars. The Cossacks first appeared in the 1480s; their numbers then increased significantly in the mid-sixteenth century. In 1553–4 the Zaporizhian Sich was established on an island in the Dnipro River; this served as an organizational centre for Cossack campaigns (Subtelny 1991; Magosci 1996). Khmelnytsky and the Treaty of Periaslav are also contentious issues in Russian and Ukrainian historiography. There is considerable controversy over the treaty. Some contend that it incorporated this area into the Tsardom of Muscovy with guarantees for autonomy. Others argue that it consigned the Hetmanate to a kind of semi-independent vassal status or made it a protectorate of Muscovy. Still others view the treaty as no more than a military alliance between the Cossacks and Muscovy. Khmelnytsky was seen by certain nationalist factions as responsible for the further colonization of Ukrainian lands by Muscovy. In Jewish historiography he is held responsible for a wave of pogroms during the uprising against the Poles. Soviet ideology highlighted the Treaty of Periaslav as the grand reunion of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples (Magosci 1996, 216). Whereas Ukrainians view ‘their’ Cossacks as freedom fighters and carriers of a distinctive Ukrainian identity, Russians tend to view them as uncultured bandits who were often traitors, while for Jews they are connected first and foremost with pogroms and anti-Jewish violence. Mazepa’s motives for switching sides are considered complex. They included fears that the Tsar’s administrative reforms would further limit Ukrainian autonomy (Kohut 1991, 185) and Peter’s failure to send troops to aid Mazepa – a violation of the political agreement with the Hetmanate (Hosking 1997, 25). See Klier (1992, 1995) and Rogger (1986) for further details on the situation of Jews in the Russian Empire. In 1795, 1863, and 1904 the population was 2,349, 120,000 and 497,395 respectively (Herlihy 1986). In part because of haphazard record keeping in this southern frontier town, the early history of Jews in Odessa is not particularly well known. Indeed, the scarcity of materials helped reinforce the idea that the history of Odessan Jewry began with the immigration of enlightened Galician Jews in the 1820s (Zipperstein 1985, 33). Jewish participation in economic

Note to pagse 31–4

225

life in the south dates back to the sixteenth century, when Jews worked among the Cossacks as merchants, importers, and translators. They moved to the new towns established along the coast after the disintegration of the Cossack Sich in 1775. It is possible that some of Khadzhibei’s original Jewish inhabitants were these merchants. Samuel Pen, the author of Evreiskaia Starina v Odesse (1903), having examined inscriptions on local headstones, wrote that some of them may have been born in Crimea or further east (ibid., 34–5). Odessa became an especially attractive destination for Jews from the Pale of Settlement and areas of Poland under Austrian rule. Since Odessa was located within the Pale of Settlement, Jews did not require special permission to move there and were generally exempted from the usual residency legislation. Odessa was also attractive for its more open intellectual environment, given that traditional sanctions were not as strictly enforced; indeed, it became a major centre of the Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah (Zipperstein 1985). Nevertheless, despite official policy encouraging the settlement of non-Russians, and the general openness to Jews, they experienced the violence of riots and pogroms in various years – 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1900, 1905 – having been scapegoated for problems such as unemployment and other economic hardships (Weinberg 1993, 15). Odessa subsequently became a centre for Zionist political activity and for organizing emigration to Palestine (Zipperstein 1985; Kotler 1996, 24). 16 In the 2001 census, 67.5 per cent of Ukraine’s citizens identified Ukrainian as their native language (up 2.8 per cent from 1989); 29.6 per cent Russian (down 3.2 per cent); and 2.9 per cent other languages (up from 0.4 per cent). Sociologists point out that many people do not use their native language (especially Ukrainian) at work, on the street, or at home. Thus, in everyday use, there is less of a gap in the proportions of Ukraine’s population who speak Russian and Ukrainian. However, this gap varies by region and size of settlement (www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/regions/reg_ukr). The language spoken on the street in Odessa as well as in many institutions and homes is Russian. In 2001 and 2002, although street signs and advertisements appeared in both languages, Russian was the language of the vast majority of local newspapers, local radio and TV stations, and books for sale. The use of Russian and Ukrainian in various branches of the city and oblast administration and other state institutions varied; that said, business tends to be conducted in Russian even if documentation must be submitted in Ukrainian. In certain contexts where Ukrainian is ‘officially’ used – such as universities – Russian is often used ‘unofficially.’ Indeed, one university lecturer showed me a student essay where the title page was

226 Notes to pages 34–43 in Ukrainian and the body of the essay in Russian. It will come as no surprise, then, that the state’s adoption of Ukrainian as the sole official language has been contentious for many Odessans, who believe that Russian should be granted official status as well. 17 An ethnographic field school was held in Odessa in 1995 for a group of Ukrainian and foreign graduate students. This resulted in the preparation of a number of papers that have not been published. See Naidorf (1995) and Boldetskaia and Leonhardt (1995). 18 Being part Ukrainian made my interest and presence more comprehensible to some Odessans. For others, the fact that I was a ‘Westerner’ trumped being Ukrainian, whence I became an object of suspicion as a possible ‘spy,’ or an audience for diatribes about the ills generated by Western versions of democracy and neoliberalism – like many other fieldworkers in this region (Bloch 2004). Meanwhile, having a surname like ‘Richardson’ – which allowed certain cultural actors to connect me to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – and my efforts to speak Russian put people at ease who were wary of diaspora nationalism and critical of the Ukrainian state’s cultural policies. 2. Uncertain Subjects: Youth, History, and Nation 1 At the Annual Convention of the Association For the Study of Nationalities there is always at least one if not more panels about textbooks. See also the journal International Textbook Research. 2 However, what is hegemonic is not static: ‘A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities with specific and changing pressures and limits ... It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own’ (Williams 1977, 112). 3 The preface to the 1998 curriculum reads as follows: ‘The main goal of elementary and secondary schools in Ukraine today is the formation of a socially aware, pratseliubna [person who likes to work], creative identity of Ukrainian citizens’ (p. 1). The curriculum mentions the following objectives of history education, among others: ‘Bringing up students with humanistic values; acceptance of the idea of humanism and democracy; patriotism and mutual understanding among peoples through a personal awareness of history; ... Preparing [students] for conscious, active participation in the social life of the Ukrainian state and to adapt in a society undergoing rapid change.’ Studying history in school is to facilitate ‘the creation of national consciousness ... affirmation of the ideals of humanism, democracy, good-

Notes to pages 43–4

227

ness and justice; ... a tolerant, unprejudiced view ... towards other peoples, groups, and individuals’ (Ministerstvo Osvita Ukrainy 1998, 1). 4 Since 1991, Ukrainian academic and school history have been based largely on two paradigms – both models for ‘national history.’ At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Hrushevsky elaborated what is called the ‘narodnytsky’ or ‘popular’ (similar to Herder’s Volk) paradigm, which proposes an essentially ethnic history of common people that is critical of oppressive elites. This was the first scheme to study the history of the Ukrainian people as an uninterrupted trajectory on a continuously occupied territory. In this view, the flow of history is the realization of the struggles of the ‘people’ for one main idea that existed throughout the centuries despite difficult political and cultural circumstances (Yakovenko 1996, 119). By contrast, Lypynsky’s statist school (developed in the 1920s and 1930s) criticized the role of the ‘common people.’ Instead, the importance of state formations, and hence elites, on Ukrainian territory was emphasized: ‘rebellions from below can topple a state, but from them not a single state has risen in the world’ (ibid.). The curriculum’s focus on state and state-like institutions is significant because it generates the ‘truth effect’ of a genealogy of states that Ukraine can claim as its own in light of its conspicuous lack of statehood in the modern period. 5 In 2001 and 2002, the school I attended was a Russian-language school offering both Ukrainian and Russian streams in younger grades. That year, roughly two-thirds of the schools in Odessa were officially Ukrainianlanguage schools. The curricula differ primarily in their language programs. The Ukrainian-language program at a Russian school is more intensive than the Russian program at a Ukrainian school (more hours, more years of study). Teachers and parents alike raised many objections regarding the fact that world literature (translated literally as ‘foreign literature’) was being taught in Ukrainian: first, the Russian translations of these works were considered much better; and second, parents were upset that Russian literature was classified as ‘foreign’ literature. For them it was absurd to study the works of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in Ukrainian. In practice, in Odessa, even in Ukrainian schools, world literature was often taught in Russian. With respect to history, however, regardless of whether a school was Russian or Ukrainian, a ministry decree from 1992 stipulated that in all schools the history of Ukraine be taught in Ukrainian. There was some variation in how this was actually practised. Teachers would write their plans in Ukrainian for the district and city boards of education but did not always conduct their lessons in Ukrainian. 6 The names of teachers, students, and schools have been changed in keeping

228 Notes to pages 44–6

7

8

9

10

with the anthropological practice of protecting the identities of informants. In some other chapters, however, real names have been used at the request of certain individuals, many of whom have had experience representing their views and stories in public in visual or print media. Many schools enable students to specialize in a particular subject area in grade ten, when classes are reconstituted based on students’ interests. The students of a certain class take all their lessons together. School 76 offered streams for math and physics, the humanities, biology, and chemistry, as well as a non-specialized stream. This means that there are more hours devoted to those particular subjects. No subjects may be dropped from the curriculum, although the hours devoted to them may be reduced. For example, since 11A was a math and physics class, the students had only one hour of Ukrainian history per week, whereas 11V, as a humanities class, had two hours (the standard allotment). In both grade nine and grade eleven, state exams must be taken. In either event, exams in the history of Ukraine and Ukrainian language are compulsory. Many other teachers I met did ask students questions during lessons and occasionally organized debates or discussions. However, they complained that the curriculum was so overloaded they had little time to use innovative methods in the class, since this would set them back in their schedule. Several teachers noted that there had been a decline in interest in history and that when students were asked what kind of lesson they would like, they opted for the standard lesson in the form of a lecture. Olga taught world history. She left because salaries had not been paid in three months and she had been offered a job at a private school where the salary was higher and paid on time. Teachers’ salaries were on average $40 per month (280 hryvnias) which was below the subsistence minimum set by the Parliament that year of just over 300 hryvnias. Mykola later took over her course, although he also threatened to quit and hinted as much to his students. Fortunately, he did not. The school director mentioned that teachers being lured away by private schools, state gymnasia, or lycées was a serious problem. In some cases schools were left without teachers in a particular subject. School 76 was without a geography teacher for half a year. The famine of 1946–7, like the famine of 1932–3, was a ‘blank spot’ in the official history in the Soviet Union and thus was absent from the history curriculum during most of the Soviet period. Public discussion of these events erupted in the late 1980s in the final years of perestroika, and in 1989 some coverage of the famine of 1932–3 was included in the curriculum for the history of the Ukrainian SSR, though this was an optional course. Discussion of the artificial famine intensified again in the fall of 2006 as

Notes to pages 46–59

11

12 13

14 15

16

17

229

the Parliament adopted a resolution declaring the famine to have been genocide. As a result of insufficient state funding, many schools either did not have enough textbooks for their students or could not afford to buy the updated versions. In School 76 there were nearly enough textbooks for all students although these were editions published in 1995 and were in Russian. The curriculum had been changed since then so that the Second World War was covered in grade eleven rather than grade ten. Thus, the grade eleven class did not actually use textbooks for studying the war, since the grade ten students had the textbooks covering this period. There was also insufficient funding for school renovations. Yet if the school did not meet the set standards it would be fined, and depending on the seriousness of the violations the director could be fired. As a result, parents contributed each month to a school fund. Most schools followed this practice, although the contributed sums varied. At School 76 parents were obliged to pay 10 hryvnias per month. In addition, there was an exam fee for grade nine students and a graduation and exam fee for students in grade eleven. This practice is possible because of the linguistic similarities between the two East Slavic languages. I also attended lessons at a Ukrainian gymnasium. Although the use of Ukrainian in classrooms was more strictly upheld in that students answered questions in that language, students were disciplined in Russian and conversed with one another and with their teacher in Russian outside of class. Teachers commented that these kinds of incidents had decreased by 2002 but had been common during the 1990s. The conversation was spontaneous. I had asked to attend one of his tours of the school museum for the younger classes, but the class didn’t show up so we talked for the duration of the period. His father was Russian and had come to Odessa from Uman (Poltava); his mother’s family was Ukrainian and from Odessa. He called himself a ‘native Odessan’ since he was the third generation born in Odessa on his mother’s side. This is an extracurricular Ministry of Education program for which students prepare and compete in delivering research papers in the subject areas of their choice. This issue emerged as we talked about her activities as the head of a students’ history association at the Odessa National University in the fall of 2002. The association had held one session on UPA to discuss legislation being debated in parliament at the time on whether to give them status as

230 Notes to pages 59–87 Veterans of the Great Patriotic War. This legislation was highly controversial not only in Ukraine but also in Poland and Russia. The Russian foreign minister had sent a note to the Ukrainian foreign minister in protest. 18 In 2002, elections were held according to a mixed proportional and singlemandate system. On the proportional side, Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Party received 25 per cent, the single largest share of votes, while the Communist Party received 21 per cent. Volodia is likely referring to these figures. The election of single-mandate candidates, which included a large number of independents, made it possible for the pro-Kuchma United Ukraine Party to form a majority (D’Anieri 2007, 162–3). 3. Living History and the Afterlives of States 1 It has not always made sense or even been safe to think about one’s personal or family history. During the 1930s and 1940s people hid their family origins and broached them only in the most intimate settings if at all. An interest in genealogy re-emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 As I have had to condense their stories considerably, and because not all stories were recorded, it has been difficult to retain a sense of this ‘shuttlework,’ though I have tried to do so as best I could. 3 Elmira is my friend’s daughter’s mother-in-law. 4 I was introduced to Olga at the Little Academy of Sciences through her great-granddaughter Elizabeth. 5 Olga met her first husband, a boarder at her mother’s flat, when she returned from the front after the war. They married, had a child, and moved to Dnipropetrovsk to be with his family. After his father’s death, his mother insisted that Olga’s husband’s salary be used to support his sister’s medical education. Olga gave her husband an ultimatum: ‘Me and my child or your sister.’ When he chose his sister, Olga returned to Odessa with her daughter. Her second husband was a colleague in the shipping fleet, who was both younger and junior in status. They married with the understanding that she would not have children, but soon after their wedding he began insisting that she have a child. She refused, and they divorced. 6 Nadia had been orphaned at a young age and was raised by a Czech family in her village for whom she also worked. She only attended school for two years and was thus illiterate. Stepan attended a pedagogical college when the area first came under Soviet rule in 1939 after quitting a job at the collective farm when he was forced to lie in recording how much land had been sown.

Notes to pages 87–101

231

7 He did not go into details on this period; indeed, both Nadia and his granddaughter told me independently that he would not speak about these experiences. 8 This word is formed from Stepan Bandera, the leader of one faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and is a derogatory term applied to Ukrainians, signifying traitor. 9 Odessa was liberated on 10 April. 10 More nuanced historical work is now being conducted on the occupation in Odessa but tends to be confined to specialist audiences. 11 One man I met at the Old Horse Market in Moldovanka (discussed in chapter 4) told the following joke: During a political information meeting one man was asked to prepare a report on what life would be like under communism. He described how there would be all sorts of good food, eggs, milk, and meat and no queues. ‘In short, it will be like life under the Romanians!’ 12 Pëtr Leshchenko was a singer of gypsy and folk songs from Bessarabia who fared well in the Romanian regime performing in theatres and restaurants, left when the Romanians retreated, and was considered a collaborator (Dallin 1998, 168). 13 This cemetery survived the occupation but was bulldozed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s. 14 She returned because she found it difficult to make ends meet but mainly because she missed Odessa. The first time I met Yelena in the My Odessa walking group, she indicated that she was a Holocaust survivor. When we met next, she brought an article that had been published about her in a Russian-language journal in Israel. We spoke a few times in her home, where she elaborated on various episodes discussed in the article. 15 In the first incident, Yury, his brother, and his mother were sent to a district police headquarters and then ordered to go to a holding site for the arrested. There a Romanian officer asked them why they had been arrested, but without demanding the incriminating document. His mother quickly answered that they had been mistakenly arrested because Yury had been given a work order but failed to turn up (this was required of men aged eighteen and older). However, as Yury was seventeen this was a mistake, which she proved by showing his passport. The Romanian officer told them to leave. After the second arrest they were taken to the same police headquarters. They were saved this time because the original official had died when the Romanian headquarters were blown up. His mother was able to explain to the replacement that they had been cleared, and the official asked only that they get a paper from the officer who had cleared them, which they managed to do.

232 Notes to pages 104–33 16 Committed Ukrainian patriots insist that commemorating Victory Day on 9 May undermines the formation of a Ukrainian political community. Some think the solution is to commemorate the war on 8 May and rename the event. The contradictory meanings that recollection of the event continues to have in everyday life and the complexity of the channels through which they are transmitted suggest that such a move is unlikely to erase the significance of 9 May. See also Epilogue. 4. On Odessa’s Kolorit and the Place(s) of Moldovanka 1 See Briker (1994) for a fascinating discussion of Babel’s use of local newspapers and urban folklore. 2 Shklovsky was accused of ‘formalism,’ undermining the state, and conspiring with ‘the West’ – in other words, of undermining the unity of Soviet literature by pointing out regional distinctions (Karakina 2004; Stanton 2003). 3 I am grateful to Diana Blank for the formulation ‘double nostalgia.’ 4 Local history (kraevedenie) museums were closed and experts persecuted in the late 1930s. 5 The Old Horse Market was founded in the 1830s as a livestock market so that cattle could be traded more conveniently than at the New Bazaar. In 1850 it became the ‘old horse market’ when a new a new livestock market was set up. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, the city Duma decided to build a produce market on that location. Although initially difficulties were encountered in attracting vendors, eventually the market developed to sell a standard range of goods. Around 1925 when the Old Bazaar on Aleksandrovskii Prospect and Bazarnaia Street burned down, the market selling exotic animals relocated to The Old Horse Market, for which it is still well known today. It operated throughout the war as a place where second-hand goods and unusual books were sold – a reputation that continues today (Dontsova 2001; Evdokimov 2001). 6 The militia usually did not harass the vendors. After the sale of the market to a private owner in 1991, many vendors moved out onto the streets. In some cases new vendors took over their spaces; others simply refused to pay higher fees. Street vendors were to be relocated to the new marketplace, but they continue to sell on the streets. 7 The vendors usually make an agreement with the owner of the house they stand in front of – they seek their permission and pay a small fee each time. Albert paid one hryvnia in 2002 (equivalent to 15 cents US). 8 Not all vendors attended the market for conversation. For many, the sale of goods provided a source of income, however minuscule.

Notes to pages 133–65

233

9 It is perhaps not insignificant that Utesev himself was a performer – a prominent Soviet jazz musician – and therefore sensitive to marketplace spectacles for their entertainment value. 10 This is the name given to the routes the Jews followed as the Romanian police forced them out of the city to death and labour camps. 5. Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa 1 Spatially, ‘Old Odessa’ refers primarily to the part of the city built prior to the October Revolution. Temporally, what ‘Old Odessa’ refers to is everchanging (Tanny 2007). 2 This organization was set up in the latter years of perestroika, first in Moscow and then in other cities, with the purpose of researching and publicizing the names of victims of the repressions. 3 Anna claimed that much of Odessa’s history could not be researched or recounted openly because of its cosmopolitan character, the bourgeois ways of its inhabitants, and the centrality of trade and commerce, features that did not accord with Soviet historiography. 4 The name of the street Balkovskaia, comes from the Ukrainian word ‘balka,’ meaning ravine. The Ukrainian word was used rather than the Russian one even though in pre-revolutionary Odessa street names would have all been mounted in Russian. Its initial name was Water Ravine, because of the various springs located along it, but early on it was renamed Balkovskaia Street, which it retained until the revolution. Although its pre-revolutionary name has been returned, many people – including Valery on occasion – still refer to it by its Soviet name – Frunze – as Odessans do with many street names. Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze (1885–1925) was a Bolshevik, the commander of the Southern Front in 1920, who later occupied important posts in the Soviet government. 5 I am grateful to Anne Brydon for introducing me to Rebecca Solnit’s work. 6 Slobodka is part of Old Odessa. It was settled by people from rural areas. It is also the location of a hospital for the mentally ill. 7 I do not want to suggest a strict correlation between ‘communal’ understandings of space with Soviet times, and understandings based on a strict public/private divide with the post-Soviet period. Descriptions of courtyard life in chapter 4 illustrated how struggles for ‘privacy’ were generated in the context of the emergence of individualized modern Soviet subjects. Efforts to assert an understanding of the city as ‘social’ space may be a way of recreating vanishing forms of sociability. This underscores a broader point I wish to make about the coexistence of contradictory conceptions of space and sociability.

234 Notes to pages 175–80 6. Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial: Spaces of History and the Place of Odes(s)a 1 In this chapter when ‘culture’ is used on its own it generally refers to ‘high culture.’ However, as Handler points out, it is difficult to be consistent, particularly in using the adjective ‘cultural,’ because anthropologically speaking, culture encompasses high culture (1992, 823). In everyday Ukrainian and Russian usage, ‘culture’ alternately refers to ‘high culture’ and ‘culturedness’ (kulturnost’) and is connected not only with knowledge of high culture, but also with behaviour and manners. 2 Odessa has had a number of different museums of an ethnographic and historical character. In 1927 the Museum of the Ukrainian Steppe, the Museum of Jewish Culture, and the Museum of Old Odessa were opened in connection with the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The Museum of the Ukrainian Steppe was closed in 1934 and its small collection transferred back to the Archaeological Museum. The Museum of Jewish Culture was destroyed during the Romanian Occupation, although some of the ritual objects were evacuated when the Soviets retreated. The Museum of Old Odessa was also shut down in the late 1930s. At this time many local history museums were closed and their employees arrested (Bukareva 1989, 69). After the Second World War, a Museum of the Defence of Odessa was opened in honour of Odessa’s status as a Hero City. In the late 1950s, this became the Local History Museum and some of the items from the Museum of the Ukrainian Steppe were transferred to it from the Archaeological Museum. A new Jewish Museum opened in the spring of 2003. 3 All three individuals are comedians. 4 The museum elite of the Soviet Union was critical of the innovativeness of the exhibitions. At a Union-wide conference, a representative of a Moscow museum said, ‘You must not turn a museum into a theatre.’ The journal Soviet Museum did not print an article about the museum and did not cite a word about the opening of a new museum in Odessa (Davidova 2002). 5 This was the name of the society that existed for the promotion of the arts in Odessa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which guides emphasize was attended by artists of all different nationalities. 6 Nikolai Gogol is generally considered a Russian classic even though he was ethnically Ukrainian and wrote about Ukrainian themes. Luckyj (1998) has explored the ambiguities in Gogol’s texts and identifications. 7 A separate branch founded in 1961 dedicated to Pushkin is located in the former Sikar Hotel, where the poet stayed during his sojourn in the city. A second branch dedicated to Konstantin Paustovsky opened in 2002. Push-

Notes to page 180

235

kin came to Odessa in 1823 from Kishenev, where he had been exiled. During the thirteen months he spent in Odessa he wrote numerous poems, including the end of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, the beginning of The Gypsy, and the first part of Eugene Onegin. Pushkin was sent away from Odessa by Count Vorontsov, allegedly for seducing his wife. 8 The room dedicated to the 1850s and 1860s provides an example of how museum designers were able to make oblique references to writers and publications absent from the exhibits. Karakina (2002j) described how the creators of the exhibit were able to invoke Jewish periodicals absent from the display. The display consists of a long table at the end of which is a bookshelf containing publications banned at that time. The books were published by the Free Russian Printing Press in London, owned by early socialists Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev. The press’s publications included political and philosophical works, Pushkin’s erotic poetry, and the writings of Catherine II. Another banned periodical, Kolokol (The Bell), founded in 1857, is placed on a writing table behind the bookshelf and opened to an article by an Odessan correspondent whose name is covered up by letters and envelopes addressed to London. The books of Jewish writer Osip Rabinovich are not present, nor are Jewish periodicals (including Russian-language ones) such as Sunrise, Zion, and Day. Karakina decoded the exhibit: ‘If you stop and look at the journal Kolokol, you could say something about a person the exhibition conceals from inattentive eyes, a person whose presence in Odessa facilitated the appearance of a Jewish press.’ This person was Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, who supported the establishment of Jewish periodicals. See Zipperstein (1985) for a discussion of Pirogov. 9 Alexander de Ribas was the nephew of one of the founders of Odessa. In 1870 he began writing stories about city life and in 1913 published the book Old Odessa, which featured the city’s founders, architects, singers, jokers, cafes, wine bars, markets, and cuisine. Vlas Doroshevich, the author of Odessa, Odessity, Odessitky, was perhaps the first to write explicitly about the topic of an Odessan type in the city press (Tanny, personal communication). Many of the works of Alexander Kuprin, who lived in Odessa from 1897 to 1910, are connected with the city; the most famous of these is the story ‘Gambrinus’ about Sasha the Musician, which acquired cult status in Odessa. Ivan Bunin, the Nobel laureate visited the city annually from 1896 onward, and emigrated from it during the Civil War. His Cursed Days, a literary diary about the Civil War years in Odessa, could not be displayed at the time the museum was founded (Karakina 2002k, 35–7). Certain works of Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913), Ivan Franko (1865–1916), and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1867–1913) were an accepted part of the Soviet Ukrainian liter-

236 Notes to pages 180–2 ary canon. All spent some time in Odessa and all visited the home of Ukrainian cultural activist Mykhailo Komarov (featured in the display), who resided in Odessa from 1880 until his death in 1913. The major works of these writers are not associated with Odessa. Displayed here are one of Kotsiubynsky’s stories published in Russian in Odessa, some of Lesia Ukrainka’s poems about the sea, and Russian translations of some of Franko’s stories published in Odessa (ibid., 38–9). 10 Yury Olesha (1899–1960) was born in Kirovograd but came to Odessa with his family in 1902. From 1922 on, he lived in Moscow. The publications presented include his children’s story Three Fat Men (1924) about circus stars who lead people to overthrow repressive authorities, the short story collection Cherry Pit (1931), and his novel Envy (1927). Eduard Bagritsky (1895– 1934) was born in Odessa. Although he was first published in Odessa, his better-known publications came out after he left for Moscow in 1925. These include The Lay of Opanas (1926), a classic of Soviet literature about class and ethnic struggles in Ukraine during the Civil War of 1918–22. The Jewish protagonist – Josif Kogan – is a commissar who dies at the hands of Ukrainian folk chieftain Opanas. The Jewish theme in this and other works was downplayed in early criticism and remained a forbidden subject until after 1985 (Shrayer 2000, 2). Kataev was born in Odessa and grew up there. In 1922 he moved to Moscow and encouraged other Odessans – such as his brother Evgeny Petrov, Yury Olesha, and Ilia Ilf – to join him. During the war he worked as a correspondent and also published a number of short stories. His writings most closely connected with Odessa can be found in the four-part series Waves of the Black Sea, which includes the well-known children’s book The Lonely White Sail (1936) about the gymnasium student Petia and Garik, the son of a fisherman, who find themselves caught up in the events of the 1905 revolution. Other books in this series include Village in the Steppe (1956), Winter Wind (1960), and Catacombs (1948) – also known as For the Power of the Soviets. 11 The room devoted to theatre and film in Odessa during the 1920s and 1930s has separate exhibits about each genre. Theatrical life in Odessa is represented by a stage illuminated by red curtains on which many posters, journals, and photographs are displayed on stands in several uneven rows. They advertise plays at various theatres: Potop at the Lenin Russian State Drama Theatre; Days of Youth (Ukr.) at the Theatre of the Revolution; Butterfly (Ukr.) at the Odessa Workers’ Opera Theatre; and Haiavata (Ukr.) at the Lunacharsky State Academic Opera. An adjacent wall has exhibits to three Ukrainian playwrights mounted in two red window frames – Ivan Mykytenko (1897–1937) in one, Oleksandr Korniichuk (1905–1972) and

Notes to pages 182–5

237

Mykola Kulish (1892–1937) in the other. All lived in Odessa for several years. Mykola Kulish was a participant and cofounder of the Berezil Theatre in Kyiv in 1922. He was arrested in 1934 and executed in 1937. Mykytenko perished in 1937 in unknown circumstances. Korniichuk became a Soviet Ukrainian classic (Karakina 2002d). The exhibit about the Odessa Film Studio is placed on the wall opposite the display about Ukrainian playwrights. In the first window frame, posters and leaflets name the various films produced at the Odessan studio in the 1920s; an article about the shooting of the film Spartak in Odessa in 1926 conveys the significance of the event for city residents, of which more than 3,000 took part. Eisenstein’s films are featured in another display. An article describes the making of Battleship Potemkin in 1925 as another major event, in which 1,500 residents participated. Karakina quoted the Ukrainian poet Mykola Bazhan to convey the film’s importance for city residents: ‘Odessa was infected with kinomania and imagined itself as the Hollywood on the shore of the Black Sea’ (in Karakina 2002e). His comments are placed next to a picture of Yury Yanovsky, chief editor at the Odessa studio for some time as well as author of the book Ship Master, which describes the shooting of Spartak in Odessa. Next to the book is a photo turned over to highlight a message addressed to Pavlo Neches, the studio director during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Under his directorship, Babel’s script Benia Krik was shot and Alexander Dovzhenko, who later became a well-known Soviet Ukrainian director, was invited to work at the studio. The films Dovzhenko made in Odessa included Zvenihora, Arsenal, and part of Zemlia, all of which became Soviet classics. 12 Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769–1838) was a poet and playwright considered the founder of modern Ukrainian literature. His work Aeneid is a burlesquetravesty of Virgil’s epic poem, which he began writing in 1774. In it, he makes Aeneas into a Cossack. The story satirizes various social estates in Ukrainian society both before and after the destruction of the Hetmanate. The Chumak poem reads: V Odesi dobro zhyty (In Odessa the living is good) Mishkom khliba ne nosyty (No need to carry a sack of wheat) Na panshchynu ne khodyty (No need to serve a master) Podushnoho ne platyty (No need to pay a poll-tax) Ne za pluhom, ne za ralom (I’m not taken for a plough) Nazyvaiut mene panom (Instead they call me a lord) 13 On Bagritsky’s treatment of Jewish themes, see Shrayer (2000). On Ilf and Petrov, see Nakhimovsky (1999). An extensive exhibit is dedicated to the coauthorship of Ilia Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. Both were born in Odessa – Ilf in

238 Notes to page 185 1897 and Petrov in 1903 – and grew up there. Ilf died of tuberculosis in 1937 and Petrov in a plane crash in 1942 while working as a war correspondent. The exhibit is composed of twelve frames – a play on the title of the first novel they wrote together – Twelve Chairs. Twelve Chairs (1927) and Golden Calf (1934) are satirical novels of cult status whose hero is the cynical con man named Ostap Bender. In the first novel, Bender travels around the Soviet Union with Ippolit Vorobianinov in search of the latter’s treasure, which has been hidden in one of twelve chairs scattered across the country. Although Bender is killed at the end of Twelve Chairs, he is resurrected for the second novel, in which he chases after a Soviet multimillionaire in the hope of getting a million from him. 14 For discussions of Babel’s Jewish identity and the Jewish themes in his work, see Sicher (1995) and Nakhimovsky (1992). 15 The exhibit about Konstantin Paustovsky includes smaller displays of the Odessan newspaper Moriak (Sailor), described in his Years of Hope, and Babel’s work. Paustovsky (1892–1968) was born in Moscow but grew up in Kyiv. After the Civil War he spent two years in Odessa, where he came to know Kataev, Ilf and Petrov, Babel, and others. From 1945 to 1963 he produced his autobiographical work Story of a Life – a series of six books including Years of Hope (1958) – which features reminiscences about Odessa and its writers during the early 1920s. The first of four small windows about Babel contains a copy of the Odessa journal Shkval, where Babel’s autobiographical piece The Story of My Childhood was published. It also has pictures of Babel and his father, and Babel as a student at the Odessa Commercial College, as well as an anthology of French poetry – a reference to the fact that Babel first wrote in French and was influenced by French literature. The second window emphasizes Babel as a Russian-language writer. The Almanac Litopis in which Gorky published two of Babel’s stories – his first publications – is displayed. Further, early publications of the stories from Red Cavalry are presented along with a volume of his collected works published during his lifetime. The third window has a program from a production of Sunset in the Odessa State Drama Theatre as well as publications of ‘The King,’ ‘Liubka Cossack,’ and other tales from Odessa Stories in various newspapers. The fourth window contains three small handwritten texts from the archives of friends and contemporaries; his main archive disappeared in 1939 when he was arrested. This window also contains his glasses, their case, and a fountain pen donated by his widow Antonina Nikolaevna Piroshkova. One guide explained that the glasses allegedly still exist because when Babel was arrested in his flat in 1939, out of nervousness he took off his glasses and

Notes to pages 185–90

239

placed them on his desk. After attempting to pass them to him in prison, Piroshkova was told he would no longer need them. 16 The Odessa Jewish Cultural Society (1989) was instrumental in the creation of the Migdal Community Centre (1993) and the Association for Survivors of Ghettos and Concentration Camps. The community centre runs programs on language and cultural traditions for adults, children, and youth, convenes conferences, and publishes journals; it has also established a dance ensemble, a day care centre, and a Museum of the Jewish History of Odessa (in the spring of 2003). The association for Holocaust survivors administers compensation from the German government and conducts research, and has been involved in the creation of memorials in Odessa and Odessa Oblast. The Jewish Self-Education Centre operates out of the Odessa Municipal Jewish Library, which opened in 1994. Among numerous activities, the Self-Education Centre organizes lecture series, seminars, and events on Jewish art, history, music, and literature for youth and the elderly as part of a program called the Jewish University. Finally, a branch of the American-based youth organization Hillel was opened in 2000–1. This is a brief sketch of the main institutions operating while I was conducting fieldwork; it does not, though, include all their subunits and programs. Many of these organizations receive funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The Jewish Library was established in part to house a donation of books and publications by the Baltimore Jewish community. The association for Holocaust survivors has a separate source of funding. 17 The exhibition had several glass display cases devoted to Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew literary traditions in Odessa from the mid-nineteenth century to the postwar period. One of these spotlighted several issues of the journal Voskhod (Sunrise), a Russian-language Jewish journal founded by the Odessan Jewish writer Osip Rabinovich. He is considered one of the founders of the Russian-Jewish literary tradition with his book Kaleidoscope about Odessa in the mid-nineteenth century (Misiuk 2002a). Other exhibits highlighted Simon Dubnow and his book History of the Jews. An issue of the journal Voskhod is opened to his article ‘What Is Jewish History?’ This room also displayed publications of Bialik’s songs and poems in Russian, and of the Jewish Self-Defence League from 1905, as well as numerous works by Semën Yushkevich. Yushkevich was a popular Jewish writer who wrote in the Russian-Odessan language about the underbelly of Jewish life in the city. The works of Mendele Moikher Seforim, Chaim-Nachman Bialik, Sholom Aleichem, and Ben Ami were featured as well as Vladimir Zhabotinsky’s novel The Five (published in Paris in 1936), about a Jewish family in

240 Notes to pages 190–202 Odessa during the 1905 revolution. Zhabotinsky (1880–1940) was born in Odessa to parents who were keen to have their children assimilate. In 1898 he began working as a journalist for the paper Odesskie novosti and became known as a political writer, playwright, and translator. After the pogroms of 1903 he underwent a radical self-transformation, became active in the Zionist movement, and founded the Jewish Self-Defence League to protect Jews from pogroms in Odessa. He became a strong advocate for the formation of Jewish armed forces; when he left Odessa at the outbreak of First World War he worked toward the establishment of Jewish battalions within the framework of the British Army. He continued to agitate for the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine until his death in New York in 1940. The remaining exhibits were dedicated to Soviet Yiddish writers. One exhibit presented pictures of Irma Druker, Note Lurie, and Isaac Guberman, along with their arrest orders after the Second World War. One picture featured Druker at the grave of Mendele Moikher Seforim in Odessa in 1966 (in the Second Jewish Cemetery, which was levelled in 1978). There was also a picture of Lurie in a labour camp and some of these writers at the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers in the 1930s. Other cases featured their various works, including translations into Russian and Ukrainian. 18 Anna’s program did not continue in the fall of 2002 because there were insufficient numbers of committed participants. She said it was because she was a bad manager. Other explanations can be offered. Another youth organization – Hillel – had attracted many of the people who would be candidates for Anna’s program. Furthermore, some potential participants also attended courses offered by synagogues, for which they received a monthly stipend. One participant explained that more people would like to attend Anna’s program but gave the synagogue course higher priority. 19 However, national legislation specifies that Russian-language newspapers must have a certain percentage of coverage in Ukrainian. Therefore the city administration’s paper, Odesskii Vestnik, has a separate Ukrainian edition – Dumska Ploscha – that is smaller, and also prints news, but focuses on Ukrainian cultural affairs. In subscribing to Odesskii Vestnik, one can opt out of the Ukrainian paper, but it is not possible to subscribe to the Ukrainian paper and not the Russian one. 20 The statue was completed in 1826 and placed at the top of the Odessa Stairs on Primorskii Boulevard (Herlihy 1986, 21).

Bibliography

Abbas, Ackbar. 2000. ‘Cosmopolitan De-scriptions’. Public Culture 12(3): 769–86. Abrams, Phillip. 1988 [1977]. ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 59–89. Agnew, John C. 1988. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Akinaso, Niyi F. 1992. ‘Schooling, Language and Knowledge in Literate and Non-Literate Societies.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(1): 68–109. Alonso, Ana Maria. 1988. ‘The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 33–57. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster London: New Left. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource.’ Man 16: 201–19. – 1996. Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arel, Dominique. 2001. ‘Interpreting “Nationality” and “Language” in the 2001 Census.’ Post-Soviet Affairs 18(3): 213–49. Aretxaga, Begona. 1997. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aster, Howard, and Peter J. Potichnyi, eds. 1990. Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York and London: Verso.

242 Bibliography Babel, Isaac. 1999. Odesskie Rasskazy. Moscous: EKSMO-Press. Babel, Nathalie. 2002. Preface. In The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by N. Babel, 19–28. New York: W.W. Norton. Bahloul, Joelle. 1996. Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ballinger, Pamela. 2003a. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 2003b. ‘Imperial Nostalgia: Mythologizing Habsburg Trieste.’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8(1): 84–101. – 2004. ‘“Authentic Hybrids” in the Balkan Borderlands.’ Current Anthropology 45(1): 31–60. Barrington, Lowell W., and Erik S. Herron. 2004. ‘One Ukraine or Many? Regionalism in Ukraine and Its Political Consequences.’ Nationalities Papers 32(1): 53–86. Basso, Keith H. 1996. ‘Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape.’ In Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K.H. Basso, 53–90. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Bater, James H. 1984. ‘The Soviet City: Continuity and Change in Privilege and Place.’ In The City in Cultural Context, edited by J. Agnew, J. Mercer, and D. Sopher, 134–162. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art As Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Beissinger, Mark R., and Crawford Young, eds. 2002. Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York. – 1979. One Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999a. Where the World Ended: Reunification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. – 1999b. ‘(N)Ostalgie for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.’ Ethnos 64(2): 192–211. Berdahl, Daphne, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland, eds. 2000. Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berkhoff, Karel. 2004. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Bibliography

243

Berliner, David. 2005. ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology.’ Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 197–211. Bilaniuk, Laada. 2005. Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. – 2006. ‘Language in the Balance: The Politics of Non-Accommodation in Bilingual Ukrainian-Russian Television Shows.’ Paper presented at the Second Annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies, Ottawa, 12–14 October. Birth, Kevin. 2006. ‘The Immanent Past: Culture and Psyche at the Juncture of Memory and History.’ Ethos 34(2): 169–91. Bissell, William Cunningham. 2005. ‘Engaging Colonial Nostalgia.’ Cultural Anthropology 20(1): 215–48. Blank, Diana R. 2004. ‘Fairytale Cynicism in the “Kingdom of Plastic Bags.” Ethnography 5(3): 349–378. – 2005. ‘Voices From Elsewhere: An Ethnography in Place in Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre.’ PhD diss. Department of Anthropology, University of California. Bloch, Alexia. 2004. Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. – 2005. ‘Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power and Residential Schools in Central Siberia.’ Cultural Anthropology 20(4): 534–69. Bloch, Maurice. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Oxford: Westview Press. Boldetskaia, Olga, and Manuela Leonhardt. 1995. ‘Bolshaia semia? Sosedskie otnosheniia v staroi chasti goroda Odessa.’ Odessa National University. Unpublished MS. Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1994. ‘Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory.’ In Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, edited by J. Boyarin 1–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boym, Svetlana. 1994. Commonplaces: Mythologies of Everday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic. Bremmer, Ian. 1994. ‘The Politics of Ethnicity in the New Ukraine.’ Europe-Asia Studies 46(2): 261–283. Briker, Boris. 1994. ‘The Underworld of Benia Krik and I. Babel’s Odessa Stories.’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 36(1/2): 115–34. Brown, Jacqueline Nassy. 2005. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

244 Bibliography Brown, Keith. 2003. The Past In Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Kate. 2004. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buchli, Victor. 1999. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg. Bukareva, L. C. 1989. ‘Kraevicheskie muzei RSFSR v proshlom, nastoiashchem, budushchem (setevyie aspekty).’ In Museievedenie: Na puti k muzeiu XX veka. edited by N.A. Nikishin 66–86. Moscow: Akademia nauk SSR, Nauchnoissledovatelskyi institut kultury. Burawoy, Michael, and Katherine Verdery, eds. 1999. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2002. ‘The Necessity and Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Local Democracy in a Global Context.’ In Identity, Difference, and Globalization. edited by E. Larretta Rio de Janeiro: EDUCAM. Carr, David, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel. 2004. Introduction. In The Ethics of History. edited by D. Carr, T.R. Flynn, and R.A. Makkreel, vii– xvi. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Carsten, Janet, and Steven Hugh-Jones. 1995. About the House: Levi Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casey, Edward S. 1996.‘ How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.’ In Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K.H. Basso 13–52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. – 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cole, Jennifer. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, Simon, and Mike Crang. 2002. ‘Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory.’ In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, edited by S. Coleman and M. Crang 1–19. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowe, David. 1994. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St Martin’s. Cruikshank, Julie. 1998. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Bibliography

245

– 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.’ Ethos 18(1): 5–47. Cukierman, Walenty. 1980. ‘The Odessan Myth and Idiom: Some Early Works of Odessan Writers.’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 14(1): 36–51. Czaplicka, John, ed. 2005. Lviv: A City at the Crossroads of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dallin, Alexander. 1998. Odessa, 1941–1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule. Iasi, Oxford, and Portland: Center for Romanian Studies. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Day, Sophie, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart, eds. 1999. Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment. Boulder: Westview. D’Anieri, Paul. 2006. Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Davidova, Maria. 2002. ‘Odesskomu literaturnomu – 25.’ In Stories of a Museum: The Odessa Literature Museum, edited by T. Liptyga, E. Karakina, L. Melnichenko, G. Semykina, A. Iavorskaia 79–94. Odessa: PLASKE. de Certeau, Michel. 1988a. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Couley. New York: Columbia University Press. – 1988b. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Kendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Ribas, Alexander. 1994 [1913]. Old Odessa. Odessa: Optimum. del Negro, Giovanna P. 2004. The Passegiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town: Folklore and the Performance of Modernity. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Dobroliubsky, Andrei, Oleg Gubar, and Andrei Krasnozhon, eds. 2002. Borisfen, Khadzhibei, Odessa: Istoriko-arkheologicheskie ocherki. Odessa and Kisheniev: Ushinksii Pedagogical University of Southern Ukraine and Institute of Ancient Geography. Driessen, Henk. 2005. ‘Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered.’ History and Anthropology 16(1): 129–41. Dontsova, Tatiana. 2001. Moldavanka: Zapiski kraevida. Odessa: Izdatelstvo ‘Druk.’ Englund, Harri. 2002. ‘Ethnography after Globalism: Migration and Emplacement in Malawi.’ American Ethnologist 29(2): 261–86. – 2004. ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi.’ Ethnos 69(3): 293–316. Evdokimov, Vadim. 2001. Proshloie i nastoiashchee Starokonnogo. Slovo. 23 March.

246 Bibliography Falen, James E. 1974. Isaac Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Feld, Steven, and Keith Basso, eds. 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Ferguson, James. 1997. ‘The Country and the City on the Copperbelt.’ In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson. 137–54. Durham: Duke University Press. – 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finnegan, Ruth. 1998. Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2000. ‘Lives and Times’ In In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by S. Fitzpatrick and Y. Slezkine 3–17. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 2002. ‘The World of Ostap Bender: Soviet Confidence Men in the Stalin Period.’ Slavic Review 61(3): 535–57. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan London: Allen Lane. – 1986. ‘Of Other Spaces.’ Diacritics (Spring): 22–7. – 1988. ‘Technologies of the Self.’ In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault, edited by L.H. Martin, H. Gurtman, and P.H. Hutton 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fournier, Anna. 2002. ‘Mapping Identities: Russian Resistance to Linguistic Ukrainization in Central and Eastern Ukraine.’ Europe-Asia Studies 54: 415–33. Funkenstein, Amos. 1989. ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness.’ History and Memory 1(1): 5–26. Gable, Eric, Richard Handler, and Anna Lawson. 1992. ‘On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg.’ American Ethnologist 19(4): 791–805. Gell, Alfred. 1985. ‘How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation.’ Man 20(2): 271–86. – 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gerasimova, Katerina. 2002. ‘Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment.’ In Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, 207–30. Oxford: Berg. Gillis, John R. 1994. ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship.’ In Commemorations: The Politics of Identity, 3–24. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bibliography

247

Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity. Gitelman, Zvi. 1994. ‘The Soviet Politics of the Holocaust.’ In The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, edited by J.E. Young, 139–47. Munich: Prestel. – 2001. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union 1881 to the Present. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. – 2003. ‘Thinking About Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine.’ In Jewish Life After the USSR, edited by Z. Gitelman, M. Glants, and M.I. Goldman, 49–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gitelman, Zvi, with Musya Glants and Marshall I. Goldman, eds. 2003. Jewish Life After the USSR. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Golbert, Rebecca. 1998. ‘In Search of a Meaningful Framework for the Study of Post-Soviet Jewish Identities, with Special Emphasis on the Case of Ukraine.’ East European Jewish Affairs 28(1): 3–28. – 2001a. ‘Constructing Self: Ukrainian Jewish Youth in the Making.’ PhD diss., Department of Anthropology, Oxford University. – 2001b. ‘Transnational Orientations from Home: Constructions of Israel and Transnational Space among Ukrainian Jewish Youth.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27(4): 713–31. Goluboff, Sascha L. 2003. Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gordillo, Gaston. 2004. Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Memory and Place in the Argentinian Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. Grant, Bruce. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 2001. ‘New Moscow Monuments, or States of Innocence.’ American Ethnologist 28(2): 332–62. Green, Sarah. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek–Albanian Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gubar, O., Ie. Golubovsky, and R. Aleksandrov. 2002. ‘Bolshe Odessa, chiem sama Odessa.’ Odessa 1(1): 37–44. Gubar, Oleg, and Patricia Herlihy. 2005. ‘The Persuasive Power of the Odessan Myth.’ Paper presented at the conference ‘Cities after the Fall: European Integration and Urban History,’ Cambridge, MA, 11–12 March. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.’ American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402.

248 Bibliography Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. ‘Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era.’ In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 1–51. Durham: Duke University Press. Guthier, Steven L. 1981. ‘Ukrainian Cities during the Revolution and the Interwar Era.’ In Rethinking Ukrainian History, edited by I.L. Rudnitsky and J.P. Himka, 158–79. Edmonton: Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row. Haller, Dieter. 2004. ‘The Cosmopolitan Mediterranean: Myth and Reality.’ Zeitshrift fur Ethnologie 129: 29–47. Handler, Richard. 1992. ‘High Culture, Hegemony, and Historical Causality.’ American Ethnologist 19(4): 818–24. – 1994. ‘Is “Identity” A Useful Concept?’ In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by J.R. Gillis 27–40. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. 1997. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke University Press. Hann, Chris M., ed. 2002. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London and New York: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.’ Theory, Culture and Society 7: 237–51. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. 2001. ‘Introduction: States of Imagination.’ In States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Post-Colonial State, edited by T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat 1–38. Durham: Duke University Press. Harrison, Julia. 2003. Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in the Pleasure of Travel. Vancouver: UBC Press. Harvey, David. 1993. ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity.’ In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by J. Bird, B. Curtis, P. Putnam, G. Robertson, and L. Tucker, 3–30. New York: Routledge. Heatherington, Tracey. 1999. ‘Street Tactics: Catholic Ritual and the Senses of the Past in Central Sardinia.’ Ethnology 38(4): 315–34. Hellbeck, Jochen. 2000. ‘Self-Realization in the Stalinist System: Two Soviet Diaries of the 1930s.’ In Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, edited by D.L. Hoffman and Y. Kotsonis, 221–42. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Herlihy, Patricia. 1981. ‘Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century.’ In Rethinking Ukrainian History, edited by I.L. Rudnytsky and J.P. Himka 135–55. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. – 1986. Odessa: A History, 1794–1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Bibliography

249

Herzfeld, Michael. 1991. A Place in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 1993. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureacracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, Eric. 1995. ‘Landscape: Between Space and Place.’ In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon 1–30. Oxford: Clarendon. Hirsch, Eric, and Charles Stewart. 2005. ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity.’ History and Anthropology 16(3): 261–74. Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hontar, O.V. 2002. ‘Mizh dvoma viynamy (1920–1930).’ In Ictoriia Odesy, edited by V.N. Stanko, 317–64. Odesa: Druk. Honcharenko, Nadia. 1998. ‘Mify v suchasnykh pidruchnykakh z istorii Ukrainy.’ Dukh i Litera 3–4: 220–30. Horowitz, Martin. 2003. ‘The Widening Gap between Our Model of Russian Jewry and the Reality (1989–99).’ In Jewish Life after the USSR, edited by Z. Gitelman, M. Glants, and M.I. Goldman 117–25. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. 1997. Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. London: HarperCollins. Hrycak, Alexandra. 2006. ‘Institutional Legacies and Language Revival in Ukraine.’ In Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine, edited by D. Arel and B.A. Ruble 62–88. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hrynevych, Vladislav. 2005. ‘Mit viyny ta viyna mitiv.’ Krytyka. Hrytsak, Yaroslav. 1996. Narys Istorii Ukrainy. Kyiv: Heneza. – 2002. ‘Dvatsiat Dvi Ukrainy.’ In Krytyka krytyka.kiev.ua/articles/s2–42002.html. – 2004. ‘On Sails and Gails and Ships Sailing in Various Directions: Post-Soviet Ukraine.’ Ab Imperio 1: 229–54. Hrytsak, Yaroslav, and Victor Susak. 2003. ‘Constructing a National City: The Case of L’viv.’ In Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic

250 Bibliography Identities, edited by J.J. Czaplicka and B.A. Ruble 14–164. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 1994. ‘Remembering an “Enemy:” The Bogd Khan in Twentieth Century Mongolia.’ In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, edited by R. Watson 21–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. – 2004. ‘Cosmopolitism and Kozmopolitizm in the Political Life of Soviet Citizens.’ Focaal 44: 138–152. – 2005. ‘Ideology in Infrastructure.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 39–58. Huyssen, Andreas. 2002. ‘High/Low in an Expanded Field.’ Modernism/Modernity 9(3): 363–74. – 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Isaievych, Yaroslav. 1995. ‘Ukraine and Russia: The Burden of Historical Tradition and Contemporary Realities.’ Journal of Ukrainian Studies 20: 5–14. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Louise. 1998. ‘Identity, Language, and Transformation in Eastern Ukraine: A Case Study of Zaporizhhia.’ In Dynamics of Post-Soviet Transformation in Contemporary Ukraine, edited by T. Kuzio 99–117. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. 99–117. Janmaat, Jan G. 1999. ‘Language Politics in Education and the Response of Russians in Ukraine.’ Nationalities Papers 27(3): 475–501. – 2000. Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Educational Policy and the Response of the Russian Speaking Population. Utrecht: Netherlands Geographical Society. Kaneff, Deema. 2004. Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village. New York: Berghahn. Kappeler, Andreas. 2001. The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History. New York: Longman. – 2003. ‘Mazepintsy, Malorossy, Khokhly: Ukrainians in the Ethnic Hierarchy of the Russian Empire.’ In Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian Russian Encounter, 1600–1945, edited by A. Kappeler, Z.E. Kohut, F.E. Sysyn, and M. Von Hagen 162–81. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Karakasidou, Anastasia N. 1997. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karakina, Elena. 2000a. ‘Guliaem po Odesse.’ Or Sameakh. 13 December; 6.

Bibliography – – – – – – – – – – – –

251

2000b. ‘Guliaem po Odesse.’ Or Sameakh, 27 December; 6. 2002a. ‘Stenka na stenku.’ Or Sameakh, 20 February; 10. 2002b. ‘Sbalansirovannyi podkhod.’ Or Sameakh, 17 April; 10. 2002c. ‘Vremia bolshykh neozhydannostei.’ Or Sameakh, 24 April; 8. 2002d. ‘Literaturnyi post.’ Or Sameakh, 1 May; 8. 2002e. ‘Gorod iavy i snov.’ Or Sameakh, 8 May; 10. 2002f. ‘Kapriznyi genii.’ Or Sameakh, 15 May; 10. 2002g. ‘Dni porazhenii i pobed.’ Or Sameakh, 29 May; 9. 2002h. ‘Ot zolotogo zala k ‘zolotomu’ veku.’ Or Sameakh, 5 June; 9. 2002i. ‘Salonnye razgovory.’ Or Sameakh, 12 June; 9. 2002j. ‘Kogda umolkaiut pushki.’ Or Sameakh, 26 June; 10. 2002k. ‘Ekskurs po muzeiu (opyt putovoditelia).’ In Stories of a Museum: The Odessa Literature Museum, edited by T. Liptyga, E. Karakina, L. Melnichenko, G. Semykina, and A. Iavorskaia, 11–67. Odessa: PLASKE. – 2004. ‘Po Sledam “Iugo-Zapada.”’ Pravoie Delo. www.nego.com.ua/pravoedelo/article/detect/6_1.shtml. Kharkhordin, Oleg. 1997. ‘Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia.’ In Public and Private in Thought and Action: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, edited by J. Weintraub 333–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1999. ‘The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices.’ Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.’ Representations 69(Winter): 127–50. Kleiner, Israel. 2000. From Nationalism to Universalism: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Klier, John D. 1992. ‘Russian Jewry on the Eve of the Pogroms.’ In Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, edited by J.D. Klier and S. Lambroza 3–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1995. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2002. ‘A Port, Not a Shtetl: Reflections on the Distinctiveness of Odessa.’ In Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitant Maritime Trading Centres, 1550– 1950, edited by D. Cesarani 173–8. London and Portland: Frank Cass. Kohut, Zenon E. 1991. ‘Ukraine: From Autonomy to Integration (1654–1830s).’ In Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, edited by M. Greengrass 182–96. London and New York: Edward Arnold. Kotler, Yigal. 1996. Ocherki po istorii evreev Odessy. Jerusalem: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

252 Bibliography Kruglashov, Anatoliy. 2006. ‘A Border Region with Fluctuating Identity: The Evolution of Polyethnic Society in Bukovina.’ Paper presented at the 11th Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York, 23–25 March. Kubicek, Paul. 2000. ‘Regional Polarization in Ukraine: Public Opinion, Voting, and Legislative Behaviour.’ Europe-Asia Studies 52(2): 273–94. Kulyk, Volodymyr. 2006. ‘Constructing Common Sense: Language and Ethnicity in Ukrainian Public Discourse.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2): 281–314. Kuzio, Taras. 2002. ‘History, Memory, and Nation Building in the Post-Soviet Colonial Space.’ Nationalities Papers 30(2): 241–64. – 2005. ‘Nation-State Building and the Re-Writing of History in Ukraine: The Legacy of Kyiv Rus’.’ Nationalities Papers 33(1): 30–58. Kymlycka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laitin, David. 1998. Identity in Formation: Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lambek, Michael. 1996. ‘The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice.’ In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by M. Lambek and P. Antze 235–254. London: Routledge. – 2002. The Weight of the Past: Living With History In Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. – 2003. ‘Memory in a Maussian Universe.’ In Regimes of Memory, edited by S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin, 202–16. London: Routledge. Lass, Andrew. 1994. ‘From Memory to History: The Events of November 17 Dis/membered.’ In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, edited by R. Watson, 87–104. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Lee, Jo, and Tim Ingold. 2006. ‘Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing.’ In Locating the Field: Space, Place, and Context in Anthropology, edited by S. Coleman and P. Collins, 67–86. Oxford: Berg. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. – 1996. Writings on Cities. Cambridge, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. MA: Blackwell. Lemon, Alaina. 2000a. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism. Durham: Durham University Press. – 2000b. ‘Talking Transit and Spectating Transition: The Moscow Metro.’ In Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, edited by D. Berdahl, M. Bunzl, and M. Lampland, 14–39. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Liber, George O. 1998. ‘Imagining Ukraine: Regional Differences and the Emer-

Bibliography

253

gence of an Integrated State Identity, 1926–1994.’ Nations and Nationalism 4(2): 187–206. Low, Setha M. 1996.‘ The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409. – 2001. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Luckyj, George S.N. 1998. The Anguish of Mykola Hohol a.k.a Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Lvov, Arkadii. 1989. The Courtyard. New York: Doubleday. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. Tourism: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken. Magosci, P.R. 1996. A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Malinovski, Albert. 2000. Kino v Odessie. Odessa: AstroPrint. Mandel, Ruth, and Caroline Humphrey, eds. 2002. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg. Markish, Simon. 1987. ‘The Example of Isaac Babel.’ In Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views, edited by H. Bloom, 171–89. New York: Chelsea House. Markowitz, Fran. 2000. Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Martin, Terry. 2001. Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McLeod, Jay. 1995. Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a LowIncome Neighborhood. Boulder: Westview. Merridale, Catherine. 2000. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. London: Granta. Meyers, Fred R. 1991. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ministerstvo Osvita Ukrainy. 1998. Prohramy dlia serednoii zahal’noosvitnoii shkoly: Istoriia Ukrainy 5–11 klasy ta Vsesvitnia istoriia 6–11 klasy. Kyiv: Perun. Misiuk, Anna. 2002a. ‘Ot “Voskhoda” do “Zakata.”’ Shomrei Shabos, 28 June: 6. – 2002b. ‘Ot “Voskhoda” do “Zakata.”’ Shomrei Shabos, 5 July: 6. Mitchell, Jon P. 2002. Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory, and the Public Sphere in Malta. New York: Routledge. Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwestern China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

254 Bibliography Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Munn, Nancy D. 1990. ‘Constructing Regional Worlds in Experience: Kula Exchange, Witchcraft, and Gawan Local Events.’ Man 25(1): 1–17. Nadkarni, Maya. 2003. ‘The Death of Socialism and the Afterlife of Its Monuments: Making and Marketing the Past in Budapest’s Statue Park Museum.’ In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, edited by K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone. 193–207. London and New York: Routledge. Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Postsocialist Practices.’ Ab Imperio 2: 487–519. Nahaylo, Bogdan. 1999. The Ukrainian Resurgence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Naidorf, Mark. 1995. ‘Odessa Segodnia: Ocherk sovremennoi situatsii v istoriko-kulturnom sveshchenii i problem ee izucheniia.’ Unpublished ms., Odessa National University. – 2001. ‘Odessa: Vid s severa. Dom Kniazia Gagarina.’ Sbornik statei i publikatsii 2: 328–33. – 1999. ‘How The Soviets Solved the Jewish Question: The Il’f -Petrov Novels and Il’f’s Jewish Stories.’ Symposium 53(2): 93–111. Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone. 1992. Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nathans, Benjamin. 2002. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Netrebsky, Valery. 2001. Progulki po Staroi Odesse. Progulka 1 ‘A’. Odessa: Inga. – 2002. Progulki po Staroi Odesse. Progulka 2 ‘B’. Odessa: Inga. Niedermuller, Peter. 1999. ‘Rethinking History: Time, Past, and Nation in PostSocialism.’ Focaal 33: 25–36. Ofer, Dalia. 1993. ‘The Holocaust in Transnistria: A Special Case of Genocide.’ In Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of Jews in the Nazi Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–45, edited by L. Dobroszycki and J.S. Gurock, 133–53. London: M.E. Sharpe. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. 1998. ‘Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mneumonic Practices.’ Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Ors, Islay. 2006. ‘Imagining the City: Cosmopolitanist Nostalgia in Istanbul.’

Bibliography

255

Paper presented at the European Association for Social Anthropology Biennial Conference, Bristol, UK, 18–21 September. Orta, Andrew. 2002. ‘Burying the Past: Locality, Lived History, and Death in Aymara Ritual and Remembrance.’ Cultural Anthropology 17(4): 471–511. Oushakine, Serguei. 2000. ‘In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia.’ Europe-Asia Studies 52(6): 991–1061. Pandya, Vishvajit. 1990. ‘Movement and Space: Andamanese Cartography.’ American Ethnologist 17(4): 775–97. Paustovsky, Konstantin. 1987.‘ I Promise You Maupassant.’ In Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views, edited by H. Bloom, 113–21. New York: Chelsea House. Paxson, Margaret. 2005. Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pelenski, Jaroslaw. 1992. ‘The Contest for the “Kievan Inheritance.”’ In Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter, edited by M. Raeff, P.J. Potychnyj, J. Pelensky, and G.N. Zekulin, 3–19. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pesman, Dale. 2001. Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Peters, John Durham. 1997. ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture.’ In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 75–92. Durham: Duke University Press. Pine, Frances. 2002. ‘The Village, the City, and the Outside World: Integration and Exclusion in Two Regions of Rural Poland.’ In Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Former Soviet Union, edited by P. Leonard and D. Kaneff, 160–79. Houndmills: Palgrave. Pirie, Paul S. 1996. ‘National Identity and Politics in Southern and Eastern Ukraine.’ Europe-Asia Studies 48(7): 1079–104. Plokhy, Serhii. 2006. The Origin of the Slavic Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poisner, Mikhail. 2001. S Odessoi nado lichno govarit. Odessa: Izdatelstvo ‘Druk.’ Pollock, Sidney, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Brackenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2002. ‘Cosmopolitanisms.’ In Cosmopolitanism, edited by C.A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha, and D. Charkrabarty. 1–15. Durham: Duke University Press. Popson, Nancy. 2001. ‘The Ukrainian History Textbook: Introducing Children to the “Ukrainian Nation.”’ Nationalities Papers 29(2): 325–50.

256 Bibliography Portelli, Alessandro. 1991. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories. Albany: SUNY Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reed, Adam. 2002. ‘City of Details: Interpreting the Personality of London.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 127–41. – 2003. ‘Expanding “Henry”: Fiction Reading and Its Artifacts in a British Literary Society.’ American Ethnologist 31(1): 111–22. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 1996. Education and Identity in Rural France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reid, Anna. 1997. Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Renan, Ernest. 1990. ‘What Is a Nation?’ In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 8–22. London: Routledge. Riabchuk, Mykola. 2000. Vid Valorossii do Ukrainy: Paradoksy zapizniloho natsiiotvorennia. Kyiv: Krykyka. – 2002. ‘Ukraine: One State, Two Countries.’ Eurozine, 16 September. www.eurozine.com/articles/2002–09–16-riabchuk-en.html. Richardson, Tanya. 2004. ‘Disciplining the Past in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Memory and History in Schools and Families.’ In Politics, Memory and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Contemporary Europe, edited by F. Pine, D. Kaneff, and H. Haukanes, 107–32. Münster: Lit. – 2005. ‘Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa.’ Ethnology 44(1): 13–39. Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 1998. ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.’ In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by P. Cheah and B. Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rodgers, Peter W. 2006a. ‘Contestation and Negotiation: Regionalism and the Politics of School Textbooks in Ukraine’s Eastern Borderlands.’ Nations and Nationalism 12(4): 681–97. – 2006b. ‘Understanding Regionalism and the Politics of Identity in Ukraine’s Eastern Borderlands.’ Nationalities Papers 34(2): 157–74. – 2007. ‘“Compliance or Contradiction”? Teaching “History” in the “New” Ukraine: A View from Ukraine’s Eastern Borderlands.’ Europe-Asia Studies 59(3): 503–19. Rodman, Margaret C. 1992. ‘Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality.’ American Anthropologist 94(3): 640–56.

Bibliography

257

Rogger, Hans. 1986. Jewish Policies and Right Wing Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan; in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford. Rojek, Chris. 1997. ‘Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights.’ In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by C. Rojek and J. Urry, 55–74. London and New York: Routledge. Rosaldo, Renato. 1980. ‘Doing Oral History.’ Social Analysis 14(4): 89–99. – 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon. Rubin, Rachel. 2000. Jewish Gangsters in Modern Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ruble, Blair. 1990. Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies and Institute of International Studies, University of California Press. Rudling, Per Anders. 2006. ‘Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Ukraine.’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 48 (1/2): 81–118. Sanjek, Roger. 1990. ‘Urban Anthropology in the 1980s: A Worldview.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 135–63. Sapritsky, Marina. 2007. ‘Coming Home or Leaving Home: Jewish Migration between Israel and Odessa.’ Paper Presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Annual Convention, New York. Sasse, Gwendolyn. 2002. ‘The “New” Ukraine: A State of Regions.’ In Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union, edited by J. Hughes and G. Sasse, 69–100. London: Frank Cass. Scott, Joan W. 1994. ‘The Evidence of Experience.’ In Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion across the Disciplines, edited by J. Chandler, A.I. Davidson, and H. Harootunian, 363–87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sezneva, Olga. 2002. ‘Living in a Russian Present with a German Past: The Problems of Identity in the City of Kaliningrad.’ In Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, edited by D. Crowley and S.E. Reid, 47–64. Oxford: Berg. – 2003. ‘Dual History: The Politics of the Past in Kaliningrad, Former Konigsberg.’ In Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities, edited by J.J. Czaplicka and B.A. Ruble, 58–85. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shelest, D.C. 2002. ‘From the Second Half of the 1940s until the 1980s.’ In The History of Odessa, edited by V.N. Stanko. Odessa: Druk. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Shkandrij, Myroslav. 2001. Ukraine and Russia: Literature and the Discourse of

258 Bibliography Empire from Napolean to Post-Colonial Times. Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1990. Gamburgskii Schet. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel. Shrayer, Maxim D. 2000. Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Sicher, Efraim. 1995. Jews in Russian Literature after the Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1969. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by R. Sennett, 47–60. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Sinyavsky, Andrey. 1987. ‘Isaac Babel.’ In Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views, edited by H. Bloom. 87–95. New York: Chelsea House. Skinner, Fredrick W. 1986. ‘Odessa and the Problem of Urban Modernization.’ In The City in Late Imperial Russia, edited by M. F. Hamm, 209–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Skrbis, Zlatko, Gavin Kendall, and Ian Woodward. 2004. ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category.’ Theory, Culture and Society 21(6): 115–36. Skultans, Vieda. 1998. The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia. London and New York: Routledge. Slezkine, Yury. 1994. ‘The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Fostered Ethnic Particularism.’ Slavic Review 53(2): 414–52. Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stafford, Charles. 1996. The Roads of Chinese Childhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Stanton, Rebecca. 2003. ‘Identity Crisis: The Literary Cult and Culture of Odessa in the Early 20th Century.’ Symposium (Fall): 117–126. – 2004. ‘Odessan Selves: Identity and Mythopoesis in Works of the Odessa School,’ PhD diss., Department of Slavic languages and Literatures, Columbia University. Steinmetz, George, ed. 1999. State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stewart, Charles. 2003. ‘Dreams of Treasure: Temporality, Historicization, and the Unconscious.’ Anthropological Theory 3(4): 481–500. Stewart, Kathleen. 1988. ‘Nostalgia – A Polemic.’ Cultural Anthropology 3(3): 227–241.

Bibliography

259

– 1996. A Space on the Side of the Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stolcke, Verena. 1999. ‘New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe.’ International Social Science Journal 51(1): 1–24. Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Subtelny, Orest. 1991. Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sunderland, Willard. 2007. ‘Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eighteenth Century.’ In Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, edited by J. Burbank, M.v. Hagen, and A. Remnev, 33–66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Sylvester, Roshanna P. 2000. ‘Making an Appearance: Urban “Types” and the Creation of Respectability in Odessa’s Popular Press.’ Slavic Review 59(4): 802–24. – 2001. ‘City of Thieves: Moldavanka, Criminality, and Respectability in Prerevolutionary Odessa.’ Journal of Urban History 27(2): 131–57. – 2005. Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Sysyn, Frank E. 1992. ‘The Khmelnytsky Uprising and Ukrainian NationBuilding.’ Journal of Ukrainian Studies 17(1/2): 141–70. Szporluk, Roman. 1981. ‘Urbanization in Ukraine since the Second World War.’ In Rethinking Ukrainian History, edited by I.L. Rudnytsky and J.P. Himka, 180–201. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. – 2000. Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University. – 2002. ‘Why Ukrainians Are Ukrainians.’ Eurozine, 17 September. www.eurozine.com/articles/2002–09–17-szporluk-en.html. Tanny, Jarrod. 2007. ‘The Many Ends of Old Odessa: Memories of the Gilded Age in Russia’s City of Sin.’ Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series. Berkeley. Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. London: Routledge. Ten Dyke, Elizabeth A. 2001. Dresden: Paradoxes of Memory in History. London and New York: Routledge. Topchiev, Aleksander G., ed. 1994. Odessa: Gorod – aglomeratsia -portovo-promyshlenyi kompleks. Odessa: AO Bakhva. Traube, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘“The Popular” in American Culture.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 127–51.

260 Bibliography Tumarkin, Nina. 1994. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic. Uehling, Greta Lynn. 2004. Beyond Memory: Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Urry, John. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Utekhin, Ilia. 2001. Ocherki kommunalnogo byta. Moscow: OGI. Utesov, Leonid. 1976. Spasibo, Sertse! Moscow: Vserossiskoie teatralnoie obshchestvo. www.kuzbass.ru/moshkow/lat/MEMUARY/UTESOW. Velychenko, Stephen. 2004. ‘Post-Colonialism and Ukrainian History.’ Ab Imperio (1): 391–404. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Volovych, Oleksiy, Mykhailo Matsiuk, and Oleksandr Muzych. 2006. ‘Perpetuating Butchers? Monument to Catherine II of Russia Planned in Odesa.’ Day Weekly Digest, 26 September. www.day.kiev.ua/169321. Von Hagen, Mark. 1995. ‘Does Ukraine Have a History?’ Slavic Review 54 (3): 658–73. – 2004. ‘Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era.’ American Historical Review 109(2): 445–68. Von Hagen, Mark, and Karen Barkey, eds. 1997. After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union, Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Boulder: Westview. Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wanner, Catherine. 1998. Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. University Park: Penn State University Press. Watson, Ruby. 1994. ‘Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism: An Introduction.’ In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, edited by R. Watson 1–20. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Weinberg, Robert. 1993. The Revolution of 1905: Blood on the Steps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Pnina. 1999. ‘Global Pathways: Working-Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds.’ Social Anthropology 7(1): 17–35. Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2004. ‘Alexanderplatz: An Ethnographic Study of Place and Planning in Contemporary Berlin,’ PhD diss., Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Bibliography

261

Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus. – 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Wilson, Andrew. 1998. ‘National History and National Identity in Ukraine and Belarus.’ In Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identity, edited by G. Smith, V. Law, A. Bohr, and A. Wilson, 23–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2002. ‘Elements of a Theory of Ukrainian Ethno-National Identities.’ Nations and Nationalism 8(1): 31–54. Wirth, Louis. 1969. ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life.’ In Classical Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by R. Sennett 143–64. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts. Wolff, Larry. 2001. Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wynar, Lubomyr R. 1985. ‘Michael Hrushevsky’s Scheme of Ukrainian History in the Contexts of the Study of Russian Colonialism and Imperialism.’ In Russian Empire: Some Aspects of Tsarist and Soviet Colonial Practices, edited by M.S. Pap, 19–38. Cleveland: Institute for Soviet and East European Studies and the Ukrainian Historical Association. Yakovenko, Natalia. 1996. ‘Do pytannia pro metodolohiiu vyvchennia istorii Ukrainy.’ Heneza 1(4): 118–23. – 2001. ‘On Historical Memory and the Traditions of the Ukrainian People.’ Independent Cultural Magazine “Ii” 22: 4–22. Yekelchyk, Serhy. 1997. ‘The Location of Nation: Postcolonial Perspectives on Ukrainian Historical Debates.’ Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 11 (1/2): 161–84. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America. New Haven: Yale University Press. – 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yurchak, Aleksei. 2005. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zhurzhenko, Tatiana. 2002. ‘The Myth of Two Ukraines.’ Eurozine. 17 September. www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-09-17-zhurzhenko-en.html. – 2004. ‘Cross-Border Cooperation and Transformation of Regional Identities

262 Bibliography in the Russian-Ukrainian Borderlands: Towards a Euroregion “Slobozhanshchyna”? Part I.’ Nationalities Papers 31(1): 207–32. Zipperstein, Steven J. 1985. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zlatoustova, V.I. 1991. ‘Gosudarstvennaia politika v oblasti muzeinogo dela (1945–1985).’ In Musei i vlast: Gosudarstvennaia politika v oblasti muzeinogo dela (XVIII-XXvv), edited by C.A. Sasparinskaia, 226–91. Moscow: Rossiskaia Akademia nauk, Naucho-issledovatelskyi institut kultury.

Index

Abrams, Phillip, 14 Aeneid, The (Kotliarevsky), 182, 237n12 afterlife of a state: explanation of term, 14–15; in living histories, 75, 77, 103–4; traces in histories, 213 Akhmatova, Anna (writer), 180 Albanians in Odessa, 110 Aleichem, Sholom (writer), 185, 190, 191, 239–40n17 Aleksandrovskii Prospect, 65, 194, 201, 232n5 Alëna (Jewish history group): on boundaries between Jews and nonJews, 195; on meaning of tour, 196 Alësha (student, 11V, School 76): on politics, 68–9 Alexander (visitor at the Old Horse Market), 133 Alexandra (walking tour), 146; on cholera epidemic, 151; on importance of walking, 166–7, 168; on monument to Catherine II, 218 Alla (student, 11A, School 76): on the Holocaust, 64; on politics, 67–8 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 239n16

Ami, Ben (writer), 239–40n17 Andreev, Leonid (writer), 180 apprenticeship, 36, 154 Archaeological Museum, 176, 234n2 architecture: of courtyards, 120, 123, 126; of Moldovanka, 110–11, 119, 123; in Odessa’s identity, 215; prerevolutionary, 173, 221n3; in regional identity, 10–11, 35, 126, 128, 163; and renovating old buildings, 165; Soviet uniformity of, 168 Armenians, 180 Arsenal (film), 236–7n11 assimilation: of cultural difference, 214; of Jews, 126, 175; of language by Ukrainians, 200; by Ukrainians, 202–3, 205 Association for Survivors of Ghettos and Concentration Camps, 239n16 Atlas, Dorothea, 18 Autoemancipation (Pinsker), 189 Babel, Isaac (writer), 146, 192; birthplace of, 151; everyday presence of, 116; and film, 236–7n11; in literary canon, 113–14; and Literature Museum, 179, 182, 185; and nostal-

264 Index gia, 107, 115, 137; as noted on walking tours, 135–6; from Odessa School, 16; in tourist guidebooks, 116–17; and understanding Odessa, 106, 199, 211 Babel, Nathalie, 113 Babyn Yar in Kyiv, 62. See also Holocaust Bagritsky, Eduard (writer), 146, 179, 182, 185, 236n10 Balkovskaia Street, 146, 151, 156; courtyard, 122; original, 157 Ballinger, Pamela, 18–19 Balmont, Konstantin (writer), 180 Battle of Stalingrad, 91–2 Battleship Potemkin (film), 236–7n11 Batushkov, Konstantin (writer), 180 Bazarnaia Street, 125, 139, 232n5 Bazhan, Mykola, 236–7n11 Belinskaia Street, 157 Belinsky, Vissarion (literary critic), 180 Bely, Andrei (writer), 180 Benia Krik (Babel), 236–7n11 Benjamin, Walter, 149 Berezil Theatre (Kyiv), 236–7n11 Berkhoff, Karel, 99 Bezgrebelnaia, Olga (life story of), 77; narrative of, 104; personal history, 85; as person in history, 83–4, 85–6 Bialik, Chaim-Nachman (poet), 189, 239–40n17 Bilaniuk, Laada, 48 bilingualism, 48. See also language and languages Black Sea Fishing Fleet, 83, 85, 178 Blank, Diana, 10 Bloch, Maurice, 76 Bodelan, Ruslan (mayor), 69, 198, 208–9

Bogdanov Street, 146 Bolshaia Arnautskaia Street, 202 borderlands: nation formation in, 210–11; Odessa as located in a, 172, 206; studying of, 213; Ukraine as a, 6–9, 24, 212 Boris (on walking tour): ‘Old Odessa’ collector, 152 Boyarin, Jonathan, 14, 149 Brezhnev, Leonid, 28, 45, 94, 126, 176, 177 Brigin, Nikita (Literature Museum), 178 Brodskaia, Elmira (life story of), 77, 104; in context of being Jewish, 80– 3; on living in Ukraine, 81–3; as person in history, 78–9, 85–6 Brodsky Synagogue, 192 Bulgarians: in Moldovanka courtyards, 125, 127; population numbers in Odessa, 221–2n4; represented in Literature Museum, 182 Bulgarian settlement, 110 Bulgarskaia Street, 80, 111, 127, 135 Bunin, Ivan (writer), 179, 180, 192, 235n9 Butterfly (play), 236–7n11 Casey, Edward, 108, 141 Catherine II, 3, 25, 29, 173–4, 218, 235n8 Chabad Orthodox Community, 189 Champagne Lane, 139 Chekhov, Anton (writer), 180 Chernikhovsky, Saul (writer), 191 Cherry Pit (Olesha), 236n10 Chornomorskaia Street, 165 chronotope, walking as a, 148, 150;

Index and analysing historical narratives, 172 Chukovsky, Kornei (writer), 180, 192 Civil War, 16, 32, 83, 90, 187 Coleman, Simon, 134 collaborators, 17, 27–8, 61, 99–101 commemorative practices: Bodelan’s new monuments, 198; Holocaust memorials in Odessa, 135, 189, 194–5; and monument to Catherine II, 218; in reformulating historical narratives, 24, 99, 103–4, 201–2; and Second World War, 93– 7, 217–18, 232n15. See also memory communal apartments, 120, 123, 124–5, 126, 128, 163–4, 192, 233n7 community, 134, 216; Jewish, 191. See also political communities; sociability continuity, imagined, 42–3, 51, 60, 75–6, 86; for Jewish community, 197; and lack of, 89, 102, 103, 187; through walking, 147, 170. See also memory cosmopolitanism: and contemporary Jewish identities, 195–7; explanation of, 18–20; and internationalism, 19–20, 70, 82, 128, 171–2, 214; in imperial port cities 11, 18– 19; and Odessa as a heterotopia, 187–8; in Literature Museum, 184, 187–8; multiple meanings of, 204– 6, 211, 215; in My Odessa club walks, 139–40; persecution for, 17, 19, 28; relationship of ethnic Ukrainians to, 200, 204; and Russian culture, 175; in distinguishing Odessa from Ukraine, 128, 169, 211. See also multiculturalism/multiethicity

265

cosmopolitan place, explanation of, 17, 20–1. See also international, Odessa as; multiculturalism/multiethnicity Cossacks: in Babel’s stories, 114; in context of Odessan historiography, 29, 174; in context of Ukrainian historiography, 25; Cossack’s Ravine, Moldovanka, 151; monument for, 198, 201–2; right to settle in Odesa, 201. See also Ukrainians courtyards: change and nostalgia for, 127–8; communal nature of, 123–5, 132, 152, 163–4, 165, 166; description of, 120, 123; featured in tourist guidebooks, 116–17, 156; lack of privacy of, 126–7; as multiethnic, 80, 125–6; museum of, 119; role in identity, 138, 211; significance of, 107; in Soviet urban planning, 120, 123; in theories of distinctiveness, 128; used in film, 151; on walking tours, 135–6, 157 Crang, Mike, 134 criminals: in Babel’s stories, 107, 113– 14, 118; in courtyards, 125; in Odessan literature, 16; in tourist guides, 116; in walking tours, 134 culture: and concept of living history, 103; and memory 21–2; high/low distinction in, 109, 118, 137, 165, 234n1 (see also kolorit); high/low distinction in Ukrainian, 203; as linked to place, 37; links between Russian and Jewish, 193–4; role in empire, 25, 27; and Russification policies, 175; viewed in opposition to politics, 70. See also intelligentsia; multiculturalism/ multiethnicity

266 Index Cursed Days (Bunin), 235n9 Customs Square, 218 Dalnitskaia Street, 147 Dasha (student, Ukrainian gymnasium): on Odessa politics, 70–1 Days of Youth (play), 236–7n11 Decembrists, the, 180 de Certeau, Michel, 108, 141, 148, 154 Defence of Odessa, 96, 151, 155, 177 democracy in Ukraine: obstacles to, 7; and privatization, 165; student’s views on, 67–9; and the USSR, 54 Deribasovskaia Street, 3, 82, 191 Dima (student, Kotovsky District): on politics, 68, 69 disciplining (Foucault’s concept of), 41–2 Disengoff, Meir (mayor), 189 Diukovskii Park, 151 Donetsk, 7, 10, 33, 208 Dontsova, Tatiana, 110–11, 118, 135 Doroshevich, Vlas (writer), 180, 235n9 Dovzhenko, Oleksandr (film), 182, 236–7n11 Druker, Irma (writer), 190, 239–40n17 Dubnow, Simon, 189, 239n17 Dumska Ploscha (newspaper), 240n19 education: funding of, 229n11; as related in life histories, 79–80, 83, 84–5, 91; teachers’ salaries, 228n9; in Ukrainianization, 198. See also history education Eisenstein, Sergei (film), 182, 236– 7n11 empire: and afterlife of a state, 14–15; and cosmopolitanism, 11, 19; Rus-

sia as multiethnic, 24. See also Russian Empire Englund, Harri, 19 Envy (Olesha), 236n10 ethnography. See urban ethnography Eugen Onegin (Pushkin), 16, 226n18, 235n7 Evodokimov, Vadim, 129 Evreiskaia Street, 194 Falen, James, 114–15 family: and contradictions of history, 59–61; on the history of the Holocaust, 63, 64, 65; life in courtyards, 123; and the moral obligations of history, 55–9, 61 famine (1932–3), 50, 57, 58, 62, 209, 217 famine (1946–7), 28, 46–7, 209 Feldman, Victor (archivist): as citing Babel, 116; on courtyards, 125–6; on Local History Museum, 176 Fesenko, Yeftim, 202–3 fieldwork: as classroom observer, 44–5; description of, 36–7; gathering life stories, 77–8; timing of, 207; use of informants’ names, 227–8n6 film/films: on the Holocaust, 62, 65; in Literature Museum, 182; as referenced in walks, 144, 151; on Second World War, 95–6 First Comintern Children’s Village, 150–1 First World War, 6, 27, 32, 37, 83, 86, 187 flâneur, 148, 169 folklore, 136, 175, 182, 184 Foucault, Michel, 41, 172 Franko, Ivan (writer), 180, 235–6n9

Index French Boulevard, 160, 166–7 Frunze Street, 233n4 Galician Jews, 192, 224–5n15 gentrification, 119, 137, 165 Georgy (gymnasium), on history education, 51 Germans: at end of Second World War, 151; in history of Ukraine, 174; in Moldovanka courtyards, 125; as tourists, 135–6 globalization, 18, 170. See also transnationalism Gogol, Nikolai (writer), 180, 234n6 Golden Age of Russian literature, 185 Golden Calf (Ilf and Petrov), 237–8n13 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 28 Gorky, Maksim (writer), 180, 238n15 Grecheskaia Street, 202–3 Grecheskii Square, 65 Greek presence in Odessa, 192; and cosmopolitanism, 187; in Moldovanka courtyards, 125; in nineteenth century, 31; in official history, 177; significance of, 15, 29, 37, 110, 174 Green, Sarah, 138 Grossman, Vasily (writer), 96 Guberman, Isaac (writer), 190, 239– 40n17 Gurvits, Eduard (mayor), 198, 208–9, 210 Haiavata (play), 236–7n11 Halbwachs, Maurice, 22, 76 Heroic Deed of Odessa, The (film), 151 Herzfeld, Michael, 47 heterotopias, 23, 172, 187–8 Hetmanate, 25, 29, 224n12

267

Hirsch, Marianne, 53–4 History of the Jews (Dubnow), 239n17 historical consciousness, 6, 9–10 historical narratives, 4; and concept of living history, 75–7; as contested, 48, 184; as contradictory, 50–1, 104, 211, 217–19; in domestic spaces, 60–1; and founding of Odesa, 201; and founding of Odessa, 175; impact of, 47; and interplay of time and space, 150–1, 154, 172, 216; of Jewish Odessan history, 97, 102, 189; place of the Holocaust in, 61; of pre-revolutionary Odessa, 18; as a presence in life histories, 79, 84, 85–6, 87–9, 91–92, 93; reformulating of, 99, 203, 204, 205–6 historicity/historicities: contradictory, 42–3; explanation of term, 22– 3; national subjects in, 42, 72–3; in walking 141. See also continuity, imagined historiography, 24–5, 172, 189 history: contradictory truths about, 53–4, 213; as dialogic process, 154, 157; generating a shared, 4, 37–8, 51, 77, 94; generational approach to, 195–6, 197; ideology of, 43; and layers of meaning, 157; and living history, 74–7, 103–4; as pursued through objects, 143, 147; and sensing place, 140, 154, 156, 168– 70; through material features, 192; as institutional accounts of, 21–2; use of term, 22–3. See also mapping history history education: and constituting national subjects, 72–3; curriculum of, 228nn7–8, 228–9nn10–11; and

268 Index disagreement over facts, 49–50, 52, 53; discussing politics in, 66–72; from the family, 55–61; of the Holocaust, 62–6; at home and in school, 54–61, 66; and indifference of students, 47–8; languages used to teach, 45–8; role in forming political community, 43–4, 52–3; role in nation building, 211, 216; social relations in, 41–2; students’ views of, 51–2; teaching about Stalin’s death, 49–50; teaching 1980s stagnation, 49; teaching the 1932–3 famine, 50; teaching the 1946–7 famine, 45–7; and textbooks, 40–1, 229n11. See also education Holocaust, 28, 32–3; as separate from circulating historicities, 61–6; memorials in Odessa, 189, 194–5; present-day encounters with, 135, 167–8; Spielberg’s archive of the, 100. See also history education Holocaust Memorial, 135, 167. See also commemorative practices Holovaty, Ataman, 198, 201–2 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, 227n4 Humorina, 177 Humphrey, Caroline, 128, 187 identity: after the Orange Revolution, 207; categorizing Ukrainian, 7–10; families and, 34–5; as formed through history education, 42, 61 (see also history education); as formed through place, 138; importance of walking to, 168; Jewish, 189, 191, 193; location rather than, 212; in narrating of history, 24–5, 140–1; Odessan, 193–4, 211; place as producing, 10, 21, 24; role of

cosmopolitanism in, 206; use of term, 222–3n6 Igor (on walking tour): on tourism exhibition, 151 Ilchenko, Victor (writer), 177 Ilf, Ilia (writer), 16, 182, 185, 237– 8n13 Ilia (student, Ukrainian gymnasium): on history at home, 60; on Odessa politics, 70 Ilichevskii Park, 135 Imas, Samuil (Jewish history group), and storytelling, 190–3 Inber, Vera (writer), 182 Independence Day, 3, 198 independence (Ukrainian), 3–4 indifference: and contradictory history, 51, 61; of students to history, 47; of students to politics, 71–2; to Ukrainian statehood, 73 Inna (student, gymnasium), 139; on the contradictions of history, 59; on the Holocaust, 64–5, 66; on politics, 69, 70, 71 intelligentsia: on boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, 195; and cosmopolitanism, 205; criticism of political and social transformation, 165; identified as European, 31; and Literature Museum, 178, 234n4; and shared history, 4. See also cosmopolitanism; culture international, Odessa as, 5, 70–1; as distinguished from cosmopolitan, 19–20, 214; role of courtyards in, 128; and speaking Ukrainian, 82. See also cosmopolitanism; multiculturalism/multiethnicity Italian presence in Odessa: in nine-

Index teenth century, 31; in official history, 177; significance of, 15, 37, 174 Iushkevich, Semën (writer), 191 Jewish cemetery, 99 Jewish Funeral Brotherhood, 125 Jewish history group, 4, 212 Jewish Library, 192, 239n16 Jewish Self-Defence League, 239– 40n17 Jewish Self-Education Centre, 135, 188, 190, 239n16 Jewish University, 239n16 Jews/being Jewish: and anti-Semitism, 78, 79–80; as associated with kolorit, 112; and Babel, 113; and communal institutions, 188–9; and contested history, 155, 177; in early Odessa, 31; and empire, 30; in history of Ukraine, 174; in life histories, 79–83; and Literature Museum, 178, 180; and Literature Museum absences, 185, 190, 235n8; migration of, 18, 188–9, 192, 196; in Moldovanka, 106–7, 111, 127; and multiculturalism, 205; and Odessa as Jewish city, 5, 199; in Odessan literature, 16; oldest synagogue, 151, 156; as part of Russian-speaking world, 192–3; pogroms against, 25, 80, 224n11, 225n15; and Russian Jewry, 175; in Second World War, 16–17, 97, 99, 100–1, 103, 127; significance of presence of, 37, 187–8; and Stalin, 18, 19; and walking tours, 134, 135–6, 146, 167, 190–7, 212. See also Holocaust Jews of Odessa, The (Tarnopol), 185

269

kaleidoscope, 38, 210, places as, 6; and history and space 21, 23–4 Kaleidoscope (Rabinovich), 239n17 Kanatnaia Street, 139, 151, 164 Karakina, Yelena, 124; on the Literature Museum, 177–9 Karpenko-Kary, Ivan (theatre), 180, 203 Kartsev, Roman (writer), 177 Kataev, Valentin (writer), 16, 65, 163, 182, 236n10 Katia (student, 11A, School 76): on history at home and at school, 57– 9; on history education, 51; on the Holocaust, 62–3; on indifference, 47; on what is fact, 52 Kazakhstan, 86, 87–8, 95 Kendall, Gavin, 19 Kerpel, Anna (journalist), on courtyards, 123–4 Khadzhibei, 29, 110, 143, 150, 176, 198, 201, 224–5n15 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 125 Khmelnytsky, Bohdan, 25 Khrushchev, Nikita, 28, 33, 46, 115, 177 Kirsanov, Semën (writer), 182 Klenovaia Street, 150 Knizhnyi Lane, 98, 99 Koblevskaia Street, 155 Kokorsky, Evgeny (Old Horse Market vendor), on markets, 132–3 Kollontai, Alexandra, 160 Kolokol (journal), 235n8 kolorit: as associated with Jews, 111– 12; as associated with obshchenie (sociability), 132, 134; and Babel’s stories, 114–15; in courtyards, 123, 136; explanation of, 15–16, 107; and high/low distinctions, 118–19;

270 Index and nostalgia, 109, 115, 137; in Old Horse Market, 132; in tourist guidebooks, 116–17 Koltsov, Mikhail (writer), 182 Komarov, Mykhailo (cultural activist), 235–6n9 Korniichuk, Oleksandr (playwright), 236–7n11 Korofeev Ukrainian Theatre, 203 Korolenko, Sergei (life story of): and Second World War in Odessa, 97–9 Korolenko, Yury (artist), 199 Kostandi, Kiriak (painter), 160 Kotliarevsky, Ivan (writer), 182, 184, 237n12 Kotsiubynsky, Mykhailo (writer), 180, 235–6n9 Kravchuk, Leonid (president), 28 Kropyvnytsky, Marko (theatre), 180, 203 Kuchma, Leonid (president), 4, 48, 73, 164, 208, 209 Kulish, Mykola (playwright), 236– 7n11 Kuprin, Alexander (writer), 16, 235n9 Kushchevy, Nadia and Stepan (life story of), 77; on being Ukrainian, 86–9 Kyivan Rus’, 24, 29 Kyiv in relation to Odessa, 10, 33, 70, 146, 211; as capital of Ukrainian SSR, 16 Lambek, Michael, 54, 72 landscapes (urban) and cityscapes: as frame of identity, 10, 40; and high/low culture, 107, 109, 112, 118; and histories and historicities, 4–5, 21, 22, 42, 66, 149, 190–1, 192,

206, 210–11; life stories in, 35–6; and memory and memorial practices, 9, 22, 24, 62, 108, 167; public/ private demarcations in, 163, 165; walking practices as producing, 36, 108, 139, 140–1, 147, 150, 152, 163, 169, 173. See also place; space; walking in the city language and languages: in Babel’s writing, 113; in early Odessa, 31; of empire, 11, 25; of Jewish Odessan writers, 190; laws governing, 48, 240n19; mixture in Odessan dialect, 5; for Odessan Jews, 197; and performativity, 132–4, 136, 138; post–Orange Revolution, 209; in the Soviet Union, 55; speaking Ukrainian, 82, 88–9; and spelling of place names, 38; and street names, 157, 198, 217; teacher’s knowledge of, 45; in teaching, 45– 8, 227n5; of Ukraine, 225–6n16; Ukrainian, 198; Ukrainian assimilation of, 200; as viewed in Odessa, 71 Lanzheronovskaia Street, 191 Latvians, 180 Lay of Opanas, The (Bagritsky), 236n10 Lazar Lane, 149 Leah (student, Odessa National University): on Moldovanka, 117; on meaning of Jewish walking tour, 196 Lena (student, Ukrainian gymnasium): on history at home, 60; on Odessa politics, 71 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 27, 54, 57, 150 Lenin Russian State Drama Theatre, 236–7n11

Index Lesanevich, Boris (mountain climber), 150 Leshchenko, Pëtr (singer), 98–9 Liberation of Odessa Day, 45 Life is Beautiful (film), 65 life stories, 75–6, 230n1. See also historical narratives; individual names literature: collector of Ukrainian, 199; connected to place, 139, 143; and contested historical narratives, 184; and high and low culture, 175; and language of teaching, 227n5; museumification of, 187; and nostalgic sense of place, 113; as referenced in walks, 144, 146; sources for Odessan Myth, 16, 113. See also individual writers; Odessa Literature Museum Literature and Art Society, 179, 180 Literature Museum. See Odessa Literature Museum Lithuanian Orthodox Community, 195 Little Academy of Sciences Program, 59, 64 Litvak Othodox Community, 189 Liuba (student, Ukrainian gymnasium), on Odessa politics, 70–1 Liverpool, 11 Local History Museum (Odesskii kraevidcheskii musee), 176, 218, 234n2 Lunacharsky State Academic Opera, 236–7n11 Lurie, Note (writer), 190, 239–40n17 Lviv: language of schools in, 48; in opposition to Odessa, 7, 70–1, 128, 208, 211; physical attributes of, 10; similarities to Odessa, 213; spelling of name, 38

271

Lypynsky, Viacheslav, 227n4 Maiakovsky, Vladimir (writer), 182, 192 Maksimenko, Galina (former resident of Moldovanka): on Moldovanka, 117; on political change, 209–10 Maksymiuk, Taras (Ukrainian collector), 3–4; background to, 198–9; on multiculturalism, 176; tour of Ukrainian Odesa, 199–204 Malaia Arnautskaia Street (courtyard), 121 Malakhovskaia, Yelena: life story of; 146; on importance of walking, 167, 168; on Moldovanka, 117; on Odessa in Second World War, 99– 101 Malanov Street, 152 mapping history, 149, 152, 169, 190, 201, 204, 217 Marazli, Gregory, 192 Maritime Museum, 176 markets. See Old Horse Market Martirosian, Gevork (driver), on courtyards, 126 Martos, Ivan, 202 Maslak, Maria (resident of Moldovanka), on courtyards, 126–7 mayoralty elections, 69 Mbembe, Achille, 15, 141, 154, 216 memorial practices. See commemorative practices Memorial Society, 142 memory, 21–2, 23; and imagined continuity, 42–3, 51, 60, 75–6, 86, 147, 170 (see also historicity/historicities); and lack of imagined continuity, 89, 102, 103; and landscape,

272 Index 23; and living history, 74–6; as moral practice, 58–9; and postmemory, 53, 60 Miasoedovskaia Street, 135 Mickiewicz, Adam (writer), 180 Migdal Community Centre, 189, 239n16 migration: and changing courtyards, 127–8; of Jews, 18, 188–9, 192, 196; leaving Odessa, 18, 166, 182, 187; in the making of Odessa, 37; of the rural to urban, 164; of writers, 182 Mikhailovskaia Square, 110 Ministry of Education, 52; and language laws, 48 Misiuk, Anna (Literature Museum and walking tour), 147; background of, 188; on boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, 195; on controversies in Literature Museum, 182, 184; on learning urban history, 35; on Orange Revolution, 209; on origins of museum, 177–8; and process of reclaiming history, 197; theme of walking tours by, 135–6, 190–7 Moldovanka: ambiguous place of, 109; as dark and dangerous, 117– 18, 137; as distinct, as locus of kolorit, 36, 106–7, 111–12; establishment of, 110–11; growing up in, 78–9; high culture of, 118–19; presence of Ukrainians in, 200; as the ‘real Odessa,’ 106–8, 115, 136–7, 152, 164, 211–12. See also courtyards; Old Horse Market Moldovanka (Dontsova), 118 morality: and emotion in history education, 54–5, 58–9, 60–1; of

market places, 132; in telling of life stories, 98–9 Moriak (newspaper), 185 multiculturalism/multiethnicity: in celebrations, 3; census figures for Odessa, 32; changing nature of, 127–8; in cohabitation of courtyards, 125–6; of early Moldovanka, 111; of early Odessa, 31; and identity, 222–3n6; imperialism and formation of, 11, 16; and Jewish presence, 191–2; and kolorit, 112; as Odessan, 5; in opposition to Ukrainian, 171; post–Orange Revolution, 208; and Soviet nationality policy, 222n5; taught through Literature Museum, 176; tensions in discourses of, 214–15; Ukrainians in the context of, 200; understanding Ukraine and, 6. See also cosmopolitanism; cosmopolitan place; culture; international, Odessa as Mumford, Lewis, 11 Muratova, Kira (film director), 177 Museum of Jewish Culture, 234n2 Museum of Jewish History of Odessa, 188, 189, 239n16 Museum of Old Odessa, 234n2 Museum of the Defence of Odessa, 234n2 Museum of the Ukrainian Steppe, 234n2 Mussorgsky, Modest (composer), 192 Mykytenko, Ivan (playwright), 236– 7n11 My Odessa club, 4; and contested history, 154–7; description of, 142– 3; description of walks, 143–4, 148; encounters with past and present, 164, 165–6; importance to partici-

Index pants of, 166–8; political influences on, 139–40; reception by locals of, 157, 160, 163–4; walking practices of, 152, 154, 169–70. See also walking in the city Nadia (student, Little Academy of Sciences), on the contradictions of history, 59–60 Naidorf, Mark (lecturer): on Moldovanka, 117; on political changes, 209 nationalism: and cities, 37; and experience of war, 104; indifference to, 73; and language in schools, 48; and multiculturalism, 214; and teaching history, 43, 47, 51–2, 55–6, 216; theories of, 34 nationality, Odessans as distinct, 5; and appropriation of language of, 9–10; changing opinions of, 214; and education, 41, 43 (see also history education); and politics, 67, 69–72. See also international, Odessa as nationhood: formation of, 74, 210–11, 223–4n9; ideas clashing with memories of Second World War, 96; post-Soviet, 5–6, 24, 27; and pre– Orange Revolution, 72 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 14 Nedzvedsky, Andrei Vladimirovich (Literature Museum), 178 Nerubaiskii, 200, 201 Netrebsky, Valery (walking guide), 139; background of, 142–3; maps by, 149, 160; and origins of My Odessa club, 142; on other historians, 156–7; on the Romanian administration, 154–6; as tour

273

guide and Odessan, 146–7. See also My Odessa club New Economic Policy, 187 New Market, 155 Nezdoiminoga, Yelena (architect), 123 Nicholas I, 30 Nina (student, 11V, School 76): on history at home and at school, 56– 7, 58; on history education, 51; on the Holocaust, 63, 66; and Stalin, 49–50 North Hotel, 191 nostalgia: and change in courtyard life, 127–8; for forms of sociability, 133–4; imperialist, 112; and layers of the past, 137; in local discourses, 18; in Odessan sense of place, 36, 108–9, 169, 211; and redemptive history, 149; for Soviet Union, 164 Novorossiia, 8, 9, 25, 30, 38, 83, 184, 218 Novorossiiskii Krai, 208 obshchenie, 132. See also sociability October Revolution, 87, 107, 120, 137, 139, 150, 218, 234n2 Odesa, 38, 210. See also Odessa Odesa Ukrainian Drama Institute, 203 Odessa: as a courtyard, 163–4; disputed origins of, 184; founding of, 4, 9, 25, 29–30, 151, 173–5, 182, 210; founding of and Ukrainians, 201– 2; free-port status of, 18, 30–1; as a heterotopia, 172; as Jewish capital, 193–4; in nineteenth century, 29– 32; as not Ukrainian, 89; as part of Ukrainian cultural space, 203–4;

274 Index population numbers, 32, 33, 221– 2n4, 224n14 (see also migration); and separatism, 208; spelling of, 38, 210; street names in, 157, 198, 217, 233n4; in twentieth century, 32–3; as urban, 174 (see also rural/ urban divide) Odessa, Odessity, Odessitky (Doroshevich), 235n9 Odessa Art College, 160 Odessa Film Studio, 182, 236–7n11 Odessa Jewish Cultural Society, 239n16 Odessa Literature Museum, 36, 116; contested history in, 182, 184; and cosmopolitanism, 205; description of, 180; gathering an archive for, 179; as a heterotopia, 188; Jewish writers and, 185, 235n8; and Odessan Myth, 176–9; ‘Odessan Pages of Jewish Culture, The’ (exhibit), 190; origins of, 185, 187; as resistance, 187 ‘Odessa Literature Museum, The’ (CD-ROM), 182, 184 Odessan character, 146–7 Odessan discourse, 20–1, 67, 71, 109, 112, 146, 168, 208, 212–13 Odessan Myth, 15–16, 36; and Babel’s image of Moldovanka, 112–13; and the Literature Museum, 176–9, 185; as multicultural, 204–5; and Russian Empire, 212–13 Odessan nationality, 5; in Soviet context, 20, 222n5. See also international, Odessa as Odessanness, 107–8, 112, 126, 132, 133. See also Moldovanka ‘Odessan Pages of Jewish Culture, The’ (exhibit), 190

Odessan school of literature, 16, 113, 115, 171, 177, 182, 185, 232n2 Odessa Opera Theatre, 176 Odessa Stairs, 3, 240n20 Odessa State Drama Theatre, 238n15 Odessa Stories (Babel), 106–7, 114, 238n15 Odessa Workers’ Opera Theatre, 236–7n11 Odesskii Novosti (newspaper), 191 Odesskii Vestnik (newspaper), 240n19 Old Horse Market, 99, 231n11; description of, 129, 132; role in identity, 138, 211; significance of, 107; sociability of, 132–4 Old Odessa (de Ribas), 16, 18, 143, 235n9 ‘Old Odessa’ (place), 139 Oleg (Jewish walking tour), on meaning of tour, 195–6 Oleksandrovych, Mykola (teacher, School 76): language of teaching, 47; and teachers’ salaries, 228n9; teaching famines, 46–7, 48–50; teaching methods of, 45; teaching postwar years, 45–6; on teaching the Holocaust, 62 Olesha, Yury (writer), 16, 146, 179, 182, 236n10 Opera Theatre (formerly City Theatre), 203, 221n3 Orange Revolution, 72, 207–0, 216– 17 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, 27, 37, 231n8 Otche Nash (Kataev), 65 Ottoman Christians, 174, 201 Our Ukraine bloc, 208 Ovcharenko, Rimma (life story of), 77; as personal, political, and his-

Index torical, 89–93; on renaming streets, 217; on war experiences, 104 Palace of the Gagarin Princes, 176, 178, 179–80 Pale of Settlement, 80–1, 175, 224– 5n15 Partitions of Poland, 25, 30, 173 Pasha (student, gymnasium), on history at home and at school, 55–6, 58 Pavel (student, 11A, School 76), on the Holocaust, 62 Paustovsky, Konstantin (writer), 15– 16, 115, 177, 179, 182, 185, 234–5n7 Peresyp, 106, 200, 201 performativity, 132–4, 136, 138 Petropavlovskaia Street, 130 Petrov, Evgeny (writer), 16, 163, 182, 237–8n13 P.F.B. (poet), 182 Pinsker, Leon (writer), 189 Pioneer Organization, 82, 149 Pionerskaia Street, 149–50 Pirogov, Nikolai (surgeon), 235n8 Pirogovskaia Street, 126 place: city as, 140, 168–9; and contested history, 156; cultivation of sense of, 213; explanation of term, 20, 107–8; in life histories, 79; linked to culture, 37; movement that makes, 141; performativity of, 134–7; role in identity, 137–8, 168, 206, 212; space becoming, 152; and themes of Odessan Myth, 205. See also cosmopolitan place, courtyards; Old Horse Market; walking in the city Plague Hill, 194 Poisner, Mikhail, 129

275

Polish presence in Odessa, 177, 187–8 political communities: complications in the formation of, 103; the creating of, 4, 232n15; dual visions of (local over national), 56; formed through history, 43; and Odessans as not political, 69–72 politics: criticism of current, 164–5; opinions of students on, 66–72 Popular Movement of Ukrainians for Restructuring (Rukh), 28 Port Museum, 201 postcolonialism, 15, 223n8 postsocialism: and afterlife of states, 15; and ethnography as ethnohistory, 207; and learning local history, 168, 169; and memory, 223n7; and nostalgia, 108–9, 137, 211 Potemkin monument, 218 Potemkin Stairs, 3, 240n20 Potemkin Uprising (1905), 176–7 Potop (play), 236–7n11 power relations: the ambiguities of, 91–2; and bilingualism, 48; and indifference, 73; of students at home and school, 67 Preobrazhenskaia Street, 98, 217 Primorskii Boulevard, 110, 191, 221n3, 240n20 privatization, 119, 128, 165, 209. See also space: public and private Prokhorovskaia Street, 135, 194 provincial, Odessa as, 16, 18, 92, 124, 204–5; in opposition to cosmopolitan, 171, 175, 196–7 Pryvoz Market, 193 Pushkin, Alexander (writer), 16, 180, 184, 227n5, 234–5nn7–8 Pushkin Monument, 139, 191 Pushkinskaia Street, 142, 192

276 Index Putin, Vladimir, 68 Rabinovich, Osip (writer), 235n8, 239n17 Razumovskaia Street, 156 Rechister, Vladimir (resident of Moldovanka): on courtyards, 127 Red Cavalry (Babel), 114, 238n15 religion: cemeteries in Odessa, 135; role in empire, 25 Ribas, Alexander de (writer), 16, 18, 143, 180, 235n9 Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, 54 Richelieu, Armand Emanuel duc de, 3, 176, 202 Richelieu Lycée, 200 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 192 Rishelevskaia Street, 202 Risovskaia Street, 131 Rivne Oblast, 86–8, 95 Roma, 66, 151; Gypsies, 32, 133 Romania, 32–3, 84, 97–103, 127, 151, 235n10 Roman (student, 11A, School 76): on the Holocaust, 62; on what is fact, 52 Rubin, Rachel, 114 rural/urban divide, 25, 135, 164, 169–70, 174–5 Russian Drama Theatre, 203 Russian Empire, 10, 87; afterlife in Odessa, 5; colonial hierarchies of, 176; and high and low culture, 175; and Jewish writers, 190; Odessa in context of, 10, 15, 25, 30–2, 106, 173, 190, 212; and Odessan Myth, 212–13 Russian Federation, 218 Russia/Russian/Russians, 5; in early Odessa, 31, 174; on generational

differences over, 57–8; Jews as speaking, 192–3, 197; language in Babel’s writing, 113; and language in Ukraine, 198, 227n5; in Literature Museum, 182, 185; as multiethnic empire, 24; and native language, 225–6n16; Odessa and identity and, 11, 14–15, 139–40; political relationship with Ukraine, 67–8, 69; population numbers in Odessa, 221–2n4; post–Orange Revolution, 208, 209– 10; Ukrainians who speak, 199 Rybnikova, Tatiana (Literature Museum), on the Odessan Myth, 176 Sadovsky, Mykola (theatre), 180, 203 ‘sailor’s village’ (Odessa), 151 Sakharov, Andrei, 83 Sasha (student, School 76): on the Holocaust, 63–4; on politics, 69 School 76, 44. See also history education Scott, Joan W., 75 Second Jewish Cemetery, 99, 195 Second World War: and commemorative practices, 93–6, 217–18; as impact on Odessans, 62; in life histories, 78–9, 84, 87–8, 91–2; in Literature Museum, 182; loss of Odessan cosmopolitanism during, 16–17; nomenclature of, 94; and Odessan Jews, 97, 99–103; and Romanian occupation of Odessa, 32–3, 84, 97–103, 127, 151–2, 217, 233n10; as still controversial in Ukraine, 27–8, 37, 96–7, 155. See also Holocaust

Index Seforim, Mendele Moikher (writer), 185, 190, 239–40n17 Serëzha (student, School 16): on history education, 52; on politics, 68 serfdom, 25, 29, 203 Serovaia Street, 97 Sharlatanskii Lane, 149 Shcherbytsky, Volodymyr, 28 Shchors, Nikolai, 84 Shelest, Petro, 28 Shevchenko, Taras, 3, 180 Shevchenko Park, 160 Ship Master (Yanovsky), 236–7n11 Shklovsky, Victor, 16, 113, 115 Sikar Hotel, 234–5n7 Silver Age of Russian literature, 180 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 114 Skrbis, Zlatko, 19 Slavin, Lev (writer), 171, 204 Slobodka, 106, 163, 194 Slobodka ghetto, 100, 127 Smetanin, Yury Illarionovich (life story, walking tour): on present conditions, 164; on Romanian occupation, 101–3, 154–6 sociability: and boundaries to, 195; in courtyards, 123–5, 132, 134; in markets, 132–4; as a feature of urban culture in Odessa, 119, 138, 211; and privatization, 165; in walking, 140, 167–8 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 82–3, 91 Sosiura, Volodymyr (writer), 182 Sotianov family, 163 Soviet Union: being Jewish in, 80–3, 185; being Ukrainian in, 86–9; and commemorating Second World War, 94–5; education in, 84–5, 91; as expansive, 92–3; generational opinions of, 54–5, 56, 57, 59, 69,

277

211; and historical narratives, 18, 78, 84, 233n3; history education in, 43–4, 53, 60; and the Holocaust, 61, 65; and Jewish writers, 190; and Literature Museum, 187; maps in, 143; nationality policy of, 20, 82; nostalgia for, 164; and present and past in Odessa, 139–40, 168; and Romanian occupation, 98–9, 102– 3; special place of Odessa in, 177; and study of Hebrew, 192; and subjectification, 75; and telling Ukrainian history, 25, 27–9; view of markets in, 132. See also communal apartments; Russia/Russian/ Russians space: and interplay of time, 150–1, 154, 172–3, 216; becoming place, 152; historical narratives and domestic, 60–1; marginal, 109, 137; public and private, 157, 163, 165, 169, 233n7; Ukrainian cultural, 203–4; urban as communal, 163–4, 169. See also courtyards Spartak (film), 236–7n11 Spielberg’s Holocaust Archive, 100 Sredniaia Street, 147, 156 Stalin, 86, 91; anti-Semitic policies of, 61; and communal apartments, 120; cosmopolitanism and, 17, 19; death of, 49–50; and 1932–3 famine, 50; and 1946–7 famine, 46; generational opinions of, 54–5, 56, 59; and literature, 187; Odessa’s pre-revolutionary history and, 16; population transfers by, 28; repression by, 27; and Romanian occupation, 100, 155 Stanton, Rebecca, 23 Starobazarnaia Square, 201

278 Index Staroportofrantovskaia Street, 110, 111 Starytsky, Mykhailo (theatre), 180, 203 state as abstraction, 14. See also afterlife of a state Stepovaia Street, 78, 79, 145, 152 Stewart, Susan, 108 Stoliarsky, Pëtr (music teacher), 192 Story of a Life (Paustovsky), 185 Story of My Childhood, The (Babel), 238n15 Sunset (play), 238n15 Sveta (student, School 76), on history at home and at school, 54–5 synagogue, oldest in Odessa, 151, 156 Tairova, 33, 44 Tarnopol, Joachim (writer), 185 Tatiana (walking tour), on history, 166 Teatralnyi Lane, 191 Tenth of April Square, 95 Theatre of the Revolution, 236–7n11 The Five (Zhabotinsky), 239–40n17 Third Jewish Cemetery, 166 Three Fat Men (Olesha), 236n10 Time of Great Expectations (Paustovsky), 177 Tolbukhin Square, 194 Tolstoy, Leo (writer), 180 tourism: 1970 exhibition on, 151; guidebooks, 116; pre-revolutionary guidebook, 143, 147, 156; theories of, 134–5 transnationalism, 18, 170, 196, 197, 214 Treaty of Periaslav, 25 Trekhugolnaia Street, 125

Trieste, 11 Tumarkin, Nina, 94 Tverskaia Street, 90 Twelve Chairs (Ilf and Petrov), 139, 237–8n13 Tychyna, Pavlo (poet), 182 Uiutnaia Street, 160 Ukraine: as a borderland, 6–9, 24; ethnic Ukrainians, 174–5; Jews’ relationship with, 193, 197; and language of teaching, 227n5; literal meaning of, 221n2; and the memory of Second World War, 94, 96; and ‘national idea,’ 27, 42, 94, 223– 4n9; and national identity, 207; native languages in, 225–6n16; post–Orange Revolution, 209–10; post-Soviet nation building in, 5–6; as represented in Literature Museum, 180, 184–5; telling the history of, 25; and Ukrainianization, 55, 198, 205, 209, 211 Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 59, 94–5 Ukrainian Odesa, tour of, 199 Ukrainians: from areas surrounding Odesa, 200; definition of, 199–200; population numbers in Odessa, 221–2n4; role in developing city, 200–2, 205–6, 212; speaking Russian, 199, 203, 240n19. See also Cossacks Ukrainian SSR, 5, 6–7, 27, 82, 178 Ukrainian theatre in Odesa, 203 Ukrainka, Lesia (writer), 180, 235– 6n9 urban ethnography, 5, 18; fieldwork for, 35–6, 36–8; and multiplicity of identities, 23; sense of place through, 215–16

Index urban identity in Odessa: historic roots of, 8–11. See also rural/urban divide; Odessan discourse urban spaces as communal, 163–4, 169. See also courtyards Usatovo, 200, 201 Utesev Street (courtyard), 121 Utesov, Leonid (writer, musician), 133, 157 Utochkin, Sergei (aviator), 3, 157 Valentina (courtyard resident), on communalism, 127–8 Victory Day, 45, 68–9, 94–5, 150, 217, 232n15 Vika (student, Ukrainian gymnasium), on Odessan politics, 70–1 Vladimir (employee Jewish Museum), 208, 214 Voland, Franz de, 221n3 Volodia (student, 11V, School 76): and disagreement about facts, 49– 50; on history at home and at school, 55; on politics, 67–9, 71 Vorontsov, Mikhail Semenovich (Count), 192 Voskhod (journal), 239n17 Wagner Lane, 160 walking the city: as a chronotope, 148, 150; as fusing time and space, 150–1, 154; and the history of the Holocaust, 65; and Jewish history, 190–7; as means of sensing history, 141, 149, 152, 168–70; as method of urban ethnography, 35–6; and narration of hidden histories, 173; and remembering Second World War, 95; as a rhetorical practice, 108; role in identity, 211–12; since col-

279

lapse of Soviet Union, 147–8; and social geography, 167; themes of tours, 134, 150–1; and working on the self, 167–8. See also My Odessa club Walks in Old Odessa (Netrebsky), 143–4 Wanner, Catherine, 94 Waves of the Black Sea (Kataev), 236n10 western Ukraine: as anti-Russian, 55, 70–1; and division with east, 67, 71, 89; and Second World War, 27– 8 Williams, Raymond, 72–3 Woodward, Ian (ref.), 19 World Wide Club of Odessans, 17 Yanovsky, Yury (writer), 236–7n11 Yanukovich, Victor, 208, 209–10, 216 Years of Hope (Paustovsky), 185 Yekaterininskaia Street, 191 Yiddish, 5, 82, 112, 113, 190–1, 239– 0n17. See also Jews/being Jewish Yurchak, Alexei, 73, 187 Yushchenko, Victor, 67, 208, 209, 216, 218 Yushkevich, Semën, 239n17 Zaporizhian Sich, 25, 201, 224n10 Zaporozhskaia Street, 116 Zemlia (film), 236–7n11 Zhabotinsky, Vladimir (writer), 174, 189, 191, 192, 195, 239–40n17 Zhdakh, Ambrosio, 199 Zhek (Housing and Utilities Committee), 164 Zhenia (student, School 56), on what is fact, 52

280 Index Zherebkin, Ivan (vendor at Old Horse Market), 132–3 Zhivakhov’s Hill, 143 Zhuk, Mykhailo (artist), 182, 199 Zhukovskaia Street, 98

Zhvanetsky, Mikhail (writer), 177 Zionism, as a movement, 185, 225n14; and Zhabotinsky, 189, 239–40n17 Zvenihora (film), 236–7n11

ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Published to date: 1 The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses / Edited by David Howes 2 Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community, and Development in Northwest Greenland / Mark Nuttall 3 Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession / Michael Lambek 4 Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town / Peter Gose 5 Paradise: Class, Commuters, and Ethnicity in Rural Ontario / Stanley R. Barrett 6 The Cultural World in Beowulf / John M. Hill 7 Making It Their Own: Severn Ojibwe Communicative Practices / Lisa Philips Valentine 8 Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town, 1200–1991 / Philip Gulliver and Marilyn Silverman 9 Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town / Ann Meneley 10 Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress / Sam Migliore 11 Between History and Histories: The Production of Silences and Commemorations / Edited by Gerald Sider & Gavin Smith 12 Eh, Paesan!: Being Italian in Toronto / Nicholas DeMaria Harney 13 Theorizing the Americanist Tradition / Edited by Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell 14 Colonial ‘Reformation’ in the Highlands of Central Sualwesi, Indonesia, 1892– 1995 / Albert Schrauwers 15 The Rock Where We Stand: An Ethnography of Women’s Activism in Newfoundland / Glynis George 16 Being Alive Well: Health and the Politics of Cree Well-Being / Naomi Adelson 17 Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture / Jane Helleiner 18 Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter Between the LoDagaa and the ‘World on Paper,’ 1892–1991 / Sean Hawkins 19 An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950 / Marilyn Silverman 20 The Double Twist: From Ethnography to Morphodynamics / Edited by Pierre Maranda 21 Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism / Edited by Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead

22 Guardians of the Transcendent: An Ethnography of a Jain Ascetic Community / Anne Vallely 23 The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada / Eva Mackey 24 The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico / Jacques M. Chevalier and Andrés Sánchez Bain 25 Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations / Edited by John Clammer, Sylvie Poirier, and Eric Schwimmer 26 Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples / James B. Waldram 27 The Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal / Katherine Neilson Rankin 28 A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western Desert / Sylvie Poirier 29 The Politics of the Past in an Argentine Working-Class Neighbourhood / Lindsay DuBois 30 Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa, 1990–1994 / Sibusisiwe Nombuso Dlamini 31 Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse / Andie Diane Palmer 32 Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania / Todd Sanders 33 We Are Now a Nation: Croats between ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland’ / Daphne N. Winland 34 Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat Sikhs / Nicola Mooney 35 Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine / Tanya Richardson