Odesans Fight Back As Regional Governor Tries To Erase City’s Russian-Language History

One of the brighter stories in Ukraine’s horrific war has been the resistance of the city of Odesa.

Ukraine’s main port on the Black Sea and great centre of culture has been repeatedly bombed and hit by Russian drones. It has suffered many casualties; some of its finest buildings have been badly damaged. But Odesa (it was known for two centuries as Odessa but now mostly goes by the Ukrainian spelling with one s) has dug in. Its defenders have made it safe from Russian seaborne invasion and the city has resumed its historic status as Ukraine’s main export hub, shipping goods and grain across the Black Sea.

There were worries that it would not be like this. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly laid claim to the city and played on its Russian imperial past, saying in 2023 that “Odessa is a Russian city. We know this. Everyone knows this.”

The Russian leader miscalculated. Odesa is a city with deep Russian cultural roots, but not of the Putin variety. As sociologists have been saying for years, speaking the Russian language in Ukraine (as most Odesans do) is not a marker of support for Russia itself. Anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sentiment has been strong and solid there.

That has not stopped the governor of the wider Odesa region, Oleh Kiper—who was appointed by Kyiv, not elected by popular vote—from committing a hideous blunder that is being resisted by the leading lights of the city, and now stands as a test for Kyiv’s future policies in the south and east of Ukraine.

Two decrees issued in July—which were not agreed with the municipal authorities, let alone its cultural elite—order the removal of a series of monuments and the wholesale renaming of streets of cultural figures from the city which are allegedly “symbols of Russian imperial policy in the Odesa region.”

Where the governor sees Russian imperialism, Odesan artists, writers, musicians and scholars and their friends in Ukraine and across the world see a high-handed cancellation of cultural figures who are integral to the city’s 230-year history. An open letter to Unesco published on 21st October calls for the decrees to be suspended. (I have signed, along with my brother, the writer and potter Edmund de Waal. We have family roots in the city.)

To understand the feeling behind the protest it’s important to understand that Odesa is also a cultural and literary artefact, celebrated by writers and artists.

That cultural identity has been written in Greek, Yiddish, Ukrainian (more so in recent years), but overwhelmingly in Russian by writers as diverse as Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, Konstantin Paustovsky and Isaac Babel. To deny their importance in Odesa is akin to stripping (the English-speaking) James Joyce or WB Yeats out of Dublin. This is what the decrees propose to do.

By the strict logic of this new policy, pretty much every monument in Odesa put up under the Russian empire or the Soviet Union should be taken down, beginning with the city’s 19th-century opera house.

It is hard to discern a rationale in who is deemed to be “imperial” and who isn’t. The beloved toga-clad monument at the top of the Potemkin Steps of the Duke of Richelieu, an enlightened French aristocrat, is spared. Tsar Alexander I named him as the city’s imperial governor and he served as a military commander in various Russo-Turkish wars.

The equally beloved bust of a bewhiskered Pushkin, put up in 1889 by public subscription and situated a short stroll away, is scheduled for the chop. Unlike the French duke, the poet was sent to the city as a political exile and during his sojourn there, wrote many unpublishable scurrilous and blasphemous poems mocking the tsar. Locals like to quote Pushkin’s line that Odesa “breathes and breezes of Europe”—which is why in 2013 they held Odesa’s first “Euromaidan” rally by his statue.  

In a mass cull of street names, an exemption is made for the street named after Nikolai Gogol, a non-Odesan pan-Slavist Orthodox monarchist. But the axe falls on two 20th- century Russian-language Jewish poets born in the city, Eduard Bagritsky and Vera Inber.

There looks to be a crude ethnic criterion at work here. Pushkin is rejected for being Russian while a French imperial 19th-century governor is reimagined as “Ukrainian”—as is Gogol who, for all his Russian imperialist views, is presumably saved because he grew up in Ukraine and knew the Ukrainian language.

There is a troubling whiff of anti-semitism in the way the Ukrainian authorities propose to label Jewish writers Bagritsky, Inber and Babel (plus a few others) as “imperial.”

The case of Babel, Odesa’s most famous native writer, is especially egregious. Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, Soviet—Babel wears all these labels and is owned by none of them. Mostly he wears his famous round spectacles that made the Stalinist regime single him out for death as a “rootless cosmopolitan”. His “Odessa Stories” of the city’s roughest Jewish neighbourhood are the quintessential literary artefacts of Odesa. Yet he has only recently begun to get the readership he deserves in Ukraine. In 1940 Babel was shot by the Stalinist secret police and his work was suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades. The statue slated for demolition was unveiled only in 2011.

These decrees are not a life and death issue. Russia is still killing people in Ukraine, including in Odesa. But the decrees still have symbolic and political significance that goes beyond Odesa itself.

If and when Ukraine recovers its territories currently under Russian occupation it will face a much more suspicious response from many local inhabitants than it finds in cosmopolitan Odesa. Kyiv needs a hearts-and-minds policy to win over Russophone Ukrainians in these places who feel no loyalty to Putin but have been acculturated in Russian and will still feel insecure about what the government has in mind for their language and cultural choices. These decisions send wavering Ukrainians like these completely the wrong message.

The letter calls on the authorities to postpone making emotional judgements until after the war, and not to play into the hands of Putin’s propagandists. This is a time for cool heads, not rash judgements, on a sensitive issue such as this.