Ode to Odessa

With negotiations underway to end an awful war, we explore a city of noble birth and admirable endurance, that gave America its most wonderful import.

Catherine the Great: Odessa, Ukraine

Atlanta, GA

February 25, 2025

“Richelieu founded Odessa – watched over it with paternal care – labored with a fertile brain and a wise understanding for its best interests – spent his fortune freely to the same end – endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet make it one of the great cities of the Old World”.

– Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

As a civil engineer after the Loma Prieta quake, I worked for the Golden Gate Bridge. I helped strengthen the structure, reinforce the roadway, and fortify the foundation of the iconic span. But after a few years of designing, dredging, and digging, I decided to supplement my engineering experience with a graduate degree.

While taking classes at the University of San Francisco, I taught economics to Executive MBA students in Silicon Valley. The classrooms were on the Stanford campus, which gave me a couple hours each week to listen to cassettes in the car. But rather than waste that time in mindless music, I used those rides to learn some Russian.

I apparently did pretty well. One night when I returned from Stanford, I startled my Russian-speaking wife by using her mother tongue to apologize for being late:

«извините, я опоздал, я купил немного молока.»

After explaining in Russian that I was delayed because I’d stopped for milk, I received a look of shock and awe…as if my wife realized she’d married a man she’d never known. Was he a Soviet spy who’d followed her from the fatherland? Or a pernicious plant firmly rooted in Mother Russia?

He was neither.

Like a pretend pianist who knows a single song, I’d played the only piece I knew. I just happened to hit the right notes, and to be in tune. But I’d exhausted my repository of conversational Russian.

My startled wife was visibly relieved. Having escaped the Soviet Union, she was understandably apprehensive about the land she’d left. After growing up under the inescapable eye of a surveillance state, she can’t be blamed for periodically looking over her shoulder or under the bed.

Even so, she’s always had an affinity for the place she was raised. It was, after all, her home. Her parents and ancestors spent their lives in Odessa. Many were interred there after death. Special occasions still make memories sparkle, like evening champagne poured into its flute.

Welcome Reminders

Our annual visits to Lake Michigan would inevitably cause pleasant recollections to bubble up. A cool breeze over the coastal dacha, abundant berries from endless fields, and a verdant frame around an inland ocean always reminded my wife of her happiest moments beside the Black Sea.

San Francisco also reminded her of the place she was born. The Richmond District is home to a large Russian community. Its small shops abounded in the berries and beets that were common in the Ukraine.

The onion domes of the Holy Virgin Cathedral were a couple blocks from our Outer Richmond apartment. The largest Russian Orthodox cathedral outside of Russia, its elaborate architecture and impressive mosaics were unavoidable emblems of the place she’d left.

Holy Virgin Cathedral, San Francisco (photo by the author)

But the best reminder was the one who came with her when she arrived in America. Till he died a couple years ago, Rita’s father was the enduring presence of her entire life. In many ways, he still is.

One year, he came to San Francisco to pay a visit. A family friend lived in the City, and he wanted to see him. Awaiting the elevator to the apartment, my father-in-law struck-up a conversation with a woman in the lobby. After a few minutes, he waved for my wife.

Notwithstanding my Berlitz-level Russian, I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. But smiles and hugs are the lingua franca of an amicable world. Several were exchanged, and all were understood.

Unbeknownst to any of us when we walked into the building, my wife’s childhood piano teacher was one of its residents. I don’t recall when she left Ukraine or how long she’d been in the US. But almost two decades had passed since this aging woman taught that young girl.

Yet somehow, on the other side of the planet, their paths crossed. The intersection was propitiously placed, and my father-in-law was the only crossing guard who could’ve made the connection. It was as if the Architect of the world wanted to remind us how small He’d made it.

Pearl of the Sea

Since that time, it’s continued to shrink. Recently, albeit for the wrong reasons, the memories have revived. They weigh heavy on anyone with Russian blood, or roots in Ukraine.

The Golden Gate took its name from the Golden Horn, the estuary connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Bosporus Strait…and thru them the Black Sea to the rest of the world. A couple years ago, a ship laden with grain sailed thru the straits and past the Horn. It was the first from Ukraine since Russian troops crossed the fluid frontier.

The vessel departed the port of Odessa, the “pearl of the sea” that produced my gem. Appropriately enough, a powerful woman established and named this elegant city where my wife was raised.

Catherine the Great founded Odessa near the ostensible site of the ancient Greek (and perhaps apocryphal) village of Odessos. She feminized the original appellation, and applied it to her magnificent new port.

The nascent town rose on the site of an Ottoman fortress recently captured by her Russian forces. A warm water outlet for merchant ships and military expeditions, the city grew and prospered around its original barracks, as churches, courts, and dachas began to proliferate.

One dacha belonged to the Duc de Richelieu, during whose decade as governor Odessa’s population multiplied by a factor of fifteen, and the city became the third-largest in the Russian empire.

With grandeur came grace. Anticipating what Haussmann would do to Richelieu’s home country’s capital a half century later, the governor accelerated the process of adorning Odessa.

Trails widened into streets. Paths blossomed into boulevards. On either side of the new avenues, ornate buildings adopted the Mediterranean features and French flair of Renaissance, Classical, and Art Nouveau.

To honor Richelieu, Odessa posthumously rewarded him with a statue atop the Potemkin Steps. Originally named for Richelieu, and later known as the Primorsky Stairs, this world-famous flight was rechristened by the Soviets as the “Potemkin Steps”, in honor of the 1905 mutiny aboard that eponymous battleship.

As with so many linguistic designations in recent years, many Ukrainians have reverted to referring to the stairs by their earlier names.

Richelieu Statue, Odessa

“Potemkin Steps”, Odessa

The steps facilitated the steep passage from Odessa’s expanding port to its elevated perch. When the city was declared a “porto franco” in 1819, strategic significance was wedded to aesthetic charm. At the cross-currents of influences…melding Russian, Austrian, Polish, Italian, French, Ottoman, Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Ruthenian…culture and commerce waltzed arm in arm (and sometimes on two left feet) thru the Golden Age of Nineteenth Century Odessa.

Seven Decades of Savagery

From its burgeoning harbor…as from a buzzing hive…ships plied the Pontus. Rails reached for points north in the interior and east along the coast. Interrupted that century only by the Crimean War, after which Odessa became the principle outlet for Russian grain, trade bustled and commerce increased.

With it came an expanding Jewish population, which included my wife’s family, and the pernicious pogroms to which they were so frequently subjected. Ukraine has been a bastion of anti-Jewish sentiment since that time, and Odessa a base of surreptitious support for those who fled.

The twentieth century was unrelenting to Ukraine. The Potemkin mutiny was an ominous precursor to the Russian Revolution, which launched a seven-decade siege of Soviet savagery. Fixed prices and grain confiscation following the Russian Civil War induced widespread famine, and was a dress rehearsal for the horrific Holodomor of the 1930s. Up to ten million Ukrainians perished under Josef Stalin’s imposed starvation.

During the Second World War, no country suffered more casualties than the Soviet Union. And, arguably, no region endured more carnage than the Ukraine. After Odessa fell, amidst persistent air raids and ground assaults, tens of thousands of its citizens were murdered or deported as part of the “Odessa Massacre.”

Several hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews were killed, with more sent to an almost certain death in Germany or Poland. Some desperate Odessans survived in the manner of early Christians, huddled hopefully in the labyrinth of extensive catacombs beneath the city.

My wife’s father grew up during the war, by which he was no doubt scarred. After Odessa was liberated and the fighting stopped, peace was welcomed. But the Soviet experience was, to say the least…unedifying.

By the 1970s, stringent emigration programs were in place that nonetheless allowed certain Jews to leave. My father-in-law was among them, and his daughter went too.

Greatest Import

With the collapse of communism, prospects brightened in Ukraine. But the last couple decades, NATO expansion, CIA infiltration, and the inevitable Russian reaction caused the lights to flicker. The last few years, they’ve threatened to go out.

Odessa suffered shelling, damage, and deaths during the current war, with strikes on Transfiguration Cathedral and other important cultural sites in the city’s historic center. Yet aside from these attacks, like a family huddled against darkening clouds and approaching thunder, it was mostly spared the storm that ravaged to its north and east.

That Russia would attempt to seize the city once seemed inevitable. Odessa is vital, and both sides know it. With it, Russia would control the entire Ukrainian coast, and be able to dictate terms. Mercifully, that may be unnecessary, as an end to this war seems near at hand.

Few would peg Vladimir Putin as a sentimental sort. But he does seem to hold some affection for some of his predecessors. I don’t know if Catherine the Great is among them. If she is, perhaps that was sufficient incentive for him to spare Odessa. I don’t know (and I doubt it). But I hope we won’t need to find out.

The “Pearl of the Sea” is worth saving, if only because it gave America its greatest import…who, thirty years ago last August, gave me the honor of marrying the man who couldn’t speak her native tongue.

JD