Unsure of their new surroundings and unaccustomed to Byzantine cultural practices, the delegates from the royal house of Habsburg consummated the toast but were confused that the drink in their cups was not the traditional fermented beverages of Europe: not wine (vino), which the Russians learned from the Greeks of the Eastern Empire before the fall of Constantinople; not Scandinavian mead (myod) made from fermented honey, which came to Moscow by way of Novgorod and the Baltic trade in the tenth century; not European beers (pivo) and ales that had become the main alcoholic fare of Muscovy. Nor was the drink quintessentially Russian kvas, a beverage fermented from rye bread that was drunk even among Russia’s ancient ancestors, the Sclavonians, almost since the time of Christ in the first century.5
Instead, their chalices were brimming with aqua vitae—water of life—distilled spirits.6 Not quite the contemporary vodka—“little water” in Russian—consumed today, this stronger distilled alcohol, known to the Muscovite court as early as the fifteenth century, was plied by royal alchemists as a medicinal elixir. The inebriating qualities of this new drink were not lost on the Russian leaders of that day.
Once acclimated to the customs, opulence, and extravagance of the Muscovite court, foreign observers like von Herberstein quickly clued into the importance of liquor to palace intrigues. Indeed, even one of the first manuscript dictionaries of Russian compiled in the sixteenth century included the transposed English phrase Gimi drenki okovitin, or, “give me drink aqua vitae.” Since very few native accounts of medieval Russia are available, such foreigners’ accounts have proven invaluable to understanding early Russian history in general and the role of alcohol in particular.7
Von Herberstein’s firsthand chronicles of the gluttonous and inebriated all-night banquets of the Muscovite court in the 1550s serve as distant echoes to the liquor surprise that awaited later foreign visitors von Ribbentrop, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Milovan Djilas to Stalin’s court. Putting quill to parchment by candlelight, von Herberstein recounted how
making people tipsy is here an honour and sign of esteem; the man who is not put under the table holds himself ill respected. The Muscovites are indeed masters at talking to others and persuading them to drink. If all else fails one other stands up and proposes the health of the Grandduke, upon which all present must not fail to drink and drain the cup. After this they try to provoke toasts to the health of the Emperor and others. There is much ceremony about this drinking. The man proposing the toast stands in the middle of the room, his head bared, states what he desires for the Grand-duke or other lord—happiness, victory, health—and wishes that as much blood may remain in the veins of his enemies as drink in his cup. When he has emptied it he reverses the cup upon his head and wishes the lord good health. Or he will take upon a prominent position, have several cups filled, and distribute them with the motive for the toast. Then each goes into the middle of the room, drains his cup and claps it on his head.8
Von Herberstein found this practice just as bizarre as the generations of foreign dignitaries who followed did. Like subsequent visitors, von Herberstein too confessed his distaste for such drunken excess and sought any means to extricate himself from the uncomfortable customs, mostly “by pretending to be drunk or saying I was too sleepy to go on and had had my fill.”9
While von Herberstein marveled at the opulence and omnipotence of his host Vasily III, the grand duke’s hold on power was not as absolute as his stature implied. While the royal family was the political and spiritual core of Muscovy, other princely boyar families wielded tremendous economic and military power from their massive estates, while the Orthodox Church held such sway that it was often exempted from state regulations. With such internal rivalries, the grand prince depended as much on his courtly elites as they did on him. The Russian state of the late Middle Ages was at once both powerful and fragile—and Vasily knew it. During the last years of his reign, so as to dilute the opposition of competing nobles who had much to gain if one of Vasily’s two brothers instead wrested the throne, the grand duke bestowed rank on a large number of boyars loyal to him and his infant sons.10
In the cold December of 1533, Vasily succumbed to a prolonged illness, leaving the grandeur and might of imperial Muscovy in the hands of his three-year-old son, Ivan. Intrigue abounded as competing clans grappled for power in an era of collective “boyar rule.” Not above blackmail, torture, and murder, the Shuiskys, Glinskys, Belskys, Staritskys, and even the church engaged in a cutthroat battle for power and influence over the infant Ivan and his regency. Whenever one clan leader had his tongue cut out or was devoured alive by wild dogs, there was always a brother, uncle, son, or nephew to vow revenge on his behalf. There was no way to cut off all heads at the same time.11
“Our boyars governed the country as they pleased, for no one opposed their power,” Ivan later recalled. Raised fatherless, “I adopted the devious ways of the people around me; I learned to be crafty like them.”12
So it should come as little surprise that the boy who became Ivan “the Terrible” was devoid of a moral compass. At a time when political decisions were being made in his stead by constantly feuding elites, the child-prince gleefully tortured birds and tossed puppies from the high palace walls to be smashed on the courtyard pavement below.13
Ivan’s bloodlust grew as a teen, as he hunted bears and wolves with an entourage of boyar teens whose families were no less affluent or respected than his. Having killed, feasted, and drunken to excess, the hunting party often set their sights on a different game: the local peasants. With heads full of drink, the carnivorous teens set upon unsuspecting villages: beating the peasant men and raping their daughters. Young Ivan reveled in the orgies of violence and debauchery—the wine, sweat, and blood—as much as his bestial pals, but Ivan never lost sense of his royal dignity as God’s appointed servant on earth. “When he became drunk, when he fornicated, it was God who was getting drunk and fornicating, through him.”14
In 1547 Ivan turned sixteen and was officially crowned, but instead of taking the traditional title of grand prince of Moscow he became the first to choose the title tsar—emperor of all Russia.15 Knowing his vicious past, the court certainly heaved a collective sigh of relief when the young tsar announced he was giving up his drunken orgies in order to wed his beloved Anastasia—daughter of a lesser noble family. Within a few years, however, Anastasia mysteriously fell ill and perished. As Eisenstein portrays in his Stalin Prize–winning Ivan the Terrible, the tsar suspected a palace plot to poison his bride, which only deepened his paranoia. And much like Stalin’s reaction to the sudden death of his own wife, the brooding tsar abandoned himself to loneliness, depression, and drunkenness. The fornication, sodomy, and unthinkable torture soon returned. Eliciting vengeance for both the suspect boyar class and whatever temperamental Almighty dared to smite the all-powerful tsar, Anastasia’s death unleashed all of the base instincts of Ivan’s childhood.16
While his conquering armies expanded the borders of the Russian state, the increasingly powerful and paranoid Ivan took pleasure in drunken debauchery, quiet prayer, and the slow and methodical torture of his would-be rivals at court. “The spurts of blood, the cracking of bones, the screams and rattles of drooling mouths—this rough cookery smelling of pus, excrement, sweat, and burnt flesh was pleasing to his nostrils,” wrote popular French historian Henri Troyat. “He took such joy in the bloodbath that he had no doubt, in these moments of horror and ecstasy, that the Lord was at his side.… To him, prayer and torture were but two aspects of piety.”17
Leading the heroic charge to topple the Khanate of Kazan on the Volga and the rebels of Udmurtia in the east, Ivan’s confidant Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky did the most to expand Russia’s borders—and was wise enough to avoid being slowly dismembered himself for the tsar’s sadistic pleasure. After leading Ivan’s army to victory over the Livonians at Dorpat (in present-day Estonia), Ivan’s general defected—fleeing to the nearby Kingdom of Poland. From the safety of his Polish a
sylum, Russia’s first political refugee not only addressed vitriolic letters directly to the tsar, but in 1573 he also penned Russia’s first historical monograph, the scathing History of the Grand Prince of Moscow.18 Just as Nikita Khrushchev gave us an insider’s view into the dictator’s drunken Kremlin banquets, Kurbsky did the same, only four hundred years earlier:
They begin with frequent feasts and drunkenness, from which all kinds of impurities sprang. And what did they add to this? Great beakers, pledged, in truth, to the devil, and beakers which were filled with extremely heady drink… and if they did not drink themselves into a stupor, or rather a frenzy, then they added a second and a third beaker; and those who had no wish to drink or to commit such transgressions they adjured with great rebuke, while they shouted at the tsar: “Behold, this one here, and this one (naming him) does not wish to be joyful at your feast, as though he condemns and mocks you and us as drunkards, hypocritically pretending to be righteous!”19
Just as Khrushchev recounted how inebriety was forced upon the Soviet Politburo, so too was it forced on the court of Ivan the Terrible. “And with still more devilish words than these,” Kurbsky continued, “they abused many men who were sober and moderate in their good way of life and habits, and they put them to shame, pouring those accursed beakers on them, with which they did not wish—or were quite unable—to become drunk, and they threatened them with death and various tortures, in the same way as they destroyed many people a little later for this reason.”20 The parallels with Khrushchev’s descriptions of Soviet commissars transforming into toady drunkards could not be more clear.
Just as Stalin’s henchmen were pumped full of alcohol for the leader’s pleasure only to be borne home by their bodyguards, so too did guests at Ivan’s table. “The obligation to do honor to all the cups sent by the Czar induced in some a stupor bordering on coma,” says Troyat. “In their stomachs mead was mixed with Rhine wines, French wines, Malmsey, kvas, and vodka. And when they rose from the table to go home, it was not unusual for Ivan to send to their residences, as a token of friendship, more alcohol and food to be downed on the spot, in front of the officers who had brought it.”21 Not only did both tyrants appreciate liquor’s effectiveness in maintaining control over their inebriated courtiers, but both were also wary of alcohol being used against them—regularly forcing subordinates to quaff what was in the leader’s cup as a test for poison.22
Like the squeamish objections of Khrushchev, Beria, Mikoyan, and Stalin’s other commissars, many of Ivan’s boyars also resisted the drunken escapades. Those who refused were denounced—either secretly or openly—as foes of the tsar.23 Consider Ivan’s chancellor, Prince Mikhaylo Repnin, who once muttered that Ivan’s drunkenness was unbefitting for God’s chosen leader of Russia. Quietly stewing, the great tsar took note. The following Sunday during church vespers, Ivan’s guards found Repnin deep in solemn prayer and unceremoniously hacked him to death beside the altar.24
Unlike Stalin’s ominously threatening toasts, Ivan often dealt with his detractors more swiftly and directly. On another occasion, tired of being forced to drink round after round, one imperial boyar, Mochan Mitkov, finally snapped. Flying into a rage, Mitkov wagged his finger and denounced the “damned” (okayannyi) tsar to his face. Infuriated, Ivan rose from his throne, grasped the metal-tipped walking staff he kept by his side, and charged at Mitkov. Using the staff as a spear, the terrible Ivan ran him clean through, covering the banquet hall floor with blood. Collecting his wits and silently returning to his table, he left his henchmen to drag Mitkov’s disemboweled and broken frame outside to finish him off.25
Having witnessed such gruesome events firsthand, the straight-laced commander Kurbsky wisely fled for his life. It is fitting that four hundred years later, Sergei Eisenstein began his scathing indictment of Stalinist autocracy in his film Ivan the Terrible II: The Boyar’s Plot with Kurbsky’s defection. Centuries before Eisenstein and Khrushchev, Kurbsky was the first to highlight the pervasive use of alcohol in Russian autocratic government.
Even without violence, Ivan found drunkenness a terrific instrument of blackmail against his underlings. While his drunken boyars feasted, sang, and uttered slanderous and shameful things, Ivan often ordered his scribes to write down their words. The next morning Ivan would confront his normally erudite, hungover yes-men with the damning transcripts.26
Eisenstein was hardly alone in underscoring the “deadly parallels” between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. Both used terror as an instrument of state security and administration, both shared paranoid and homicidal personality traits, and both, it must be added, placed alcohol at the center of their statecraft as well as their personal lives.27 When in 1925 Stalin revived the imperial vodka monopoly to extract additional resources for the Soviet state, he was following a path blazed by Ivan’s monopolization of the kabak—or tsar’s tavern—in 1553. Ivan was perhaps the first to realize the tremendous potential of the liquor trade. As Englishman Giles Fletcher wrote in 1591, the annual rent from these drinking houses “yeeldeth a large rent to the Emperours treasurie” on the order of a few thousand rubles annually from each establishment.28 Their most effective use of alcohol, however, was keeping their rivals stupefied, suspicious, and divided.
As with Stalin, objecting to drinking was one of the offenses that drew Ivan’s ire, often ending in the gruesome death of the nobleman and even his family. To replace the scores of elites who met such horrific ends, Ivan promoted from the ranks of the lesser nobility flunkies who never dared cross him and instead encouraged his debauchery. Sycophants such as Alexei Basmanov, Ivan’s son Fyodor, Vasily Gryaznoi, and Malyuta Skuratov—who shared Ivan’s lust for torture—became his closest advisors and most reliable drinking companions.29 Together, these degenerate inebriates fed off one another, exploring new depths of drunkenness, cruelty, and depravity.
In the winter of 1564 Ivan suddenly and inexplicably abandoned Moscow, leaving to wander his lands aimlessly with his voracious, drunken entourage. After a long journey, they arrived at a small settlement north of Vladimir known as Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where the paranoid Ivan ordered an unofficial capital constructed—hoping for safety behind fortified ramparts, moats, and high walls. No one could enter or leave without Ivan’s knowledge. At this new “court,” Ivan created a new inner circle—the oprichniki—led by Skuratov, Basmanov, and others known for their loyalty, cruelty, and capacity for alcohol. With ranks eventually swelling to over six thousand, the oprichniki were above the law: commissioned to hunt down and sweep away Ivan’s foes. Only the oprichniki could stand the piercing gaze of the tsar, and only with them did the demented Ivan finally feel at ease.30 Having kissed the cross and taken an oath “not to eat or drink” with the Muscovite boyars of old—even if they were relatives—the drunken marauders ravaged the Golden Ring territories northeast of Moscow. Noblemen were either executed or exiled along with their families; crops, forests, and entire villages were set ablaze; peasant men and children were tortured; women were raped and killed in alcohol-fueled orgies. Leading the oprichniki was the bloodthirsty Skuratov, who even strangled the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Philip II, to death with his own hands. No wonder the Skuratov character in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible II was seen as such an obvious parallel to Stalin’s inebriate executioner and KGB head, Lavrenty Beria.
Behind the ramparts of Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar—together with his teenage son and heir, tsarevich Ivan—led the slaughter. A typical afternoon began with public beheadings followed by private sessions of excruciating torture. In the evening the tsar, tsarevich, and their thugs received the blessings of (terrorized) priests before yet another drunken dinner feast. Ivan the Terrible was pleased that he had so much in common with his eldest son: they got drunk together, swapped mistresses, and enjoyed the same hobbies: whipping and roasting educated men, pouring scalding wine on ambassadors, and unleashing wild bears on unsuspecting monks, all for sport.31
While the thick walls o
f Ivan’s unofficial capital protected him from outsiders, they could not defend him from his own drunken neuroses. In the growth of his bloodthirsty and headstrong son Ivan saw a new rival—one who had much to gain from his demise. By 1581 Ivan had wholly convinced himself that his son was plotting against him. In a subsequent fight between the two, Ivan swung at his son with his pointed staff. The tsar recoiled in horror to find that his pike had pierced his son’s temple, which was gushing blood. Suddenly terrified to realize that he had just killed his son and the heir to the Russian throne, Ivan cradled the head of the tsarevich. For the last time regaining consciousness, the younger Ivan reportedly kissed his father’s hands, muttering, “I die as your devoted son and the most submissive of your subjects.”32
In the world-famous Tretyakov Art Gallery in downtown Moscow hangs Ilya Repin’s famed Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, which depicts the formidable tsar coddling the bloodstained and lifeless body of the tsarevich. In this moment, the eyes of the one who wrought so much horror on his people are themselves filled with dread, not simply for the death of a son—it is said—but also for the future and the end of the royal dynasty. When Ivan the Terrible met his inevitable end, the throne would now be left to his sickly and “weak-minded” son Fyodor, whom Ivan dismissed as “not fit to rule.”33 When Fyodor died without a male heir, the centuries-old Rurik bloodline died with him, ushering in Russia’s first “Time of Troubles”—marked by Polish invasions, civil war, economic chaos, peasant revolts, usurpers, and impostors.34 Of course it is doubtful that Ivan the Terrible foresaw such a collapse, but subsequent events highlight the importance of a strong leader as the linchpin holding together the political and economic institutions of the early Russian state. With the death of Ivan, that too was gone.35 Yet while the autocracy itself would be compromised, the primacy of alcohol within the autocracy would endure.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 6