There is a German club and an Anglo-American club in the same neighbourhood, to which the English-speaking portion of the population belongs, and a British Sailors’ Institute on the lines of a Y. M. C. A. for the benefit of the crews of the many British steamers which come regularly to Odessa.
In another part of the city the imperial library occupies an imposing building of classic design with several hundred thousand books. The university, which ranks third among educational institutions in Russia, occupies several buildings and has between four thousand and five thousand students. The schools of art, engineering, chemistry, and medicine are celebrated, and the students of medicine have access to several enormous hospitals and charitable institutions for the infirm and defective. I am told that medical science has attained much higher proficiency in the southern provinces than in northern Russia.
There are several military schools, which are needed more than anything else, and are well patronized, for the army is the principal thing here, and when a young man is deciding upon a career he always tries that first. The army grows bigger, the taxes grow higher, the people grow poorer, and labour becomes scarcer in Russia every year. Military rank seems to be essential to happiness and social prestige. Nearly every man you meet on the street or in the hotels and cafés wears a uniform and everybody has a military rank. The school teacher, the apothecary, the lawyer, and doctor, and architect, the clerks in the custom-house, the post-office and city hall—even the convicts in the prisons—wear uniforms, and the registrars of the schools of the university are dressed like major-generals.
There is a boom town in southern Russia with a short history like that of some of our Western cities—yesterday a village, to-day a flourishing centre of commerce and trade, to-morrow the metropolis of the Black Sea. The boomers call it “The Winnipeg of Europe,” but it was named Nicolaieff, in honour of Nicholas, the iron czar, and it is situated at the mouth of the river Bug, at the head of an estuary of the Black Sea, sixty miles north of Odessa and six hours’ sail from that port by the ordinary steamers.
Until 1884 Nicolaieff was a sleepy and insignificant village included in the area which Catherine II wrested from the Great Turk in the war of 1778. During the Crimean War it gained some historical prestige by being a temporary naval station after Sevastopol was corked up. During the latest war between Russia and Turkey in 1877–78 it was used as a rendezvous camp, but there was no business there until 1884, when a railway from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the northern part of the empire was extended down to touch the Black Sea, and Nicolaieff became an outlet for the grain of southern Russia and an entrepôt of much imported merchandise.
The convenience of the situation, the superiority of its harbour over that of Odessa, and the favour of the imperial family and the clique of sycophants and speculators who hang around the grand dukes, gave it a preference among shippers, and, since 1898, it has been growing faster than Minneapolis or Seattle. It has jumped from 18,000 to 200,000 population in a decade. During the same time it has acquired the largest shipping business in grain, manganese ore, and coal in the Russian Empire and is booming along in an extraordinary manner. The population is increasing at the rate of ten thousand a year. The volume of business is gaining with even greater rapidity, the value of real estate has advanced 1,000 per cent. during the last eighteen years and the wealth of the community is increasing at a corresponding rate.
The successful prosperity of Nicolaieff, correctly or incorrectly, is attributed to the partiality of the grand dukes and the imperial court, through whose influence much has doubtless been done to encourage the new town, at the expense of Odessa. A deep harbour has been dredged, with a channel of thirty feet; the government has built elevators, and the department of communications has manipulated railway rates and traffic arrangements so as to divert the grain trade in that direction.
It is the unanimous opinion that Nicolaieff is favoured above all other cities by the imperial family and the members of the court, and that the benefits and advantages it enjoys have been entirely due to their influence for two reasons:
First, it is asserted that the grand dukes and their friends are heavily interested in real estate speculations at Nicolaieff and have made enormous sums of money by the advance in the prices of property, which is entirely probable.
Second, it is asserted that the grand dukes and their friends are not only willing but anxious to destroy Odessa because of their hatred of the Jews. Nearly all of the business at Nicolaieff is in the hands of Russians; at Odessa the Jews control everything, and will enjoy the benefit of whatever is done for the improvement and prosperity of this city.