Post-cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence

Chapter 1

Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City

CAROLINE HUMPHREY

How can we explain the case of a city famed for its cosmopolitanism, where nevertheless pogroms have taken place? In the early twentieth century, when Odessa was renowned for its enlightened multinational mercantile elite, its magnificent opera house, its irreverence and street humour, it was also the city where Russia’s most violent pogroms against the Jews took place. It cannot be convincingly argued that they were only a matter of externally-incited passions unleashed in the city, for attacks on Jews had taken place in Odessa many times in previous decades (notably in 1821, 1849, 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1900, as well as countless minor raids). So although the most devastating pogroms were related to great political events in Russia, specifically to the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 and the revolution of 1905, there is still something to be explained about the city itself that so regularly produced these spurts of hatred. This chapter does not aim to provide a causal account of the pogroms, on which there is already a distinguished literature;¹ nor is it a study of the suffering inflicted and the subjectivities of those involved. Rather, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is an attempt to explain how the pogroms happened and to characterise the complex – disjointed yet mutually aware – make-up of a city undergoing radical change in which such events could take place.

The destructive energies of violent mobs vented against people seen as alien (pogroms) were the reverse of cosmopolitanism, if by this we mean generous and appreciative interactions between those who recognise one another as different. This incompatibility, the difficulty of thinking them adjacently, is reflected in the literature on Odessa, which tends to focus either on its complex cosmopolitan culture or on pogroms, but not on their co-presence (see, however, Gerasimov 2003). But perhaps there is a way of conceptualising such a situation when it is seen that in some respects these undoubted opposites – pogroms and cosmopolitan interactions – were not dissimilar kinds of phenomenon. Both were changeable heterogeneous assemblages, for which an analysis in terms of epistemological pluralism – rather than individualism or holism – is appropriate. Both were unstructured, leaderless, relational and contagious, and for these reasons best understood, it will be suggested, through Tardean notions of ‘imitation’ and ‘opposition’.² The historical conditions of cosmopolitanism and pogroms changed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but on any given occasion they consisted of the spontaneous enactment, in slightly altered form, of specific sets of things that were said and done, including ritualised and symbolic elements (Löwe 1998: 457–59). I shall argue, however, that there were several distinctive kinds of cosmopolitanism and that they tended to be mutable and creative, whereas the pogroms were recursive and backward looking. This dire repetition of pogroms has been interpreted as standardisation, giving rise to the notion of the ‘pogrom paradigm’ (Klier 1992: 13–18). However, that interpretative-explanatory theory cannot account for the absence of pogroms in Odessa after the culminating orgy of ethnic violence in 1905. A more convincing perspective, and one that chimes with the Tardean approach taken here, is Il’ya Gerasimov’s idea (2003: 251) of ‘immunity’ to pogroms that developed in Odessa after 1905.

Cosmopolitan networks and pogrom crowds created their own separate, patterns of relations, which can be seen as topographies, defined by the overall connectivity of their different elements as assemblages. They had characteristically different ways of changing over time, seeping, coagulating, or leaping like wildfire across the boundaries of civil estates, ethnic groups, religions, classes, neighbourhoods and professions. Furthermore, they interacted in different ways with the same physical features of the city. The central avenue, the fashionable Deribasovskaya Street, for example, was a key attractant for destructive rampage but it was also, more constantly, one of the most prominent venues for displaying courteous interactions. What complicates this picture is that because the two opposite activities were played out in public, they were to a degree rhetorical, and thus their actors were aware of one another’s potential emergence and long histories in the town. Some people at the time, as well as historians, have seen them as reactions to one another (Sekundant 2005) or as ‘counterbalancing mechanisms’ in the turbulence of economic modernisation (Gerasimov 2003: 252). However, in a longer history we should consider the idea of balance carefully, for these were inimical movements that had different dynamics. Pogroms in the pre-Soviet period, I shall suggest, were a recurrent part of an archaic politics of the autocratic state, and the ‘immune reactions’ were a refusal of this politics; whereas cosmopolitanisms were inventive in their own right, were more than just a rejection of ethnic violence, and should always be thought of in the plural: the forms of cosmopolitanism were very different at the beginning of the nineteenth century from those at the end.

Still, whatever form cosmopolitanism took at various times, the violence of pogroms dealt their fragile relations a brutal blow. If the term ‘post-cosmopolitan’ refers to the sense of there having been a former benign state of social harmony, now evaporated, then Odessa was repeatedly prey to this awareness throughout its history.

Some ideas used in this chapter

Pogroms against Jews could be analysed in the light of the anthropology of ethnic violence, with its characteristic themes of social suffering, resistance, cultural rights, legitimacy, the moral economy of the mob, blame and healing (Das 1995; Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997) or the relation between collective violence and everyday practice (Kapferer 1988; Spencer 1990). This chapter, however, attempts a different, both material and communicative, approach. The pluralistic epistemology just mentioned is inspired by the work of Gabriel Tarde and Gilles Deleuze, in particular Tarde’s notion of ‘imitation’, which he endowed with an everyday quality, describing it as the repetition, always in an infinitesimally different way, of ‘a word or phrase spoken, a job executed, or a legal procedure enacted’ (Tarde 1969: 143) and Deleuze’s idea of the ‘molecular’, a wave-like assemblage (or multiplicity) of tiny immanent differences that do not submit themselves to any totalisation (Deleuze and Guatari 1987: 34 and 248–50). This chapter will not deal with these theories as philosophical explanations of phenomena in general, but will focus instead on certain ideas relevant to the subject at hand.

Because it is founded on the notion of incremental additions, in Tardean theory the spatial and the temporal dynamics of the social occupy a single conceptual gesture (Born 2010: 237). This chapter will show how seasonality and timing was crucial to the formation of pogrom raids. Externally given times, such as religious holidays, or dramatic political events, brought crowds together – crowds that, if they formed pogrom mobs, ‘cascaded’ through time in characteristic patterns. Separately, there were times of cosmopolitan interactions. Just as important were the engagements with material places. I therefore pay attention to the physical layout of Odessa: its districts, market squares, port, and places of social display. These places had names (Greek Street, Polish Street, Jewish Street, Cathedral Square, etc.) which reflect their associations with different kinds of people; but an engagement in a theoretical sense with the materiality of place also means taking seriously changeable emergent qualities, rescuing, as Matei Candea has put it, ‘a more dynamic version of place from the premature foreclosure of approaches in which the relevant (political) actors and the relevant (political) issues are known in advance’ (Candea 2009: 1).

What might this mean? In the case of pogroms, it was not just that the crowds of people were active, creating places of ruin from city edifices, but that the mobs themselves were enticed, frustrated, divided, blocked off, or channelled by the emergent qualities of the sites they encountered. Looking at what actually happened, however, it is difficult to assign predominant agency to one side or the other, to assemblages of people or to architectural ensembles, since they transformed one another. In a way we know this well. Before the great sale on ‘Black Friday’ (the day after Thanksgiving) at Walmart on Long Island in 2008, the glass doors held back a heaving queue, but when the doors shattered, instead of opening in an orderly way, the ‘customers’ were suddenly transformed into ‘a dangerous stampede’ that resulted in death and injury. The glass doors, which had earlier welcomed customers and offered an enticing look at the goods inside, turned into sharp instruments of blood-letting (Brockes 2009: 21–25).

Let me take the example of Odessa port. The transformative possibility of the port was suddenly made evident in the dramatic stand-off in June 1905 when the rebel battleship Potemkin steamed into the harbour and trained its guns on the merchants’ palaces. The spatial setting, which presented the range of the elegant Primorskii (Seashore) Boulevard to the purview of the armed ship, became an essential and powerful agent in the emergence of a new landscape. This was the arc in which it was possible to be a target from the sea, behind which extended a similarly emergent zone, that of the ‘safe areas’, to which the frightened merchants could retreat. In pogroms, the running patterns taken by crowds were to a great extent formed by the disposition of objects that became their quarry, from rows of trading stalls to imposing banks.

It might seem that the undramatic and small-scale activities of cosmopolitanism would be less apt for such an analysis, but as I hope to show, they too formed, and were formed by, the affordances of specific places, from market squares to basement taverns to elegant clubs: places that had indeed often been built to enable certain kinds of cosmopolitan sociality. All this implies that we should pay attention to what Lisa Blackman (2007: 574) calls the ‘suggestive realm’, i.e. where embodied experience and material encounters engage with fantasies that are both affective and ideational.

If Blackman outlines a largely unspecified ‘intersubjective zone’ of relations between human subjects, Bruno Karsenti (2010), also inspired by Tarde, takes us directly to what passes between individuals. This content – crucially beliefs and desires – is in effect the ‘social’; or to put it another way, the items that are learned (imposed, copied, rejected, etc.) from someone else are the ‘vectors of sociality’. Focusing on such vectors raises the question not of the origin of the relation, but simply of what it consists in, what it is made of, what it is, precisely, that makes it a relation. These are psychic phenomena that are beyond the individual and yet are not subsumed into collective representations. As Karsenti continues, ‘In a strict sense, beliefs and desires imitate each other, not individuals’ (2010: 45), and they constitute ‘an impersonal milieu in which imitative flows are built up and clash with one another’ (2010: 49).

One does not have to go the whole hog with Tarde’s social theory – that is, to accept his three analytical categories of imitation, opposition and creation as the key to understanding all (social, political, economic, biological, psychological) phenomena – in order to see that the focus on impersonal content proposed by Karsenti is particularly apt for understanding the unstructured change-making activities of the kind discussed in this chapter. For in fact, as can be seen from eyewitness accounts, specific kinds of breakages, blows, shouted slogans, etc. constituted pogroms, but it could not be known in advance who would participate, nor even who would be a victim. In other words, pre-existing social categories, such as ‘the Russians’, ‘the Greeks’ or ‘the Jews’, did not determine who were the acting subjects. Rather, during pogroms such named categories, together with representations and symbols of them, were some of the key vectors (i.e. ‘content’) that temporarily linked people – people who otherwise had quite variegated and multifarious identities.

We should pay attention, therefore, to crowds by examining the synthesis of the properties of such emergent assemblages (DeLanda 2006: 4) rather than assuming them to be organic totalities pervaded through and through by culturally-given ideologies. If crowds are seen as temporal processes of gathering and dispersal of diverse components, it is then possible to examine the micro-histories of particular crowds, the way they become attached together by specific contents, encounter internal and external resistance as well as further agglutination, and thus form changing topologies over the time of their existence.

Such an approach may seem to fly in the face of our intuitions. Surely, it might be protested, everyone in Odessa knew who was a Jew and who was not, and at the very least, the Jews themselves knew who they were, and that their pre-existing ancestral status was why they were victimised. But with the idea of assemblages things would never be so clear, since the relations envisaged by Deleuze imply that a component part of one assemblage can be subtracted from it and plugged into a different one (DeLanda 2006: 10). And in fact, ethnography bears out this idea: not only were ambiguous/multiple social identities widespread during the turbulent period of suppressed modernisation that was late Imperial Russia (Haimson 1988), but more specifically there were Jews who converted to Christianity, there were Slav Christians who joined Jewish defence militias, and sometimes, as in 1871, people identified as Jews even joined the mobs of pogromists (Morgulis 2001: 31). Rather than defining particular subjects, such as ‘the cosmopolitan’ or ‘the pogromist’, I prefer to describe inimical ways of communicating, acting and imagining that passed among people, sweeping them temporarily into groups.

Still, this brings up what one might call the sticking point – or inconsistency – of the Tarde-inspired presentist theory: the delineation of the actors. The vocabulary of imitation and suggestion seems to imply a blank subject, on whom impressions are made. If individual people have consistency over time, it is relevant that the sets of vectors passing between people in crowds could act as reminders of stored-up prior experience, or act as touch papers for earlier emotions. Indeed, Tarde’s own idea of opposition implies an actor whose previous ideas and experiences jar against the new inputs and make her reject them. Some of the most telling vectors in the events I shall describe were memories. Occasionally they consisted of a combination of memories and promises, such as the threat made at the start of the 1871 pogrom that unless a Jewish cabstand was removed from near the Greek cathedral, ‘the events of 1829’ (i.e. the pogrom of that year) would be unleashed again (Morgulis 2001: 42–43). The Blackman-Karsenti portrayal of the subject as merely a processing zone, stacking up inputs, sorting them out, and opting amongst among them – the theory according to which a memory is merely a passing acquisition – runs counter to the alternative ‘humanist’ vision in which memories and the capacity to make promises are central to what the subject is.

The present chapter does not attempt to resolve this issue of the subject (see Humphrey 2008) but I conclude the section with an insight, again derived from Tarde, which sheds some light on the dispositions of people in social multiplicities. Tarde distinguishes between a ‘crowd’ and a ‘public’. Tarde’s use of the terms crowd and public is non-judgemental, unlike that of other social theorists of his time and later, in whose works ‘crowds’ are anxiously invoked as unruly phenomena, whereas ‘the public’ and more recently ‘multitudes’ appear as positive phenomena of vitality and autonomy (see Mazzarella 2010). For Tarde, a crowd, a physical assemblage in which communications are passed by direct contact, is different from a current of opinion, a diffuse ‘inorganic transformation’, in which ideas are transmitted at a distance, a public: ‘The transportation of force over distance is nothing compared to this transportation of thought across distance. Is not thought the social force par excellence?’ (Tarde 1969: 279)

The people transfigured by ideas in a public, Tarde writes, do not meet or hear one another, but there is a social bond between them, ‘their simultaneous conviction or passion, their awareness of sharing at the same time an idea or a wish with a great number of other men’ (1969: 278–79). In pre-modern times, Tarde writes, publics were the small and occasional audiences produced by oratory, but they were succeeded in later centuries by more intense, persistent and widespread publics enabled by printing, newspapers, radio, political parties, etc. Society has become entirely pervaded by the ‘mobile atmosphere’ of countless publics (‘there is not one sect that does not wish to have its own newspaper in order to surround itself with a public extending far beyond it’, 1969: 284). The most salient point for this chapter is that a person can be physically present in only one crowd, but ‘one can belong – and in fact one always does belong – simultaneously to several publics’ (1969: 281).

Thinking about Odessa enables one to see that cosmopolitanism and pogroms bore different relations to publics as defined above. By the end of the nineteenth century the city was host to countless newspapers, journals, public reading-rooms, libraries, professional newsletters, legal publications, political leaflets, etc. and there could hardly have been any educated person who did not regularly read many of these. But in 1897 around forty-two per cent of the population of Odessa was illiterate (Herlihy 1986: 242–43) and the publics they belonged to, if any, were the old audiences of oratory in churches, synagogues and political meetings. The evidence is that pogrom incitements were overwhelmingly transmitted person-to-person orally and material-symbolically, among workers, indigents, local peasants and similarly non-literate migrants from central Russia looking for work, as I will describe later. There were undoubtedly anti-Jewish publics in Odessa at the end of the nineteenth century. One was the middle-class readership of the newspaper Novorossiiskii Telegraf, which, although its editorials condemned the use of violence against Jews, also published anti-Semitic articles inciting hatred, accusing Jews of exploitation of peasants and workers, of disloyalty to the state, and of masterminding the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1981 (Aronson 1990: 68–75). Irresponsible journalists publicised rumours predicting pogroms. Nevertheless, the anti-Semitic campaign run by the paper in spring 1881 did not result in a pogrom at the time (1990: 79). The mass of pogromists was not this literate public sprung to life, but consisted rather of a heterogeneous gathering of people threaded together by various signs, rumours and slogans, sometimes focused, but often confused. Sometimes it was wealth, or privilege, or perceived economic advantage that was attacked, rather than ‘Jews’ as such. Working-class antagonism towards Jews was not universal and where it existed, its main stream could perhaps be seen as a pre-modern ‘sub-public’, conveyed intimately, by ancient calumnies, grandmothers’ fables, resentment at a bad deal, or a neighbour’s invective. The coming together of these various flows was crucially energised by malignant rumours, as I shall describe later. The pogroms could not have come about without these various – oral and literate – kinds of public. But pogroms were not publics: in Tarde’s terms they were ‘crowds’, having their own crowd-like characteristics of spontaneity, physical ferocity, excitement, attraction of bystanders, and brute imitative