It is the third largest city in Ukraine and has the largest commercial sea port in the country. Now he faces the threat of Russian forces.
Capturing this cosmopolitan city would be a major win for Vladimir Putin.
And it is that Odessa has a great symbolic value: occupies an important place in the history and culture of Russia.
Located in the southwest of the country, on the northwest coast of the Black Sea, this city of more than a million inhabitants is a multi-ethnic cultural center and an important tourist and transportation hub.
It is sometimes called “the pearl of the Black Sea”, perhaps because of its historic architecture which is more Mediterranean than Russian in style and also has a strong French and Italian influence.
Observers say that Odessa is a very different place from Kiev or other Ukrainian cities.
Certainly the city still has strong Russian roots.
It was founded in 1794 by decree of Catherine the Great and during the 19th century it was the fourth largest city in Imperial Russia.
And it has been the scene of violent battles.
The “beginning” of the revolution
In 1905, Odessa was the site of a workers’ uprising, supported by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin, which culminated in the deaths of hundreds of citizens.
The Potemkin, like many other ships of the Russian Navy, was full of feeling revolutionary and animosity towards the aristocratic officer class.
In June 1905 the crew staged a mutiny after disagreements over food. In reality, the mutineers planned to support the sailors of other ships and the general working class in a revolt that was beginning to take place in Russia to remove Tsar Nicholas II from the throne.
Enraged by the mutiny, the ship’s captain ordered the execution of thirty soldiers and this led to a violent confrontation that culminated in the mutineers taking control of the Potemkin and the shooting death of the captain.
The ship then headed for the port of Odessa, which was also in the throes of massive protests and workers’ strikes.
The mutineers planned to stock up in Odessa and then take their “revolution” to mainland Russia.
Soon the citizens of Odessa began to express their support and organize protests.
But the news reached Nicholas II and he ordered to put down the revolt. The soldiers entered the port and after immobilizing the crowd began to shoot indiscriminately.
In the end, Some 1,000 Odessa residents lay dead in the streets.
The event was later immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous 1925 film “Battleship Potemkin,” which includes a scene in which hundreds of Odessa citizens are murdered on the grand stone staircase that connects the old town with the Black Sea port area.
This is why the staircase is now known as “the Potemkin staircase”. But in reality, the real “Odessa massacre” of 1905 did not take place there but in the nearby streets.
“heroic” city
Another bloody battle took place in 1941, when Romanian and German troops stormed it. The defense of the city lasted 73 days and between 40,000 and 60,000 Soviets died.
It ended up receiving the title of “heroic” city of the USSR.
Part of the defense during the Second World War, in fact, was done underground thanks to the many underground galleries initially built to remove limestone.
It is estimated that there are more than 2,500 km of tunnels in the city and these were used by Soviet soldiers to defend Odessa.
After the Battle of Odessa, the city was occupied by the Axis powers. Some 25,000 inhabitants were killed and more than 35,000 deported, in what came to be known as the Odessa Massacre.
Until the 1940s, Odessa had a huge Jewish population. But many were deported to death camps during World War II.
Later the largest ethnic group were the Russians.
today the city it is also home to other nationalities and minority ethnic groups, including Albanians, Armenians, Azeris, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Romanians, and Turks, among others.
Currently, as revealed by a municipal survey in 2021, published by the International Republican Institute, a think tank in the US, 68% of the population of Odessa is of Ukrainian origin and 25% of Russian origin.
But despite that Ukrainian majority, most of the population speak Russian at home.
special value
For Vladimir Putin this multi-ethnic city has a special value.
Although militarily not as important as the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, Putin has spoken wistfully about reconstitution of “the New Russia” of the imperial era, a region along the Black Sea centered on Odessa.
In one of his pre-invasion speeches, Putin specifically mentioned what happened in Odessa in May 2014, when nearly 50 mostly pro-Russian protesters were killed in the city after clashes with Ukrainian nationalists.
In his angry February speech broadcast on television, Putin said that Russia knew the names of those responsible for the May 2014 tragedy and that it “would everything possible to punish them”.
The 2014 events erupted after coordinated pro-Russian groups in several cities seized government buildings.
In Odessa, Ukrainian nationalists responded by attacking a pro-Russian march, culminating in a fire at a union building that killed 48 people, most of them pro-Russian activists.
The events were quickly taken advantage of by the Kremlin to build their narrative of a “fascist Ukraine”.
The events also deeply divided the inhabitants of Odessa.
Boris Khersonsky, a 72-year-old poet, psychologist and philosopher, told The Guardian that he “lost more than half” of his friends when he decided to take a stand. unconditionally pro-Ukraine.
In the last two weeks, after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Odessa has been radically transformed.
And you no longer see crowds in its museums or climbing the Potemkin Stairs. There are also no visitors at its most famous tourist attraction, the Opera House.
The Odessa Museum of Fine Arts, which houses 10,000 works of art from the 16th century onwards, including those of one of its most illustrious citizens, abstract art pioneer Wassily Kandinsky, also closed its doors.
Its director, Oleksandra Kovalchuk, fled to Bulgaria for the sake of her one-year-old son, a decision that left her “terribly upset”.
“I feel like a traitor”, he told the BBC. “I let my staff down. Of course I feel guilty about it.”
“The Odessa Museum of Fine Arts has been like a son to me for many years, so it was basically a decision about which son you want to leave and I decided that I am obligated to take care of my little son.”
Kovalchuk says that, as has happened in almost all other museums in Ukraine, “workers stay overnight, stay for days to be close to the art, to be able to make some last-minute decisions” and keep the collections safe.
For now the videos from the city show a historic center sealed off with sandbags, barbed wire, and armed soldiers.
Many Odessa residents cannot believe that Vladimir Putin is launching an attack on this city linked to Russia with deep family and cultural ties.
But in recent days Russian warships have been spotted near the city’s beaches and now residents are preparing for the worst. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
