While drinking was largely a male activity, the traditional drinking culture also ensnared women and children, who often drank alongside their men. Describing a typical village celebration, Adam Olearius wrote: “After they got drunk, the men struck their wives for the pleasure of it, and then proceeded to tipple with them again. Finally the women, sitting astride their sleeping husbands, drank to each other until they toppled over alongside them and slept. One may easily imagine the peril to honor and modesty, and its frequent ruin, under such conditions of life.”39
Vodka was even central to the “circling dances” of young peasant girls during village festivals. Children sang folk songs ranging from the fantastic to the satirical: some spun stories of witches and vampires while others (disturbingly) glorified the infidelity of particular villagers, wife-beating, and the vodka that helped perpetuate it all. Envision a band of pre-teen girls—dressed in their Sunday best—entering the traditional drunken banquet as Olearius described and performing an homage to vodka. They stumble about—imitating the drunken women of the village—singing gaily as they dance.
Vodka delicious I drank, I drank
Not in a cup or a glass, but a bucketful I drank…
I cling to the posts of the door.
Oh, doorpost, hold me up, the drunken woman, the tipsy rogue.40
Shocking as this may seem to our modern sensibilities, children were not spared from alcohol within the communal drinking culture. “One can hardly fail to be surprised when a child who cannot yet walk or talk reaches out for vodka, asks for some with gestures, is given some, and then drinks it with pleasure,” describes a Yaroslavl parish priest in the nineteenth century. “A four- or five-year old will already drink a full glass.…And even a young unmarried girl does not find it shameful on occasion, for example during work parties [pomoch’], to drink a good glass of vodka and another of beer.”41 Socialized from such a young age into a community that not only tolerates, but actively encourages, drunkenness—is it any wonder that such practices endure for generations?
Touring Russia’s rural provinces, nineteenth-century agrarian reformer Andrei Zablotsky-Desyatovsky recalled the lamentable—but typical—use of religious holidays as a pretext for getting inebriated. Upon entering a village, he found nothing but drinking and debauchery.
“What are you celebrating, and why are you so drunk?” he asked one of the peasants.
“What do you mean? Today is the Assumption of the Mother of God,” one drunk replied, adding wryly: “perhaps you have heard of her?”
“But the day of the Assumption was yesterday!”
“So? You’ve got to drink for three days,” claimed the peasant.
“Why three days?” Zablotsky-Desyatovsky shot back. “Did the Mother of God command that?”
“Of course she did. Our Holy Mother knows how we peasants love to drink!”42
While the ritual-based traditional drinking culture led to bouts of extreme intoxication, the oversight of a tight-knit community helped prevent chronic, day-in, day-out alcoholism. “It must also be said,” as one nineteenth-century parish priest from Yaroslavl suggested, “that in spite of their inclination towards drunkenness, there are extremely few or even no drunkards. Even the most hardened drinker will return home at midnight, or early in the morning, sleep, sober himself up with kvas, and work as hard as ever until the next Sunday.”43
The traditional drinking culture can be seen even today throughout Russia, especially around holidays. During the thirteen days between Christmas (December 25) and Orthodox Christmas (January 7), many Russians engage in a two-week bender. Consequently, the first week of January in Russia is always marked by a dramatic spike in alcohol poisonings, crimes, highway accidents, murders, and all manner of alcohol-related mortality.44 According to Russia’s foremost alcohol researcher, Aleksandr Nemtsov, Russia’s annual vodka “marathon” is a more dire threat than terrorism—annually killing over two thousand inhabitants of Moscow alone. Some have even suggested that a modern “cult of Bacchus” has supplanted traditional Orthodox Christianity as the basis for religion and social interaction. “Once, when people wished each other well, they prayed for you—now, they drink to you.” One’s friendships are measured by how much you’ve drunk together, and even when you die, your friends will carry you to the grave, drinking on your behalf.45
These are the roots of the uniquely Russian tradition of zapoi—a period lasting days or even weeks dedicated to continuous overintoxication, which may or may not correspond with a religious holiday. During a visit to Russia in the 1850s, Baron von Haxthausen described it in the following terms: “The Great Russians do not drink constantly, nor daily, and many of them not at all for months, nor will they take brandy even when offered to them; but times and temptations occur when, if they taste a drop, a perfect rage for it seizes them [zapoi]: they will then drink continuously for days, nay weeks, and squander all they possess, to their last farthing. On these occasions arises the great profit of the kabak.”46
EARLY SOVIET PROPAGANDA POSTER. “Away with Church Celebrations!” depicts two drunken workers leaving a church festival. Side panels show the disastrous consequences of holiday drinking, from fights and hooliganism to family destitution and getting run over by public transportation. Source: Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
New Drinks, New Drinking Patterns
These destructive elements are deeply rooted in a Russian traditional drinking culture that predated vodka. The arrival of vodka and the tsar’s taverns not only wedded those practices to a drink of unmatched potency but also introduced “modern” social relations, economic conflicts, and individual drinking customs that proved to be even more destructive.
As in other countries, once introduced, the tavern quickly became the center of village life, with traditional, communal celebrations even taking place within its walls. But the tavern was open every day, not just on holidays and feast days. It was an especially powerful temptation for village artisans and workers: paid in cash, they could more easily pay for booze than could peasants reaping grains in kind. These, then, became Russia’s first “modern” alcoholics: men who drank regularly and individually rather than strictly according to the communal calendar.
For those accustomed to traditional patterns, finding dozens of inebriates holed up in a dank village tavern in the middle of a workday was difficult to comprehend. In the 1850s, the Russian traveler Protasyev was so struck by it that he barged into taverns and bluntly asked the drunkards there why they drank.
“The temptation is huge. I myself am not glad that I drink, but what can I do?” answered one man, who professed that life would be better without taverns. “The vodka seems to beg me to drink it. Sometimes, I do not want to go into the tavern, but I go onto my front steps and it’s there, right there, as if beckoning to me. I go in, and once I am in no good can come of it.”47
The combination of these two distinct drinking cultures—one ancient, one modern—was even reflected in different characterizations of the drinkers themselves. Adjectives like temperate or sober normally denote someone who does not drink at all. “But in Russia,” as nineteenth-century observers noted, the “sober” label applies to “one who only gets drunk upon the festivals of the Church,”in other words, to one who adhered to the traditional drinking culture, not the modern.48
In economists’ terms, the demand for alcohol in the traditional drinking culture was inelastic—limited only by regular communal rituals. In the modern culture, demand was elastic—limited only by the peasant’s ability to pay. Consequently, the state stood to profit far more from the modern, individualistic drinking culture, which in turn worsened the negative social and health consequences of widespread intoxication.49 Vodka, the tavern, and the individualistic drinking culture also created the modern alcoholic. While close-knit communal drinking resulted its share of embarrassing, alcohol-fueled escapades, oversight by the community at least discouraged the type of chronic alcoholism engendered by the
modern drinking culture. “At a single blow vodka destroyed social, cultural, moral and ideological taboos,” even our old friend Pokhlebkin claimed. “In this respect it acted like an atomic explosion in the stagnant calm of patriarchal feudalism.”50 Indeed.
The arrival of vodka, the tsar’s kabak, and the tavern keeper changed everything. Instead of weaker fermented beverages, people now drank the more potent vodka. Instead of drinking within the community, now peasants escaped whenever to the tavern to drink away their last dime, often leading their families to destitution. What’s more, the welding of the new, individualistic drinking culture to the traditional, communal one irreversibly changed the relationship between state and society: tearing peasants away from their communities and tethering them to the state with a bond of alcohol that proved to be more durable than even serfdom. In this way, it broke the economic self-sufficiency of the traditional Russian village.51
At the same time, the tavern also exacerbated feudal class divisions. For one, it wasn’t the peasantry, but the local gentry, landowners who had the resources (raw materials, labor, and imperial permission), to conduct large-scale distillation on their estates. So, it was the regional landlords who provided the vodka to the local tax farmers and village taverns. Meanwhile, these wealthy elites could afford to drink at home—enjoying more expensive, higher quality imported wines stored in their well-apportioned wine cellars—rather than patronize the village tavern and mingle with artisans, tradesmen, and peasants who dwelt in the taverns—the veritable drug dens of imperial Russia. The culture of tavern drinking thus accentuated class distinctions between rich and poor in Russia, while the liquor trade itself made the rich richer and the poor poorer.52
The modern drinking house effectively loosened the community’s hold on a would-be alcoholic, drawing him away from the oversight of village elders and into the solitary recesses of the tavern, where he could better serve the financial interests of the state. At this time, even the issue of drunkenness was recast from a moral conflict between the individual and his religious community into a social and political conflict over state finances. In addition to new social conflicts, the arrival of vodka also created early industry in the form of distillation (as distinct from the traditional trades and handicrafts); it sharpened feudal class conflicts between the gentry and the peasantry; it established new political institutions, such as the highly corrupt tax farm; and firmly entrenched the tavern as the primary interface between Russian society and the state.
From its first introduction, then, vodka fundamentally transformed both Russia’s society and politics. Its potency ensured a steady demand; its advanced manufacturing and laws outlawing distillation except by the nobility meant that the uneducated peasants had to pay cash for this new commercial product; and its monopolization transformed vodka into the primary mechanism by which the government—in concert with feudal lords—simultaneously dominated and exploited the lower classes. Once vodka became entrenched as a key mechanism of autocratic statecraft, the subsequent history of vodka politics in Russia revolved entirely around the inherent contradiction of minimizing the social harms caused by this powerful drug, of which the state was the sole dealer and most eager pusher.53
The conclusions, then, are unavoidable: if one is looking to explain why Russians drink what they do and how they do it, the answer isn’t culture; it’s politics. The financial needs of the early Russian state dictated pushing the more potent and more profitable distilled vodka over less lucrative beers and meads. To maximize revenues, the state actively encouraged its subjects to become alcoholics. Consequently, Russia’s long-standing addiction to vodka is not some eternal, immutable cultural trait, but the result of political decisions intended to enrich the state.
Finally, the introduction of vodka fundamentally altered cultural drinking patterns—augmenting the episodic drunkenness of community celebrations with an even more damaging culture of individual alcoholism. While this perversion of the noble, medicinal ends of the “water of life” would have surely appalled earlier generations of medieval doctors, mystics, priests, and ambassadors who helped introduce distilled spirits into Russia, even those medieval alchemists—to quote historian David Christian—“would have envied a process that transmuted grain so readily into gold.”54
Vodka and the Origins of Corruption in Russia
“You can’t change this system from within. Its founding principles are corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism,” claimed Russia’s prominent anti-corruption blogger, Alexei Navalny. If you join this system, your main instruments become corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism, and it’s impossible to build anything with such instruments.”1
Fed up with Russia’s systemic bribery and corruption—which undermine the ideal of a state bureaucracy, staffed by professionals implementing rules evenly and impersonally, and whose salary is their means of income rather than money culled from their station—this tenacious Moscow lawyer began tracing countless cases of embezzlement, kickbacks, and graft often leading to the highest levels of power. In the frigid winter of 2011–12, massive protests erupted in Moscow against allegations of widespread fraud in the series of elections that heralded Vladimir Putin’s return for a third term as Russia’s president. Before gradually retreating unfulfilled, this predominantly young, predominantly urban, predominantly middle-class protest movement shook Russia’s stagnant political scene and rallied against Putin’s corrupt United Russia party, which Navalny forever branded as “the party of crooks and thieves.”
According to Transparency International, in 2012 Russia was far and away the most corrupt of the world’s twenty largest economies, ranking 133rd of 176 countries—placing it squarely behind such paragons of clean and effective governance as Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. As a percentage of overall economic activity, the shadow economy in Russia is larger than in Chad or Senegal. And as cost projections for the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi ballooned over 400 percent to $50 billion—eclipsing even China’s world-record $40 billion tab for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics—many cited pervasive corruption, with businesses paying kickbacks in excess of fifty percent. The Russian edition of Esquire even estimated the construction cost of one notorious stretch of Sochi roadway as the equivalent of paving its entire length in Louis Vuitton handbags.2
Russians are well aware of corruption, regularly ranking it just behind alcoholism as one of the country’s most pressing problems. Patients pay off doctors for their “free” healthcare, students grease teachers for better grades, families bribe draft boards to keep their sons out of the army, and police officers spend more time on shakedowns than stakeouts. According to the government’s own statistics, Russians shell out more than $300 billion in bribes every year. While the economic costs are staggering, so too are the political impacts: Russia is saddled with an enormous, outmoded, and notoriously corrupt sistema, throughout which bureaucrats exploit their public positions for private gain.3
Yet while Navalny and throngs of shivering protesters were quick to blame Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party for this state of affairs, systemic corruption in Russia predates both Putin and the oft-cited weak post-Soviet institutions he inherited from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.4 Its roots go far deeper.
Even in the 1970s, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev championed a “decisive struggle against greed, bribe-taking, parasitism, and drunkenness”—those vestiges of Russia’s capitalist past—words that parroted his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev a decade earlier.5 Yet bribes and favors were often the only way to get scarce goods necessary to fulfill the state’s economic plans. “Corruption may be as integral to Soviet life as vodka and kasha,” concluded one Cold War study—it was the secret oil that lubricated the communist system. Not surprisingly, every Soviet leader waged a half-hearted war on corruption, and they lost every single time.6
Corruption likewise plagued the tsars’ feudal economy. In the 1850s, Nicholas I commissioned an anti-corruption investigation, which exposed graft an
d bribery even among the tsar’s highest officials. When asked how many of Russia’s forty-five governors would not take bribes, the commission could only find two honest men—no more. “To live in the middle of such conscious corruption was horrible,” explained Nicholas’s biographer, “yet to remove it was impossible. In despair, the czar threw the report of the commission into the fire.” Privately Nicholas lamented that he was the only honest man in Russia.7
Corruption and alcoholism are the twin systemic afflictions that have “debilitated Russia as long as anyone can remember.”8 These diseases are symbiotic: each is perpetuated by the other. Like so many of Russia’s social ills, one major source of corruption in Russia can be found at the bottom of the bottle.
Blat, Bribery, And Corruption
Any discussion of corruption begins with blat—a word so quintessentially Russian that it defies literal translation. Unlike “bribery”—so cold and impersonal—blat embodies the warmth and friendship of mutual assistance as friends struggle to cope with both hardship and red tape through favors and connections. Bribery demands cash for action. Blat can be a favor that needn’t be repaid immediately or in cash. Even incorruptibles who would never take a bribe would happily use their connections to help family and friends.9
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 14