Volume 9, Number 2, 2022 Odesa’s Many Frontiers Guest-edited by Volodymyr Kravchenko and Jessica Zychowicz

EN:

Odesa was one of the largest and most important cities in the Russian Empire. Numerous studies have addressed the economic development and social structure of Odesa, but there are some gaps in the knowledge of the social stratification during the nineteenth century. Although most studies of the social and economic histories of Ukraine provide qualitative or highly aggregated quantitative data, micro-data at the level of individuals and households in Ukraine are rare. This paper provides new micro-data from the 1897 census in Odesa. It is the first attempt to code occupations of Odesa workers according to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO). Of the 2,435 individuals in the 457 sampled households analyzed, 1,443 individuals demonstrate 86 of the unique occupations coded with the international HISCO scheme. The analysis compares these HISCO occupations by the social estates, the gender, and the language of the surveyed individuals. The study confirms several old hypotheses but also unearths new findings regarding the number of urban females involved in service and sales occupations.

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Ivan Kozlenko’s novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine’s biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country’s media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city’s popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa’s history during Ukraine’s wars of independence in 1918–20 and the time it served as Ukraine’s capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic socio-cultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics.

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The popularity of Odesa-themed restaurants across the world presents an opportunity to explore a possible core of the Odesa city myth, sedimented into consumer space. The article analyzes 63 enterprises in seventeen countries, examining the cuisine, interiors, restaurant concepts, media reviews, and visitor reports on social media. The theoretical framework of this study revolves around the concept of memory entrepreneurship, the concept of travelling mnemonic plots, and instruments of marketing semiotics, especially the “cultural mélange” phenomenon. The surveyed restaurants reveal a specific picture of an Odesa “memoryscape,” formed as a dense palimpsest. The key themes are the motifs of an inverted world and of a lost Paradise. The plot of the Odesa myth in restaurants outside Odesa can be described as a temporal loop, starting at several points simultaneously, traversing the space of the world, then collapsing and returning to the departure time in a gesture of grief over the lost paradise.

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Diachronic and synchronic studies of linguistic landscapes of central streets and markets were conducted in five cities in Ukraine with different language use preferences in 2015 and 2017–19. The relationship between a monolingual state language policy and the reality of language use in public spaces was investigated. This study focuses on the dynamics of the linguistic landscape of Odesa, a Russian-speaking city with a weak historical connection to the state of Ukraine, and compares them with the linguistic landscapes of central Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, and Lviv. Linguistic landscape data are complemented with semi-structured interviews investigating de jure policies, de facto practices, and beliefs of individuals who make their language choices in public signage, often contesting the official language policy regulations. Linguistic data can deliver messages about power, values, and the salience of languages used in public places. This mixed-methods research is grounded in a critical ethnographic approach to the study of language policy, politics, and planning. The linguistic landscape in Odesa, a polyethnic city, is exceptionally dynamic in reflecting the de facto language policy in the city. The effects of globalization and language commodification were marked by compliance with the official policy on the central street, but proof of inhabitants’ identity with the Russian language as the lingua franca was evident as the data collection site moved away from the city centre. This synchronic and diachronic studies of languages in Odesa is compared with the languages spoken in four Ukrainian regions and marks a proportional increase in the presence of two main languages—Ukrainian and Russian—independent of the Ukrainization efforts of the state at the time of war. It also suggests that an increase in the use of English, as observed in Odesa, is a way to avoid using the state language.

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This essay explores how Soviet authorities appropriated medical knowledge derived from the treatment of a “passive” juvenile population to create a new assurance of municipal well-being in the 1920s. The attempt to control and remediate the spread of disease reflected a Bolshevik certainty in the state’s ability to confront the frontier of health by applying the dictates of modern science. Revolution and civil war brought challenge—the fractured city changed hands repeatedly until a final, tentative victory by the Red Army in 1920. Odesa’s children figuratively confronted a political, moral, and social liminality, standing between the diseased, corrupt yesteryear and a salubrious, principled future. Soviet central authorities sought to revive the newly liberated city by establishing a network of children’s institutions in which they would contain contagion, but also bring the full spectrum of applied expertise to bear on young bodies. In this traumatized city at the Soviet Union’s edge, state custodians would raise a new, loyal generation. Its health would signify revolution achieved. Illness would continue to plague the city’s residents, but the myth of a community united in health created an ecology of promise and activism.

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This essay raises the issue of historians’ responsibility to the communities that they study. While some purported version of history has been central to the Kremlin’s justifications for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the region’s historians have failed to make a stand against this misuse of history. Moreover, in many instances they endorsed and disseminated the Kremlin’s narratives about Ukraine’s past and present. Aiming to explain the anti-Ukrainian biases that have become well entrenched in both Western academia and Western public opinion, this essay examines the regional subfield of area studies, to which Ukrainian studies are usually relegated, as well as the expectations and agenda of the Western-educated public. I argue that the subfield is dominated by Russian studies and frequently uncritically adopts the positions, concepts, and explanations of Russia’s imperialist ideologists. At the same time, Western public opinion, while opening up to the historical injustices committed by Western empires, still sees the world through retrograde imperial lenses. The essay also discusses in detail what happens when researchers shaped by both these trends write Ukrainian history. Looking for ways forward, I suggest rethinking the issue of intellectual responsibility and “de-imperialization” of Ukraine’s Western historiography.

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Negotiations between Ukraine and Poland concerning the return of lost treasures have been ongoing since the beginning of the 1990s. In total, during 1997–2020 six sessions were held of the Intergovernmental Ukrainian-Polish Commission for the Protection and Return of Cultural Property Lost and Illegally Displaced during World War II. However, no cultural objects have been returned to Ukraine or Poland. This article analyzes current Ukrainian-Polish intergovernmental relations on the return and restitution of cultural property lost in consequence of World War II, describes the accomplishments, and examines the problematic issues concerning mutual co-operation.