The Odessa of Isaac Babel’s youth was a vibrant, notoriously rumbunctious place. A city of wealthy merchants and squalid poverty, of high culture and unbridled gangsterism. A melange of nationalities drawn by the opportunities offered in one of the Russian Empire’s most important ports. Odessa was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, along with Istanbul, Smyrna, Salonika and Alexandria. Babel was born there in 1894, in the rough and tumble district of Moldavanka, a largely Jewish neighbourhood notorious for its lawlessness and dissipation. The family soon moved to the nearby town of Mykolaiv, but returned to Odessa, to a more salubrious district, in 1906.
Babel wrote his Odessa Stories during the early 1920s. His portrayal of life in Moldavanka in the first two decades of the 20th century, with its close-knit Jewish community and its notorious gangsters, did much to build the legend of old Odessa that continues to define the city to this day. According to this legend, while they preyed on their fellow Odessans, these flamboyant hoodlums became popular heroes, a part of the city’s heritage. In her book, Tales of Old Odessa, Roshanna P. Sylvester portrays the “unsavoury terrain” of Moldavanka, with its “dark allies, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence”, but also the “businesslike criminality” of the “thieving aristocrats” and “gentlemen burglars”.
Comprising up to 30 per cent of the city’s population, the Jews of Odessa played a crucial role in the city’s life and its character. As Charles King describes in his history of the city, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, they had mainly come from western Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement on the western fringes of the Russian Empire. Many of them thrived in Odessa, becoming rich from the trade in grain from their old homelands in Galicia down to the port of Odessa and onwards from there. Odessa, with its freeport status, offered a degree of freedom denied to Jews elsewhere in the Empire, although Odessa too was scarred by murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. The world of the Jewish community in Odessa was quite different to that of the shtetls of the western border lands, with a higher degree of integration in the wider community. Just as Odessa’s Jews were prominent among the city’s wealthy bourgeoisie, they were also conspicuous in the seamier side of the city, in the slums and among the criminal gangs of Moldavanka. This was the side of Odessa that Babel portrayed in his stories.
Among Babel’s rich cast of characters, most famous of all was Benya Krik, the gangster “king” of Moldavanka. It was a world of filth and squalor, of thieves and prostitutes, violence and murder. But in the character of Benya Krik there was also a kind of gallantry. There was honour among these thieves. When Benya extorted money from Odessa businesses, he sent them his terms in polite, business-like letters. When a senseless murder takes place during one of Benya’s raids, the gangster provides a pension to the victim’s mother and a lavish funeral for her son. For while Benya Krik preys on his fellow Odessans, in his fashion he also provides for the people of Moldavanka.
Babel based the fictitious character of Benya Krik on a real-life Moldavanka crime boss, the notorious Mishka Yaponchik (real name Mikhail Vinnitsky), Mishka the Japanese, so-called because of his physical appearance. According to a profile of Yaponchik in the October 2020 edition of the Odessa Journal, while still in his early teens he took part in a Jewish self-defence unit during the 1905 pogrom. He held on to the weapon he had been given, and was soon robbing the shops and the homes of the wealthy, and extorting money from businesses. Through guile, force of character and sheer nerve, Mishka Yaponchik established himself as the leader of Odessa’s gangs of thieves. Merchants and shopkeepers paid him tribute, and the police were in his thrall. Despite the fear he inspired, Yaponchik presented himself as a dandy, with his well-cut suits, his bow tie, and lilies in his buttonhole. He had a seat at the Opera and his own table at the fashionable Fanconi Café. But like the fictional Benya Krik, he didn’t forget Moldavanka, putting on lavish feasts for the people from whom he had sprung.
Eventually Yaponchik’s luck ran out. With the coming of the Bolsheviks, the world which had made him, in which an astute gangster could reach an unspoken accommodation with the authorities, was gone. He tried to adapt to the shifting sands of the Russian Civil War, making approaches to General Denikin’s Whites when they controlled the city, and even forming a Red Army unit when the Boslsheviks took over. But his cunning and wiliness were not enough to preserve him. Betrayed by his fellow gangster, Grigory Kotovsky, who had also become a Red Army commander, Yaponchik was shot in the summer of 1919.
By the time Babel wrote the Odessa Stories, in the early 1920s, the Odessa he depicted, the Odessa of Misha Yaponchik and Benya Krik, was already a thing of the past. But the image of Odessa from those times lived on in peoples’ imaginations, both in Odessans’ sense of themselves and their city, and in the way that others perceived them. Odessa’s reputation as a free-wheeling port city, and that of its people as sharp-witted hucksters, living off their wits, not always on the right-side of the law, has endured. Odessans are especially proud of their distinctive humour, which, while the Jewish population of the city is much diminished, is said to have its roots in Jewish wit.
Moldavanka is no longer the slum portrayed by Babel, although many of its old buildings are crumbling and run down, and the district is in a much worse state than the vibrant city centre. At weekends, Moldavanka holds a sprawling flea market. Among souvenir stands selling Soviet era medals and other memorabilia, traders lay out pitiable little assortments of tattered clothes and dilapidated household ornaments, the wretched possessions of impoverished households hoping for a bit of change to keep their heads above water. Perhaps this desperate commerce is in some way a throwback to the shady entrepreneurialism of Babel’s Moldavanka.
Was the romance of old Odessa, with its gallant gangsters and gentleman crooks ever real? I have my doubts. Corruption and criminality in today’s Odessa take a different form, and are found above all in the corridors of power and among the well-connected business figures who are granted government contracts, and the construction tycoons who are allowed to flout planning rules. As in Babel’s day, many in the police are biddable, and prosecutors are all too often for sale. In the face of these modern-day besuited hoodlums, ordinary Odessans are powerless and largely resigned. They pay their bribes when they have to, and their expectations of the corrupted state are low. But that they are resigned does not mean they like it. Were Odessans of a century ago who accepted the gangsters who preyed upon them but who every now and then threw a big party any more content with the state of things?
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