A monument to Tsar Peter I has stood quietly in Poltava for many years. Fine, let it stand there because it’s not doing anybody any harm — “it’s a monument,” to quote a popular Soviet comedy. But as the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava approaches, we are sure to see that even immobile monuments can “speak” loudly and have an impact on politics and public moods. These properties of architectural structures are attested by the majestic four-meter-tall bronze monument to Catherine II, which will soon be unveiled in Odesa, a city that is proud of its traditions.
Adieu, my charming and freedom-loving Odesa! “Bye, my darling mother, Adesa,” as speakers of the local patois say. Goodbye, my lovely city on the Black Sea, where I, a provincial youth from the Kyiv region, ended up three decades ago and saw that, in addition to metropolitan Kyiv, there was another splendid city on earth with extremely beautiful streets and squares, buildings and churches, theaters and parks, where there was a special air of respect for people, no matter what language they speak, where they come from, what their nationality is, and what swimsuit they are wearing when they take a dip into the sea.
I don’t want to offend the current residents of Odesa, but I must say that now all this has disappeared from the city and may never return. With the erection of this disgraceful monument of the empire, this world-famous Black Sea gem lost its inimitable charm and unique civilized nature and turned into a dictator — a monster that strives not only to dominate residents and visitors alike, but also to scorn their ancestors, who had particular national customs, traditions, and historical memory. So the people of Odesa want to be contemporary spiritual serfs and slaves, who are skillfully manipulated by oligarchic leaders for the sake of politics and profit. But Odesa doesn’t just belong to the city residents but to me: it is not only part of the Ukrainian cultural and state space but also a treasure of world civilization. Odesa belong to all of us!
For various reasons, Odesa, which throughout the centuries zealously maintained its multicultural and polyethnic civilization under all kinds of political regimes, has unfortunately lost all this. Today it is difficult to call Odesa “mother” because one of its downtown squares will soon display a Russian empress, who was a wicked and spiteful “stepmother” of many nations. It is common knowledge that even today most historians call the Catherine-era Russian Empire none other than a “prison of nations.”
WHAT ABOUT THE “STEPPE-DWELLING KALMYK?”
It is not clear to me, and perhaps many other people who are concerned about their own past, why some Ukrainians should have chosen — in the 16th year of independence, when all the archives are open, there is access to libraries and the Internet, when everybody can familiarize themselves with history, warts and all — to erect a monument to a person who may well be called a Schicklgruber-Hitler or Dzhugashvili-Stalin in a skirt.
Why this kind of comparison? Because during her 34-year reign from 1762 to 1796 Catherine II, alias Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor Prussian princess from Stettin (today: Szczecin, Poland), destroyed not only all things Ukrainian (the abolition of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich, and the imposition of serfdom) but also the statehood and culture of the Tatars, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Karelians, Mordvins, and many other peoples that populated the multinational Russian Empire. It was Catherine II who sought by repressive means to drive all the people into a single “corral” called the “undivided Great Russian people.” Thus, she resembles the world’s No. 1 criminal Adolf Hitler, who tried to form the “great German nation” by means of wars and concentration camps, as well as his follower and later enemy Joseph Stalin, who deported entire nations to the camps of the GULAG in order to create “the great Soviet-Russian people.”
By no means do I wish to insult the Russians or the Germans, who are proud of representing their truly great nations and who also suffered at the hands of their former imperialist leaders. But what do you think a present-day Turk, for example, will feel, standing in front of Catherine II’s magnificent monument in the resort city of Odesa? After all, the bronze figure is trampling a Turkish flag with Islamic symbols. And what will a Tatar feel? Catherine II not only destroyed the Crimean Khanate, but also tried to expel by force all the Tatars from the Crimean peninsula, well before they were deported by Stalin in 1944. Jews will also feel distress because Catherine II was the first to introduce the discriminatory “Pale of Settlement” for their ancestors whom she banned from holding any government post in Russia.
The unveiling of the monument will also be painful for Poles because it was Catherine II who partitioned and then erased the Polish Kingdom from the world map and then, well before the Nazis (who exterminated the residents of Warsaw in 1944), allowed General Suvorov in 1794 to massacre thousands of Warsaw residents, mostly old people, women, and children. Obviously, every Pole who was taught in childhood to respect his history will remind the people of Odesa that Catherine’s troops put down the national liberation uprising led by the famous Tadeusz Kosciusko.
A Greek beholding the bronze monument will probably recall his family’s story that in the late 1770s and early 1780s all the Greeks who had lived on the Black Sea coast for millennia were forced out of the Crimea on the orders of Catherine II. The Kalmyks and Bashkirs will recall that Catherine II did not allow their forefathers to escape to China and sent her troops to exterminate them. As for the Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, they are still comparing Catherine II to Stalin because the tsarist government robbed them perfidiously and forcibly of their statehood, culture, and language. Perhaps some contemporary Russians, who come to Odesa on vacation, will also recall that the tsarina, in pursuit of her policy of “enlightened absolutism,” traded their serf ancestors like cattle and suppressed numerous popular revolts, including the one led by Yemelian Pugachev.
Well before the notorious Hitler and Stalin, Empress Catherine II physically destroyed her political opponents and her own family members (an illustrative example: in 1762 she seized the throne as a result of a plot and had her husband Peter III killed), waged aggressive imperialistic wars, ruined other states, suppressed national liberation movements, repressed entire nations, and wiped out the spirituality and culture of many peoples both in the Russian Empire and abroad.
In view of this, I think that the Odesa city councilors who made the controversial decision in July 2007 to restore the 19th-century monument to the “founders of Odesa,” of which the majestic statue of Catherine II is the main element, committed a crime that — don’t be surprised! — is punishable under certain articles of Ukraine’s Criminal Code, including those that ban offenses against human dignity and incite interethnic enmity. I hope these “people’s servants” from Odesa will in due time answer to the law and the people — and to their own conscience, if they still have one — for their antihuman action. But what about President Viktor Yushchenko, who presumably has an excellent knowledge of Ukrainian history? Even in the not so distant year of 1995 his predecessor Leonid Kuchma banned such a monument.
It is painful to lose Odesa — not just for me, a Ukrainian who is engaged in researching the history of his fatherland, but also, I trust, for many of my compatriots, who are aware of their place in the world vis-a-vis their past — Russians, Jews, Tatars, Turks, Poles, Greeks, Bulgarians, Belarusians, and representatives of other peoples that today form the Ukrainian political nation and which populated the Russian Empire in the time of Catherine II and suffered from her rule no less than the Soviet people did under Stalin or the European nations under Hitler.
However, while our parents and grandparents experienced the crimes of the communist and Nazi regimes “on their own backs,” the misanthropic actions of Catherine II have been somewhat forgotten over the course of time. Furthermore, Russia’s ideological machine is continuing, unfortunately, to spit out mythically sweet “bonbons” about the tsarina and her retinue in films and movies made for TV, books, and the mass media. As we can see, these are being consumed with pleasure not only all over Russia but also in Odesa and the rest of Ukraine.
CATHERINE “THE GREAT” AND UKRAINE
The reasons why the infamous Odesa bureaucrats are installing the monument are very questionable: they maintain that Catherine II was by far the best ruler “of all times and nations,” a statement that is discussed on an almost daily basis in Odesa’s government-controlled and gutter press as well as many television programs. This situation is the result of a powerful wave of tawdry TV and film productions, which has been inundating our informational space for decades, as well as belletristic newspaper and magazine publications by writers from our neighbor, a state that portrays Catherine II as a “defender of all the oppressed.” What inspires the Russian popularizers and their Buzyna-style apologists in Ukraine is the fact that, from the second half of the 18th century to this day, Russian historiography has been assessing Catherine’s contribution to the building of the Russian Empire in more than positive terms. During the tsarina’s lifetime, court historians, showered with money from the royal coffers, created a slicked- up image of an “educated,” “democratic,” and “wise” ruler, even calling her “Great.”
This myth-making tradition thrived in subsequent years, too. Sergei Solovev, one of the best- known Russian statist historians, always emphasized the tsarina’s efforts in the “glorious annexation” of the Crimea, Northern Black Sea Coast, “Western Russia” (Poland and Belarus), and Southern Russia (Ukraine) by St. Petersburg and Moscow.
There were exceptions, though, in Soviet times, when scholars adopted the so-called class approach and described the Russian tsarina’s historical role without excessive reverence. For example, in his book Field Marshal Rumiantsev in the Period of the Russo-Turkish War in 1768-1774 (Moscow, 1951) Yurii Klokman writes that one of the consequences of Catherine’s policies was the “enslavement of the Ukrainian peasantry and the liquidation of the last vestiges of independence and particular features of Ukraine’s political order.” From then on, Soviet scholarship no longer mentioned the destruction of Ukrainian statehood, although almost every Soviet schoolbook discussed the enslavement of Ukraine as well as other “national borderlands” of the Russian Empire.
Therefore, while Russian “bourgeois” historiography, which had always been institutional (i.e., it always justified the necessity of imperial state institutions), as a rule extolled the tsarina, her social policies were treated negatively in the Soviet era, Moscow and Leningrad lavished more praise on Peter I, who was a more appealing figure to Stalin and, through inertia, other communist bosses.
Are the historiographic conclusions of Russian and Soviet scholars the norm for Polish, Turkish, Finnish, Israeli, Lithuanian, and other scholars? The truth is that foreign historians have adopted an unequivocal attitude to Catherine II and her associates, and, although their assessments of the Russian Empire’s aggressive foreign and domestic policies in the late 18th century are contradictory, they in no way induce the public and the government of any country to spend public or private funds on the erection of majestic and totally unnecessary monuments.
What have we, latter-day historians of independent Ukraine, done to promote the truth to the public, including the people of Odesa, about events that took place more than 200 years ago? Let us examine the value judgments of Ukraine’s leading experts on the reign of Catherine II and her attitude to Russian-ruled Ukraine, which the Russian Empire’s official documents called Little Russia. The historian Valerii Smolii, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and his co-author Valerii Stepankov, noted in their book The Ukrainian National Idea in the 17th-18th Centuries (Kyiv, 1997) that in 1764 “the Petersburg court nurtured the idea of finally abolishing the autonomy of Ukraine and totally ‘Russifying’ the area.” To substantiate their claim, these well- known scholars cite a secret instruction that Catherine II sent to Prince Viazemsky: “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed on the basis of granted privileges. It would be inappropriate to flout these privileges right now but, on the other hand, these provinces should not be considered alien and treated as if they were foreign lands — this would be nonsense. We must do our utmost so that these provinces, like the Smolensk region, are Russified and cease to resemble wolves that are looking into the woods...And when there is no hetman in Little Russia, we must try to ensure that the era and the names of the hetmans will vanish” (author’s emphasis).
Catherine II’s extremely negative role in the history of Ukraine is also the subject of extensive research by historians based in Kyiv, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Vinnytsia, Kamianets-Podilsky — even Odesa, such as L. Melnyk, A. Putro, H. Shvydko, V. Stepankov, A. Boiko, V. Horobets, O. Hurzhii, S. Tsviliuk, and O. Bachynska. Unfortunately, the print runs of their books are very small, and you will not find them in bookstores or makeshift book markets in Odesa or other Ukrainian cities.
If somebody questions the conclusions of Ukrainian historians, they would do well to turn to the works of foreign researchers, such as the American historian Dr. Mark Raeff, who showed that Catherine II’s policy towards Ukraine, Poland, Finland, the Baltic territories, and other “national borderlands” was aimed at institutional Russification, i.e., integration that was intended to result in administrative, economic, social, and cultural sameness (Mark Raeff, “Uniformity, Diversity, and the Imperial Administration in the Reign of Catherine II,” Osteuropa in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Cologne, 1977).
An interesting conclusion about the importance of the social restructuring of Ukrainian society during the reign of Catherine II may also be found in the book Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s-1830s by Zenon E. Kohut, a Ukrainian Canadian historian, which was published in Ukraine in 1996. This Harvard graduate and professor of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Alberta writes that Catherine II and her successors successfully managed to integrate the Hetmanate into the Russian Empire, while at the same time Ukrainian cities became Russified, whereas the countryside, populated by the Cossacks, peasants, and nobles, remained predominantly Ukrainian. In this historian’s opinion, it was at this time that the word ‘Ukrainian’ became synonymous with ‘peasant.’
Yet the people’s memory is more truthful than historical science, which always caters to the dominant political regime in any country. In the 19th century, the ethnographers and historians O. Afanasiev-Chuzhbynsky, Y. Novytsky, D. Yavornytsky, I. Manzhura, O. Storozhenko, and H. Nadkhin found much anecdotal evidence (tales, songs, proverbs, etc.) from southern Ukrainian peasants and former Cossacks about their recent tragic past. Here are some brief statements from what eyewitnesses and their closest descendants said: “Tsarina Catherine liked the Zaporozhian land, so she decided to hound the Zaporozhians out of it,” “It just followed the evil witch’s curse: Tsarina Catherine ravaged the Sich, the Zaporozhian nest,” “They had forty kurins and 40,000 warriors, but Catherine drove them away and gave the land to the Germans,” and the like.
If you examine the song collections published in the 19th century by M. Maksymovych, Z. Dolega-Chodakowski, O. Bodiansky, P. Kulish, P. Lukashevych, M. Vovchok, O. Markovych, M. Drahomanov, and you will see that the words of the vast majority of late-18th-century folk songs are full of oppressive sadness, despair, and undisguised outrage: “I was born hapless and I will die hapless, for my mother bore me in an evil hour.”
There is much original documentary evidence that speaks eloquently of the misdeeds of Catherine and her bureaucrats. On May 14, 1776, Potemkin, the Russian empress’s longtime favorite (whose figure is also part of the controversial monument in Odesa) sent her the following proposal, “My gracious sovereign! Your Imperial Majesty is aware of all the brazen offenses of Petro Kalnyshevsky, the former Zaporozhian Sich ataman, and his accomplices, Judge Pavlo Holovaty and Secretary Ivan Hloba, whose riotous treachery is so grave that, under all civil and political laws, they quite legitimately deserve capital punishment...I suggest that they be incarcerated in monasteries for life — the ataman in the Solovky Islands and the others in Siberia.” Catherine gave a terse answer, “So be it.”
Do you think that Kalnyshevsky and his senior officers, who spent roughly 25 years rotting in the dungeons of Solovky, Tobolsk, and Turukhan, really committed crimes against Catherine’s regime? Not at all — they had not only helped the tsarist government in the victorious Russo-Turkish war of 1768-74 but also dissuaded the Cossacks from taking up arms when the empire was mopping up the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775. All those who today are advocating the restoration of all kinds of “unions” and “single economic spaces” should think all these facts through.
KOCHUBEIV-KHADZHIBEI-ODESA
As a historian, I am well aware that our historical national memory was effaced for centuries by powerful totalitarian-state actions that were always of an imperial (i.e., predatory, totalitarian, inhuman) nature. As a citizen of Ukraine, I know that even today my country is still facing a well-planned and generously-funded informational and ideological enemy attack aimed, on the one hand, at drawing Ukrainians into the globalized world and, on the other, at sending them back to the democratic-looking but still imperialist Muscovite stables. One element of this campaign is the attempt to persuade Ukrainians (including the residents of Odesa) that all the cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, as well as in the Crimea, were founded, if not by Catherine II, then by other Russian rulers. There is no mention of the fact that there had been Ukrainian Cossack settlements on the territory of Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Nykopil long before they were “founded” by the St. Petersburg government. Moreover, present- day Sevastopil and Bilhorod- Dnistrovsky have an ancient history that spans thousands of years, not 200. The obvious goal of this historical disinformation is to prove that these are “primordial Russian” lands.
Meanwhile, sources indicate that in 1415 the Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas founded a fortress town on the site of present- day Odesa and named it Kachybei. The Ukrainians, whose lands were then ruled by Lithuanian dukes, called the town Kochubeiv and engaged in a brisk trade with it, thanks to its harbor. When the Ottoman Empire conquered the Northern Black Sea Coast in the late 15th century, Kachubei-Kochubeiv was renamed Khadzhibei in the Turkish manner and was repeatedly attacked by Ukrainian Cossack units in the following years. Long before Catherine II issued her “city foundation ukases,” this Ottoman town had a small port, a population of about 3,000 (including Turks, Tatars, Noghays, and Greeks), and more than 600 houses, including stone ones. It should be emphasized that six regiments of the Cossack Otaman Zakharii Chepiha, who remained loyal to the tsarina after the destruction of the Sich, helped the Russian army win back Khadzhibei from the Sublime Porte.
It would be very instructive for modern-day apologists of Catherine II, the mythical “founder of Odesa,” to read the fundamental monograph On the History of the Settlement of the City of Khadzhibei, 1775-1789, written by the well-known Odesa-based scholar Prof. V. Yakovlev in 1889. In his work, the longtime chairman of the Odesa Association of History and Antiquities convincingly proves that all the tsarist government did was to settle a new Slavic population in Khadzhibei. Out of the 1,000 new town residents, nearly 650 were Ukrainians — former Zaporozhian Cossacks.
Using archival documents, Odesa researchers provide ample proof in their books that the history of Odesa did not begin in 1794, when Catherine II promulgated her well-known ukase on the construction of a more modern city and a new large port on the site of the conquered Turkish fortress: the history of this city goes back four centuries, when Kochubeiv-Khadzhibei-Odesa was under Lithuanian, Turkish, and Tatar rule.
Now try to conduct a kind of straw poll. Ask the average Polish schoolchild why there is no monument to Catherine II in the Polish city of Szczecin (formerly the Prussian German city of Stettin). After all, she is world famous and, therefore, Poland could glorify her. Believe me: you will get an exhaustive and unequivocal answer: the Russian empress partitioned the Polish Kingdom, crushed the Kosciusko-led national liberation uprising, and slaughtered Warsaw’s residents. Then ask a Ukrainian schoolboy from Odesa why this Ukrainian city is getting a monument to the person who destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich and the Hetmanate, introduced serfdom, and suppressed the Ukrainian language and culture. Exhaustive answers to these questions can be found in all textbooks on Ukrainian history, encyclopedias, and reference books. Then you can poll contemporary Crimean Tatar children on their attitude to Catherine’s activities and the attempt of the Crimea’s denationalized residents to install not only a monument to Stalin, the murderer of millions of people, but another one to his predecessor. Obviously, the answers of young Poles and Tatars will differ very little. What will the Ukrainian schoolchild say?
ARE THERE ANY COSSACKS LEFT IN UKRAINE?
Goodbye, Odesa! Everybody is fed up with your trite humor. There are lots of cars on your streets; there is smog in the air, dirt in the sea, garbage on the beaches, foreign information junk in the brains of bureaucrats, and slavish emptiness in the souls of Odesa residents. It is this emptiness that laid the groundwork for building a monument to the “immortal” empire — Chauvinism, Corruption, Ignorance, Tastelessness, and Profanity. I would rather go on vacation to the Muslim town of Antalya in neighboring Turkey.
But as soon as I return from my “campaign on Istanbul,” I will immediately visit Odesa. That is where my historian friends live, who have been writing fundamental monographs and articles for a long time. “Knocking on all the government doors,” they say that their city is much older than 200. Yes, Catherine II’s ukases expanded the former Khadzhibei and renamed it Odesa, but this does not mean that the tsarina is the founder of this beautiful Black Sea coastal city.
Let us hold another scholarly conference (what else can scholars do?) and once again call on the city authorities to realize the harm that imperial monumentalism does not only to the city’s architectural environment but also to the difficult process of making Ukrainians perceive themselves as a modern political nation. Let us try to prove that City Hall does not need this materially and spiritually costly “imperialization” of Odesa, and that it would be far better to restore the good memory of the indefatigable scholar Apollon Skalkovsky who, while living in Odesa from 1828 to 1898, loyally served both Russia and Ukraine and was the first to write an unbiased history of the Zaporozhian Sich.
People of Odesa! Let us choose the historic figures who helped to unite, not disunite, entire nations and states and are thus worthy of being revered and immortalized in bronze. I will continue to visit Odesa over and over again because it is finally awakening from its stupid, lethargic, Soviet-era sleep. Some Odesa residents who are not indifferent to their history — genuine modern- day Cossacks — have launched an unequal but righteous battle against the supposedly democratic authorities. The efforts of concerned Ukrainians of Odesa, who since 1992 have been opposing the renaming of a downtown street to Katerynenska and the erection of a monument to the tsarina in 1995 and 2007, could serve as the plot of a thrilling documentary film. It would show the clashes between Cossack patriots and police, when dozens of youths were beaten to a pulp and detained for 15 days for their “knowledge of history.” There was also a special security service operation, during which people who were protesting against the plans to erect the monument were savagely manhandled, while plainclothesmen told eyewitnesses that a movie was being shot. This complete “repressive set” of the Brezhnev-Suslov era was used only to immortalize the dubious heroine of a neighboring state.
To counter the “brazen-faced khokhly,” a lavishly-funded civic organization, with the interesting name of Undivided Fatherland, was founded recently. Its leader, a certain Kaurov, makes no secret of the fact that he is constantly receiving “moral support” from Moscow.
Meanwhile, representatives of Odesa’s Cossacks and other Ukrainian organizations are actively protesting against the wanton abuse of the memory of their forefathers and all those who were executed, tortured to death, deported, or oppressed by the Russian tsarina. As Odesa slowly wipes the imperialist-communist film from its eyes, I believe that one day it will again be a good “mother” to its residents and visitors. Hello, my beautiful Ukrainian city!
Taras Chukhlib is a historian and director of the Cossack Research Center at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
