1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

The Odessa Orchestra survived financially by making recordings, and supplementing
salaries with the income from recordings. Most second-tier orchestras are not able to
finance their concerts from private contributions – at least not yet. The Odessa Orchestra
with Hobart Earle’s direction has been accorded all the legal status and protection that the
new Ukraine can provide; it has been awarded a national orchestra status, given pensions
by the state for the musicians, and the benefits of social protections. The orchestra has
traveled quite a bit throughout Ukraine and Russia and Western Europe. Their recordings
are really of first rate quality specializing on Russian and Ukrainian music, and some
American music as well. I performed there in a minor way, as the speaker in Aaron
Copeland's "Lincoln Portrait". I performed in the Kyiv Opera House with the same
orchestra, and in a number of other cities. It was quite a wonderful experience for me.
Hobart Earle and Aida are good friends of ours. When they came to Kiev on occasion and
they would sometimes stay with us, and my wife, Suzanne and I would visit them in
Odessa. Odessa had made the transition from a Soviet way of life to the life of an
independent, cultured, non-ideological city. In Odessa, the Soviet manner and style of the
past has been rejected, but nothing systematic has really replaced it. Certainly, ideas are
floating around about what might be the best way, but the real structured thinking
concerns survival, survival along the Black Sea, how to enjoy the life that those who live
in Odessa have been given, and they're tending towards, not unexpectedly, preserving the
best of their society, reviving the cultural life of the past and trying to provide, as best as
they can, for everyone. It's more evidently socialist than almost any other city in Ukraine.
Odessa had, for example, in the Soviet period, a very extensive athletic program, as many
Russian cities did, rising up to Olympic standards, where children would be selected at
the age of five to be athletes, would attend special schools where sports were emphasized.
The very best would go onto Olympic training camps at the age of 20. The exceptional,
the gifted students, would receive all of their education in special schools, and this was
true not just in athletics. It was also the case with mathematics, music, dance and the arts.
Those with talent flourished in Odessa. There are still colonies of athletes, artists,
painters, sculptors, musicians, and they're still organized in “collectives”. Even if they're
not now formally Soviet collectives, they look on their activity in a collective way, even
in the symphony orchestra. It's a union now, but it really is a collective of the 500 or so
people that make performances possible – musicians, all of the workers, electricians,
stage hands, ticket sellers, ushers, and the cleaners.
Athletics are still organized in the form of collectives. Collectives are found in
universities, museums, even in the port, certainly among the dockworkers and those who
go to sea on ships and manage the coastal protections of lighthouses and buoys. The basic
organization for professional work is still the “collective”. Thoughtful Odessa leaders say,
"Thank God for that, that there's still some structure," and what's missing from the Soviet
system is coercion through the use of force. They're working with each other as best they
can. The worst result of the absence of the coercive use of State force is oligarchy, but the
best result is collectives that are self-governing. On the negative side, oligarchy is the
198