Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (21 page)

Two makers of modern Odessa: Isaac Babel (left) and Sergei Eisenstein (right), ca. 1935.
Russian Museum of Cinema/Abamedia.

Sergei Eisenstein was only twenty-seven when he created his version of the
Potemkin
events. Short and compact, with a large head and a shock of wild, clownlike hair that retreated behind his substantial brow, he was not from Odessa. But he was part of Babel’s generation, the group of artists and intellectuals who drew inspiration from the revolutionary élan of the Soviet 1920s, an era when novelty in art, literature, theater, and virtually every aspect of social and cultural life was not only tolerated but encouraged.

Like Babel, Eisenstein had served with the Red Army during the civil war and, in 1921, began work as a set painter for Proletkult, the “proletarian culture” movement that became the epicenter of artistic experimentation in the early Bolshevik state. A year later he was made director of the First Moscow Workers’ Theater and soon began exploring film. In his first full-length feature,
Strike
(1925), he experimented with the montages that became his filmic signature. In time, as a prominent proponent of the use of film not only as entertainment but as a form of political education, Eisenstein emerged as the dean of Soviet filmmakers and the master of the earliest video imagery of Soviet power. Even today, his staged scenes of revolutionary workers and reactionary soldiers are routinely misinterpreted, by Western audiences as well as by Russians, as “documentaries” of Russia’s multiple revolutions.

Battleship Potemkin
became one of his preeminent pieces and certainly one of the most copied works in film history. It was commissioned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, but by the time Eisenstein began the project, the end of the anniversary year was only a few months away. He and a vast team worked in Odessa and other parts of the Black Sea region for weeks, using the Hotel London as their base. To save time and money, they scraped together archival footage that could be used in place of new film. (The shots of tsarist ships steaming ominously toward the valiant mutineers are actually old images of the U.S. Navy on maneuvers, the giveaway being a small American flag visible in one scene.) In a mad rush at the end of the year, Eisenstein cut down some fifteen thousand meters of film into a running time of around seventy minutes.
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“The fetters of space and the claws of time held our excessive and greedy fantasy in check,” he later wrote, surely with little inkling of the lasting success produced by just over three months of scenario writing, set design, shooting, and editing.
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What Eisenstein injected into the story was its single most memorable—and in large part imaginary—element: the slaughter on the Odessa steps. Eisenstein’s genius was to place the steps at the center of his film, a scene that he called in his memoirs “the very core of the film’s organic substance and general structure.”
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Ranks of soldiers and Cossacks fire on the striking workers. When a Cossack strikes a woman across the face with his cavalry saber, we know exactly what has happened in that gruesome and shocking scene, even though the director never shows the sword making contact with her upturned face; the woman simply turns her gouged eye full-on to the camera. In the climactic sequence, a baby carriage teeters on the edge of the staircase then slides horrifically down the granite cataract.

In reality, there was no popular memory of a “massacre on the steps” as the centerpiece of the violence of 1905. The major shooting occurred elsewhere in the city and involved not only the military but also a whole series of self-protection units organized by city neighborhoods to guard against bandits and the inciters of pogroms. The idea for the scene may have come from an illustration of the staircase that Eisenstein found in a contemporary French magazine while doing background research for the film in Moscow.
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In Eisenstein’s retelling, the single bloodiest event of 1905—the murder of hundreds of Jews—faded into the background. Through the film, Odessa was transformed from a place where Jews had been killed in the streets to a city remembered for working-class solidarity and opposition to the tsar’s arbitrary rule. It was, to say the least, a heroic act of misremembering.

When Soviet audiences viewed the silent film, they were witnessing the birth of their own country—a revolutionary nation that looked back to the heroes and martyrs of 1905. By the time the film was released in 1925, the Soviet Union had succeeded the Russian Empire as the de facto ruler of much of the Black Sea coastline, including Odessa. Yet it was a country without a history. Its ideology proclaimed youth and rejection of the past as the hallmarks of a new social and political order. Even its founder—Lenin—lay dead, his legacy uncertain and a host of former courtiers now vying for power. The
Potemkin
mutiny, in Eisenstein’s talented hands, became the Old Testament of the Bolshevik Revolution, a series of events that presaged the triumphant changes of October 1917.

One of the last places
Battleship Potemkin
was shown was in Odessa itself. It had played at the Bolshoi Theatre and the First Sovkino Cinema in Moscow in December of 1925 and January of 1926, and when the American film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford saw it during a visit to the Soviet Union that summer, they hastened its release abroad.
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Charlie Chaplin pronounced it the best film in the world.
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It soon played to packed houses in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before arriving in Odessa later in the year. The film had been taken for a dry documentary elsewhere in the Soviet Union and had been screened to half-full houses. But in Odessa it was an instant hit—and also an instant scandal.

A local citizen claimed to have been a participant in the events on board the original
Potemkin
and brought a court case against Eisenstein, demanding a cut of the royalties for having his personal story stolen by the famous director. When he was questioned on the matter, the old sailor maintained that he had been aboard ship at a critical stage in the rebellion, when a group of seamen were draped with a tarpaulin in preparation for their execution as mutineers. The case was soon dismissed. As Eisenstein pointed out, the tarpaulin scene had been solely the product of directorial creativity—an artistic representation of a collective blindfold being draped across the condemned heroes. No such event had taken place.
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Eisenstein’s filmic techniques are often stunning in their originality and effectiveness. He decomposes images into their component parts. He moves between one image and another to create a visual metaphor, such as the famous comparison between men and maggots in the dark larder of the battleship. He uses multiple, staccato shots to indicate a single event, rather than recording the action as one fluid set of movements by the actors. The director was clear on the connections among technique, art, and politics.
Battleship Potemkin
was part of a new era in filmmaking, he believed, an age of “the new psychologism” in art that would focus on audience reaction as the central measure of worth and influence.
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As Eisenstein recalled in an interview not long after the film’s release, the power of the images, not their historical veracity, was the real worth of his creation. “Take the scene in
Potemkin
where the Cossacks slowly, deliberately, walk down the Odessa steps firing into the masses,” he said. “By consciously combining the element of legs, steps, blood, people, we produce an impression. Of what kind? The spectator does not imagine himself at the Odessa wharf in 1905. But as the soldiers’ boots press forward he physically recoils. He tries to get out of the range of the bullets. As the baby carriage goes over the side of the mole he holds on to his cinema chair. He does not want to fall into the water.”
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Imagery, lighting, camera angle, and editing were all intended to provoke a discrete emotional response in the viewer, and these effects could be calculated with almost scientific precision. The impact on the filmgoer, not the verisimilitude of image and action, were the hallmarks of a film’s success, even when dealing with historical topics. “By ‘film’ I understand tendentiousness and nothing else,” he wrote blankly.
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Battleship Potemkin
is arguably the single most important cultural artifact in Odessa’s modern history—a piece of art that did more than any other to encapsulate the city’s own image of itself and the way in which it would be remembered for generations to come. If portside hucksters and the mélange of East and West had impressed visitors for much of the nineteenth century, Eisenstein’s staging of the
Potemkin
affair came to define the city in the twentieth. Eisenstein included all the basic elements of the incident that were passed down from the participants themselves, such as the crew’s refusal to eat rancid meat as the impetus for the mutiny. But he added the heroic gloss that turned Odessa into the avant-garde of revolutionary change, providing a usable prehistory for the Bolshevik Revolution and, by extension, for the new Soviet state.

But that is also why the film has so little to do with Odessa itself. The steps were there, of course, but other images were not. In one sequence, a stone lion seems to lift itself from its plinth, like the working masses of the Russian Empire rising against their capitalist oppressors. Eisenstein composed the scene from separate shots of several statues, each in a different pose from prone to standing. Visitors to Odessa still look in vain for the restless lion, however. The original statues are actually hundreds of miles away, at Count Vorontsov’s old summer palace in Crimea.

F
OR A TIME
, Isaac Babel lived in an ornate apartment building not far from the old Brody and Glavnaya synagogues. Today the commemorative plaque is easy to miss beside the plate-glass window of the Bang and Olufsen store that occupies the ground floor. Until recently there was no plaque at all, and the obscurity was intentional.

For most of the Soviet period, Babel’s fate remained a mystery, a secret guarded by generations of bureaucrats. The full story only became available once Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost began to shine light on the blackest corners of Soviet history. A special investigation revealed what even Babel’s close associates had never known in detail. He had been arrested as an enemy of the people in May of 1939 and tortured at the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the dungeon of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Babel’s arrest was part of the massive purge of artists and writers that accompanied the broader self-immolation of Soviet society in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s campaign to reengineer society and root out supposed enemies. The official Soviet story was that Babel had died in 1941 while serving a sentence, bizarrely, for spying for France and Austria. It later emerged that he had already been shot in January of 1940, one of many Soviet artists who fell during Stalin’s terror.

Not long before his arrest, Babel had been living in Moscow. He was at the center of Soviet artistic life, even if his output had been modest compared to that of many of his contemporary writers. He had celebrated the birth of a daughter with his longtime companion, Antonina Pirozhkova. (His estranged wife and elder daughter, Yevgenia and Nathalie, had been living safely in Paris for more than a decade, after Yevgenia had emigrated from Odessa in the mid-1920s.) Sergei Eisenstein, a friend of Babel’s and always a flamboyant jokester, arrived to welcome the new baby with a child’s chamber pot filled with a bouquet of violets.
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But within two years, Babel’s friends and family were left bewildered and paralyzed at the prison door. “I’ll be waiting for you,” said Pirozhkova as she accompanied Babel and his captors to the Lubyanka. “It will be as if you’ve gone to Odessa…only there won’t be any letters.”
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His manuscripts had been scattered and burned by the police.

Babel’s fate was emblematic. His hometown had long been a city of arrivals—of grain carts from the steppe, immigrants from the hinterlands, and ships from faraway ports. Even the influx of refugees, seeking safe haven as empires and governments crumbled around them, enlivened Odessa’s social scene. The poet and prose stylist Ivan Bunin came to the city after the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow; he became part of the circle of the Odessa writer and memoirist Valentin Kataev, later to emerge as one of the shining lights of early Soviet literature. Russia’s preeminent silent film star, the young and almond-eyed Vera Kholodnaya, fled the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow only to die in Odessa in the late winter of 1919. Wailing crowds of mourners elbowed their way into the Preobrazhensky Cathedral and surely dwarfed any public meeting called by Whites or Reds. “In those days, anyone who was anyone could be seen on the streets of Odessa,” wrote the memoirist and historian Saul Borovoi about growing up in the city. “First-class actors lit up the stages; the most popular journalists and writers filled the pages of Odessa’s newspapers; the most renowned politicians and scholars appeared before crowds of listeners.”
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