Cancel culture in Ukraine
What happens in Odessa will shape what kind of country Ukraine becomes
At the top of the Potemkin Steps in Odessa, the most famous staircase in cinema history, a statue of the Duc de Richelieu stands on the corniche of Primorsky Boulevard. Richelieu, a French nobleman who became a Russian army officer, was, in 1803, appointed governor of the region and mayor of the young and then underwhelming city. His reformist zeal, introduction of duty-free trading and religious tolerance helped the small town transform itself into an Enlightenment metropolis. Two centuries later his toga-clad bronze form looks out sternly at the Black Sea.
In March 2022 Odessa’s inhabitants anxiously followed his gaze, scanning the horizon for signs of an amphibious attack that might open a new front in Vladimir Putin’s invasion. The acacia-bordered heights of Primorsky Boulevard were pressed into service as an emplacement for Ukrainian artillery. And Nika Vikniansky, an agile man with curly hair and expressive grey eyes, began to fear for the statue’s safety.
It was not Mr Vikniansky’s job to worry about such things. He is a furniture distributor. But that spring it was everybody’s job to defend the city and they put aside all differences to do so. Mr Vikniansky was co-ordinating volunteers who brought aid to a hipster food-court; he was delivering stoves to the army. But, as he recalls, “I suddenly thought, what if our duke gets hit? How are we all going to live?” Soon he had volunteers covering the monument up with sandbags.
Further down Primorsky Boulevard there is another statue: of Alexander Pushkin. Statues of the poet are commonplace in the countries which once formed the Soviet Union, a symbol of Russian cultural primacy. In Odessa, though, he has a more intimate connection. He lived there in internal exile; it is the city in which he began to write his masterpiece, “Eugene Onegin”. His statue, like that of the duke, was paid for by Odessa’s citizenry: Richelieu’s, in 1828, in gratitude for raising the city up; Pushkin’s, in 1889, as thanks for celebrating it in verse as European, free and cosmopolitan. Should Pushkin, too, be shielded from the guns?
Odessa’s identity, its polyphony and its freedom are under threat from Ukraine’s own officialsMr Vikniansky thought not. If Mr Putin’s Russia was happy to laud the poet as a symbol of its nationalism, then the duty of protecting him was theirs. “I just thought, Putin is not going to risk hitting Pushkin. And if he did, it would be quite ironic.” Pushkin would have appreciated the irony.
Mr Putin attacked Odessa, claiming its history made it Russian. Mr Vikniansky turned to history for the city’s defence—getting it listed as a unesco World Heritage Site. He pestered officials who said it was impossible, exploited friendships and circumvented bureaucracy. And in early 2023, using an emergency procedure, unesco designated Odessa’s historic centre a place of unique value, “a polyphonic city”, built by Italian architects, run by French and Spanish subjects of the Russian empire, inhabited by some 130 nationalities. “It was meant to protect Odessa from Russian missiles. I never thought I would have to protect it from our own vandals,” says Mr Vikniansky.
Today, though the city is regularly hit by Russian drones and missiles, Odessa’s identity, its polyphony and its freedom are under a subtler threat. This is from Ukraine’s own officials, and from a small but aggressive and vocal group of activists who have seized on a loosely worded law on the decolonisation of Ukraine which orders the “liquidation of symbols of Russian imperial politics to protect Ukraine’s cultural and informational space”. Pushkin’s statue, unshelled, is in their sights. So, too, is that of Odessa’s best-known literary son, and Mr Vikniansky’s hero, Isaac Babel, who shaped its Jewish character.
The law on decolonisation was signed by Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2023 and coincided with Ukraine’s counter-offensive to liberate territory captured by Russia. Most Ukrainian cities and regions complied without causing consternation. Like the statues of Lenin a few years earlier, the monuments to Pushkin fell across Ukraine from Uzhhorod in the west to Kharkiv in the east. Most were indeed part of Stalin’s imperialist policy; their proliferation began in 1937, the centenary of Pushkin’s death and the height of the great terror. Mr Putin also conscripted Pushkin to his cause. When Russian troops entered Kherson, the occupying forces put up billboards featuring Pushkin and proclaiming that Russia was “here for ever”.
Breathes and breezes of Europe
But what holds in the rest of Ukraine does not hold in Odessa, because Odessa is not like the rest of Ukraine. Pushkin’s sojourn did not make it Russian; his writing celebrated the city as liberal and European. Babel gave voice to a Jewish population as culturally important as that of any European city. The problem of decolonising Odessa is not that it is in any way pro-Russian—it resisted Russia’s attempts to engineer an insurgency there in 2014 and defended itself against invasion in 2022. The problem is that it was not a colony so much as a world city ahead of its time—a metropolis.
As scholars and citizens have reflected, it had its own way of speaking and thinking, its own music, its own humour, its own literature, even its own gefilte fish. What other city in Ukraine has given its name to restaurants in Istanbul, New York, Paris and Vienna? Like them, it has also produced a distinct myth that is bigger than the city itself. Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian at the Ukraine Catholic University in Lviv, says that its cultural influence spread far beyond its own limits or those of whichever country encompassed it.
At the heart of Odessa’s myth is a joyous idea of freedom and beauty, enterprise and opportunity, a city built on “the sun-drenched steppes washed by the sea”, in the words of Babel. Leonid Utesov (born Vaisbein), a singer and bandleader popular from the 1920s, mixed Yiddish klezmer with New Orleans jazz. “I was born in Odessa,” he wrote. “You think I am bragging? But it’s really true. Many people would like to have been born in Odessa, but not everyone manages to.”
Its climate, free port and religious freedoms attracted traders, merchants, fortune-seekers, and smugglers and gangsters of every ethnicity: Greeks, Italians, Germans, Poles and countless others. Jews, who were excluded from other large cities of the Russian empire, made up a third of Odessa’s population. Odessa was the melting pot of all melting pots.
In 1794 Catherine II ordered the construction of “a military harbour along with a merchant quay” on the site of Khadjibeia, a seaside Turkish village, but the merchant quay took over. Odessa grew up centred not on a citadel, a seat of government or a prison, as many cities in the Russian heartland did. It evolved around market squares. It was built on a human scale and designed not for intimidation, but for commerce and enjoyment. Its main landmarks were a neoclassical stock exchange and a Baroque opera house.
In the 19th century it was the fastest-growing city in Europe; its population soared from 2,000 in 1795 to 400,000 in 1897, larger than San Francisco. “For most of its history Odessa has earned a reputation of defiance of Russian imperial and later Soviet law,” writes Patricia Herlihy in her evocative book, “Odessa Recollected”. Today Ukrainian politicians are struggling to Ukrainianise Odessa (which they spell with one ‘s’) and to make it fit into their decolonisation law.
Oleh Kiper, the head of the regional military administration, doesn’t much care about such complexities. A former prosecutor who served under Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-backed kleptocrat who was president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014, he had been barred from official positions, but was reinstated in 2019. As an unelected bureaucrat he was interested in obeying orders, not in how Odessans think about themselves. So in July 2024 he ordered the wholesale removal of the city’s statues and the renaming of its streets, sparking a cultural war that is tearing the city apart.
The statues of Pushkin and Babel have prompted the biggest controversies because their writing is so central to the myth of Odessa. Pushkin has been cancelled as a Russian imperialist; and Babel as a Bolshevik (he was executed on Stalin’s orders in 1940).
Pushkin spent 13 months in Odessa in 1823-24, after being banished from St Petersburg for his anti-autocratic poetry. The city was only four years older than him when he started writing “Onegin” there.
“I lived back then in dry Odessa...
Where all breathes Europe to the senses,
And sparking Southern sun dispenses
A lively, varied atmosphere.”
He was not allowed to travel abroad, but in Odessa Pushkin felt himself to be in Europe. He stayed in the Hôtel du Nord (the house still stands). He sipped Turkish coffee and slurped “plump and living” oysters in a French restaurant, before strolling to the theatre for the latest Rossini opera.
The liberal city by the sea was a radical one too: “A nest of conspirators” in the words of Tsar Nicholas I. A secret Greek society plotted the war for independence from the Ottoman empire. In the late 19th century Ukrainian students and intellectuals promoted their language and culture. And revolution became part of the iconography of Odessa with Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film of 1925, “Battleship Potemkin”, which mythologised the city’s uprising in 1905. The scene of a pram careening down the grand staircase gave Odessa’s most famous landmark its place in history.
When Odessans staged a Euromaidan protest against Mr Yanukovych’s rejection of closer ties with Europe in 2013, they met by Pushkin’s statue and used his line about the city’s Europeanness as a slogan. Alexander Babich, a Euromaidan activist and historian, watched Russian troops occupy Crimea in response to Mr Yanukovych’s eventual overthrow. He wrote a Facebook post: “Russians, I will be defending Pushkin’s house in Odessa from you! [And] Potemkin staircase...!!!! You get this into your head!!!!”
This was precisely what Mr Putin could not get into his head. Mr Babich wrote in Russian. To Mr Putin, Russian-speakers were Russian. As Mr Hrytsak says, he could not, or would not, “understand that Ukraine has evolved into a civic nation that was defined not by language and ethnicity, but by people’s readiness to defend its independence”.
A decade later, Mr Babich is at the front, defending Odessa and Ukraine from Russia, while Ukrainian ethno-nationalists attack Pushkin’s house. Like Mr Putin, they see Russian-speaking Ukrainians as a deviation. One ideologue is Oleksandr Muzychko, who teaches history and memory at Odessa’s main university and sits on a commission that decides which streets should be renamed and which statues removed.
Mr Muzychko, a tall man with rectangular glasses, sees the war as a chance to “purify” Ukraine. “The skeleton of a healthy Ukrainian nation is ethnicity and language.” Those people who are “holding on to this Russian language, essentially parts of identity, monuments and street names…whether they want it or not, help keep the Russian claws in the Ukrainian body.” The metaphor of a body in need of surgery crops up often and echoes the worst of Mr Putin’s propaganda.
Mr Muzychko’s companion, Katerina Musienko, a neatly dressed 26-year-old doctor and activist, reinforces his message. “A Russian-speaking Ukrainian is a political construct, created by enemy propaganda. It serves as fertiliser for Mr Putin’s war.” As such, the pair agrees, these people bear the responsibility for Mr Putin’s invasion because he came to “defend” them.
While Mr Muzychko disseminates his views among students, Ms Musienko enforces them on the street. She runs a group of “language vigilantes”. When they hear of a shopkeeper or waiter addressing a customer in Russian, they go and “ask them to correct it”. If the staff refuse, her activists inform the authorities and people are fined. And sometimes thugs turn up.
The result of this de-Russification is fear and polarisation“The Russian language should be cancelled in public spaces. Anything to do with Russia, with our main enemy, must be levelled. Without negotiations or compromises,” Ms Musienko says firmly. But as Maya Dimerli, an Odessan writer, points out, Russian is not only the language of the aggressor, it is also the language of the victim. And the victim is now being shamed for the acts of the aggressor.
The result of this de-Russification is fear and polarisation. What was marginal is becoming mainstream. On the boulevard, people look away when asked about the statues. “The fear of speaking gives way to fear of thinking, until people no longer know what they think,” says Anastasia Piliavsky, an Odessa-based anthropologist at King’s College London. Criminal cases against “collaborators” make clear that the threat of being branded a Russian sympathiser is real.
What is my name to you?
When Mr Vikniansky was visited by two colonels from the sbu, Ukraine’s security service, who “prophylactically” warned him not to protest on the streets, he replied “And what if I did?” “It is unacceptable when people in my country tell me not to speak.” Defending the statues of Pushkin or Babel is not a matter of history or language (he is funding a translation of Babel into Ukrainian), but of freedom and his own existence.
And as a Jew growing up in the Soviet Union, he knows about prejudice. His father and grandfather grew up speaking Yiddish and Ukrainian. Babel’s Jewish Odessa was largely destroyed in the Holocaust and drained by post-Soviet emigration. Mr Vikniansky embodies Babel’s Odessa. He did not go to shul. But he recites Babel’s autobiographical story like a portion of the Torah, interspersed with his own commentary.
It is a tale of a frail nine-year-old Jewish boy, who studies feverishly to get into a school that has a 5% quota for Jews. As a reward, his parents give him money to buy the dovecote he had been dreaming about. Then an antisemitic pogrom starts and his loving great-uncle is killed. The boy runs into a crippled cigarette seller who takes a dove and smashes it against the boy’s face. “I lay on the ground, the crushed bird’s innards sliding from my temple. They ran down my cheek, winding, dribbling, and blinding me.”
Perhaps in response to his own experience of a pogrom, Babel created a gutsy and generous Jewish gangster, Benya Krik, the King of Moldovanka, a poor part of Odessa. “It was a story of a Jewish kid who fought back,” Mr Vikniansky explains. These tales gave him solace and courage when boys at school picked on him and told him he stank, and when a schoolteacher tried to Russify his name.
Mr Vikniansky’s parents wanted to call him after his grandfather, Naum Moiseevich Shrabstein, who fought the Nazis all the way to Berlin. But to give the boy an obviously Jewish name in the Soviet Union was to spoil his chances. So they chose one that starts with the same letter: Nikolay. Russians usually shorten it to Kolya. Instead, he was called Nika.
His Russian teacher did not like it. She would stand him before the class and say: “Vikniansky, remember, there is no such name in the Russian language as Nika. Your name is Kolya. You are Kolya.” The boy would cry and the class would laugh. Mr Vikniansky did not want his name to be changed. He does not want his favourite writer to be “cancelled”. His name and Babel make him what he is: an Odessan. ■