Ethnic violence prevented by screams in the dark

THE Odessa Steps are an emblem of ruthlessness. Eisenstein made them so with his film The Battleship Potemkin. He made them into the set of what is really an unspeakable ballet about organised force used against disorganised civilians. The polished boots of the Cossacks rise and fall in unison as they descend the steps; the fleeing mob (it is the revolution of 1905) dies and tramples and bleeds down the flight of stairs, and a famous perambulator careers to disaster.

Orwell, I suppose, had the steps (Eisenstein version) somewhere in mind when he described the future as a boot coming down into a human face - forever. But the real steps are an anticlimax when you come to the head of them: just a broad, shabby, cracked flight of stone stairs. Odessa is built on a high terrace curving round the harbour below and the steps connect the two levels, running down from a queer, dwarfish bronze statue of the Duc de Richelieu who built and governed the city 200 years ago on the orders of Catherine the Great.

From above, through an architect's trick, you see only the landings. But from below you see only the risers, an enormous step-pyramid soaring up to the skyline where Richelieu - a tiny idol - pulls the clouds round his shoulders. This is where Russian imperial power, after its long journey across the Steppe, at last marched down to the Black Sea.

The first trading language in the town was Italian. Then came French planners and Greek businessmen and after the Greeks came the Jews, not from the sea but escaping from inland parts of the empire to a far freer life on this new frontier in the south. They built up the vivid, extravagant Odessa of Isaac Babel's stories. In those years, Odessa and the north shore of the Black Sea were a Wild South, a place of booms and busts and immigrants and mad hopes of instant wealth.

Odessa became another of those special places in Europe - like Bosnia - where very different communities lived together and accepted the social discipline of being neighbours. In the 1897 census, just over half the Odessans gave Russian as their native language. One-third gave Yiddish. Fewer than 6 per cent spoke Ukrainian although Odessa is Ukraine's second city after Kiev.

But even here, where the serfdom and autocracy of Tsarist Russia seemed so distant, the discipline broke down. There were three main pogroms in Odessa before the Bolshevik revolution. The first was in 1871, and it began as a mere brawl between Jews and Greeks. The police stood by and did nothing, just as they did 10 years later in 1881 when a much more vicious pogrom exploded. But the 1881 affair was no accident. Anti-Jewish riots had been organised in many cities by those 'dark forces' of the extreme right which are still around in Boris Yeltsin's Russia. The worst was to come in 1905, at the end of that year of revolution which, in Odessa, had brought the massacre of civilian demonstrators on the steps.

I walked through the old Moldavanka quarter, where Babel set his stories of Jewish piety, gangsterism and celebration. The streets still have houses with lattice balconies and backyards swarming with children, but the culture (songs, speech, dress, inscriptions) is no longer on the street. Most Odessa Jews sailed for Israel or America in the 1980s, when emigration became possible. But after the pogrom of October 1905, 50,000 left within months.

On one of these streets, the boy Isaac Babel saw his father kneeling before a mounted Cossack patrol, pleading as his shop blazed. The captain did not even look down but rode on. The 1905 pogrom was no more spontaneous than the one in 1881: the city governor, an ultra-conservative commanding 'dark forces' of his own, took the police off the streets and let the mob charge into Moldavanka.

This time, though, a Jewish self- defence force was waiting for them, led by the butchers with their huge knives. The battle lasted for three days and nights. The known dead numbered 302, and more than 1,400 Jewish shops and offices were wrecked.

In Bosnia now, in Odessa then, turning 'races' against each other is not as easy as it may seem. Mixed communities put a high value on keeping the peace. Pogrom, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide is usually pushed on local people by outsiders with a grand design: politicians; intellectuals; agents provocateurs from the secret police.

Coming back down Sholem Aleichem Street and watching the shabby crowds pouring in and out of the market, it seemed that - first of all - the pogrom director requires a We which can perceive a Them. In Odessa, as in New York a century ago, They were the last immigrants off the boat and We were the previous shipload. The Odessa Greeks in 1871 felt like natives already, and saw the incoming Galician and Lithuanian Jews as barbarians.

Secondly, the regisseur needs a government which makes plain that it will not exert itself to protect a particular group of its citizens - or to restrain their tormentors. The Bosnian Serbs know that Radovan Karadzic and his ilk, without saying so openly, have licensed them to rape, loot and kill the Bosnian Muslims. In Tsarist Russia, Count N P Ignatieff introduced the 1882 'May Laws' banning Jews from owning land and explained that the Jews had 'succeeded in exploiting the main body of the poor, hence arousing them to a protest which has found distressing expression in acts of violence'.

The production requires a chorus, a crowd of dishevelled underdogs who compensate for their sense of abandonment with a desperate patriotism. But it also needs a silence - the passivity of those decent, respectable people who find terror politics disgusting but prefer not to confront them directly. Babel's Christian neighbours, a Russian officer and his wife who sheltered the survivors of his family in 1905, were like that. So are more Serbs than the world imagines.

Finally, this kind of crime requires darkness. Those who sat together in the same classroom are now to rape and murder one another: there must not be light here. Not just because the world would see and protest. The darkness is also personal: those who do these things must, afterwards, find it impossible to believe that they once did them. They must become normal again, greeting Jewish or Muslim acquaintances. The vision of a grocer dying among his ruptured flour sacks or of a woman in a cellar facing the bayonet - these surely belong to some movie whose title is forgotten.

But if the world is forced to see and hear, these things can be prevented. The writer Konstantin Paustovsky once heard a pogrom fail. It was in Kiev, in the night. He stood at the window to listen to the screaming which was rising from one darkened street after another. Not the cries of families actually under attack but a sort of tribal alarm- siren of fear and outrage and warning which gradually spread all across the city, eventually so universal and horrible that every soul in Kiev was awake.

The Jew-hunters, deafened, sur rounded and revealed by the noise, fled home. In our time, the scream is coming from all the valleys of Bosnia. But we are still half-asleep. We would like to turn over and wake into a silent, clean dawn, with a memory of some bad dream. Meanwhile, the killers rule the street.