Odesa’s Catherine the Great Monument and the Legacy of the Russian World – The American

Odesa

May 6, 1900 (Old Style)

The crowd in Katerynynska Square grows larger with each passing moment, fed by a continuous stream of pedestrians making their way down Katerynynska Street, or up the sandstone steps of the Primorsky Stairs, toward the elegant triangular piazza that lies at the heart of old town Odesa. Ladies in their finest toilettes de promenade, accompanied by gentlemen in frock coats and stiff collars, emerge from four-wheeled droshkies, raise their silken parasols, and assume vantage points along the pavement, in the park, or on the capacious balconies overlooking the square. Soldiers in parade uniforms stand strictly at attention, photographers line up shots with their view cameras, and dignitaries pace back and forth, mulling over their coming speeches. Flag bunting and garlands flutter in the Black Sea breeze, and all around there is a continuous hum of voices conversing in myriad tongues — Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Greek, Armenian, and French among them — a cacophony that competes with the raucous laughter of the seagulls in the harbor, and with the stirring brass fanfares of regimental marches and imperial anthems that echo down the cobblestone streets.

All eyes are on the bronze statue group being unveiled today in the center of the square, on this the 100th anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov, prince of the Russian Empire and victor of the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792. The newly installed monument does not, as it happens, actually depict Suvorov, but rather Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, crowned Catherine II, empress regnant of Russia, and better known as Catherine the Great, portrayed here as a middle-aged woman of full habit treading on a mound of abandoned Turkish standards. She is joined by smaller representations of four of her most trusted servants: Prince Platon Zubov, Prince Grigory Potemkin, José de Ribas y Boyons, and François-Paul Sainte de Wollant, each of whom played an important role in the establishment of Odesa in 1794. When the Odesa City Council approved plans for a memorial dedicated to Catherine II and her subordinates on Sept. 23, 1891, it was hoped that the project would be finished in time for the city’s centennial, but the team of architects, sculptors, and engineers led by Yuri Meletyevich Dmitrenko had only managed to complete the granite pedestal when the commemorative festivities came around on Aug. 22, 1894. Now, at long last, and in time for the tangentially related centennial of Suvorov’s death, as well as the dawn of a promising new century, the various pieces of the sculptural group have successfully been cast in bronze, joined together, polished, patinated, and affixed to the circular base — yet another artistic adornment for a city dubbed the Pearl by the Sea, not to mention a potent symbol of Russian rule.

As the inauguration ceremony comes to a close and fireworks light up the sky over Odesa, it is hard to imagine that any Russians in the cheering crowd are thinking about the contradictory nature of the new monument, which has simultaneously been dedicated to the “founders” and the “conquerors” of the city. There is no acknowledgment that, before the 1792 Treaty of Jassy, Odesa had been a Crimean Tatar port known as Khadzhibey, a coastal settlement featuring docks, homes, caravanserais, a lone minaret, and a stout stone fortress dominating the horizon, which was sensitively recreated in Gennady Ladyzhensky’s 1899 landscape painting Khadzhibey, now in the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum. It will go entirely unmentioned that the town, before that, constituted a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and was called Kaczubyeiow, according to Jan Długosz’s 15th-century Historiae Polonicae. It was from here, in 1413, that a shipment of grain was sent by the Polish king Władysław II Jagiełło to the besieged defenders of Constantinople; more than 600 years later, wartime grain shipments from Odesa remain a matter of pressing international concern. And there is no inclination to recall how the Golden Horde, the Cumans, the Pechenegs, and the Scythians had at different times dominated this southern littoral region that lies so far from the northern Muscovite heartland. A certain amount of credit might be given to the ancient Greek colonists who identified the site as an ideal warm-water port, but as far as the average Russian is concerned, it was the czarina Yekaterina Alekseyevna Romanova and her trusted courtiers who had brought civilization to Odesa in 1794, and that was that.

The unveiling of the Monument to the Founders of Odesa, with its simplified and decidedly rosy view of the past, present, and future of the city, and of the Russian Empire as a whole, can be seen as the high-water mark of the Romanov dynasty. All the confidence on display during the ceremony would turn out to be profoundly misplaced, for quite soon after the apogee came a precipitous decline. The streets, alleys, and staircases that had funneled the city-folk of Odesa towards the celebration in Katerynynska Square would, five years later, be slick with blood, first in June of 1905 when hundreds of workers, protesting with the support of the battleship Potemkin mutineers, were cut down by Cossack guardsmen’s sabres, and then in October when the city was convulsed by a series of deadly and destructive anti-Semitic pogroms. A regime that had so recently reveled in the glories of the past, while looking expectantly towards the future, instead found itself teetering on the brink of revolution.

When the Bolsheviks assumed control of Odesa in the aftermath of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the first order of business was to do away with the ideologically problematic Founders memorial. The Odesa City Council was ordered to “remove from its pedestal the monument to Catherine,” though “the question of its preservation or destruction needs to be transferred to the Petrograd artistic committee under the chairmanship of Comrade Gorky.” For the next three years, Odesa was to be a prize fought over by the Reds and the Whites and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, plus intervening armies from Germany, Austro-Hungary, Romania, Greece, and France, so it was not until 1920 that the removal order was carried out. The sculpture of Catherine was damaged beyond repair during its dismantling, but segments of the four other figures were sent to the Odesa Museum of Regional History, Maxim Gorky’s artistic commission having determined that the aristocratic portraits were worthy of partial preservation on purely aesthetic grounds. In their place, a hideous concrete and pink granite bust of Karl Marx was plonked down on the plinth, but it was far too small for the setting and had to be replaced with a full-length rendition of the same political philosopher, promptly dubbed “Karl II” by waggish locals. Then, in 1965, yet another change was made to the site, with the Marx statue swapped out for a Potemkin Mariners monument nicknamed “the Iron,” and euphemistically described as “non-aesthetic.”

Katerynynska Square thus represents a sort of mise-en-scène of Odesa’s involuted collective memory. Its name has been changed seven times by various governments and occupying forces; other appellations include Elizavetynska (after Empress Elizabeth), Diukivska (after the duc de Richelieu), Karla Marxa, and Adolfa Hitlera. The artworks displayed on its granite pedestal have been changed about as often, and it is tempting to view the alterations in terms of degeneration and degradation, the pattern of aesthetic decline from the neo-Baroque splendor of the Founders to the tedious socialist realism of the Marx and Potemkin sculptures being readily apparent. But our perspective is not necessarily that of the imperial-era celebrants on that spring day in 1900, nor that of the Bolsheviks who despised the aristocratic sculptures enough to relegate them to the dustbin of history. We needn’t feel beholden to hackneyed chauvinisms, and can assume the vantage points of, say, the Tatars whose port of Khadzhibey preceded Odesa, the Moldavian and Romanian colonists who founded Moldavanka (now absorbed into an Odesan neighborhood) long before any Russians arrived on the scene, or the Cossacks who likewise dwelled in the lands downstream from the Dnieper Rapids before Catherine’s armies dismembered the Zaporozhian Sich and the Crimean Khanate. We can acknowledge that history, like the city of Odesa itself, is bewilderingly complex, sometimes beautiful, sometimes inspiring, sometimes decadent, sometimes bloodstained, and always in flux. Yet facile imperial myths have a tendency to die hard, and no more so than in Odesa’s Katerynynska Square. 

Odesa

Oct. 27, 2007

History is repeating itself this evening, as crowds assemble in Katerynynska Square for the unveiling of a recast Monument to the Founders of Odesa, painstakingly recreated by…