Soviet Socialism and the Dismantling of Old Odessa, the Jewish City of Sin

Odessa has been mythologized as a frontier seaport boomtown on the Black Sea whose commercial prosperity, lax legislation, and a balmy southern climate attracted legions of adventurers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
Old Odessa is unique among her sister cities of sin, for old Odessa was a “judeo-kleptocracy” – a city overrun and governed by Jewish gangsters and swindlers.  Rebellious Jews pursued their dreams of opulence and immoderation in Odessa. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance.
But old Odessa’s unique Jewishness does not end with crime and debauchery, as Odessa is also depicted as a land of wit and irony, where thieves induced laughter through their crooked and dissolute behavior. 
Odessa’s unique Jewishness does not end with crime and debauchery, as is also depicted as a land of wit and irony, where thieves induced laughter through their crooked and dissolute behavior. When the Bolsheviks took power in Odessa in February 1920, they immediately announced the dawn of a new era for the city, promising an end to the crime, debauchery, and the frivolity of the city of sin.  With Marxism as their guiding ideological framework, Odessa was slated for transformation into a model Soviet city – proletarian, industrious, and cultured. 
            Old Odessa’s emblem, the ironic Jewish criminal, was thus a casualty of Soviet socialism, but his silencing in the 1930s was not rooted in a specific attack against Jewish culture.  The fundamental problem with the Odessa myth was the amalgamation of Jewishness, humor, and criminality, not with each of these elements in and of itself.  The regime’s attack on Jewish culture itself would only come later, during the final years of Stalin’s rule.