Even before confronting his own mortality, the headstrong Eisenstein had long grappled with resisting the state’s all-encompassing domination. At the height of Stalin’s totalitarian terror, outright criticism would be professional suicide, yet he could not betray his principles. In 1943 Eisenstein decided to work himself to death, thereby choosing the only form of suicide that would preserve his creative vision.28 While Ivan the Terrible portrayed the triumph of tyranny, the already planned sequel would embody its tragedy. Eisenstein was fearless and passionate in using his cinematic vision to speak truth to power, and he would do so by unmasking Stalin’s brand of vodka politics.
By the end of World War II Eisenstein had completed his sequel, Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Boyars’ Plot, in which a group of gentry boyars—the tsar’s high-ranking inner circle of oprichniki—scheme to dethrone the tsar. The paranoid Ivan Grozny uncovers this plot by holding a drunken banquet where the intoxicated Vladimir Staritsky—Ivan’s cousin and primary contender to the throne—informs the ruthless tsar of the boyars’ plot to kill him, in the process sealing his own fate as well as that of the conspirators.
Serving as artistic leader of the most acclaimed Russian film studio, Mosfilm, fellow director Mikhail Romm was honored to be part of the group who viewed a sneak preview of the film as it neared completion. And it was Romm who was charged with breaking the Politburo’s devastating reviews to Eisenstein:
He asked us, “What’s the matter? What’s the problem? What do you mean? Tell me straight.” But no-one dared to say directly that in Ivan Grozny could be felt a sharp reference to Stalin, in Malyuta Skuratov [the lickspittle head of Ivan’s secret police] a reference to Beria, in the oprichniki a reference to his henchmen. And there was much more that we felt but couldn’t say.
But in Eisenstein’s boldness, in the gleam in his eyes, in his defiant sceptical [sic] smile, we felt that he was acting consciously, that he had decided to go for broke.
This was awful.29
Russia’s most famous director had indeed gone for broke by using his cinematographic skills to highlight the tragedy of Russian tyranny, both past and present. Among themselves, other Soviet directors were understandably uneasy. In response to suggestions that The Boyar’s Plot was a masterpiece and would have been a hit in the West, dramatist Vsevolod Vishnevsky sniped: “It would be ‘Secrets of the Kremlin’” on show for the world to see.
“Either Eisenstein is naive, or—I don’t know,” added Ukrainian screenwriter and director Aleksandr Dovzhenko, “But such a film about such a Russia, the Kremlin—could serve as fantastic agitation against us.”30 To depict the tragedy of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics was strictly taboo.
But Eisenstein did not back down. “‘Taboo’ is falsehood,” he declared, “if you do something with your heart’s blood you can say everything.” Eisenstein even planned to disseminate his artistic condemnation of autocracy on the widest scale possible. “We shall have to have a lot of screenings—historians, writers, artists—and mass screenings, with thousands of people watching the film simultaneously, so that they will understand it better.”31 But before that could happen, it would have to first pass muster with Joseph Stalin himself.
Late on the night of March 2, 1946, Eisenstein’s movie was shown to the Politburo—in their usual condition. At the end of the viewing, Stalin flew into a mad rage. “This is not a film, but some kind of nightmare!” His hangman Lavrenty Beria despised Eisenstein’s masterpiece as “a bad detective story.”32 Stalin even berated the projectionist Ivan Bolshakov—who also happened to be chairman of the Committee for Cinematographic Affairs—using the Boyars’ Plot to lash out at the entire Soviet film industry: “During the War we didn’t have the time, but now we’ll lick you into shape!”33
Did the depiction hit too close to home? Did Stalin object to the portrayal of Ivan’s sadistic cruelty and inhumane repression for all to see? No—Stalin thought that Ivan’s “ruthlessness” was fine, so long as the reasons for his cruelty were clear. The official resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party condemned the depiction of Ivan “as weak in character and lacking in willpower, something on the lines of Hamlet”—the character and tragedy of murder and high politics that Stalin famously loathed.34 With this, the film was banned outright and Stalin was forced to rescind his earlier accolades for Eisenstein—something of a moral victory for Eisenstein the artist.
MAKING IVAN THE TERRIBLE. Actor Nikolai Cherkasov (left) portrays the title character. Sergei Eisenstein (seated, center) directs, as cameraman Eduard Tisse films. January 3, 1945. Source: RIA-Novosti/Mikhail Ozersky
Along with other writers and critics, Romm concluded that the film was scrapped precisely due to the drunken feast scene, where the dictator is depicted as formidable (grozen) and cunning (khiter) in using alcohol to keep his entourage off guard. It was an attack on Stalin’s cult of personality and a direct implication of Stalin’s vodka politics. According to Romm, the dreadful “references to the contemporary situation could be sensed throughout the film, in the subtext of almost every episode.”35
When informed of Stalin’s condemnation of his film—a threat to both his life and livelihood—Eisenstein was surprisingly calm. He knew what the response would be. And while he was forced to ritualistically admit publicly that he (in the words of the Central Committee’s official decree) “displayed ignorance in his depiction of historical facts,” in private he decided to take the fight to Stalin. The great director requested—and received—a personal meeting with the great dictator.
At 11 p.m. on February 24, 1947, Eisenstein and Nikolai Cherkasov—the actor who portrayed Ivan the Terrible on screen—arrived at the Kremlin for a late-night meeting with Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Stalin’s alcoholic commissar for ideology and culture, Andrei Zhdanov. The evening lasted well into the morning. The conversation was decidedly one-sided, with Stalin and his sycophants doling out equal parts tongue-lashing and history lecture. The usually diplomatic Eisenstein was unrepentant, much to the displeasure of Stalin. The following day he blithely remarked to friends: “Went to see Stalin yesterday. We didn’t like one another.”36
Throughout the standoff, the master filmmaker had unparalleled access to the very viper’s nest he portrayed on screen. He took copious notes throughout the encounter. Eisenstein thought the outcome of the meeting was generally favorable: he was given a few years’ time to reflect and prepare changes to Part II in order to appease Stalin, while this firsthand encounter only strengthened Eisenstein’s resolve that his portrayal be accurate. “We’ll hardly change a thing,” he later told his co-workers. “It was an interesting meeting. I’ll tell you some time…”37
Perhaps Eisenstein was emboldened by his prophecy of an early death, which he envisaged for 1948—the same year he was to complete Part II. “What reshooting?” Eisenstein asked his acquaintances. “Don’t you realise that I’d die at the first shot? I can’t even think of Ivan without feeling a pain in my heart.”38 Indeed, Eisenstein died before making any changes to Part II: victim of a second heart attack while defiantly filming Ivan the Terrible, Part III in 1948—as he predicted—at the age of fifty.39
Who Outdrinks Whom?
Stalin died of an agonizing brain hemorrhage in 1953, five years after Eisenstein’s passing. Beria was arrested soon thereafter and charged with treason and terrorism. The trial allegations of Beria’s rapes and drunken sexual exploits only added to his damnation, culminating in his summary execution—the parting shot that signaled the end of Stalinist terror.40 It was left to the portly Nikita Khrushchev to confront Stalin’s legacies. The personality cult, purges, forced collectivization, famines, and horror of the Stalin era were replaced by reforms and a thawing of Soviet society, culture, economy, and foreign affairs.
Five years after the curtain fell on Stalin, Beria, and Soviet totalitarianism, the curtain finally rose on Ivan the Terrible, Part II. Shown publicly for the first time in 1958, on the ten-year anniversary of
Eisenstein’s death, it met with national and international acclaim. His portrait of the patriotic emperor turned paranoid fratricidal murderer was dusted off and “rehabilitated”—much like Eisenstein’s legacy itself—as an implication of the tragedy of tyranny, both past and present.41 Confronting Stalin’s brand of vodka politics became part of the nationwide catharsis of de-Stalinization under the peasant turned premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Though no longer steeped in terror, the alcoholic Kremlin traditions continued even after Stalin. During his decade in power, Khrushchev never passed up an opportunity to celebrate with a drink. Chinese premier Zhao Enlai even confided that, on occasion, “Khrushchev got me drunk,” apparently to get him to divulge truths and enhance the Soviet bargaining position.42
By the 1970s even the Americans were preparing to confront vodka as part of what they saw as high-level Soviet negotiating strategy. When President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger visited Moscow in 1972 to finalize the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Leonid Brezhnev (whose own notorious alcoholism was born of his Stalin-era party upbringing) pushed for even greater concessions “while Kissinger was exhausted and Nixon drunk.” In another instance, the American president joked that Brezhnev was trying to get his advisors inebriated during top-level arms control negotiations. Brezhnev apparently “played along” with this “gag” by constantly pouring ever-more vodka into Kissinger’s glass.43
“The highest diplomacy does not consist of trying to drown differences in champagne and vodka toasts at feel-good summits,” protested the straight-laced Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, “but in finding ways to disagree without doing profound damage to an important strategic relationship.” Apparently the sodden Brezhnev failed in this regard.44
Dobrynin described how the traditional high-level drinking backfired when visiting Nixon’s California compound the following year. During a chance, late-night encounter in a hallway, the longtime Soviet ambassador was forced into “the most bizarre situation in all my years of diplomacy.” Dobrynin became the uneasy translator for the American president as a whiskey-drunk Brezhnev grumbled about his nagging Politburo comrades before Dobrynin and Nixon were forced to carry the drunken general secretary to his bed.
“Anatoly, did I talk too much yesterday?” Brezhnev later asked.
Yes, he did, but Dobrynin reassured him that not everything was translated.
“Well done,” Brezhnev replied. “Damn that whiskey, I am not used to it. I did not know I could not hold that much.”45
Such anecdotes are fun to tell, but there are good reasons to do so beyond providing a voyeuristic glimpse into high-level diplomacy. For one, tensions between the steady Dobrynin and the sloshed Brezhnev foreshadow the surprisingly salient wet/dry divisions within both the Soviet leadership and Russian society. Second, theses anecdotes suggest how alcohol becomes intertwined with political power at the highest levels. Vladimir Lenin artfully summarized the central question of politics as kto kovo? Literally meaning “who whom?” it is often translated as “who wins out over whom?” or “who does-in whom?” When it comes to diplomacy, it would be more apt to ask “who outdrinks whom?” Finally, they give us greater insights into Soviet politics in the postwar era, when Russia’s traditionally high levels of alcohol consumption soared to heights never before seen in Russia (or elsewhere)—the unshakable legacy of Stalin’s reimposition of traditional autocratic statecraft.46
Whether in the Soviet Union of old or the Russian Federation of today, the more time you spend in Russia, the more you are struck by how important vodka is to Russian society and culture. Likewise, the more you look, the more you find vodka politics as a pervasive element of Russia’s long and storied history. It is time to set aside well-worn cliches about Russia’s alcoholism to address the reasons for it. Alcohol abuse is not hard-wired into the genetic code of Russians, but like the elites in Stalin’s inner circle, Russians are victims of a system that has long cultivated—and to a staggering degree benefited from—social drunkenness. If Russia is a country of alcoholics, it’s because the Russian autocratic state helped make it that way.
Only by unmasking the legacies of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics can the primary contributors to a variety of Russian social, political, and economic problems be understood and confronted. This book lays bare the dynamics of vodka politics and the contentious relationship between the Russian state and society over health, revenue, and the common good throughout the imperial, Soviet, and even post-Soviet past with an eye toward a more prosperous future.
Cruel Liquor: Ivan the Terrible and Alcohol in the Muscovite Court
Sergei Eisenstein was a master of the historical epic. Virtually all of his films—from The Battleship Potemkin and October to Alexander Nevsky and his would-be Ivan the Terrible trilogy—depicted key events and leaders from the broad sweep of Russian history. Fortunately for storytellers such as Eisenstein, Russia’s past is littered with both great triumphs and unspeakable tragedies; heroes and villains; eclectic personalities and majestic leaders. Perhaps had he lived beyond age fifty, Eisenstein would have chronicled not only Ivan the Terrible but also other so-called great leaders of Russia’s past—such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great—all the while highlighting the pervasiveness of alcohol in courtly intrigues throughout imperial Russia and the ubiquity of vodka politics as the historical basis of Russian statecraft.
Every tsar and tsarina worth his and her salt found alcohol both a convenient and necessary tool to use in strengthening the Russian state as it grew from an isolated principality to an expansive, multiethnic, multicultural, and multicontinental empire. Peter the Great not only forcibly dragged Russia out of the Middle Ages and into modern Europe; he also perfected the art of vodka politics within his court. Catherine the Great made Russia a major European power and a center of culture, but even she owed her position to vodka politics. Yet well before Russia became the global power it is today, it was a remote kingdom on the banks of the river Moscow. And while the growth of Romanov power was hardly smooth and uniform, vodka politics was there from the beginning.
Long before Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar in 1547, before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg church doors in 1517, and even before Christopher Columbus set out to find new passages to the East Indies in 1492, the princes of Moscow had begun conquering neighboring principalities, consolidating their dominions through effective administrative institutions. The territory of Muscovy stretched from the Volga flatlands east to the Ural Mountains and north to the Arctic. In the west they did battle with the Lithuanians. In the south they rebelled against the Golden Horde, driving back the Asiatic Mongol invaders who had for centuries demanded tribute and subservience from the Slavs. Muscovy grew into a formidable power, as its grand princes adopted the symbolic Byzantine double-headed eagle—one looking east toward Asia, the other westward over Europe—simultaneously claiming the imperial heritage of Rome.1
The early Russian state had the economic resources to back up such audacious strategic and symbolic moves. The fifteenth century was a boom time for the elites of Moscow. The ancient wooden and limestone walls of the city’s central fortress—or Kremlin (kreml’)—were replaced with solid brick, protecting gleaming new cathedrals and imperial palaces crafted by the finest Renaissance architects. Contrasted against the wrenching poverty of the peasants outside, the Kremlin court was opulent—characterized by a “barbaric grandeur” that mystified foreign visitors unfamiliar with Orthodox rituals.2
In the early sixteenth century the Austro-Hungarian baron Sigismund von Herberstein twice resided in the Kremlin palaces as the envoy from the Holy Roman Empire. Published in 1557, his extensive writings give us the earliest foreign account of the Russian court under the last Muscovite grand prince—Vasily III. Upon the Austrian’s arrival, von Herberstein was given the traditional Russian invitation: “thou wilt eat bread [khleb] and salt [sol’] with us.” The ceremonial breaking of bread and salt h
as deep roots in the traditional Russian lexicon, with khlebosolny being the Russian word for hospitality.3
The Kremlin guard led von Herberstein through torch-lit halls of cut stone adorned with magnificent tapestries to a banquet hall where he found the grand prince sitting on a magnificent throne, flanked by ranks of nobles: some in high fur caps, kaftans, or clad in white satin, each with a silver hatchet by his side. In the center of the hall stood a feast of magnificent proportions upon plates of purest gold, prepared by servers in thick robes embroidered with pearls and gems. Yet before the feast of roast swan, malmsey, and Greek wines began, the murmur in the hall hushed as Grand Prince Vasily raised his glass and spoke in a booming voice: “Thou art come from a great sovereign to a great sovereign; thou hast made a long journey. After receiving our favor and seeing the lustre of our eyes, it shall be well with thee. Drink and drink well, and eat well to thy hearty content, and then take thy rest that thou mayest at length return to thy master.”4
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 5