How Things Were Done In Odessa

Cultural And Intellectual Pursuits In A Soviet City

Maurice Friedberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429722356
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Among Soviet-Jewish immigrants to the United States in the 1970s, more than 10,000 came from the Black Sea port and resort of Odessa. In this book, Dr. Friedberg has drawn upon many hours of conversation with more than a hundred of these immigrants to convey the flavour of the Soviet city's cultural life in the middle decades of the 20th century. The study was conducted under the auspices of the Soviet Interview Project headquartered at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.

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Ethnicity and Religion

DOI: 10.4324/9780429044854-2

Ethnic Groups

No other major city in Imperial Russia—or, for that matter, in the Soviet Union before World War II—had the ethnic variety that Odessa did. Indeed, the city's linguistic, religious, and national mosaic was among its chief attractions and also accounts for much of the exotic allure of the stories of Alexander Kuprin, Isaac Babel, and their contemporaries. The Russians were, of course, most influential politically, but there were also Ukrainians—especially on the outskirts—as well as Jews, Greeks, Moldavians, Poles, Germans, Turks, Karaites, Bulgarians, Armenians, and even a few French and Italians. By the 1970s, however, the onetime variety had faded as a result of the war, Soviet deportations of nationalities Stalin considered suspect (the Greeks, for example), and assimilation into the dominant Russian culture.

With virtual unanimity, some one hundred informants described Odessa as essentially a Russian city that was only formally part of the Ukrainian Republic, the population of which, Russians aside, consisted of thoroughly Russified Ukrainians, Jews, and Moldavians (Romanians), as well as small pockets of equally Russified Poles, Germans, and Bulgarians. Although there were Ukrainian newspapers, a Ukrainian theater, and Ukrainian schools (only three out of a hundred), the language of instruction in colleges and universities and the language spoken in the streets was almost exclusively Russian. It might be Russian with a Ukrainian accent and, occasionally, Yiddish inflection, but it was Russian nevertheless. True, street signs were bilingual, and official forms in government offices were in Ukrainian only; still, with only rare exceptions, Odessans filled out the latter in Russian. Preference for Russian was also demonstrated by the chronic inability of the Ukrainian theater to fill its hall for performances, regardless of the play. Often, tickets were distributed free of charge at factories, and busloads of soldiers or schoolchildren were brought in. Russian theaters were, in contrast, well attended. In fact, a theater director reported that the city's Ukrainian children's theater often staged plays in Russian.

A park administrator recalled that very few of the retirees resting on the benches read Chernomorskaya kommuna, a Ukrainian newspaper published in Odessa. Similarly, the local television station's Ukrainian programs were confined to late evening hours. The park where the administrator worked, though named for the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, offered very few activities in Ukrainian. Readings by Volodymyr Ivanovich, a local author, were among the few such programs.

There was, however, one major exception to this process of Russification. When it was decided that some of the city's schools would be turned into elite institutions offering two hours of daily instruction in English, German, or French, Odessa's Ukrainian schools were chosen. Thus, Ukrainian schools became, overnight, the most desirable in Odessa's school system. Parents eager to have their children learn a foreign language thoroughly (and also study that country's history, geography, and literature) would hire tutors in Ukrainian to make the children eligible for admission to the newly fashionable Ukrainian schools, which were the only ones offering intensive training in foreign languages.

Except for Odessa's small literary and artistic intelligentsia, there was little sense of Ukrainian nationalism, even in its relatively mild cultural and nonpolitical form. Among writers, journalists, and actors, one might come across some manifestations of Ukrainian ethnic assertiveness, but even then only in private (at a social gathering, for instance) and certainly without the militancy and defiance often seen in Kiev and in the western Ukraine, which had been annexed by the USSR from Poland in 1939.

The doubling of Odessa's population between the end of the war and the mid-1970s was largely the result of the influx of Ukrainian farmers from neighboring districts. Driven by poverty and the hope of a better life in the city, they found menial jobs easily enough in factories, on construction sites, or as janitors and domestic servants. (There was, indeed, a location in the city—the Chizhikov Street trolley station, on the corner of Preobrazhensky Street—where newly arrived farmers and prospective employers congregated.) But obtaining housing was another matter. The authorities attempted to stem this unauthorized influx, primarily by denying the immigrants residence permits (propiski), but to no avail. The newcomers built shantytowns on the edge of the city and refused to budge. One particularly resourceful group of homeless Ukrainians hit upon an ingenious tactic. Aware of the fact that Soviet officialdom went to unusual lengths to ensure 100 percent turnout at elections (no matter that these were uncontested), they complained to higher authorities that they were being denied the opportunity to vote by those who refused them residence permits. The stratagem worked. Insensitive bureaucrats were ordered to remove at once any formalities standing in the way of these Soviet citizens' sacred right to vote. More conventional methods of obtaining residence permits included real as well as fictitious marriages to legal residents and employers' use of their government and private connections.

Because the recent immigrants to the city were employed largely as "hewers of wood and carriers of water," the fact that they spoke no Russian was not a serious impediment at work. Their Ukrainian speech was, however, a symbol of their lowly social status (much as the languages of the Old Country were a similar symbol for newly arrived immigrants to the United States), and they made a conscious effort to shed this disability by attempting to learn Russian and to use Russian everywhere except in the home and with trusted old friends from the Ukrainian village. Significantly, these new Odessans sent their children to Russian rather than Ukrainian schools. One respondent, a male Jewish teacher of Russian and Ukrainian at a secondary school in a working-class neighborhood recalled:

Most of my students were Ukrainian, but they attended Russian schools. Although Ukrainian language and literature were required subjects, my pupils showed very little interest in them. (That the same was true of thoroughly Russified Moldavian, i.e., Romanian, students was less surprising.] As a teacher of Ukrainian I tried to awaken in my students an interest in their Ukrainian heritage, but the students, as a rule, remained indifferent to their national culture and ethnic heritage. At school functions, Ukrainian children refused to sing Ukrainian songs and perform in Ukrainian folk dances. This attitude was not a result of forcible Russification. It stemmed from natural causes. The apathy toward things Ukrainian extended to adults as well. In adult education programs, there were hardly any lectures on Ukrainian subjects. In the schools, teachers of Ukrainian were viewed as inferiors, and not too many people wanted to become teachers of Ukrainian.

A very small number of thoroughly Russified Ukrainians benefited from the official policy of appointing "token" Ukrainians to highly visible political positions, where the chief officeholder (e.g., the Communist party secretary) was to be Ukrainian and his deputy, Russian. Otherwise, being a Ukrainian was neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in seeking employment. Ukrainians were, however, shown distinct preference in admission to institutes and universities: This "affirmative action" was extended to them, however, not out of ethnic considerations, but because of their peasant background. Ukrainians, the reasoning went, might be expected to desire to work in the countryside and small towns where Ukrainian was spoken, rather than seek every excuse to remain in Odessa, as did Russian and, especially, Jewish college graduates.

Ukrainians in Odessa were by and large resigned to being Russified, and some of them, in fact, appeared eager to shed their Ukrainian heritage. Such resentment of the Russians as existed was articulated mostly as a sense of resentment toward strangers from faraway places who came to Odessa to grab the best jobs and apartments. Occasionally, Ukrainians would refer to the Russians by the old derogatory nickname katsapy, a word of Tatar (or possibly Yiddish) origin meaning "butchers." In contrast, the Russians' contempt for the Ukrainians was rooted in a sense of cultural superiority to backward peasants, and their assortment of pejorative nicknames for Ukrainians was both richer and nastier, including (in addition to the relatively good-natured khokhly, from the forelock of hair on the shaven heads of Ukrainian Cossacks) such terms as rogi (horns) and bydlo (cattle). All in all, however, intercommunal relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians were rather good, and intermarriage was common.

That intermarriage was not necessarily a sign of ethnic equality and tolerance was, however, emphasized by scores of my informants. Occasionally, intermarriage met with violent opposition from relatives. A Jewish engineer recalled that when an uncle of his wanted to marry a Russian woman, her relatives expressed their disapproval by scalding her face with boiling water, leaving her permanently disfigured. The woman broke with her relatives, and although she did not marry the informant's uncle, she did end up marrying another Jew. The engineer continued: "Marriage to Jews was in part also a result of the fact that side by side with negative stereotypes ('Jews are dishonest, sneaky') there were also positive stereotypes. One of them held that Jews were hardworking people who didn't drink, didn't beat their wives, and made model husbands and fathers."

Anti-Semitism, State-Sponsored Discrimination, and Conflict in Daily Life

Still, the engineer continued:

there was much popular anti-Semitism in daily life. Once I was accosted on a suburban train by some ruffians who said, "Why don't you goddamned kikes get railroad cars of your own," but other passengers sided with me and there was no physical violence. In the communal apartment where my wife and I lived with our small daughter, when the wife complained that the child was bothered by stray cats, she was told to "go to her lousy Israel." On one occasion I complained to the police about anti-Semitic insults and asked why nothing was done about them. The cops told me to shut up and forget it. On the other hand, when the neighbors found out that we were leaving the country for good, some of them actually cried, and one of them said, "Even though you are Jews, you are decent people, and we are sorry to see you go."

Occasionally, popular anti-Semitism could be life threatening. A variety of factors contributed to popular anti-Semitic moods. These ranged from envy of the Jews' generally higher social status and Odessa's notorious anti-Semitic traditions to the need to find scapegoats for the hardships of Soviet life. A woman musician related that a group of semilkerate Baptists were actually about to kill her, but that some gentile neighbors saved her. An aging actress recalled a saying that reflected the popular tendency to blame the Jews for the various hardships of life in the USSR; "Esli v krane net vody, znachit vypili zhidy" (If there is no water in the faucet, it's because the Yids drank it all).

Popular anti-Semitism is one thing. Needless to say, it antedates the advent of the Soviet regime and was reinforced during the years of Nazi and Romanian occupation. This sort of thing was not, however, the chief complaint of my sources. Rather, their principal grievance concerned the official, government-sponsored anti-Semitism and systematic discrimination in employment and in university admissions. Indeed, a great many volunteered the information that this state-sponsored anti-Jewish hostility and discrimination, particularly insidious because it was never officially admitted, ranked high (if not highest) on the list of factors that prompted them to emigrate. Thus, a professional chess player recalled:

Anti-Jewish discrimination in Odessa was extremely stringent, and it was common knowledge that rigid Jewish quotas existed both in the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning and in hiring. If a personnel director chose to disregard instructions and hired too many Jews at his factory, office, or laboratory, he risked losing his own job. Every attempt was made to flunk Jews in secondary schools and at entrance examinations to the universities. As a result, only the very best of the Jewish applicants made it.

Anti-Jewish discrimination was more severe in some departments than in others. The law school admitted almost no Jews at all, and then only as nonmatriculated evening session students.¹ Similarly, very few Jews were admitted to study foreign languages, but Jews were accepted to study engineering.² Yet even then, it was often necessary to pay a bribe, with two to three thousand rubles being a "normal" bribe.³ Only a very few Jews were admitted to the medical school. Anti-Semitic stereotypes portrayed the Jews as clannish, dishonest, and suspicious persons who worked too hard and did not drink. Clearly, such people were not to be trusted. The curious paradox, however, was that, notwithstanding all the anti-Zionist propaganda, rank-and-file Soviet anti-Semites preferred Jews to Arabs. Only out-and-out Jew haters, those who approved of Hitler, sympathized with Arab enemies of Israel. Anti-Semitic stereotypes change. Thus, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the Jews were no longer thought of as cowards.

Anti-Semitic discrimination in university admissions had its occasional tragicomic moments. An instructor at a teacher's college recalled that a Greek giri had once been failed on an oral exam because the examiner mistook her for a Jew. An identical story involving a Ukrainian boy applying for admission to the Merchant Marine Academy was related by a naval engineer. For purposes of discrimination, the definition of a Jew was reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws: One Jewish grandparent was reason enough to be considered Jewish (the teacher's college instructor told me), particularly when sensitive security-related work was an issue. Other respondents contested this claim. In any case, this particular criterion seems not to have been strictly enforced, a reflection of yet another, and widespread, rule in Odessa: Doctrinal and ideological guidelines (anti-Jewish discrimination included) were often quietly disregarded for good pragmatic reasons. For instance, a technical translator and English teacher agreed that "anti-Jewish discrimination was something that only certain institutes and departments could afford to practice. Other institutes and departments might have liked to discriminate, but because of shrinking enrollments could not indulge in this particular luxury." This consideration explained the relative liberalism in the admission policies of mathematics and engineering departments. They simply had to fill their admission quotas.

According to most respondents, in those college and university departments that admitted Jews at all, the number fluctuated between 3 and 5 percent, whereas in the mid-1970s, Jews constituted a little over 10 percent of the city's population. If this information is accurate, then the "Jewish quota" in higher education was higher under the openly discriminatory czarist regime than under the ostensibly egalitarian Soviet system. This hypothesis was emphatically confirmed by an Odessa physician with respect to the city's medical school. Individual horror stories were numerous. An economist recalled that as the winner of a gold medal from secondary school, he was legally entitled to be admitted to college without an entrance examination. When he applied for admission, however, he was officially informed that he was rejected "because 1 could not sing. They told me that they needed boys for the choir." A mechanical engineer reported that he witnessed an oral examination in physics during which a Jewish student disagreed with the examiner, who was obviously trying to fail him. The examiner then called in the police and the student was taken away. The informant himself had failed the entrance examination two years in a row and on the third try was admitted only to correspondence courses. Subsequently, however, his parents bribed some college officials, and it was thus that he was finally admitted to the Institute of Technology....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• INTRODUCTION: PROFILE OF A CITY
• 1 ETHNICITY AND RELIGION
• 2 INFORMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT
• 3 DOCTORS, LAWYERS, AND PARTY BUREAUCRATS
• 4 EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
• 5 THE ARTS
• 6 INTELLECTUAL LIFE
• EPILOGUE