Ukraine War Day #793: French Odessa Is Macron’s Phantom Limb – Part II

Dear Readers:

Continuing with my review of this historical piece by reporter Matvei Malgin. Where we left off, we saw that the Russian city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, became a French colony. In which glorious state it existed for 100 glorious days, before the Rebellion broke out.

The Rebellion

In deciding to occupy and colonize the Black Sea shoreline, what the French government and officers did not take into account, was the mood of the rank- and-file soldiers. The ferment of socialist ideals was as strong among them as in many other European armies.

For 100 days Odessa was a French province.

Ferment can be a spontaneous thing. But how to tap into that ferment and guide it in the right direction! Ah, there’s the rub! For a Resistance to become effective, it needs leaders and organization. To expel an army, you need another army. La Resistance can only work if it is an auxiliary of a much larger guiding force. In this case, the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army. The Bolshevik leadership put together an underground group called “The Foreign Collegium”. Which consisted of dedicated Communist cadre and was organized as an auxiliary of the Odessa branch of the Bolshevik Party of Ukraine. Its mission, as ordered by the Bolshevik Central Committee, was to spread Communist and anti-war propaganda among the Allied troops, including the French, who had occupied Odessa. The group produced a newspaper called Kommunist in both Russian and French languages.

The leader of the underground was a shadowy man named I.F. Smirnov, who also headed the Bolshevik Party in Odessa. Other agents were dispatched to occupied Odessa (winter of 1918-1919) from the Russian Soviet Republic. They included an ethnically diverse group of Communist activists including Russians, Jews, Gruzians, Serbs, Romanians, Poles; and some French people as well, including a woman named Jeanne Labourbe (1877-1919, her death date gives away the ultimate fate of this group.)

A Soviet woman places flowers on the grave of Jeanne Labourbe.

The auxiliary underground cell organized itself into “national” sections: Greek, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, French. (The cell was actually so small, that in some cases a “section” might consist of just one person!) The French Communists involved in this were key to this ideological quest to turn ordinary French soldiers against their leaders. They operated non-violently, mostly producing just agitational literature and propaganda. One of the members of the group, the Gruzian Martyn Lopadze, opened a restaurant in Odessa, in which agitation of Allied soldiers proceeded openly, without any attempt at secrecy.

On March 1, 1919 French counter-intelligence succeeded i shutting down the entire operation. By the following night all the members of the group had been arrested and shot without even a trial. Their bodies were tossed into an open area near the city jail, close by the local cemetery.

The deaths of these Communist martyrs were not in vain: Within a month Odessa was taken by the Red Army. The anti-war propaganda campaign of the Bolshevik activists was very effective as, more and more frequently, French rank-and-file soldiers refused to open fire against their “Russian brothers”. Even after their victory over the Collegium, the French command, seeing the hostility of the locals towards them, came to the conclusion that they would not be able to hold the city. And so they evacuated from Odessa and moved their HQ to Sebastopol. Leaving Odessa to the Red Army and the Bolsheviks.

The magazine Prometheus honors the martyrs of the Foreign Collegium, who were shot by the French.

But the French were not welcome in Sebastopol either. Here they faced increasing opposition from their own soldiers and sailors. Mutterings of discontent and rebellion moved through the ranks, especially of the sailors. The French sailors were exhausted by the war and the years away from home and families. A mutiny broke out aboard the ships. Among the demands of the mutineers: “We don’t want to fight against our Russian brothers, they are working men, just as we are.”

As a token of solidarity with the locals, French sailors disembarked at the Grafskaya dock of Sebastopol, and began to march along Ekaterinskaya Street. Local workers flowed in and joined the procession. Before you knew it, the parade consisted of up to 5,000 people. The French command saw this as a mutiny and decided to crush it. For this purpose they brought in a group of marines and also a group of Greek sailors who were fighting alongside the French. The latter opened fire against the French sailors and ordered them to return to their boats.

This shooting spree in the center of Sebastopol was the last straw for the French command: They lost their nerve, convinced that their own sailors were no longer going to accept orders. Not long afterwards, it was officially announced that the French fleet and indeed the entire Entente was leaving Sebastopol. Which they did, on May 1. Their sad story ended back in France, where a tribunal convicted 130 of the mutinous sailors to various terms of imprisonment.

While assessing these amazing events of April 1919, British historian Eric Hobsbawm came to the conclusion that it was precisely this mutiny of the French sailors in Sebastopol, which put an end to Allied intervention in the South of Russia. And all because a handful of sailors refused orders to shoot Russians. “They are just workers, like us. They are not our enemies.” Ordinary French sailors understood what was going on, they were smarter than their leaders, and they did the right thing.

In our times, the French leadership shows itself to be just as dim-witted as their forebears. They have no clue what is happening on historically Russian land, including that same land that the French army tried to occupy, a century ago.

[THE END]