The Odesa Fire 2014. Part 1: The black legend beyond Russian state propaganda
Aleksei Titkov, Sociologist, Visiting Fellow at The University of Manchester
The fire in Odesa (Odessa), Ukraine's third largest city, on 2 May 2014 generated one of the most famous rhetorical themes associated with the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation of the last decade. Genre-wise, it’s an exemplary atrocity story, mobilizing for hatred and retaliatory violence.
The fire at the Trade Unions House, which killed 42 people, was the result of five hours of clashes between pro-Ukrainian (pro-unity, pro-government) and pro-Russian (pro-federalists) activists that began with a minor skirmish and unfolded like a chain reaction. The fire happened when pro-Ukrainian activists were trying to storm the Trade Unions House, which an hour earlier had been occupied by pro-Russian activists. The core of the atrocity narrative is the accusation that pro-Ukrainian activists “burned alive”, allegedly on purpose, their opponents.
The most dramatic use of this theme is President Putin’s televised address on 21 February 2022, just before the beginning of full-scale war in Ukraine. The speech was meant to justify the military intervention, already planned but not yet announced. Among other reasons, Putin recalled the ‘terrible tragedy in Odesa,’ the memories of which make ‘one shudder’, and promised to ‘do everything to punish’ those responsible for the alleged atrocities.
To call the Odesa Fire the ‘crown jewel’ of Russian propaganda, as Ukrainian journalist Alya Shandra did, is hardly an exaggeration. The point is not how many times this topic has been raised by Russian politicians and state media (besides annual commemorations, not so many), but the response it evokes among a wide audience. In discussions about the nature of this response, one of the most popular assertions refers to the decisive role of the Russian propaganda machine and its manipulation of affect-evoking images and concepts.
Explanations of the public response that focus on the role of propaganda typically assume a passive audience and the reality-distorting nature of the propagated narrative. I intend to highlight a different tendency according to which the audience forms a representation of the incident based on (limitedly) rational debate and (biasedly selected) real video documents. My argument does not deny the power of state propaganda, but rather leads to a more nuanced view of its role. It also suggests that the concept of “disinformation” is insufficient for understanding why the Odesa Fire atrocity story has taken hold among Russian audiences. This narrative, with all its distortions, can be explained as the result of a collective practice of rational people who sought to find and tell the truth. We can find there not so much the spread of false ideas to which the audience for some reason turned out to be susceptible, but the formation of knowledge, comparable, to some extent, with the work of scientific teams.
I
In the Russian debates of 2022, after the start of a full-scale war, recollections of the Odesa Fire provided the basis for one of the key arguments for supporters of military intervention. They posed to anti-war opponents and Western audiences the rhetorical question: ‘Why were you silent when Ukrainian nationalists burned people alive in Odesa?’. This question, like the more general ‘Where have you been for the last eight years?’ was meant to expose the opponents' hypocrisy and anti-Russian bias.
The ‘eight years’ argument refers primarily to the 2014-2015 military conflict in the Donbas, in which, according to the UN Human Rights Office, more than 3 thousand civilians and four times as many combatants on both sides were killed. Public opinion in Russia was then much more sympathetic to the pro-Russian rebels, who were perceived as victims of aggression. According to polls of that period, they were supported by the majority of Russians. In this rhetoric, Donbas and Odesa complement each other. The first one set the scale of suffering brought about by ‘Ukrainian Nazism’ (Russian state media tended to inflate the number of civilian casualties). The latter offers a graphic example of the enemy's cruelty.
The spread of the 'why-were-you-silent' argument in social media was fuelled by state-controlled bots and paid bloggers, but the latter were only exploiting a ready-made topic. Indirect evidence of the argument’s popularity in spur-of-the-moment grassroots conversations is provided by opposition Russian media, which in the spring of 2022 often described disputes among relatives and colleagues or gave advice on what counterarguments to use in such disputes. Both the ‘8 years’ argument and references to the Odesa fire were among the most common topics there.
Figure 1. A typical grassroots dialogue between an opponent and a supporter of the war in Ukraine: ‘Rockets hit residential buildings, hospitals and nursery school! People are in bomb shelters! - Where have you been all these 8 years?’ Source: Roskomsvoboda.org
The rhetorical formula “Odesa Khatyn”, widespread in this context, emphasizes both the emotional charge and moral significance of the story of the Odesa Fire. This phrase refers to an episode of World War II that is well known in post-Soviet countries. In the Belarusian village of Khatyn in 1943, an SS punitive battalion burned almost all the villagers - one and a half hundred people who were locked in a wooden barn. In the late USSR, the Khatyn memorial, opened in 1969, became one of the key symbolic sites associated with World War II. 'Khatyn' has become a familiar name symbolizing the inhuman brutality of the Nazis against the civilian population, alongside Auschwitz and Coventry.
Figure 2. An amateur collage (no later than February 2015) combining two iconic images: the burning door of the Trade Unions House and Sergei Selikhanov's sculpture "Unconquered Man" in the Khatyn memorial complex (1969). Red carnations have been used since the Soviet period as a flower of mourning for those killed in the war.
The widespread use of the phrase “Odesa Khatyn” is often understood to be the result of a cynical propaganda campaign. The basis for this version is obvious: the phrase was intensively used in the rhetoric of Russian state media and politicians. However, this does not explain the earliest stage of the phrase's origins. Between 10 p.m. and midnight on 2 May, at least a dozen examples of the term ‘Odesa Khatyn’ were recorded on blogs and small websites. Some of them have hardly any connection to the Russian propaganda machine, such as the Ukrainian-language site Odesit.com focused primarily on cultural issues. In turn, major Russian media began using these keywords only on the morning of 3 May, several hours later. This pattern can be explained rather as a simultaneous invention that emerged in a suitable media environment.
II
In explaining why the Odesa Fire became so important for Russian audiences, there are two key conflicting explanations: one points to the truly horrific nature of the event, and the other to the formative role of state propaganda.
Proponents of the first version rely primarily on their eyewitness experience: they saw (in the media) shocking episodes ‘with their own eyes.’ The latter one highlights that collective ideas about the Odesa Fire were formed considerably under the influence of false horror stories. Studies of media perceptions of the Odesa Fire provide key examples of such unreliable episodes. These include the topic of the massacre inside the Trade Unions House, which features a chilling story about a brutally murdered pregnant woman; the same shocking versions of the use of poison gas inside the building and conspiracy theories accusing disguised provocateurs of staging the riots and then carrying out the mass murder. These versions were spread by Russian federal TV channels and mass-market newspapers.
Despite all the differences, both the ‘true atrocity’ version and the ‘deceitful propaganda’ version share a common blind spot. Both fail to acknowledge the effort the pro-Russian audience, with which the 'Odesa Khatyn' story resonated, made to form a picture of the event. The result of this grassroot practice is a documented, if biased, body of knowledge that proponents of the atrocity story accept as self-evident even in the face of outside criticism.
An illustration of the problem can be gleaned from a well-known text by Russian nationalist publicist Yegor Kholmogorov, which is often referred to in works on the representation of the Odesa Fire. In an op-ed published in the mass-market newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on 3 May 2014, with the paradigmatic title ‘The Odesa Khatyn’, he writes:
‘The tragedy of Khatyn was repeated in Odesa city centre. The Right Sector and ultra-right nationalists burnt people alive, asphyxiated them with smoke, and forced bloodstained victims who had jumped out of windows to crawl along, then beat them to death with clubs. One of the activists had his leg cut off with a spade, live on video. More than forty people were martyred by the fanatics of United Ukraine on Russian bones and Russian deaths. We saw all of this with our own eyes. Saw it live’. (Translation by Vera Zvereva)
This fragment has been shown several times before as a prime example of ‘horrifying fake details’ being added one after another. Nevertheless, the topics mentioned there refer to actual video clips that became available to social media users on the night and the morning after the incident. Kholmogorov, like other users, is trying to interpret these fragments and put together a coherent story from them.
Figure 3. Militia (police) officers provide first aid to a beaten pro-Russian activist with a broken leg. A fragment from the live stream of Odesa blogger Stas Dombrovsky, which circulated in social media in early May 2014 under various titles with the keywords ‘cut off a leg.’ The episode was filmed in the area of daytime street clashes 2.5 kilometres from the House of Trade Unions at approximately 6:25 p.m., one and a half hours before the fire.
Figure 4. A pro-Russian activist crawling out of the backyard of the Trade Unions House amid abusive shouts. In the next few seconds, the crawling activist is given first aid. Fragment of the live broadcast of the First City Channel (Odesa) copied to Youtube on the night of 2 May 2014. The episode was filmed at 8:40 p.m., by which time the fire had already been extinguished by firefighters.
For Kholmogorov, from the very beginning, there was no question of who was to blame for the Odesa tragedy. The idea that pro-Ukrainian activists are cruel fascists, and pro-Russian ones are victims of a just cause, was clearly driven by his political views. However, such a story could be told (and was told at first) in many ways. Political bias did not dictate the specific details of the story which had to be pieced together from scattered documentary evidence. Not knowing the context of each fragment, their time and space coordinates, Kholmogorov makes gross factual errors, but there are no clear grounds to accuse him of deliberate deception.
In parallel with Kholmogorov, many other social media users who were in no way connected with state propaganda carried out similar operations with primary files from the scene. We may suspect professional journalists of malicious manipulation, but the same suspicion regarding the wide audience of social media users no longer seems reasonable. This complex issue is of far wider importance for our understanding of how propaganda works in the digital age and is the focus of Part II of this blog.