1905

1905 was both a great and terrible year for Odessa.

In the 1850s, there had been a few fights between Greek Orthodox Christians and Odessa Jews arising from accusations of conspiracy, ranging from messing with the grain trade to assisting in the repression of the greek's revolution.  None of that could compare to the violence of 1905, after peasants had fled into the city, tripling the population and threatening the economy where Jews were finally fairly confident that they were assimilated.  They made up most of the high level positions and merchants, while peasants and christians made up the working class.  When those peasants couldn't find jobs, they turned on the Jewish business owners, the only public and prominent representations of the large grain industry and merchants in general.

"When Carters had a sick cow, when petty traders haggled over the price of a bolt of imported cloth, and when working men sought to combat the winter chill with a bottle of vodka, they were in intimate interaction with their Jewish neighbors.  But in a context of rising Russian nationalism and the state's growing fear of political subversives, this familiarity bred the opposite of fellow-feeling.  'The common remark therefore is that 'Everything is in the hands of the Jews,' the US consul reported to Washington" (King).  

This hatred and resentment fermented for decades, resulting in the bloodiest pogrom in Russian History.  Disgruntled workers clashed with innocent women and children as well as self-defense organizations, in the end causing 1,273 deaths and changing the political, economical, and social structure of Odessa forever.

Victims of the 1905 pogrom.

The workers were not just attacking Jews, but the establishment itself, as 1905 was also the time of the arrival of the mutinied Battleship Potemkin.  Its docking in the Odessa harbor spurred on the landlocked revolutionaries, but it could only throw a few bombs into the city before moving on to Romania in defeat.  Unlike Eisenstein's brilliant work of propaganda, Battleship Potemkin, a massacre occurred in the city at the hands of the Tsar's police, but it didn't take place on the Richelieu steps, rather, it took place around the entire city, and that year, it was chaos.   Eisenstein's movie elevated the incident from being like many of the other insurrections across the empire into an iconic event that spurred the Russian revolution.

None of that violence would compare to the German/Romanian occupation in less than 30 years.

King, Charles. Odessa: Genius And Death In A City Of Dreams. New York: W.W. 
     Norton & Company, Inc., 2011. N. pag. Amazon Kindle. Web. 4 Apr. 2012.
Photo from: http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/eng_captions/42-5.html