Paper short abstract:

Odessa's distinctiveness in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras is attributed to its cosmopolitan qualities. The paper discusses continuity and change in the significance of cosmopolitanisms in producing Odessan uniqueness to interrogate differences among them and current scholarship on the subject.

Paper long abstract:

The distinctiveness of Odessa - Ukraine's Black Sea port - vis a vis other cities in Ukraine and Russia is attributed to qualities identifiable as "cosmopolitan." Today residents and non-residents alike insist that Odessa is "international" "multi-ethnic" "Jewish" "tolerant" but "not Ukrainian." Yet, the 19th century "cosmopolitan" Odessa documented by historians was radically transformed by the cataclysms of 20th century history. The city lost half its population as a result of revolution and civil war. The establishment of the Soviet Union drastically curtailed Odessa's economic importance and links with the world. World War II annihilated the Jewish population that remained in occupied Odessa while subsequent Soviet policies deported Germans and Tatars for collaboration with the Nazis. Meanwhile Stalin's post-war campaign against cosmopolitanism targeted Jews and explicitly negated contact with, and orientation to, the outside world as a result of which Odessa's cosmopolitan past was, at least officially, denigrated and repressed.

This paper examines how Odessa's cosmopolitan qualities - both in terms of specific practices and images of the city's pre-Revolutionary past - have contributed to the generation of the city as an "other space" in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. By considering Odessans' cosmopolitanisms as manifestations of the afterlives of the Russian and Soviet empires, the paper highlights continuities and discontinuities in practices and memories through which Odessa has been constructed as a unique place vis a vis the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2001/2002 in the Odessa Literature Museum and a local history walking group I illustrate the influence of particular cosmopolitan practices and imaginaries in subverting a political order and conceiving an alternative future even while the conditions for imperial cosmopolitanism have been destroyed. Using these examples, this paper examines how contemporary scholarship on cosmopolitanism stressing hybridity, diversity, and openness may obscure an analysis of the operation of cosmopolitanism in other times and the legacies of these cosmopolitanisms in subsequent periods.