Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State

by Mark Lawrence

  Has anyone received access to a better medical care, education? To new apartments? What have we got?… We have only got one thing. You all know the one product that since Soviet time has become more affordable: vodka. This is why the only thing that is guaranteed to all of us, citizens of this country, is the degradation and the chance of drinking ourselves to death.68

  Popular apathy “only helps this disgusting feudal regime, which, like a spider, is sitting in the Kremlin.” In concluding, Navalny declared that indifference toward the corrupt sistema only benefits the state and the well-connected few, while putting the rest of “the Russian people on the path of degradation and drinking to death, and to take away all of the national wealth from the country,” just as in imperial Russia.69 Well then—if the parallels are so stark, what does history suggest in terms of the prospects for genuine reform? Here too, the outlook is gloomy.

  Following its embarrassing military defeat in the Crimean War in 1855, the great reformer, Tsar Alexander II, enacted sweeping reforms: revamping the military, judiciary, bureaucracy, and financial system and abolishing both serfdom and the tax farm. But corruption has a cockroach-like tenacity in systems of personalized power: even though the cause of obligatory corruption was gone, the corrupt officials remained, finding other dubious paths to riches. For instance, the notorious, aforementioned tax farmer Vasily Kokorev simply moved into distilling while using his government contacts to snag upwards of eight million rubles.70 What’s more, these reforms did nothing to stop the petty corruption of the tavern keepers, who still watered down and undermeasured drinks while maintaining a lucrative pawn-and-credit trade on the side. It did nothing to remedy the infiltration of vodka, money, and influence into Russia’s traditional institutions of local self-government and the Orthodox Church.

  Simply changing the method of tax collection could not undo generations of systemic corruption. Even approaching the dawn of the twentieth century, German author Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna explained that the highest civil servants appointed by Emperor Alexander III were “the most hopeless mediocrites, bigots or mere seekers of wealth and position” and explained how below this ruling mediocracy toils

  an innumerable army of minor officials, of whom many are good, intelligent, honest men, who, however are compelled by the acting system of government to act mostly in the capacity of tyrants, of stiflers of every token of personal independence and intellectual life, and agents for pressing taxes out of the economically exhausted population. The better part of these officials try to avoid doing, so far as they possibly can, what the system forces them to do; the worse part try to turn their power into a means for personal profit; and this creates a most unnatural position of things in the country: both parts practically (though silently) teach the population that laws are created in order not to be observed.71

  For Samson-Himmelstjerna, the disconnect between the corrupt, out-of-touch leadership and the suffering of the Russian people was most vividly illustrated in 1892, as the government debated resurrecting the reviled vodka tax farm amid a devastating famine along the Volga that claimed nearly a half-million lives. To the horrors of typhus, scurvy, and cholera the imperial ministry of finance sought to add the burden of a salt tax and the vodka tax farm—“those two scourges of the unfortunate nation, that contributed so much to its impoverishment and demoralisation—speak for themselves of what is the present Tsar’s government from the economic point of view.”72

  Since corrupt individuals and practices outlast the reasons for their formation, generations of imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have had to grapple with these consequences. Indeed, placing debates over present-day anti-corruption measures in this deep historical context underscores corruption’s intractability and the inadequacy of proposed remedies.

  On the one hand, many of the practical policy suggestions for grappling with corruption in present day Russia—like empowering autonomous business organizations, redrawing legal districts, or rotating judges to reduce the potential for patronage—are simply not enough to meaningfully overcome the problem. Even the monumental reforms enacted by Alexander II—which fundamentally attacked the roots of systemic corruption—hardly made a dent. Why should we expect greater results from smaller, more easily circumvented initiatives like rotating judges?

  On the other hand, academic accounts claiming that—theoretically—corruption can be restrained by “strengthening the rule of law” or by empowering “accountable local self-government” may well be true, but these suggestions are vague and impractical.73 Virtually every Russian leader over the past hundred years—including some of the world’s most powerful autocrats—has vowed a war on corruption, and each one has failed. “Blat is higher than Stalin,” as the old Soviet saying goes—and it isn’t far from the truth.74 Patronage, bribery, and corruption are the legacies of Russian state building. Along with the corrupt officials who secured positions of economic and political power through such means—they are also the intractable foundations of the autocratic state itself. They serve the needs of the autocracy, which in turn relies on them.75

  The only conclusions for true reform, then, are the most pessimistic ones. Some suggest that real change will come with only a complete overhaul of the social and political systems that make corrupt behavior in people’s economic interest. Not only are such wholesale structural changes in contemporary Russia unrealistic, but history suggests that they are not adequate.76 To root out corruption, Russia would need to completely demolish its political, economic, and social structures, develop a vibrant economy that makes bribery and graft less vital to a household’s bottom line, and adjust to cultural norms that no longer tolerate the rewards of position.77 As with drinking cultures, cultures of corruption change only glacially over generations—and this says nothing about how such mass socio-cultural re-education could ever be done.

  The sad prognosis is that Putin and every Russian autocrat who follows will continue the eternal battle with corruption.78 And whether genuine or halfhearted, every such attempt is likewise doomed to fail until they meaningfully confront the nexus of alcohol, corruption, and autocracy that constitutes Russian vodka politics.

  Vodka Domination, Vodka Resistance… Vodka Emancipation?

  From Peter the Great onward, the history of modern Russia is often told in terms of its imperial conquests: an expansive empire searching for warm-water ports from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and eastward to the Pacific Ocean. These geopolitical ambitions brought Russia in conflict with Swedes and Turks, Poles and Persians, and the empires of Japan and Britain. While realpolitik characterized imperial Russian foreign policy, the domestic foundations for these conquests were provided by vodkapolitik. Russia’s great power status was built not only by her massive military but also by the Russian peasantry who paid dearly to support it.

  From Peter’s twenty-year Great Northern War against Sweden, to Alexander I’s triumphant showdown with Napoleon, and to Nicholas’ fiasco in the Crimea, wars are costly—not only for the peasant conscripts who paid with their lives but also for the society that endured ever greater requisitions, impositions, and taxes. Even in peacetime the costs of repaying war debts and maintaining a standing army brought little respite for the people and ensured that vodka revenues would remain crucial to the state’s ambitions.1

  Yet by the mid-nineteenth century it was obvious that Russia’s outmoded political system—built on medieval serfdom and a corruption-generating tax farm—could no longer keep up with the industrializing and modernizing powers of Europe. The autocracy was besieged by reform pressures from European liberals, abolitionists, and temperance advocates, while Russia’s embarrassing military defeat in the Crimea finally triggered sweeping political reform. Yet even the death of serfdom and the tax farm could not kill the political dynamics of Russian vodka politics: the state’s thirst for revenue was unquenchable, and once again it would be society that paid the tab with its misery.

  The Drunken Budget

&nbs
p; Figuring out exactly how much vodka contributed to the imperial treasury sounds simple: just leaf through the archives of the finance ministry. The problem is that—like most European states—until 1802 Russia did not actually have a finance ministry or even a unified state budget. Instead, a hodgepodge of different institutions was empowered to both raise and spend revenues in the name of the tsar. Add to that the generations of monarchs who considered the land and people as their personal possessions, and suddenly untangling public (government) from private (royal) funds becomes difficult, and retroactively constructing a modern-looking “budget” becomes almost impossible. Of course it was the same entanglement of public and private through the vodka tax farm that bred Russia’s systemic corruption in the first place, as the state encouraged private tax farmers to profit handsomely from the collection of public taxes.2

  For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider just the two main revenue sources: direct and indirect taxes. The link between specific expenses and specific revenues was far more explicit then it is today, especially between military expenditures and direct taxes. To pay for war debts and maintain the army, after the Great Northern War with Sweden (1700–1721), Peter the Great replaced a tax on households with a poll tax—or “soul tax”—levied on every man (except the clergy and gentry) from the youngest baby to the village elder. Peter reasoned that the tax from 35.5 “souls” paid for each infantryman, 50.25 for each cavalryman, and so forth. The army itself collected the tax before later outsourcing tax collection to the same landowners who were already responsible for rounding up conscripts from among their serfs. But the poll tax was not reliable for the state: it was tough to collect across Russia’s vast territory, and its collection—often requiring military backup—was highly unpopular. Since any tax increase threatened to ignite a peasant rebellion, revenues from the poll tax were historically stagnant, since the size of the taxable population also was stagnant.3

  For the state at least, indirect taxes—including the gabelle on salt and the tax on vodka—were far easier to collect thanks to the tax farmers. They had the appearance of being voluntary rather than forced, and the amount of the tax was not visible: it was just simply hidden within the retail price. Peter’s salt tax was incredibly lucrative, but by the early 1800s, rising fuel and labor costs had turned the salt trade into a loss-making venture.4

  Vodka, by contrast, was easy money. Whether for religious, medicinal, or recreational purposes, liquor was always in high demand. Unlike the stagnant poll tax or the declining gabelle, the vodka trade was incredibly lucrative, and vodka revenues could be increased by simply raising the tax rate, encouraging greater consumption, or both. This inherent contradiction—that the financial power of the autocratic state rested on the debauching of its own people through drink—was the ultimate deal with the devil. As historian John P. LeDonne argued, once the treasury was hooked on vodka, the government “could not escape the dilemma that in encouraging the nobility to produce and the masses to consume liquor, it contributed to the spread of drunkenness and moral turpitude in town and countryside alike. This dilemma remained with the Imperial government until its demise in 1917.”5 Indeed, this is the essence of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics: this fundamental dilemma outlasted the tsarist empire to bedevil the Soviet empire and the present-day Russian Federation as well.

  The state’s “big three” revenue sources were always the poll tax, the salt tax, and the vodka tax. From the few historical re-creations of eighteenth-century Russian finances that we have, already by 1724 the 900,000 silver rubles gained from the liquor trade constituted 11 percent of all government receipts, eclipsing the gabelle’s 600,000 rubles (7 percent) to be the biggest indirect tax source. By 1795 vodka’s contribution had grown to 17.5 million rubles, or fully 30 percent of the budget, while the salt trade lost 1.2 million rubles. In 1819 receipts from the vodka trade eclipsed even direct taxes, and from 1839 until the empire’s death throes in the Great War, vodka consistently provided the single greatest source of revenue to the imperial treasury.6

  Yet, even in light of these staggering statistics, is it fair to characterize this as subjugation of the Russian lower classes? After all, the peasantry seemed all too willing to drink up and endure not just the vodka tax farm, but also the systemic corruption it created.

  “To be under the will of a lord is a good thing for subjects [muzhiki],” claimed godfather of the kabak, Ivan the Terrible, “for where there is no will of the lord set above them, they get drunk and do nothing.” But it was not just the tyrannical Ivan who saw slavery as preferable to alcohol: an early-seventeenth-century Dutch visitor found the penchant for drunkenness as proof that the Russians “better support slavery than freedom, for in freedom they would give themselves over to license, whereas in slavery they spend their time in work and labor.” Ultimately, in Ivan’s era, alcohol and slavery were two sides of the same coin: when it came to amassing laborers, some were indentured by force, “others were merely asked to drink some wine, and after three or four cups they found themselves slaves in captivity against their will.”7

  But that was medieval Russia, well before the codification of serfdom in the Ulozhenie of 1649. What then? As it turns out, even foreign visitors from the eighteenth century found the same subservience of the enserfed classes through alcohol.

  “The vice of drunkenness is prevalent among this people in all classes, both secular and ecclesiastical, high and low, men and women, young and old. To see them lying here and there in the streets, wallowing in filth, is so common that no notice is taken of it,” wrote Adam Olearius in the 1630s. Highlighting the class distinctions, he noted: “The common people, slaves, and peasants are so faithful to the custom [of drinking elites’ vodka] that if one of them receives a third cup and a fourth, or even more, from the hand of a gentleman, he continues to drink up, believing that he dare not refuse, until he falls to the ground—and sometimes the soul is given up with the draught.”8

  Figure 9.1 IMPERIAL RUSSIAN ALCOHOL REVENUES, 1763–1914 Sources: Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 329, 337; David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 382–91.

  Similar accounts of the people’s submissiveness to vodka litter the eighteenth century, too. In 1778 Englishman William Coxe described how a “benevolent” tax farmer—who had enriched himself by foisting vodka upon the peasantry—threw a liquor-infused public feast for his inebriate flock, who “crowded around the casks and hogsheads; and with great wooden ladles lapped incessantly wine, beer, and spirits. The confusion and riot, which soon succeeded, is better conceived than described; and we thought it expedient to retire. But the consequences of this feast were indeed dreadful.” He continued: “Many intoxicated persons were frozen to death; not a few fell a sacrifice to drunken quarrels; and others were robbed and murdered in the more retired parts of the city, as they were returning late to their homes. From a comparison of various reports, we had reason to conclude that at least 400 persons lost their lives upon this melancholy occasion. (The following day I counted myself no less than forty bodies, collected in two sheds near the place of entertainment.)”9

  By the early nineteenth century this system had long been entrenched—its human costs ever more apparent. “During the chilling blasts of winter,” begins Englishman Robert Ker Porter,

  it is then that we see the intoxicated native stagger forth from some open door, reel from side to side, and meet that fate which in the course of one season freezes thousands to death.… After spending perhaps his last copeck in a dirty, hot kaback or public house, he is thrust out by the keeper as an object no longer worthy of his attention. Away the impetus carries him, till he is brought up by the opposite wall. Heedless of any injury he may have sustained by the shock, he rapidly pursues the weight of his head, by the assistance of his treacherous heels, howling discordant sounds from some incoherent Russian song; a religious fit wi
ll frequently interrupt his harmony, when crossing himself several times, and as often muttering his gospodi pomilui, ‘Lord have mercy upon us!’, he reels forward… and then he tears at the air again with his loud and national ditties: staggering and stumbling till his foot slips, and that earth receives him, whence a thousand chances are, that he will never again arise. He lies just as he fell; and sings himself gradually to that sleep from which he awakes no more.10

  In the early 1800s, foreign visitors moved beyond simply describing the drunken misery of the peasantry; they wanted to explain it, too. “The masses of the nation, the genuine Russians, still bears, in a very great degree, the stamp of northern barbarism,” wrote Hannibal Evans Lloyd in 1826. “They are a vigorous race, but rude, slavishly governed by the knout, almost contented with their melancholy degradation, grossly superstitious, and even without a notion of a better condition. The word of their priests, the images of their saints, and the brandy bottle are their idols.”11 The irony was just as apparent as it was tragic: the more the serfs turned to vodka as an escape from their forced bondage, the more they became slaves to it.

  Lest we be accused of patronizing orientalism in pointing out the pervasive drunkenness of the serf populations of Russia, it is worth mentioning that their additional enslavement to the bottle permeated Western countries as well. Consider American activist and orator Frederick Douglass: born into slavery in antebellum Maryland, the self-taught Douglass escaped to freedom in New York City in 1838 and quickly dedicated himself to the abolitionist cause. Published in 1845, his influential autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: American Slave—a riveting firsthand account of man’s inhumanity toward man—became a bestseller and a galvanizing call for emancipation.