In it, Douglass describes how the only respite from the backbreaking labor, whippings, and the master’s general cruelty came—as with their enserfed counterparts in Russia—during the holidays. “It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas,” Douglass explained, as it was “the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” He continues:
Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery. I have said that this mode of treatment is a part of the whole system of fraud and inhumanity of slavery. It is so.12
Alcohol was even more a part of Russia’s system of fraud and inhumanity of serfdom. At the same time as Frederick Douglass was escaping his bondage in “democratic” America, in 1839 the reactionary French aristocrat Marquis de Custine was touring Russia, searching for arguments against the “mob rule” of democracy. When he got there he was put off by the Russian system of autocracy and the people’s complicity in their bondage through drink. “The greatest pleasure of the people is drunkenness; in other words, forgetfulness,” he wrote. “Unfortunate beings! they must dream if they would be happy.” Custine empathized with the brutalized serfs, whose virtue shone through their happy and affectionate intoxication, so unlike the mean drunks back in France. “Curious and interesting nation! it would be delightful to make them happy. But the task is hard, if not impossible,” he concluded. “Show me how to satisfy the vague desires of a giant,—young, idle, ignorant, ambitious, and so shackled that he can scarcely stir hand of foot. Never do I pity this people without equally pitying the all-powerful man who is their governor.”13
Yet by mid-century the inherent contradictions in this antiquated system of dual slavery—physical subjugation under the knout and economic subjugation to the bottle—were becoming evident. “The consumption of brandy is one of the greatest evils, the true plague of the Russian empire,” wrote German agriculturalist August von Haxthausen in his detailed 1843 study of rural Russia. His conclusions—widely debated both in Russia and abroad—placed the blame squarely on the system of vodka politics, through which “the peasants were tempted to drink,” if not actively “forced to do so.” When it came to solutions, he argued: “The Government could adopt no more salutary measure than to put it down, but there are great difficulties in the way of effecting this: the farming of the trade in spirits yields an immense revenue, which cannot be relinquished, and could not be easily raised in any other way.”14
Studies like these make it clear that—instead of blaming the victim—it was the system of autocratic vodka politics that created the peasants’ subjugation and misery and that the inherent tensions of slavery to both master and bottle were growing.
Resistance And Rebellion
If the peasantry were truly held captive by vodka, shouldn’t we expect there to have been popular resistance to it? Indeed, by the nineteenth century, the onward march of Enlightenment ideals and the Industrial Revolution were leaving Russia’s feudal culture and economy in the dust while an expanding transnational network of temperance activism championed greater sobriety, which threatened the very foundations of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics.
The temperance contagion entered Russia by way of its European conquests: the third and final partition of Poland in 1795 brought much of the once-great Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth under Russian control. These “new” subjects were more attuned to the political and ideational fashions of Europe, while their link to the Catholic Church in Rome only accentuated their cosmopolitanism. These ecumenical links provided a vital conduit for transmitting new—and potentially subversive—ideas into the Russian empire. While enlightenment liberalism and later socialism loomed as the most obvious foreign threats to the conservative Russian autocracy, the seemingly innocuous temperance cause may have been even more dangerous. “The temperance movement,” in the words of one historian, was “the most important social movement aimed at combating the political and socio-economic policy of tsarist Russia.”15
The international temperance movement can be traced to the American Temperance Society (ATS), which had dazzled the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville during his travels in the United States in the 1830s. “I at last understood that these hundred thousand Americans, alarmed by the progress of drunkenness around them, had made up their minds to patronize temperance.” Tocqueville concluded: “Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than these intellectual and moral associations of America.”16
Tocqueville was hardly alone in introducing American-style temperance to Europe: Protestant activists like the American missionary Robert Baird and the scotsman John Dunlop reported not just the successes of the ATS, but also their mechanics: local self-help communities organized into lodges with members signing a pledge of abstinence from liquor. Ideas begot action: in 1836, an article about the successes of the ATS was published in Riga. Within days the Russian government was flooded with petitions to establish ATS-inspired temperance lodges. Rather than encourage the sobriety of their subjects (and threatening the foundations of state finance), the government resolutely banned all temperance societies, “lest they should be mistaken for separate religious sects.” After an audience with Tsar Nicholas I in 1840, Baird privately lamented that “it will not be possible to form temperance societies here for years,” adding that still “much may be done at once by diffusing information.”17
Yet perhaps the most fertile areas for temperance activism in the tsarist empire lay along its newly incorporated western borderlands. Just as the Catholic Church provided a bulwark against cultural Russification by the Russian Orthodox Church, the temperance cause provided a defense against Russian political colonization. By 1858, the Catholic clergy of Poland and Lithuania had developed a “Brotherhood of Sobriety,” which infused ATS structures with ecclesiastical elements of the Father Mathew and Rechabite temperance societies of Ireland. Father Mathew was a Catholic crusader not just against alcohol, but also against imperial subjugation to the hated English and their Anglican Church. The parallels with the plight of the Catholics under the Orthodox Russian empire were lost on no one.18
The movement spread with breakneck speed (by nineteenth-century standards, at least). From one town to another, priests encouraged their parishioners to take a temperance pledge—not to give up all alcohol, just vodka. Beer, wine, and mead were okay as long as you didn’t get drunk, but vodka—and the Russian imperial domination that it represented—was clearly off limits. Within a year, 83 percent of Catholic parishioners in Kaunas guberniya had taken the oath. In the neighboring provinces of Vilnius and Grodno temperance membership quickly topped one million, accounting for fully three quarters of the population.19
The unexpected outbreak of sobriety threatened financial ruin for the tax farmers and the imperial treasury. Annual liquor sales fell by 40 percent in Vilnius, 33 percent in Grodno, and 70 percent in Kaunas province. Glowing reports described empty taverns, shuttered distilleries, improved health, and more affordable prices for grains, given their greater suppl
y. Tax farmers went bankrupt. Finally, the imperial government stepped in to directly administer the trade and deal with the temperance “emergency.” The lessons of the liquor boycott were painfully clear: if at any point the majority of Russians suddenly decided to sober up, the government would face immediate bankruptcy.20
This was the embarrassing dilemma of vodka politics: if the state promoted the health and well-being of its citizens it faced financial ruin—yet the only alternative was to double down and support the drunkenness and corruption of the tax farm system. Time and again generations of Russian autocrats chose the latter. Defending the tax farmers from Lithuania’s dangerous sobriety, the ministry of internal affairs confiscated abstinence petitions and reprimanded censors for publishing temperance manuals. Yet they stopped short of enforcing the finance ministry’s demand that the Catholic clergy publicly renounce their heresy and preach the gospel of vodka as a “harmless,” even “necessary,” indulgence.21
By the spring of 1859, news of the sobriety movement in the Catholic provinces had spread to the hard-drinking heartland of Russia, from Moscow to the Volga. Among the rural peasants and urban poor, the vodka boycotts were largely peaceful. By that summer, temperance societies had sprung up in thirty-two Russian provinces, with peasants vowing abstinence pledges and village assemblies drafting new fines and corporal punishments for drinkers.22
Yet in migrating to the Orthodox heartland, the temperance movement lost the anti-colonial character of the Catholic provinces of Poland and Lithuania and the Protestant regions of Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. Temperance forces could not coalesce around the Orthodox Church, which had long been complicit in the vodka trade. As Ivan Pryzhov, author of the earliest history of the Russian kabak, noted in the 1860s: the Orthodox monasteries not only introduced and developed distilling in Russia; they also benefited handsomely from kickbacks from the tax farmer. Plus, the village priest’s chronic inebriation meant he could not preach abstinence without being ridiculed at as a hypocrite.23 “If the Church would direct her maternal solicitude to the peasant’s drinking,” wrote nineteenth-century Times correspondent D. Mackenzie Wallace, “she might exercise a beneficial influence on his material and moral welfare. Unfortunately she has a great deal too much inherent immobility to do anything of the kind.”24
By contrast, the corrupt agents of the tax farm were extremely mobile when mass sobriety threatened their lucrative incomes. In one recorded instance from February 1859, the vodka tax farmer from Balashov district enlisted the local police captain (to whom he routinely paid bribes) to help defend his economic “rights.” The police chief tapped the local prosecutor, who opened a formal investigation into the “conspiracy not to drink tax farm vodka.” The otkupshchik himself accompanied the prosecutor to the estate of a local noble to ask his serfs why they were not drinking.
“We’ve seen the error of our ways,” they replied. “This vodka is ruining us! It is a joke—8 rubles a bucket! How many carts of grain would you need to buy a single bucket?”
“In any case,” pressed one of the peasants, wearing the medals of a former soldier, “the vodka is terrible; it’s worse than river water.”
The insulted tax farmer flew at the peasant: “what do you mean, ‘terrible’?”
“Just that. It’s bad. All it does is bloat your stomach.”
“How dare you say that!” raged the tax farmer, who then proceeded to beat the peasant, as they say, “in the customary manner.” The scandal caused a huge backlash in the village. Rumors flew that the tax farmer paid to hush up the entire incident, without success. As a last-ditch effort, the authorities persuaded the landowner to assemble his serfs and present each of them with a free bucket of vodka. “But to their credit,” the report notes, “not one of them would touch it.”25
As time went on, confrontations between the sober peasantry and the alcohol-pushing agents of state finance became more frequent, contentious, and even violent. Occasionally peasants torched taverns, prompting the dispatch of the armed forces to suppress the rebellion. Upwards of 780 “instigators” were tried before military tribunals, whipped and beaten with rods before being exiled to Siberia. Aghast, one British journalist described how “the teetotalers were flogged into drinking; some who doggedly held out had liquor poured into their mouths through funnels, and were afterward hauled off to prison as rebels; at the same time the clergy were ordered to preach in their churches against the new form of sedation, and the press-censorship thenceforth laid its veto upon all publications in which the immorality of the liquor traffic was denounced. These things sound incredible,” he added, “but they are true.”26
It wasn’t just foreigners who shook their heads at such absurdity—liberal Russian critics also were appalled. “Is it true that the crime of sobriety has become so common in Tambov province that governor Danzas has sent army units to suppress non-drinkers?” asked abolitionist Aleksandr Herzen, whose influential magazine, Kolokol (The Bell) avoided Russian censorship by being published from exile in London:
Poor troops! Poor officers! Is it not enough to have to defend the throne and the altar, the whips of the serfowners and the depredations of officials; but now you have to defend the kabak, with its sales by the bottle and glass? Perhaps they will start giving out knighthoods of the tax farm with a vodka bucket for the epaulettes, half-shtof [bottle] crosses for the buttonhole, and, for the lower ranks, medals showing a dove descending towards an open shtof bottle, with the inscription: “Spiritus sanctus—spiriti vini!”27
This was getting out of control. It didn’t take an outspoken critic like Herzen to see that something was very wrong here.
Freedom From Chains And Bottles?
“The Liquor Tax Rebellion,” according to the Big Soviet Encyclopedia, “was a spontaneous protest not only against the tax farmers and the responsible government agencies, but also against the system of serfdom.”28 As we’ve seen, serfdom and vodka politics were cut from the same cloth of feudal servitude—and by the mid-nineteenth century, all it took was a westward glance across Europe to see how outmoded this medieval system was.
The inadequacies of the system were painfully obvious during the Crimean War (1853–1856), when the mighty Russian empire was decimated by the Turks, British, French, and Sardinians on their own territory around the Black Sea. Greatest among the casualties of the war may have been Tsar Nicholas I himself: obsessing over military planning day and night, the ultraconservative gendarme of Europe succumbed to pneumonia on March 2, 1855.
It was up to his successor, Alexander II, to wind down the humiliating and exhausting debacle, and confront the shortcomings it had laid bare. The practical initiatives of Russia’s “great reformer” included reorganizing and modernizing the military, judiciary, and bureaucracy, and also loosening press censorship—for the first time permitting discussion about social and political challenges, including the alcohol problem. While historians commonly point to defeat in the Crimea as prompting Russia’s emancipatory reforms, the protests and riots that pitted entire swaths of Russian society against the state’s antiquated system of dual servitude through serfdom and vodka were arguably a more proximate cause. Serfdom was certainly the most obvious relic of a bygone era, but the state’s reliance on the antiquated tax farm was arguably just as important. So intertwined were the two, it was difficult to consider getting rid one fossil without the other—which is just what Alexander did.29
Sometime between 1858 and 1860, the tsar decided that the vodka farm had to go. Beyond the perverse impact on public health and morality and the specter of an ever-widening vodka rebellion—corruption was running rampant, tax farmers were getting more brazen with their wealth, and neither the treasury nor the gentry distillers were profiting. In 1860, a report by the Department of Political Economy to the State Council openly admitted the fundamental contradiction of vodka politics:
The government cannot and must not lose sight of the effects of this system on the moral and economic welfare of the people.
Everyone knows that tax farming ruins and corrupts the people; keeps the local administration itself under a sort of “farm,” which nullifies all efforts to introduce honesty and justice to the administration; and slowly leads the government into the painful situation of having not only to cover up the flagrant breaches of the law engendered by the system, and without which it cannot operate, but even to resist the people’s own impulses to moral improvement through abstention. In this way, the government itself offers a model of disrespect for the law, support for abuse and the spreading of vice.30
On October 26, 1860, Tsar Alexander II assented to the report and its recommendation not to renew the tax farms set to expire in 1863, at which time they would be replaced with modern system of excise taxes. Not only did this signal the end of the ancien régime in Russian finance, it also nominally removed the source of the systemic corruption (though not the deeply ingrained practices it produced) that was the lifeblood of the vodka farm and finally separated the public from the private—taxes and profits—when it came to the vodka trade. Nevertheless, the systemic corruption and dynamics of vodka politics proved to be far more resilient.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 18