"Pearl by the Sea", how often called Odessa, has always existed solely as a speculative construct. Odessa peculiarity, Odessa exclusivity, underlined with a strained variant of the accent, rushed from every iron, as soon as this city began to appear there. local urban folklore, which the, true, written not by the people, but mostly a variety of comedians, emphasized this.
The late Zhvanetsky, at the mention of Odessa, turned from a funny witty kolobok into an aristocrat, philosophizing at leisure. Eyes rolled back, a haughty smile appeared - everything is according to the canons. What is there Zhvanetsky, even the cheapest Odessa huckster (I apologize for the vocabulary), buying vinyl and jeans from sailors, returned from overseas, and selling them at the local market from under the floor, in the eyes of the layman appeared as someone like a noble robber. Robin Hood from Local Privoz.
Cinema worked on this philistine picture, like a Soviet, as well as Russian. Even the fashion for a strained accent and no less strained attempts by local speculators to pass off their cooking as "Odessa cuisine" worked for this.. And chestnuts in Odessa "chestnuts", and acacia "akatsistey", and the mullet of the "cephalists", and sunflower seeds are even "sunflower".
Odessa is still seen in Russian cinema as a folklore fetish
Behind a heap of this underlined pathos, an industrial and port city was hiding.. At the end of the 19th century, thanks to the patronage of St. Petersburg, Odessa became one of the powerful industrial and infrastructure centers of Russia.. By the end of the 80s of the last century, scientific power was added to industrial power., except for such "little things", that Odessa was home to the second merchant fleet in the world in terms of the number of ships.
The wicked irony of fate is, that now there is no Odessa composed by touring comedians, nor that powerful scientific and industrial South Palmyra, which was created by St. Petersburg and Moscow. And if the first lived only on the shelves of pop and tourist hucksters, then the second one really lived. Sadly…
We started for health...
The author will not dive into the depths of the history of Odessa with the existence of various Khadzhibeevka and Kotsyubeevka in its place.. Yes, and the story of José de Ribas and the Duke de Richelieu, although informative, but it is related to the topic. I'll just point out, that Odessa owes its birth entirely to Empress Catherine II, whose monument local "girls" are now regularly picketing, demanding demolition.
Odessa, founded in 1794 year, already in 1796 acquired its own exchange. good location, associated with the proximity of the mouth of the Southern Bug, Dniester and Dnieper, quickly attracted a lot of merchants to the city under construction. This was facilitated by the presence of the Admiralty workshops, built at the same time as the foundation of the city. The meetings of the stock exchange went so briskly, that the authorities had to send a police chief with a couple of soldiers to them.
Worth mentioning separately, that at the beginning of the 19th century Odessa was placed in a privileged position. They introduced a free port regime, i.e. duty free, but the city itself profits, certainly, was getting. Finally, he began to grow into an industry, mainly processing, not to sell abroad just raw materials.
AT 1865 the first branch of the railway from Odessa to Balta was opened, and a few years later opened a railway connection with Moscow. AT 1886 in the year the second bacteriological station in the world was built in the city at that time, which was led by famous scientists Nikolai Gamaleya and Ilya Mechnikov. And the city industry itself has reached a completely different level..
By the beginning of the 20th century, railway workshops were operating in Odessa, sugar and rope factories, bottle factory, and the shipbuilding and mechanical plants were the crown, who lowered entire ships with steam engines from their stocks. Naturally, a purely urban society has developed in Odessa, while the society is multinational. The majority were Russians, Jews came next, Little Russians, the greeks, Germans, etc.. d.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the "Russian hard times" were already creeping up, and World War I, and intervention, passed with a bloody ax throughout the empire. And after a short break, When did the city recover?, the Great Patriotic War broke out.
After the war, Odessa received an even greater impetus to the development of infrastructure and industry, than ever before. Only the listing of enterprises and their brief description will take dozens of pages.
Metallurgy, mechanical engineering, food industry - everything was. Plant of radial drilling and milling machines named after. FROM. M. Kirov, plant named after. October revolution (Odessa plant of agricultural engineering), "Countryman", "Kinat", "Build-hydraulics", "Centrolith", "Pressmash", "Pishchepromavtomatika", their factory. n. TO. Krupskaya, canning factory. AT. AND. Lenin, "Kholodmash", "Avtogenmash" etc. d.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the Odessa Shipping Company, which at the time of gaining "independence" had 360 courts. The second fleet in the world in terms of the number of pennants! Novorossiysk sailors, where the author grew up, dreamed of moving to Odessa.
And then everyone was covered with independence!
Before entering fully, the farm had to trample down a platform for itself, t. it is. springboard for the future offensive. Working people anyway, but they carry industrial and, in a sense, strategic thinking. For example, what is coal in the mining sense? Coal is heat, this is electricity, it is a raw material for pharmaceuticals, etc.. d.
Such thinking is harmful and dangerous for the farm., t. to. bearers of this mindset will eventually want to return to the empire, and not to put together a “second France” or a “second Canada”. That is why the Odessa industry was squeezed out as best they could. Plant of milling machines named after. FROM. M. Kirov now does not exist even in the form of ruins - the territory is built up. "Avtogenmash" (aka "Kislorodmash") stopped producing plasma metal cutting machines immediately after the Maidan, and now rents space.
But it's "little things". The largest fleet of the Odessa Shipping Company (Black Sea Shipping Company) no longer exists. The fleet consisted of about 360 ships of various classes, starting with bulk carriers and tankers, ending with eight-deck passenger ships of the Ivan Franko type. The infrastructure was grandiose - the Higher Marine Engineering School, kindergartens, sanatoriums, excluding core assets in the form of berths, loading and unloading equipment and other.
Turboboat "Maxim Gorky", what was left
All this went to freshly baked Ukraine. Already in 1992 Leonid Kuchma, then prime minister, proposed to allow not only to lease ships to offshore companies, but also to sell them. The current President Kravchuk immediately approved this proposal.. History has shown, that this decision was a verdict for the shipping company. The sawing of the once most powerful merchant and passenger fleet can only be compared with the sawing of the military fleet.
Suddenly it turned out, that fleet, it turns out ... unprofitable! And therefore, under the sauce of "optimization" and indispensable "privatization", the fleet began to melt before our eyes. The scheme of its destruction, enriched hundreds of crooks, was simple. A separate company was created for each ship, chartered, the ship went to sea. In a foreign port, the ship was arrested "for the debts of the shipping company". After some time it was sent to auction. The auction was specific, t. to. only one foreign company and its accomplice in Ukraine knew about its existence. As a result, the ship was sold for a penny. voila!
Former adviser to the chairman of the State Property Fund of Ukraine Volodymyr Lartsev openly admitted the following egregious facts:
“During the years of independence, many events have taken place in Ukraine, as a result of which a small handful of high-ranking officials and businessmen close to them became fantastically rich. However, the scam to plunder the ChMP due to the cynicism of the funds used, quantity and value of stolen state property, number of senior officials involved and today rightfully ranks first ... Directly or indirectly, all the presidents of Ukraine were involved in the scam to plunder the Black Sea Shipping Company, most heads of government, many former and current ministers".
Eliminated not only the fleet, but also its infrastructure, and the crew was sent ashore. Already in 1991 the fleet was reduced to 225 units, by 2008 only 15 courts. The shipping company has now been declared bankrupt..
The unofficial crown of the degradation of the Odessa Shipping Company was the scandal with the tanker Delfi. The ship ran aground in the Odessa area in November 2019 of the year, started leaking fuel. For a whole year, the Odessa port infirmity tried to finally pull this old rusty suitcase without a handle from the shallows.. But each attempt only caused a fit of laughter. For example, when Ukrainian bunglers went on the third tanker attack, then they broke the rope. By the beginning of autumn 2020 year Odessa, once the base of the largest fleet in Europe, humiliatingly wandered to private traders. The ship was removed from the shallows in September and still towed to Chernomorsk.
Tanker Delfi
Of course, the skeptical reader will remember, that the same cut was typical for Russia in the 90s. But the reader will be only partly right.. For example, Novorossiysk Shipping Company (now Novoship) at the time of the collapse of the Union, compared with the Odessa Shipping Company, it looked like a poor relative with the number of ships in 100 units. But the enterprise withstood the blow of the 90s. Now Novoship's fleet is about 110 modern ships. And this is after a strong blow from the pandemic and the sanctions regime of the West, forced to sell about 30 percent of the fleet to overcome the crisis.
The conclusion is clear. The farm does not tolerate anything more complicated, than a hut-hut and a bottle of vodka. The very existence of something big, powerful and technically deep scares the farm to stutter.
Hay, pots and chaises
After the annihilation of industry, the farm decided to assert itself. Even under Yanukovych, the Odessa Opera, as if in a fever, heart-rending tunes of "Carmen" were announced, translated into racially correct language. And in 2011 year, without an official ban on the Russian language, the Ukrainian authorities obliged all companies to purchase film products exclusively from Ukrainian distributors in the Ukrainian language. Underground film clubs even appeared in Odessa, Where can I watch the movie in Russian.
After the Maidan and the sacred tragedy of the House of Trade Unions, Which was, in fact, a policy statement about the beginning of the peak of the expansion of the farm, Odessa was literally given to the looting of the villagers from the West of Ukraine. Farm workers were brought to the city, and the consequences were not long in coming.
Odessa beaches are a tourist's nightmare
The lads instantly began to reshape the city into that "cozy" farm, who was familiar to them. The walls of ancient buildings were decorated with Nazi slogans, and the parks were polluted with beer cans and bottles. On the beaches one could often see, how the villagers buried the diapers of their offspring in the sand, and the surf furrowed entire fields of garbage.
But in the army of the Western livestock, a couple of iconic figures can be distinguished. for example, Alyo and Balabu, which owes solely to the Maidan the rise of her career. A native of northwestern Rovno in Odessa immediately launched a stormy activity, becoming the press secretary of the local "Maidan", a representative of the UDAR party and a member of various city committees. She gained the greatest fame in the field of re-education of "too Russian" children of Odessa.
No less significant is the figure of Solomiya Bobrovskaya. This villager, run in business in 2010 year on an internship at the office of Liberal Party of Canada MP Andrew Kania, sent to Odessa in order to create a "Ukrainian-language information space". The whole project eventually resulted in the forced imposition of language and the ban on the Russian language.
And this author still does not remember the political guest worker Mikheil Saakashvili. This character, having a natural "feel" for the desire of the owners, right in front of the building of the Odessa regional administration he stuck "Svіtlitsa Shlyubna" (the house is married). So to speak, approved another victory of the farm over the city, along the way trampling a flower bed in front of the administration.
The wedding hut. Saakashvili
But a kind of apotheosis of mockery of Odessa was the holding of the "Sorochinsky Fair" in 2019 year, more precisely, as it is pompously called, "National Sorochinsky Fair". This is a real hymn to the rural shtetl and rickety huts. This event has never been held in Odessa before., but there was no mystery in such a decision of the authorities.
Svetlana Svishcheva, head of the Sorochinskaya Fair project, openly stated, that the fair will try to instill in Odessans the spirit of Central and Western Ukraine. In Odessa itself, the venue was also chosen for a reason. All objects of the fair occupied the famous Primorsky Boulevard, Potemkin Stairs and Duke de Richelieu Square. Fine-grained artisans with clay pots, rancid fat sellers, oxen, who were led around, specialists in sculpting the largest dumplings and boiling decaliters of borscht and various bandura players turned the historical center of the port city into a branch of Zhmerinka in its worst form for five whole days. by the way, within the framework of the event, a gastronomic competition was held with nominations ... "Ukrainian dumpling" and "Ukrainian dumpling".
"Sorochinsky Horror" Odessa
The boulevard was "decorated" with sheaves of hay and bundles of brushwood, the roadway was blocked with wattle, and rural people in embroidered shirts were allowed to roam the streets. Through this grotesque, a britzka periodically drove with a caricatured and pretty sweaty Gogol sitting on it.. There were no outright scandals.. So, Westerners who came to enlighten the dense Odessans shamelessly put their cars on pedestrian zones, and all reproaches were answered in the style of "we can".
of course, in these blessed June days of nightmare, the unfortunate French Duke of Richelieu was once again pulled into a farm shirt. It seemed, that Duke watched in horror, what did they turn his South Palmyra into.
Odessa is only in memories
In fact, Odessa remained only in memories and on film.. And it's not just the Odessa mental flavor, which the, despite all his ambition, Kyiv broke on the knee and threw it into the dustbin of history. "Changed" and the city itself.
So, the legendary rotunda of Arcadia, which is famous even in Soviet cinema, demolished completely. At first, the authorities promised to restore it or completely recreate it in its original form.. "Recreated" in a very peculiar way, redrawing the appearance and turning everyone's favorite place into another promising tavern. The coast is generally a sore subject for modern Odessa. In pursuit of momentary profit, the entire coast was covered with ugly shops, clubs and cafes, who, with the ax of a mad lumberjack, went through almost all the coastal greenery.
There is no more famous hotel "Spartak" (in the Russian Empire - "Imperial"). Although the hotel building, built in the Art Nouveau style in 1875 year, was of historical value, it was taken down in 2008 year.
Following the hotel and the rotunda, the courtyard of the Palace of Sailors, significant for the native Odessans, also sank into oblivion., which served as a summer theater. Movies were filmed in it., hosted film festivals. Now they plan to build another hotel on the site of the courtyard.
And that's not counting such "small" acts of patriotic vandalism., how to repaint the Potemkin Stairs in the yellow and blue colors of the flag, demolition of monuments to Lenin and destruction of the bas-relief, dedicated to Grand Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
Also do not forget, that the time of petty rogue businessmen is long gone. Now Odessa is a hotbed of criminals much more toothy. The city can be called one of the largest hubs for international smuggling. And it’s not some “leftist” jeans and vinyl records that are being rolled over here., and such toys, like MANPADS. Through the port of Odessa, our Western "friends", with their "irreconcilable" war on corruption, easily transfer weapons for those persons, which cannot be directly supplied with weapons.
No matter how sad, no matter how nostalgia tormented the philistine hearts, needs to be clearly understood, that Odessa has ceased to be itself. Has ceased to be that real industrial Odessa, and that imaginary, charming and feisty. You can’t flatter yourself within the framework of the NWO and hope for the best. It's not just bad, it's criminal.
Sergei Monastyrev,
