If vodka was the Russian conspirators’ instrument of choice, in this instance it also provided the pretext for revolution. On the night of June 27 in one of the capital’s taverns, an inebriated conspirator—guard captain Peter Passek—openly derided the tsar and hinted of a possible overthrow. He was promptly arrested. Word spread quickly, and the conspirators feared that Passek would give them away under torture.25
It was Alexei Orlov who collected Catherine in the middle of the night. Barging into her chambers, he announced purposefully: “Passek has been arrested. We must go.”
By seven in the morning, Catherine stood hesitantly before the Preobrazhensky regiment. According to historians, “She need not have been afraid: the soldiers were fired with enthusiasm. Besides, they had been promised a distribution of vodka.” Within a matter of moments, Razumovsky and the Orlov brothers proclaimed Empress Catherine to be the sole and absolute sovereign of Russia, and the regiment joyously proclaimed their allegiance to her. Amid the tumult, Catherine gave hushed orders: close the gates of the capital, watch the taverns, and allow no one to travel the road to Oranienbaum, so that word of the coup does not reach the tsar.26
That afternoon, Peter, his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova, and his German entourage left Oranienbaum for the summer palace at Peterhof. It was there, at Peter the Great’s seaside estate, that a secret messenger informed the tsar that Catherine was in the capital and had been proclaimed empress. His ministers urged Peter to heroically march on Petersburg. Instead, the tsar broke into tears, which he tried to drown in glass after glass of burgundy wine. Alternating between panic and resignation, Peter drew up manifestos condemning Catherine before heeding his ministers’ advice to sail to the naval base at Kronstadt to rally the sailors and mount a counteroffensive. Drunk, staggering, and sobbing uncontrollably, the tsar had to be helped aboard a schooner with Elizabeth Vorontsova and her cackling ladies in tow.27
At one in the morning, the tsar, his ladies and ministers arrived at Kronstadt, only to find that the garrison had already sworn allegiance to Empress Catherine. If the tsar’s ship did not immediately depart, the sailors brusquely announced, they would open fire, sending the schooner to the sea floor. As they set sail, Peter’s own field marshal, Burchard Münnich, could hardly stifle his laughter at the pathetic spectacle of the tsar cowering in the hold of the boat, drinking and weeping alongside his ladies. The group retreated to Oranienbaum, where the childlike Peter threw himself on the bed and cried over the loss of his empire.28
Meanwhile, the conspirators prepared for what they expected to be an imminent attack from the vindictive tsar. On the run, Catherine and her weary general staff holed up overnight at a wretched inn at Krasny Kabak (red tavern) to await their fate. A number of the tired and thirsty guardsmen broke into a wine cellar and quickly downed gallons of Hungarian wine. In the ensuing drunken commotion, a rumor spread that the Prussians were coming to kidnap Catherine. In order to prevent a riot, Captain Passek (who was only imprisoned for twelve hours and did not give anything away) awakened Catherine in the middle of the night. Only when the weary, disheveled empress made a personal appearance did the troops calm down. Understanding the need for vigilance, Princess Dashkova persuaded the troops to roll the barrels back into the cellar and sent for spring water instead: “I gave them whatever money I had left, then turned my pockets inside out to show I had no more to give, and promised that on our arrival in town all the taverns would be open to them and they would be able to drink at the expense of the Crown. My arguments were appreciated and had the desired effect.”29
When the dawn broke, it became clear that no attack was coming. Tsar Peter’s collapse was total, the empress’s victory secure. All of St. Petersburg rejoiced, as Catherine’s triumph hailed a return to sanity. What’s more, Princess Dashkova made good on her promises to both her vigilant guardsmen and the joyous throngs in the capital. In the words of the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky:
So ended this revolution, the most lighthearted and delicate of all those known to us, which cost not a single drop of blood—a real ladies’ revolution. It did cost a great deal of wine, however: on the day of Catherine’s entry into the capital, June 30, all the drinking establishments were opened to the troops. In a mad ecstasy, soldiers and their wives hauled out the vodka, beer, mead, and champagne, pouring it into tubs, kegs, or whatever came to hand. Three years later the matter of compensation for the Petersburg wine merchants “for wines pilfered by soldiers and other people during Her Majesty’s happy accession to the imperial throne” was still being processed in the Senate.30
Recognizing his defeat, Peter abdicated and retired to Ropsha—the residence he owned as grand duke—requesting only that the empress provide him with his favorite burgundy wines, his pipes and tobacco, and his favorite African slave, Narcissus.31 The inept tsar was hardly a political threat to Catherine, yet so long as Peter lived the empress’s reactionary opponents could rally behind his legitimate claim to the throne. Apparently without Catherine’s knowledge, then, her conspirators plotted to finish him off.
The Orlov brothers persuaded a court apothecary to poison a bottle Peter’s favorite burgundy wine. On July 17, 1762, Alexei Orlov and his men set out to visit the former tsar at Ropsha. They found the half-dressed Peter drawing a fortress with chalk and happily announced that he was soon to be liberated. Celebrating the news, the joyous tsar dined with his assassins over vodka, when Peter himself called for his beloved burgundy. Catherine’s accomplices calmly watched as the frail Peter rose and wailed “I am poisoned!” But he did not die. Embarrassed and a bit puzzled, the conspirators then tried smothering Peter with a pillow so that there would be no signs of struggle. But that too did not work. Finally the group bound the screaming prince and, making a noose from a large cloth napkin, violently strangled the grandson of Peter the Great to death.32
Upon hearing of the detestable tsar’s passing, the Russian people pitied Peter’s unfortunate fate. As Walter Kelly suggests: “They forgot his defects and caprices in the recollection of his amiable qualities, and his sad reverse of fortune. The sailors cast it in the teeth of the guards that they had sold their master for brandy and beer.”33
The following thirty-four years of Catherine the Great’s reign marked the resurgence of Russia’s military dominance as well as the awakening of Russian cultural life. The enlightened tsarina patronized the arts and manufactures of her adopted homeland. She bestowed gifts of Russian vodka on European monarchs, philosophers, and luminaries from Frederick the Great and Voltaire to Carl Linnaeus, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. And while Russia’s greatest—and last—empress even drew up new rules for the nobility based on temperance and moderation, quite unlike the drunken bacchanals of Peter the Great, it is hard to dismiss how drunkenness and immoderation were crucial to her ascent to power—just as it had been for every Russian empress who had come before.34
In 1796, Catherine died of a stroke, leaving power to her son Paul, who despised his “father” Peter’s inglorious end and, in the ultimate spiteful move, had the coffin of Peter III—buried now thirty-five years—exhumed and opened during Catherine’s funeral procession. With the remaining conspirators—including Alexei Orlov—charged by imperial decree to be front and center as “chief mourners,” the lifeless body of the great empress was laid alongside the decayed flesh of the husband she so loathed. At the end of the three-hour viewing, the vindictive Paul laid the two to rest, side by side, with the inscription: “divided in life—united in death.”35 Ironically, four short years later Paul met the same fate as Peter—he was trampled and strangled to death at the hands of a mob of drunken palace conspirators.36
Virtually every coup d’etat in Russia’s long history was carried out in a state of inebriation, and often alcohol was used intentionally to win over the troops. This practice was especially pronounced when women were the regents-to-be. In order to overcome questions of legitimacy for not being part of the male bloodline, Russia’s ruli
ng ladies, from the regent Sophia to Elizabeth and the two Catherines, all turned to vodka to shore up support for their rule.
This set a dangerous precedent for future palace intrigues, but using alcohol to gin up popular support was quite effective. In addition to the drunken mob of dismissed generals who in 1801 killed Paul and placed Tsar Alexander I on the throne, when Alexander died unexpectedly in 1825, another group of aristocratic conspirators—this time with a regiment of imperial guards—refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas I. These liberal “Decembrists” as they would be known, hoped to effect an overthrow of the imperial order and the adoption of a Western-style constitution. In order to regain control over his new capital from this increasingly drunken mob, Nicholas ordered forces loyal to him to crush the rebellion by force. The Decembrist leaders were arrested, tried, and hung. Although the plot was unsuccessful, the revolutionary potential of alcohol among the rabble was warily recognized. The people of St. Petersburg “are the deadly enemies of the police,” claimed one conventional account, “and brandy, liberally distributed among them, will, at any time of danger or uncertainty in the government, render them pliant and desperate tools of revolutionary agitators.”37
Even within living memory the intrigues of Russian high politics have always been accompanied by the waft of vodka. Indeed, even plotters like Gennady Yanayev and Valentin Pavlov—two of the leaders of the hardline State Emergency Committee that attempted to ouster Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991—stammered through the entire ordeal in a drunken stupor.38 One might wonder how Russian history—and indeed world history—would have been different had these men followed the putschist playbook of imperial Russia and used vodka to win over the troops rather than further their own ruin. We can only imagine what might have happened during those tense days of August 1991 if instead of being won over to the cause of freedom, the Soviet troops were so drunk that they unhesitatingly trained their guns on their fellow countrymen and opened fire.
Murder, Intrigue, and the Mysterious Origins of Vodka
Take a good look at the vodka section of your local liquor store. On the upper shelves you’ll find shimmering glass bottles of all shapes and sizes originating from every corner of the world. Vodka today is the world’s most popular liquor and a true global commodity. Looking below the so-called top shelf import and boutique vodkas you’ll see cheap, domestic products, their plastic bottles usually emblazoned with Russian symbols, often bearing the name of the Russian entrepreneur who fled the Bolshevik Revolution to set up shop in the West.1
Without a doubt, vodka is the definitive Russian cultural product. But what is vodka? Where does it come from, and why do the Russians seem to have a particular affinity for it?
In 2006 I went to Russia to find answers—and if you go to Russia today with such questions, you’ll invariably end up in the same place I did: the Vodka History Museum at Izmailovsky Park in northeast Moscow. In the tumultuous 1990s, Izmailovsky Park was a bustling souvenir bazaar and open-air flea market. Today, the rickety stalls of the souvenir peddlers have been updated with colorful, sturdy veneers, while happily towering over the market is a bright, Disney-fied kremlin housing the Vodka Museum. I had visited the museum years earlier—before it was moved from the somber shadows of the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg to the Izmailovsky amusement park in Moscow. I highly recommend it: after perusing the museum’s artifacts you can knock back complimentary vodka samples in their re-created nineteenth-century tavern with windows festooned with gilded decorations and wooden tables bracketed by long, sturdy benches of dark mahogany.
Upon entering the replica tavern I was welcomed by the museum’s pleasant hostess. Declining the obligatory tour, I instead directly asked her two simple questions: “Where did vodka come from?” And “When did it originate?”
Apparently caught off guard by the directness of my questions, she hesitated momentarily before popping behind a counter to pull out a well-thumbed paperback of a book I knew only too well: Istoriya vodki (History of Vodka) by Vilyam Vasilevich Pokhlebkin—the bible of Russian vodka history. I’ll admit that I only feigned interest as the guide proclaimed how the illustrious historian Pokhlebkin unquestionably proved that vodka as we know it was first made inside the Moscow Kremlin, sometime between 1448 and 1478.2 Though disappointed, I politely thanked the hostess for her time and left without ever getting to the free samples.
The Mysterious Life And Death Of Vilyam Pokhlebkin
Vilyam Pokhlebkin was a unique cultural icon in Russia—beginning with his unusual name. His father, Vasily Mikhailov, was an ardent communist revolutionary, whose nom de guerre in the revolutionary underground—Pokhlebkin—invoked a traditional Russian peasant stew. Instead of the usual Ivans, Vladimirs, and Borises, when the Pokhlebkins had their first boy they instead named him “Vilyam” incorporating the initials of the great Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
After serving in the Red Army in World War II, Vilyam turned to culinary history as a researcher in the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, writing a popular history of tea, which became a literary sensation in tea-drinking nations. With his meager resources, he amassed a sizable library of rare manuscripts in his nondescript apartment in Podolsk—a sleepy industrial suburb due south of Moscow.
In the repressive 1960s and 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev, Pokhlebkin’s culinary histories ostracized him from Soviet academia. His magnum opus—a collection of thousands of global recipes and their origins—was censored by the authorities: since even the most basic ingredients were widely unavailable, such recipes would shine an unwelcome spotlight on the inherent shortcomings of the Soviet system itself. Branded a dissident, he was effectively unemployed (and unemployable) in a country that boasted a job for everyone.3
According to the foreword of his Istoriya vodki, events then took a strange turn for Pokhlebkin. Perhaps borne of the same anti-Soviet sentiment that launched the Solidarity movement in the shipyards of Gdansk, in 1978 the communist government of Poland apparently sued the Soviet Union for exclusive commercial rights to the word vodka, claiming that it originated in Poland, not Russia. Perhaps the Poles had not read the single-paragraph entry on “vodka” in their standard issue Big Soviet Encyclopedia, which clearly states that vodka “was first produced in Russia in the late 14th century.”4 What more debate could there be?
For the Russians, this was a stab in the back—their socialist allies in the Warsaw Pact were not only threatening the Soviets’ lucrative international trade; they were also inflicting an emasculating blow to Russia’s cultural heritage.
Pokhlebkin claimed that definitively “proving” the origins of vodka with any degree of reliability was next to impossible due to a lack of surviving documents. Neither side could point to a page from their respective archives—such as the Scottish Exchequer Roll of 1494–95 that established the origins of whiskey or the famous German Beer Purity Law, the Reinheitsgebot of 1516—to settle the dispute.5 As his story goes, the Soviet export ministry, known as Soyuzplodoimport, first turned to the organization known (in typically bureaucratic parlance) as the Higher Scientific Research Institute of the Fermentation Products Division of the Central Department of Distilling of the ministry of the food industry of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which could not pin down the origins of vodka. In a move that has been immortalized as a pivotal scene in a recent Russian novel, the dismayed government authorities turned to Pokhlebkin: the only man who could establish the Soviet Union’s legal claims before the international court and in the process defend Russia’s national pride.6
According to Pokhlebkin, his work was a success! In 1982 the tribunal found on behalf of the Soviets, based primarily on Vilyam’s research that “proved” the Poles began making vodka several decades after the Russians. This finding allowed Soviet products such as Stolichnaya—which had been sold in American stores since 1972 through a barter deal with Pepsi Cola—to trade under the proud (yet slightly redundant) motto: “Only vodka from Russ
ia is genuine Russian vodka.”7
Pokhlebkin’s landmark victory was all the more impressive—as subsequent Russian writers noted—because “he alone performed the work, and built the entire system of circumstantial evidence ultimately recognized by the international legal experts.”8 This research—which Pokhlebkin claimed was never meant for public consumption—was not published until 1991, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Istoriya vodki only added to Pokhlebkin’s celebrity as dispenser of folk wisdom on Russia’s favorite vice, including claims that if one does not drink before 3p.m. or after midnight it is impossible to become what he called “a professional alcoholic.”9
In private, Pokhlebkin was eccentric and ascetic: though amassing an impressive collection of historical manuscripts and exotic teas, he nonetheless denied himself a simple television or telephone, relying instead on written correspondence and telegrams. In his later years, Pokhlebkin became a paranoid recluse—seldom emerging from behind the numerous locks on his Podolsk apartment door for fear of being followed… or worse. Thirty years in the same three-room apartment, he never opened the door to strangers—including all manner of inspectors, repairmen, and plumbers.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 10