Target of bombing last Saturday (23), the city of Odessa, in southern Ukraine, has been the scene of a series of massacres throughout history – but it is best known for a fictional conflict.
According to the Ukrainian government, Russian missiles hit military installations and two residential buildings in the city last weekend, killing, according to Ukrainians, at least eight people; on Monday (25) Moscow denied having attacked any residential area.
On the shores of the Black Sea, Odessa is of strategic importance for Russia in the war. The region, if conquered, could isolate Ukraine from the sea and help establish a corridor between Crimea and Transnistria, a pro-Moscow breakaway area in Moldova that is home to Russian troops.
It was from Odessa, where Ukraine’s main port is located, that the missiles that hit and sank the main Russian warship, the Moskva, in the Ukrainian government’s version, departed – according to Moscow, the cruiser sank after a fire on board. .
Ukraine has cities with more than a millennium of occupation, such as the capital itself, Kiev, founded between the 6th and 7th centuries. This is not the case for Odessa, whose occupation began to take shape as a Tatar fortress in the 14th century, was under Turkish control from the 15th century and was officially founded within the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century.
The city became known worldwide for being the scene of one of the most famous sequences in the history of cinema. In “Battleship Potemkin”, a 1925 film by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Cossack soldiers advance on the population on the steps of the city, considered the gateway for those coming from the Black Sea, in a scene that has entered the cinematic canon. The staircase is still the biggest symbol of the city to this day.
However, real-life conflicts abound, most of them against Jews, who settled in the city over the centuries fleeing persecution in other parts of the country. The most serious one took place in 1941, when more than 20,000 Ukrainians were murdered, most of them Jews, during the Second World War – to this day the exact number of victims is not known.
Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union, was facing a Nazi offensive, which had the capture of Odessa as one of its most important moments. In October of that year, after two months of battle, the Red Army surrendered and German-backed Romanian troops occupied the port city.
A survey carried out in 1939 showed that, of the 600,000 inhabitants of Odessa, 180,000 were Jews, according to the United States Holocaust Museum. With the Nazi takeover, more than half of this population fled the city, and between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews remained in Odessa.
On 22 October, after the conquest, a bomb exploded a building in the center used as the headquarters of the occupying troops and killed 67 people, including Romanian and German officers. The Bucharest forces then decided to take revenge: they forcibly gathered around 19,000 Jews in a square and shot at the group. Then they poured gasoline on those who survived and burned them alive.
Troops took another group of about 20,000 people to makeshift camps in warehouses, and the remaining Jewish population was forced to live in ghettos on the outskirts of the city. In January and February 1942, Romanians deported 19,295 Jews to concentration camps elsewhere, according to the Holocaust Museum. Nazi persecution continued until the Soviet Union reconquered the city in April 1944. By the end of World War II, it is estimated that the Jewish population of Odessa had been reduced to 5,000 people.
This group had already been the target of attacks in Odessa throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in the so-called “pogroms”, as the mass persecutions against the ethnic group became known. The most famous of them, in 1905, left about 300 dead, victims of persecution by the Russian Empire.
More recently, the city was the scene of clashes in 2014, in the post-revolution context that removed President Viktor Yanukovych, aligned with Moscow, from power.
On May 2 of that year, after weeks of tension, groups in favor of and against greater integration with Europe got involved in violent clashes in the city, and 48 people were killed. Almost all of the victims, 46, were pro-Russian.
That afternoon, nationalist groups cornered the Moscow-aligned protesters at the House of Trade Unions, a building of a union union in the city, and set fire to the building. A UN report on the tragedy found that 32 people died from carbon monoxide poisoning and 10 by jumping out of windows to escape the fire. The episode became known as the “hell of Odessa”.
The clashes that day left another 247 people injured, 27 shot and 31 stabbed. In all, 99 were hospitalized, including 22 police officers.
The atmosphere still remained tense in the city in the following days. In reaction, more than 2,000 pro-Russian protesters gathered and attacked police headquarters, armed with batons and demanding the release of comrades detained in the clashes. The officers entrenched in the building began releasing the arrested suspects one by one, hailed by the crowd as heroes.
