00:00:04 Kelly
From the Imperiia project at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, I'm Kelly O'Neill. This is the MapMaker.
00:00:17 Paul
Welcome, dear listeners. My name is Paul Vădan, project coordinator for the Imperial project here at the Davis Center. And today we will do things a little bit differently as our regular host Dr. Kelly O'Neill, will be in the guest seat. I’ve asked her to talk to us a bit about the so-called watermelon rebellion, a fascinating, strange and revealing moment in Russian imperial history. Kelly, welcome and thank you for agreeing to talk to me about this rebellion. Is it a rebellion? Is [it] a rebellion around watermelon?
00:00:55 Kelly
Hi, Paul. Thank you. Yeah, this is a story of rebellion. It's in a way, a classic rebellion story. And it's an episode in the global timeless struggle between tradition and change, action and reaction, truth and fear. And what I like about it is that it pits the powerful against the powerless and it's a story about empire. You don't usually get to package all of that together with watermelons, but in this case, yeah, that is exactly what's happening. This is a story in which you get the circulation of a heady combination of rumors, revolutionary ideas, merchant ships and germs moving from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And all of them link a small group of men who were working in coastal shipyards and some women who were laboring in small town markets to this trans-national phenomenon of bourgeois revolution. It's the end of the 18th century, right and epidemic disease. And it all began one hot August night in 1796 in the port town of Kherson.
00:02:02 Paul
Kherson, of course. Right. The city remains famous for its watermelons, perhaps even more so now during the war in Ukraine. It was reported that Zelenskyy visited Kherson to mark its liberation from the Russian occupiers in November 2022, joking that he went there because he wanted a watermelon. So what exactly happened back in 1796 that watermelons caused a riot?
00:02:28 Kelly
Yeah, I had forgotten about that story with Zelenskyy. I'm so glad you remembered it. So basically, in August, on August 15th, at about 8:00 in the morning, the acting chief of police of Kherson, a man named Onufrii Volkov, and I just want to warn listeners, there will be many, many strange and wonderful names in this episode. And don't worry if they don't make sense to you. Just kind of embrace the exotic quality of them. But Onufrii Volkov, he’ll come up, he'll crop up a few times in our story. He knocked on the door of a Lieutenant Colonel named Yakovlev to pass along a very ominous piece of news.
00:03:12 Kelly
Volkov had been patrolling with his sergeant from the local naval battalion and the sergeant’s name was Johann Shulting. OK, are you with me so far? So, while out on patrol, Volkov and Shulting overheard a group of sailors discussing a major disturbance. And the Russian word for disturbance is pretty wonderful. So let me just share it with you: возмущение (vozmushchenie). That just sounds like a disturbance (Kelly laughs, Paul: yeah). So, there is a major disturbance that was supposedly about to break out near the bazaar and bazaar was kind of like an informal temporary market that would take place. And the word on the street was that at noon, that very day, just a few hours from then, a shout of “Uraaa!” would ring out across the marketplace and it would be a call to mobilize. And the really ominous bit of this was that this was going to be followed by three days of looting, (Paul: hmm) according to this piece of information that was circulating. And so, according to Volkov, the sailors were planning to rampage through the city and loot. And they were under the impression, for reasons that were really unclear at the time, that their actions, their, their rampaging and looting would be forgiven.
00:04:29 Paul
OK, if I may, “mobilize,” that's a serious word that usually summons images of a coup or a national threat is that what was being prepared here? (Kelly laughs)
00:04:44 Kelly
I think that's a great question and I think we'll let the story unfold and you can be the judge of that is that (Paul laughs) is that fair?
00:04:51 Paul
Sure. Absolutely. (Kelly laughs) Very curious already.
00:04:55 Kelly
So, as the chief of police or acting chief of police, Volkov wasted no time. He decided to take the ringleaders into custody, and he told Yakovlev he was doing this and Yakovlev, in turn, decided to write to a high-ranking member of the Russian Navy, Rear Admiral Gavril Koz’mich Golenkin. And he was the commander of the Port of Kherson. Kherson was a town, but it was also a naval port. And so, Yakovlev writes to Golenkin requesting additional soldiers to secure Kherson for up to three days because he's so concerned about the impending “Ura!” that will ring out… and the rampaging and the looting. (Kelly chuckles)
So Yakovlev had a personal interest in maintaining order because he had personally been entrusted with a rather large sum of money by a very well positioned Prince named Prince Platon Zubov. Now, it's very impressive when I say that he was a field marshal, and he was an admiral of the Black Sea fleet. But you should also know that he was one of Empress Catherine the Great’s lovers. And because of that had a great deal of power. So Zubov had given Yakovlev the authority to command whatever local resources he needed to conduct Zubov’s affairs in this area and to maintain security. And so, Yakovlev feeling this pressure from Prince Zubov, had preemptively stationed about 30 members of a naval battalion to guard the market area. And he felt that there was really no way a mere 30 soldiers would be able to protect the interests of of the Treasury, and he really means protect the interests of Prince Zubov, right? (Paul: right) who basically has all this money and he is both an individual person but an extension of the state because he's Catherine's (Paul: right) designated
00:06:48 Paul
Yeah. Oh, designated lover, (Kelly laughs) I guess you could say, but yeah.
00:06:54 Kelly
Lover with all kinds of official, you know, appointments, civilian and military. (Paul: ok, ok)
00:06:58 Kelly
Yeah. So Yakovlev is sure that the town is teetering on the brink of chaos. So the next day, Volkov writes to Lieutenant General Matvei Femers. Now again, don't worry too much about who all of these people are, but I just want you to start noticing the fact that in this town, in Kherson over a course of 24 to 48 hours, a million people are writing notes back and forth; they're passing notes and passing information like kids in a 7th grade classroom.
00:07:30 Paul
And this, all because of a certain message that something might be happening. (Kelly: yes, yes, something) Ok, I’m hooked! (Kelly laughs)
00:07:41 Kelly
Something might happen and that thing might be that people might shout “Hooray”, basically in a marketplace which is very scary. (Paul: ok, Kelly laughs) So Volkov communicates with a Lieutenant General, who was the commander of the Engineering Brigade in Kherson. So he's on the armed military side. And he communicates with him in secret. Though the reasons for that turn out to be something other than expected, (Paul: hmm) we'll get to that in a minute. So Volkov reports… with his report to Femers the story of the impending disturbance began to kind of unravel in a number of perplexing ways because in his letter Volkov explained that at 10 o’clock in the morning on August 15th - he's very precise about this (Paul: hmm) - it's 10:00 in the morning, he received a messenger who had been sent by Shulting, that guy we mentioned a few minutes ago. And according to the messenger, Shulting had overheard a conversation among five carpenters who were assigned to the naval shipyard. And according to this third hand report, because now we've got someone is telling Shulting and Shulting is telling Volkov and Volkov is telling Femers, right? That the carpenters were discussing news that there was going to be a celebration of the birth of a new grand duke, Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich. (Paul: hmm) So, this is the son of Grand Duke Paul, and Grand Duke Paul is the son of Empress Catherine.
00:09:09 Paul
So, one version of the story has sailors. But then another version of the story has carpenters. One version is 12:00 PM, 1PM, 10:00 AM, umm, something's about to happen either in the military district or the market. OK…
00:09:29 Kelly
Exactly. So you're catching on to the fact that there is a lot of inconsistency (Paul: right) in the story and again, we just need to embrace it for a moment. So, Sergeant Shulting, according to Volkov, who's reporting to Femers, he pressed the carpenters for details, and he learned that the plan originated not with them; they hadn't come up with it on their own. The plan had been hatched by two unknown unnamed sailors from the nearby town of Nikolaev and the modern Ukrainian name for the place is Mykolaiv.
00:10:05 Paul
I'm starting to sense the trend of people acting rashly based on unverified reports from unknown people plotting unclear plans for unclear reasons. (Kelly laughs) Why were high-ranking officers so eager to follow these loose threads?
00:10:23 Kelly
Right. I think that's a very rational question to pose at this time, and let's come back to that. I think we should kind of hold that in the back of our mind, this kind of disjuncture between rational thinking and irrational thinking; it's kind of a main theme of this story. (Paul: all right, Kelly laughs)
00:10:41 Kelly
So, the news of the arrival of these two unnamed unknown sailors from Nikolaev and their dangerous message of celebratory looting - remember, they're going to be celebrating the birth of a baby by looting - so this news was apparently spreading like wildfire among the common folk of Kherson. And this little detail that was included in the report was sure to send chills down the spine of anyone who was determined to maintain law and order in Kherson. So Femers has this news and the next individual to weigh in, because everyone in southern Ukraine at the time has something to say about what is happening (Paul laughs) or not happening in Kherson on August 15th, 1796, so the next individual to weigh in was another Lieutenant General Khorvat. And he wrote to the vice admiral of the Black Sea Fleet. Now the Black Sea Fleet admiral's name was Nikolai Semyonovich Mordvinov. And we'll talk about him a bit more later. So Mordvinov is one of those names you can hold on to. They have a little correspondence in secret (Paul: hmm), and one of them is in Simferopol, in Crimea. So it helps us remember that Kherson and Nikolaev and Crimea, they're all part of that northern coast of the Black Sea, and they're all kind of a connected space.
00:12:05 Paul
And Simferopol today is in the news over and over again, over contested Black Sea territories and the Russian fleet’s presence and attacks and counter attacks and so forth. So, it continues to be a highly key strategic location.
00:12:22 Kelly
Absolutely. The relationship between those cities has remained incredibly strong through the centuries. (Paul: mm) Absolutely right, yeah. So, according to Khorvat’s report, on August 16th - so the next day (Paul: mhm) - six men from another nearby town (Paul laughs), not from Kherson, not from Nikolaev, but from another little village actually, called Oleshki, were arrested for spreading word among sailors that Kherson was going to be looted. And as a result, rumors and, kind of, upheaval was rife in the region and Khorvat wanted to know what is the source of the rumors and why are people willing to believe them? Which is a reasonable question, right? I'm sure, you know, you're relating to Khorvat. (both laugh)
00:13:08 Paul
Yet again, another town. Was Oleshki, also significant strategically, or it was just kind of…
00:13:15 Kelly
Not so much. It was a little bit inland and located on the shore of the Dnepr River, but it wasn't in a very navigable location, so it wasn't fortified. (Paul: right, right) It wasn't as it was kind of a backwater at the time.
00:13:27 Paul
But it's a great place to arrest someone who all of a sudden… yeah…
00:13:32 Kelly
Totally. Yeah. So, Mordvinov who's that Black Sea admiral, naval Admiral, got another report. So he's sitting at his desk, just like fielding reports from all of these people who are freaking out, losing their minds. So he gets a report from another rear admiral, Pustoshkin, and he's the commander of Nikolaev. He gets a report on August 21st and according to the commander of the Port of Nikolaev, Pustoshkin, on August 10th a crowd had gathered at the market in Nikolaev. So in the days preceding all of the things that were supposed to happen in Kherson and on that Sunday morning, August 10th, um, there was a cry of “Ura!” in the marketplace, which of course is the thing you don't want to hear if you're an official of the empire, and the crowd had seized six carts of a prized local delicacy 6 carts of juicy sweet.
00:14:33 Paul
Watermelons.
00:14:34 Kelly
Of course! (Kelly laughs) Right. So luckily, the police, you know, from the perspective of Pustoshkin, the police were able to basically arrest six of the perpetrators and they came from a series of naval vessels. They were skippers and transport officers and ship carpenters and garrison soldiers. So they were arrested and they were questioned. And Pustoshkin went on to explain that similar events had taken place in a couple of other towns in the southern part of the empire, and that a couple of other local governors were warning their chiefs of police that waves of disturbances that had been coordinated, or maybe even instigated by foreigners (Paul: mhm) and here you know, this has been a pretty domestic story up until this point (Paul: mhm) and still until we start hearing that there are rumors of foreigners. And here's the really scary part. The foreigners most likely are French, right. And if they're not French, they might be Jewish, either of which is, you know, very ominous from the perspective of an official of the Russian Empire, here, at this time.
00:15:48 Paul
OK, so I'm starting to get the sense that it might not be as irrational as it might initially seem, because if you're hearing reports from different places, different cities, you're trying to kind of, you know, cut it at the root of the problem to nip it in the bud as the American expression goes. So now that the plot is starting to thicken I'm just curious, first of all, what this term means chuzhestrantsy. I'm sure you can pronounce it better for our listeners. So, what does that term actually entail? And secondly, what was so threatening about the French and while we're at it, could you talk a bit more about perceptions of Jews in Kherson at this time? And I'm sure that many listeners are already familiar with the plight of many Jews in Eastern Europe. But was there anything particularly inflammatory in this case, or rather, what made Jews such easy targets in Kherson specifically?
00:16:48 Kelly
Good gracious. Do you have any more questions? You want to tag on there? (Both laugh)
00:17:14 Paul
It just, all of a sudden when we hear foreigners and French and (Kelly: mhm), it just all of a sudden you're getting the sense that now the problem is exponentially larger.
00:17:02 Kelly
Absolutely right. So the word that's used in this particular source for foreigner is not the normal Russian word for foreigner. Here we see the word chuzhestrantsy. So chuzhe means, um, other and stran means country. So it literally means people from another country. It's not specific, it's very general, people from outside the boundaries, people who are not subjects of the tsar. And there's kind of a key distinction in the 18th century, distinctions are not necessarily made among ethnic groups or even linguistic groups, but are you someone who has given your oath of allegiance to the tsar? Or are you not? That's kind of the defining feature. So if you're someone from another country, you're from away and you have not, you're not part of this community of people who has given some assurance of their loyalty to the Russian empire. So whether you're French or you're Prussian or Austrian, or any number of other things, you're from outside. But there's a particular threat that is packaged up with Frenchness at the end of the 18th century, right? (Paul: mhm), which is, has to do with the French Revolution. So there is this sense of contagion of a particular kind, a particularly liberal kind moving eastward (Paul: right). So there's that.
And then you have this question about the position of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the shortest way to answer that question is to say that a few decades prior, Catherine’s Russia had begun moving westward, annexing territories from the Habsburgs, and partitions of Poland had happened essentially. So, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been carved up on three occasions and the Russian empire under Catherine the Great had taken in large, large chunks of what we now think of as Lithuania and Belarus, and parts of Ukraine, and that territory already had a Jewish population. The Russian Empire hadn't had a big Jewish population prior to the partitions of Poland. Suddenly they had Jewish subjects. And so, Catherine the Great set up something called the Pale of Settlement. And this was the designated provinces of the empire where Jews were allowed to live (Paul: mhm). And so the story of what that we're tracing right now unfolds within the Pale of Settlement, within the part, the only part of the empire which is its kind of western territories where Jews were allowed to live. So there's this kind of internal, not frontier, but there's this internal zone where the population has a different kind of confessional character than the rest of the empire.
00:19:45 Paul
That is fascinating and it really kind of puts this episode in perspective. So were the events in Nikolaev, um, more than an episode eruption of economic violence? Were they tied to a wave of peasant unrests sweeping the countryside, in a most inauspicious way, at least from the point of view of imperial authorities?
00:20:07 Kelly
Mhm, well, so Pustoshkin, that guy who's fielding all these reports thought not. He really argued that these were just capers of local workers. This was the mood of the time and he was not terribly worried.
00:20:51 Kelly
According to Pustoshkin, the events of August 10th were nothing more than just a singular one off manifestation of the local obsession with watermelons. (both laugh) But, nevertheless, he did his due diligence and he saw fit to deploy pickets at the market on Sundays and on feast days as a deterrent to any further disturbances. However, other people might want to describe their nefarious and potentially dangerous motivations. That was kind of not Pustoshkin’s position, but he said “OK, we'll do what we can to prevent anything more from developing.” So Pustoshkin seems to have been the only level-headed guy dealing with this emerging crisis. And even as he was issuing this diagnosis, a courier was making his way from Kherson to Saint Petersburg, the imperial capital, way up on the Baltic coast. And this courier was bearing news of the dread impending rebellion in the south that was somehow tied to watermelon (both laugh). And Empress Catherine II was, shall we say, displeased with the news. She was very personally invested in the safety, security and flourishing of the northern coast of the Black Sea that she had basically annexed and conquered from the Ottoman Empire. So she immediately ordered Prince Zubov, whom I mentioned, to address the insolent behavior of her subjects which threatened the peace of the town and insulted the person of the Empress.
00:22:01 Paul
That's quite the crime. I would assume that it had everything to do with the French Revolution and the specter from the imperial family’s point of view of the execution of Louis XVI in 1792, just four years earlier. Also, were these two royal houses related in some way as, in fact, many European royal families were at the time?
00:22:28 Kelly
Yeah, I don't know of any relation between the Bonapartes and… So, Napoleon and Catherine the Great and… Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the French royal house (Paul: Bour-, bour-). Bourbons. Thank you (Kelly laughs). Thank you. And I don't know of a link there either. There isn't with the Romanovs, but there could have been through Catherine, who herself was a Prussian princess who had all kinds of noble connections. It's possible, but it's not something I can say with authority it was the case. But you're definitely on the right track with the importance of the French Revolution, and Catherine II had kind of styled herself as a very enlightened ruler, someone who took liberal reform pretty seriously in the first couple of decades of her reign. After the French Revolution, however, and the execution of Louis she soured on those ideas, they kind of lost their attraction. She had been very liberal with her printing presses. She imposed, you know, censorship. She started sending people to Siberia as political prisoners (Paul: mhm). Things took a turn right in the early 1790s. So that is definitely part of the historical context of the story.
00:23:46 Paul
So now that the Empress gets involved, (Kelly: mhm) I would assume things get quite serious.
00:23:55 Kelly
Of course they do. Oh yes, things now are serious. So all of a sudden this has gone from, you know, as you described it.
00:24:31 Kelly
A little local, like a small thing, right? A localized disturbance. Right? And as Pustoshkin saw it, you know, this is just some people super obsessed with watermelon who just want a free watermelon. And people are shouting “Hooray!” in the streets. Now, this is a potential rebellion, taking root in a geo-strategically sensitive area of the empire on the Black Sea, where Catherine is building ships, and not just merchant ships. Naval vessels, right? This is one of her prized port towns. This was almost too much for her to bear. So she issued a decree on August 28 charging Prince Zubov to order an investigation. She didn't herself order the investigation. She told Zubov to order the investigation right. Delegate, delegate, delegate, which he did. And the duty of prosecuting the investigation fell on the acting commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Nikolai Mordvinov, who we did mention before (Paul: right).
So Mordvinov had been in Simferopol, in Crimea, he travels to Kherson immediately and gets the investigation underway. He gets underway on September 14th and the investigation goes for three days and three nights. And at the end, Mordvinov and Khorvat, who had gone with him put together a report that they send to Prince Zubov documenting the circumstances of what they called the audacious and outrageous disturbances and riots that had taken aim not only at public order, but against her Imperial Highness herself. So in other words, Mordvinov and Khorvat kind of took as their starting position the premise of Catherine, who was taking this as a personal assault, that this was, they kind of assumed that this was more than rabble rousing. And more than the deep and abiding and insatiable desire for watermelon: this was a matter of state security.
00:26:09 Paul
I could see how it's almost a lose-lose situation for people involved because it's either a very serious crime and something serious is going on under everyone's noses, so that's a problem. Or, it's not, and yet you're the local guy under whose tutelage and oversight. All of this is starting to happen. So you can't even control a few rebel rousers, some drunken sailors stealing watermelon. Like, it just doesn't look good for people involved.
00:26:40 Kelly
You're absolutely right, it does not look good. And just the fact that there are so many conversations about it, there are so many reports and investigations. There's a documentary, kind of, mountain, you know, that is just kind of amassing and someone has to do something about it purely by virtue of the fact that people are talking about it. So Mordvinov, so basically what then happens over the course of those three days and three nights is that Mordvinov investigates, he interrogates as many people as he can find who may or may not have any kind of connection to the, what is called in Russian, arbuznii bunt the Watermelon Rebellion (Paul chuckles), the watermelon kind of bunt. So, he pulls in all kinds of guys, he questions them multiple times and all of everyone who was investigated received the priestly admonition to confess; this was a thing that was often done in Russian investigation. Repentance would win them mercy.
00:27:40 Paul
Mercy in front of the Empress, mercy in front of the police chief, or simply just mercy in front of God?
00:27:50 Kelly
Hmm. Well, who really matters, Paul?
00:27:52 Paul
God. (Kelly laughs)
00:27:54 Kelly
Wrong. (Both laugh) So this story that emerged was this: this is the story, right? Again, another version of the story. That was, on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother, men were at the market. Two of the people investigated heard several women talking in a rather animated way about the fact that there would soon be an “Uraaa!” and a crushing of melons and watermelons. And one of the gentlemen who was investigated approached his comrades just as the cry was going up, that “Uraa!” was starting, and all three, because they were congregated together, were immediately arrested by some passing soldiers. A couple others were taken into custody later and apparently they were charged with the crime of singing in a tavern (Paul: hmph). All five of the men who were arrested were, as the document say, a bit worse for the drink. Well, that's my Irish American spin on the (both laugh), on the Russian.
00:29:02 Paul
Sloshed would also be a word (both laugh).
00:29:04 Kelly
They were sloshed. There you go. So, Volkov, who we talked about at the very beginning of the story, kind of the architect of this whole story, he testifies as well. And in fact, he testifies several times and he explains that he had heard on August 17th there at 1:00 PM, there would be a cry of “Ura!”, right?, and that he had learned about this while he was riding in a carriage, passing a fortress. And he had overheard workers talking about it. Again, Volkov loves to throw in these teeny, tiny little specific details that I think he thinks make his testimony totally rock solid.
00:29:45 Paul
And it's actually maybe it's worth reminding, um, the listeners that in fact all of this starts in August and all of a sudden now we're deep into September. So this has been going on for quite a while. To what extent his details changed, developed, modified, forgotten, remembered. Yeah, this is. This is all shaping up into a very interesting conundrum. (Kelly laughs)
00:30:08 Kelly
I know this could definitely be the next series on Netflix if you wanted it to be. So there are more testimonies. We hear that the cry of “Ura!” or Hooray was going to be in honor of Grand Duke Paul taking the throne. Now, Paul was Catherine's son and there were ideas that he was about to take over for his ailing, she was about to die, his ailing mother. Remember, there had been other people that were saying that the cry of Ura was meant to celebrate the birth of Paul's own son. So no one even agrees on who people are going to be celebrating at the time.
00:30:50 Paul
So, you've mentioned this before, but maybe could you explain to listeners why “Ura!” is so striking to a Russian, especially an imperial ear? What are the connotations for such a cry, especially in such a setting?
00:31:06 Kelly
That's such a great question. So “Ura!” is what is going to be cried as soldiers are taking the field, right, going into battle. It's a vocal gesture of solidarity and tends to be something that is solidarity among the people. It might be soldiers and it might be peasants, but it's solidarity among the people. So in theory, those people ought to be following the orders of commanding officers or imperial officials. But there's always that sense that that people might be following their own motivations. (Paul: right) And so a cry of “Ura!” might be something that is totally an act of patriotism, but it has that potential to be something very destabilizing as well. So I think that that ambiguity in its use (Paul: mhm) is kind of what people are cashing in on in this story.
00:32:00 Paul
When masses, a collectivity of people start cheering, there's other tensions involved and you like it when it's addressed to you, but preferably if everybody just stayed quiet, that would probably just solve imperial bureaucrats’ problems more and more.
00:32:17 Kelly
Yeah, silence is blissful, and especially if you don't know why people are yelling “Ura!”. If you know why they're yelling at, that's great (Paul: right), but if you don't know why they're yelling it then you might feel like “Oh no!” (both laugh)
00:32:21 Paul
If it's not the Empress, and if it's not God, then it's an actual problem.
00:32:35 Kelly
Yes, exactly (Kelly laughs), exactly. So yeah, these testimonies keep pouring in, and the guy who was supposed to be Volkov’s key source kind of undermines Volkov’s testimony and backtracks and said that Volkov might have said that there were people, he overheard people talking about an “Ura!” but he hadn't heard the same thing. And that he hadn't been in a carriage. He'd been sitting at a bench and you know, every single element of this story just kind of falls apart under these multiple rounds of testimony, and even though the, you know Mordvinov and Khorvat keep reminding everyone of the dire consequences of lying, everyone is just kind of basically collapsing in a puddle of, you know, contradictory statements, basically. One guy does waltz in toward the end and testify that it had in fact been a group of women who had been planning to get together to cry out to celebrate in honor of the birth of the grand Duke’s child, and then gather up their watermelons and go to the market, go to the bazaar and this was seen, the officer who kind of witnessed this, had stopped the women, apparently, and brought the matter to the attention of the local police captain who found it so suspicious that the women were planning to do this that he ordered some local Cossacks over to listen to the Who Said What in this particular case, and everyone was kind of, if not arrested, then apprehended and kind of subjected to some interrogation.
00:34:15 Paul
So now we have Cossacks in the picture. Um, who were these guys, what? (Kelly laughs)
00:34:24 Kelly
Right, right. Well, I think in every story that comes out of what you think of as southern Ukraine right at this time, there's always going to be Cossacks, you know, involved. Cossacks are in a kind of ambiguous status within the Russian Empire. They're basically armed militia. Well, the Russian Empire sees them as kind of an armed militia, men for hire that may or may not be loyal to the empire. The Cossacks, some of them have their own very specific political plans, (Paul: right) that they tend to kind of, some of them anyway, play off the interests of the Russians against the Ottomans. They have their own ideas about who should be controlling the territory north of the Black Sea. But inevitably, in every story of the coastal area of the Black Sea, there are some Cossacks floating around and they are armed. And they may or may not respond to Russian officials. But in this case, apparently they, they did (Paul: OK..). So they come running over. So now we've got Cossacks. We've got the women back in the story and then someone else comes in and says, oh, you know, we don't know anything about reports, reports of looting. There were three days of feasts and there were no unrests. Everything seemed fine. Different story, right? (Paul chuckles) And then we get more written testimony. So we hear that sailors had in fact come from Nikolaev, and they had announced that a decree had been read, an official decree from Catherine II, had been read in Nikolaev giving permission for three days of looting in the bazaars. So now you've got everyone kind of cashing in on Catherine's interest in the region. So, there are stories of decrees, stories of looting, stories of feasting, stories of absolutely nothing happening. And no one seems to agree on anything.
Finally, there's one last little detail that comes into this story with one man's testimony. He mentions that it was Grand Duke Paul himself, who had issued the decree announcing the looting and celebration that would happen in his honor. And in fact the same… - which made it this a very personal attack against Catherine II - and this particular testimony also included the detail that there were French spies who were involved in the same thing. So the story is basically that French spies had come and in order to destabilize the Russian Empire they're propping up Grand Duke Paul (Paul: mhm) and telling him he's going to be the one in charge and he's issuing decrees and everyone's looting. And this makes Paul really happy because he hates his mom (Paul chuckles) and he hates everything she's ever done, which means that he hates Kherson and Nikolaev and he hates the Black Sea fleet and anything that can happen to destroy that legacy will make Paul happy. And it will make the French happy because they want the Russian Empire to be weakened. Right? (Paul: right) So all of this stuff is getting quite dark and diabolical.
00:37:30 Paul
So now we're at a point where all of this seems to be, if we follow one of the many threads that this is now existential crisis, not just for the queen, but for the empire. And if we are to follow this one particular version of events, they're about to succeed like, this is just about, he's about to win. (Kelly: totally) Prince Paul is about to become emperor and to change the Russian Empire forever and the French are there tweaking their French mustache of a Musketeer, sort of like “ahahah, you know, we've done it,” yes. Aha.
00:38:04 Kelly
Look what we have done. Absolutely. It's gone totally next level, right? It's like apocalyptic at this point in the story. Meanwhile, we get to the end of testimony and we get one last little report about what had actually happened. There was a, like, a private, a low ranking, you know, army guy, corporal basically in a private, you have the same story and they report seeing a crowd that was standing around in her zone near their market stalls in tears. And they were in tears because some guys had stolen their watermelons and smashed them and they didn't know who had done it. And this little bit of information kind of comes back to the root of the story, right? (Paul: mhm) Really gets back to that kind of local nitty gritty story about what really happened, what really can be proved and what can't be. The criminals who were accused of this watermelon catastrophe - I don't know how else to put it - they were harshly punished. And the punishment that began to be imposed there was a little bit of discomfort among high-ranking officials that perhaps they hadn't gotten the decision right. And so there was one last investigation of the crime, and it did in the end turn out that maybe the charges, um, were maybe unfounded and there was an acknowledgment, finally, from the officials, from their imperial officials, that a single armed man, a musketeer, had seized a watermelon.
00:39:41 Paul
So there were French involved in the are, a Musketeer? What? (Kelly: No, no, those, those are Russian, like… Laughs)
00:39:48 Kelly
I mean, right, sorry, this is just again my, you know, idiosyncratic translation, basically the Russian word is you know, a man who's carrying a rifle (Paul: oh, a musket!), a musket, not not, not the mustachioed… (Paul: D'Artagnan figure, OK) right, no. Just a plain old guy with a gun who had seized a watermelon. There's a little bit more arguing about whether it was one watermelon or three, but basically Volkov, who had been the architect of the whole story, in the end was forced to admit that he had basically made the whole thing up. (Paul: oh!) Yeah!
00:40:24 Paul
Oh, OK.
00:40:25 Kelly
It came to everything had unraveled and fallen apart, and it turned out that maybe one watermelon had been smashed on the ground and Volkov had made the whole thing up. So Volkov was confronted with this like, “you know, turn... you know, you fabricated quite a story” and Volkov has his back up against the wall and insists that he did so for good reason.
00:40:48 Paul
OK, now I'm very curious. (Kelly laughs) So we were just on the brink of the empire collapsing. (Kelly: yes!) And just like the geese saved Rome now, watermelons were saving Kherson and Saint Petersburg (Kelly: absolutely!). But now, in fact, you know, like a crushed watermelon. (Kelly: yes) The story just kind of fell to pieces.
00:41:07 Kelly
It really has fallen to pieces and Volkkov is bending over and picking up like one little watermelon seed (Paul laughs) and holding on to it and saying “but here!”, you know. He basically he kind of stands his ground on this idea that word had spread from Nikolaev to Kherson, and there had been warnings at the market, and he comes back to his idea that it was probably a Jew who had passed word along to Volkov. And by insisting on these little details that it was someone who didn't belong right? (Paul: right) in Russian imperial society, and that there had been the possibility of something bad happened, that was enough to justify (Paul: mmm) his sending up this crazy alarm that led to all of this brouhaha. And so, we hear that all of this, you know, Pustoshkin who is the level-headed guy who had been thinking in the beginning, that there was nothing really treasonous happening here, he's vindicated and officials conclude that the rabble rousers, however many there were, had in mind nothing more than the satisfaction of their endless desire for watermelons. (both laugh) So, kind of considering the balance of information, written testimony, oral testimony offered up by a huge range of individuals from naval officers, sailors, civilians. There were noblemen, common, subject, foreign, Orthodox Christians, Jewish subjects, no testimony given by females (Paul: hmm), right? But in the end, Mordvinov and Khorvat conclude there has been no rebellion, no bunt, no treasonous behavior, no audacious disturbance, no rioting against Catherine, no rioting against her claim to rule.
00:42:58 Paul
I'm sort of fascinated by historical sources because you're giving me so many interesting details. Minute details, dates, hours, private individuals, three sailors or craftsmen. If I may ask a question, how come we know so much about this incredible episode in Russian imperial history? Do we have documents, records of these testimonies?
00:43:25 Kelly
Yeah. So we do. (Paul: mm) All of the testimonies were recorded. There were scribes present. And when the navy or the army were involved, testimonies tended to be a little bit better documented than on the civilian side, especially in this part of the empire where there were not many civilian officials. The kind of civilian imperial presence was pretty thin. But there were a fair number of naval officers around, so that's why Mordvinov the rear admiral, the admiral of the Black Sea fleet had been commissioned to conduct the investigation rather than it being a provincial governor who conducted the investigation. So he had the capacity, he had the jurisdiction. And Mordvinov, who had a very long career, a very illustrious career, maintained an archive.
00:44:16 Paul
So what is the state of preservation of these documents and where are they kept now? Have you consulted the original? (Kelly: right, laughs)
00:44:24 Kelly
So I have not consulted the original documents. The archive of Mordvinov was pulled together and published in a multi-, multi-volume set in the Soviet period. It was published and one of the places that holds a full run of the archive of Count Mordvinov happens to be Harvard University Library. (Paul: nice) So I stumbled, I literally, well, I didn't stumble. (Paul laughs) I didn't fall down in the stacks, but I was in the stacks of Widener Library, probably about twelve to fifteen years ago at some point looking for other things, and was simply curious when I found these red bound volumes that all said, you know, “Archive of Graf Mordvinov (Архив графов Мордвиновых)” and I pulled them down and I started going through them and that's where I found the consolidated documents having to do with the watermelon rebellion. So, this kind of brings us to the end of the story, right? You have this situation where Russian officials had focused considerable attention and time and investment on the port town of Kherson, supposedly in pursuit of truth, the preservation of order, and what they uncovered was nothing more than a local caper, and a local caper of the most insignificant kind. Mordvinov in his conclusion that he, you know, is, his conclusion is published in that multi-volume set, in Mordvinov’s words this had been some kind of disturbance among the women. By which he meant the women who sold melons at the bazaar.
00:46:11 Paul
That's another trend that's always on time, I think. And while we're talking about people in the market, especially women in the market, I think it's really fascinating to think about what the setting of these kinds of places are. It's not like going in the supermarket where everything is beautifully, nicely organized. And, um, from my own experience, I was born and raised in Romania and traveled a lot in Eastern Europe. When it comes to watermelons, even today, they're basically sold, there's a pyramid of watermelons made on the floor of a market of a place where designated, sometimes even someone’s garage. And the people who come, in Romania, at least they come from the Danube, they bring it up with either carriages or trucks and they sit there and sell them for about 2-3 weeks and they sleep there. They, they sit there, and in fact, because of that, it could be one, two, three people, but they're also very anxious about people stealing their watermelons because you just kind of pass by the pyramid and you kind of just, you know, take one and well you try to run, you know, but if it's a really good watermelon, it's probably big and juicy. But that just goes to show that these guys are tired, they've traveled, they've worked the whole day. So, they're also their nerves are a little shot about like, who's stealing what, what's happening, especially as night falls. So you're looking at a very sort of dynamic, fluid, crowded environment, I assume. So the fact that you have these “Uraas!” and drunk sailors walking by, I mean, of course there's gonna be tension and trouble and drunkenness and everybody's getting extra suspicious, especially if you're trying to manage and oversee that whole area as chief of police.
00:48:03 Kelly
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And we get a really interesting glimpse of experiencing empire on the ground level (Paul: right) in a story like that. I mean, those little logistical considerations that that you're describing, the fact that even if you want to steal a watermelon, it's actually not that easy. It's not like stealing an apple, right? (Paul: right) You can easily steal an apple from a cart and run away. But if you're gonna grab a watermelon, you're not going to be running very fast, are you? And watermelons or kind of cumbersome to carry (Paul laughs) and rather large and heavy. And they represent a different kind of labor. And you know, that's both, I think, a metaphor for how empires work, but it's also just a very non-metaphorical description of how empires function, especially in territories where they have only recently asserted control, which is essentially what is happening on the northern coast of the Black Sea. This is a area that had only recently been settled by Russian sailors and shipbuilders and immigrants. It is not a well-developed, highly urbanized area. The infrastructure of the city is growing. Kherson occupies kind of an intersection and a bunch of different trade routes that are going overland and overseas. So you have all kinds of different merchants who are coming through trading salt from Crimean salt lakes and Ottoman products, both from the Ottoman Empire and traded through the Ottoman Empire, Greek wine is coming in through there, you have grain being traded out. You have furs and honey, and.... The list of goods that are being, that are circulated through this region is kind of an exciting and very… our idea of the thickness of consumption practices becomes very obvious when you look at the list of goods being traded in Kherson. But it's not highly urbanized. There aren't many buildings that are made of stone (Paul: right). That will come later. But Kherson now is kind of at the edge of empire, very literally (Paul: right) at the edge of land and sea. It's at the edge of Russian authority and Ottoman authority. And there's just, there's a lot at stake, but there's not a lot of capacity of the state to do what it wants to do. So, it's really interesting when you think about the cost of a rebellion like this. That really isn't a rebellion, right? (Paul: right, laughs) I mean, like, Catherine’s fine, the empire’s fine. But someone has to pay a price and a couple of people do pay a price for what happened.
00:50:40 Paul
So, when we think about it as someone who's interested in history and someone who wants to listen to this podcast and learn more about imperial history or Eastern European history, society, culture, and so forth. Why is this moment in so… Why does it stand out so much? What are we to take from this particular moment, and more importantly, why did this story stick so much even after the events, right? We're still talking about it. It's still fascinating. People are writing about the watermelon rebellion. How do we explain this episode? How do we explain this paranoia? How exactly did it spread to such a level that people were willing to believe it? It's almost like they were waiting for something like this.
00:51:29 Kelly
In a way, it's so specific to that moment and that place, but it's also completely a universal story of the circulation of information about things that, the way that gossip spreads, the way that misinformation, disinformation circulates. These are stories that are very familiar to us in the summer of 2024, right? These are these are things that we wrestle with. How do people come to believe the things that they believe (Paul: right). I mean, that I think is one of the most important takeaways of this story and one of the things that listeners might be really excited about in listening to this story is that you are now intimately familiar with an episode of history that is not well known (Paul: mm) and is not celebrated (Paul: ah!). And if you take a course in Russian history and you open up your textbook, I can guarantee you there is not a section about the watermelon rebellion. It's kind of one of those unknown phantom stories that exists in the archive (Paul: hmm) and never made its way into the main narrative. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting case of where an individual historian such as yourself or myself finds a story, finds a documentary record of something that happens and has a chance to decide whether or not it has, it merits a place right in that larger kind of cannon, what we think we know about the past.
00:52:55 Paul
I was hooked. It was fascinating and to see so many people, high-ranking officials lose sleep and life, or at least the years of their lives for something like this, it's fascinating just how many things related to empire, related to people's lives outside of empire, how it all sort of comes together in this one particular episode. So as a conclusion or as we wrap up this episode, what ended up happening to these people? And also, why was Volkov trying to? Why did he make up this story? What were his interests? It's not like he just was bored. What was happening on his end? What happened to him? What happened to these people? And was the Empress satisfied with the conclusion that in fact nobody was actually trying to push her aside and the French to take over Russia.
00:53:59 Kelly
Yeah, so we can only dig so far into the mindset, motivations of the individual actors, but there are some loose ends that we can tie up with a little bit of a in a satisfying way. So Yakovlev, who was one of the originators of the story, along with Volkov, it had been his job to supply the timber that was needed for shipbuilding. The shipbuilding that was happening in Kherson, the ships that were needed for the Black Sea Navy, the Navy that would protect the empire. So, he was one of the original guys who spread the rumors. So, for him this is a story of personal advancement because he fabricated most of the story, he ends up getting described as a spy and this is pretty damning language in the documents, an unscrupulous subordinate. (Paul, laughs) There's nothing worse than an unscrupulous subordinate. But Yakovlev describes himself as something of a professional voyeur. Maybe a little bit less creepily, as an inveterate eavesdropper. (Paul: mm) So he is saying, you know, not only am I important for you know, providing timber for the fleet, I'm really good at listening collecting information, and passing it along. That's one of my values to the empire. But by November 24th, he was under house arrest. He was in Odessa at the time he was under house arrest in Odessa and his papers and all of his money had been seized. Yakovlev had, in addition to fabricating the story he had tried to pay someone off as well, and he had passed an envelope containing about 500 rubles to some guy to try to cover his tracks.
00:55:39 Paul
How much would that be in today's money? 500 rubles now doesn't sound like a lot. What are we looking at here as a way for him to try to escape? He must have been pretty desperate.
00:55:50 Kelly
Yeah, I think he was pretty desperate. 500 rubles at the time would be, you know, for a member of the elite it wouldn't be so much. But for most people, that's maybe four or five year’s salary (Paul: oh wow!) and it's a lot of money. Most people are never going to see 500 rubles in their lifetime. (Paul: ok) So it was a tidy sum of money, to be sure. And when Mordvinov heard about this attempt at bribery, he convened a committee to discuss the matter, and they investigated it and they packaged together this bribery and Yakovlev’s gossip mongering in the arbuznii bunt, the Watermelon Rebellion, and the more the investigation revealed about sums of money passing through Yakovlev’s hands and packets of mysterious documents, some of which were reportedly tucked away in a very finely wrought case more about that in a second, Mordvinov began, um, became, they we decided to brand this Lieutenant Colonel a spy. Right. So this guy who had been supplying timber for the navy, made-up a story about the Watermelon Rebellion, is now getting branded a spy, which is a very serious crime to be accused of. So, on December 5th, this is several months after all of these events never took place in Kherson, the case that contained all the documents that finely-wrought case was located and its contents were revealed. And again, all of the air went out of the sails of Yakovlev's accusers. (Paul chuckles) Again, there's this unexpected twist in the story. It turns out that they found a receipt for ship masts, 3000 masts and documents that were accounting for about 150,000 rubles that had not been stolen or used for bribe money. The money had been spent in Yakovlev's work provisioning the wharfs the naval wharfs. So his store of documents, this trove of documents that was supposed to be the proof that he was a spy and this totally dirty guy, turns out it was the opposite. Yakovlev had all of those documents in the case because that was one of the regulations of his job. He was not allowed to let the case out of his sight. He slept with it under his bed. He had done, been doing the right thing all along, except for making up the story part. But no one believed that he was innocent, and one of his main accusers reported having knowledge that Yakovlev had recently received absurdly large amounts of money from the Treasury. There is no evidence to be found backing up any of these claims. All of the accusations against Yakovlev the spy turns out, were inconclusive. And he was not, in the end, the one to pay the price for all of this. Someone else did.
00:58:44 Paul
Please share (Kelly laughs) I just find it ironic how this entire story was all about spies and threats and so forth, and they all they're about to pin it on this one guy. And ironically, he's the one person who's actually surprisingly diligent with money, with information, with his task in the service of the empire and his empress. So yeah, I'm very curious to hear what happens to everyone else involved.
00:59:11 Kelly
Yeah. So the man who pays the price in the end is the man with whom the buck stops. Mordvinov himself the Admiral of the Black Sea fleet. So, he had been appointed the head of the administration that had to build the Black Sea fleet from scratch. It was kind of an independent entity. Mordvinov had a lot of control over financial and material resources. And he'd kind of been given carte blanche to do whatever he needed to build a fleet that would keep the empire safe in the Black Sea. And he had an enemy. So Mordvinov had been appointed by a guy named Grigorii Potemkin, who was probably Catherine the Great's unofficial husband (Paul laughs). Had definitely been her lover for years, and when their relationship cooled, Zubov was one of his replacements, and we talked about Zubov in the beginning, right? So and now it turns out that two ex-lovers of Catherine the Great are going head to head (background noise) and Mordvinov is the one who's going to pay the price because his patron was Potemkin instead of Zubov. So Zubov.
01:00:25 Paul
So, this is, (Kelly laughs) so he's, he's in-between the official lover and the unofficial husband.
01:00:30 Kelly
Totally. (Paul laughs) That's where, that's his place. That is where he is at, yes. So Zubov did not like Potemkin did not like Mordvinov and he never missed an opportunity to blame Mordvinov for anything that went wrong with the Black Sea fleet. So, the watermelon rebellion was a perfect storm. There's rebellious activity on the part of sailors and workers, the very men that were building the ships of the Black Sea fleet. (Paul: right) So, ultimately, responsibility is going to land with Mordvinov, right? This is a violation of order on a sensitive frontier and this is going to be serious. So, Mordvinov had concluded that the watermelon rebellion was a figment of the imagination, it was a trick that had been perpetrated by an unscrupulous official who happened to be attached to Zubov and sweeping the rebellion under the table saved neither Mordvinov nor the independent status of the Black Sea Fleet basically as soon as Catherine dies, one of the things that happens in November of 1796 is that Catherine herself finally dies and she is succeeded by her son Tsar Paul who had hated his mother. And he hates Potemkin as much as he hates his mother, and so he dissolves the independent status of the Black Sea fleet. He folds it back into the main Admiralty. And in January, one of the very first things that he does upon becoming tsar is to recall Mordvinov to Saint Petersburg and put him under house arrest. (Paul chuckles) He has him dismissed from service and poor Mordvinov goes running back to his estates in Crimea, again, enter Crimea, where he hides for about twenty years until, well, actually, excuse me, about six years until the next tsar comes to power.
01:02:26 Paul
So, if we were to move away from watermelons for one second, the story has now turned from a story of rebellion and watermelons and market dynamics to one of networking couloirs of power, who knows whom? Who is sleeping with whom, who hates whom in the higher echelons of empire, which is in fact a universal story of empire. And that's one of the fundamental characteristics of power and empire. Who can take advantage of what opportunity to either rise, or in fact, if you slip up or to fall?
01:03:15 Kelly
Absolutely. I mean when it really comes down to it, we talk about empires as if they are these entities that act and have will and interests and that's not at all what they are. They're constellations of human beings. And because of that, that human quality, the very human quality of this story of intrigue and, you know, a desire to do all the things that you just described to rise, to fall to, you know, pursue your own interest, to gain a sure footing in the world where there are so many threats to one's stability and security and continued existence. It's that humanness, that thirst for something as basic as a taste of watermelon is really what it all comes down to.
01:04:04 Paul
This has been a fascinating journey, and I thank you so much. And I'm sure that listeners thank you so much for sitting down and telling us about this Watermelon Not-Rebellion, and yet it had everything to do with power and intrigue and threat. Thank you so much.
01:04:26 Kelly
Thank you.