Odesa and Ukraine in Historical Perspective
On Thursday, November 2, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest virtually hosted Dr. Bob Weinberg, Professor of History and International Relations and Director of the Honors Program at Swarthmore College, and Ms. Inga Saffron, Architecture Critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer to discuss the Ukrainian Port City of Odesa. The city was recently placed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List: “this decision recognizes the outstanding universal value of the site and the duty of all humanity to protect it.”[1] The Lepage event explored the rich cultural identity of this now-endangered city.
Watch the event recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFdBaJBV4uc&list=PL_Z9mt0HJesnqXQRRe8bYlPcFpOOi6KTc&index=2
“To have a better understanding of the present and look into the future, we need to turn to history.” [2] This is a sensible statement which President Vladimir Putin uses to begin a pseudo-historical treatise where he ideologically justifies his invasion of and war in Ukraine. In this 2021 propaganda article “On the Historic Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” he tells 1000 years of history, bending the narrative to his ideology: “Russians and Ukrainians were one people.” [3] For Putin, they have shared the same “historical and spiritual space,” they have always shared the same language, economic ties, and “after the baptism of Rus [in 988] — the Orthodox faith.” [4] According to Putin, this supposed historic and spiritual unity has repeatedly been disrupted by “Western” influence which he believes undermines Russian-Ukrainian integrity. For Putin, the war against Ukraine is for the “spiritual, human and civilizational” unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people.[5] This is Putin’s national myth for the war in Ukraine.
Having a national history formed by political and ideological expediency is not unique to Russia. The United States has an official history — the kind of history being taught under the new laws in Florida this year — that glosses over uncomfortable moments in the nation’s past. However, what is different in the US is the presence of non-official histories, which are actively censored in Russia.[6] Some of these histories push back against nationalist myths, and others train people to think critically about history.[7] The study of history teaches us to question the stories the powerful tell about the past. One purpose of doing history is to disentangle dangerous, mythic uses of the past. The recent event hosted by the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, a conversation between Ms. Inga Saffron and Dr. Bob Weinberg, demonstrated that the history of the Ukrainian port city, Odesa, punctures Putin’s national myth.
In the twenty-first century, Ukraine is spatially imagined as a place pulled between Moscow to the east and the European Union to the west. This has not always been the case. Long before the modern nation-states of Russia and Ukraine, the space of Ukraine was imagined not east to west, but south to north. The southern Black Sea coast, where Odesa is today, was first populated by ancient Greeks and Jews who were already exporting grain to Athens.[8] They imagined the space as moving from civilized in the coastal south to exotic in the forested north. Centuries later, the space was imagined north to south, as the Vikings traveled down the Dnipro River from the Baltic Sea as far south as Kyiv.
From this ancient past to the modern city’s founding in 1792 by Catherine the Great, many peoples populated the area of Odesa. After the Greeks, it was a fortress and fishing village occupied by the Mongolian Golden Hoard, the Crimean Khanate, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Then, in 1529, the Ottoman Empire took control of the south of Ukraine. The Russian Empire forced the Ottomans to cede the area at the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war (1787–1792) and Catherine the Great “decided that it would be a perfect place to build a city.”[9] Between 1792 and 1914 the city grew to 600,000, making it the fourth largest city in the empire.
During the nineteenth century, Odesa was imagined by its immigrants as an “El Dorado, where the streets are going to be paved with gold.” As a free-port city — meaning “goods in transit for countries other than Russia were permitted to enter and leave the city duty-free” — Odesa attracted foreign banks and branch offices of merchants from Western Europe, the Near East, and the Caucasus.[10] In 1897, the city was home to fifty-five languages and boasted inhabitants from over thirty countries, including most European and Near Eastern nations, the United States, China, and Japan.[11]
The city also attracted Jewish people. By 1900, it was unique among cities of the Russian Empire for being 40% Jewish. One contemporary said, “If a Jew…doesn’t dream about America or Palestine then you know he’ll be in Odesa.”[12] Because the city lacked an established Jewish communal authority, Odesa was a place where Jews “could engage in new and different intellectual, cultural, and economic pursuits.” They were free to snub their religious traditions. Odesa became “a major center for the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment).”[13] Some Jews were able to grow wealthy in Odesa, even as there was also a large Jewish underclass. While the city appeared to be a liberal and cosmopolitan place, Jews were consistently kept out of political power and frequently subjected to antisemitic violence. Even so, to this day, “it would be difficult to talk about Odesa without talking about the Jewish influence.”
The history of Odesa punctures each point of Putin’s national myth of a supposed Russian and Ukrainian unity. Not only do Russia and Ukraine not have the same ‘historic space,’ but over the last thousand years, the space Putin is talking about has been divided both east to west and north to south by dozens of peoples, empires, and nation-states. Even though Rus may have been baptized into Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988, Odesa has been home to Ottoman Muslims, eastern European and Mongolian animists, western European Protestants and Roman Catholics, and Jews, Orthodox and secular. Putin treats contemporary secularity as a western attack on what he believes to be ‘Russian-Ukrainian spiritual unity’, but secularity has been a possibility in Odesa for at least two centuries, especially among the Jewish people who moved there in part to escape the confines of their religion. Putin believes Russia and Ukraine have always shared a single language; Odesa has long boasted fifty-five. Putin believes Russia and Ukraine share defining economic ties; Odesa’s wealth came primarily from world trade, including but not primarily Moscow. Odesa, like Ukraine itself, “has long understood what it means to have overlapping identities. Odesa has always been on the edge of some empire, absorbing something from all of them.”[14]
[1] “Odesa Added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List amid Threats of Destruction | UN News,” January 25, 2023. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/01/1132807.
[2] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” President of Russia, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
[3] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
[4] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
[5] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
[6] Timothy Snyder: How Putin’s Lies Are Driving the War in Ukraine | The Foreign Affairs Interview, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfnza5YmRrE.
[7] Timothy Snyder: How Putin’s Lies Are Driving the War in Ukraine | The Foreign Affairs Interview, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfnza5YmRrE.
[8] The Jews and the Greeks were the first documented inhabits of the area but the archeological record shows that the Scythians lived in the space prior to that. See Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8; Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 4: Before Europe, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhCK5uGJ3Tw.
[9] All unattributed quotes are Dr. Bob Weinberg’s from the Lepage event.
[10] Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps, First Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 3.
[11] Ibid, 12.
[12] Quoted in Ibid, 9.
[13] Ibid, 10.
[14] Ms. Inga Saffron at the Lepage Event.
