The liquor question likewise had a palpable influence on Alexander II’s other monumental reform: the abolition of serfdom in 1861. “If there have been riots for a bottle of polugar [cheap vodka],” asked Yakov Rostovtsev—one of the major figures in drafting the emancipation—“what will happen if we cut off a dessiatin [hectare] of land?”31 While the fate of serfdom may have been determined well before the roiling liquor riots, the logistics were not. The gentry slaveholders were pressuring the Crown to protect their power by granting the serfs their release without land. The specter of a massive peasant population that was both restive and dispossessed spooked the “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II into a compromise arrangement that made Russia’s newly landed citizens nominally self-sufficient but still retained significant power for the landowners. In this way, then, as historian David Christian suggests, “it is reasonable to maintain that the liquor protests did play a significant role in the shaping of the emancipation settlement.”32
Laissez Faire, Laissez Boire
In 1861, Alexander II liberated the peasants from serfdom and by ending the tax farm in 1863 liberated them from their slavery to vodka too… right? Unfortunately, no. Just as Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was an important symbolic break with America’s feudal past that did not translate into immediate freedom from domination, the same could be said about Russia’s emancipation. For one, the land the newly liberated peasants received was rarely enough for their own survival, while the crushing weight of the redemption tax—meant to compensate the landowner for the sudden loss of his workforce—effectively kept the village dependent on the landowner. Likewise, the dumping of the tax farm for a free market system that collected only an excise of four rubles per bucket (or vedro—3.25 gallons) of 100-proof spirits only masked the continued subservience of Russian society to the state through the bottle.33
The new system effectively strengthened Russia’s state capacity by expanding its bureaucracy to take over functions that had been outsourced to the tax farmers. Regulating the liquor trade and collecting vodka revenues required recruiting over two thousand honest and competent civil servants—no small task. To reduce the incentives for bribery, the new administrators had to have no ties to the former system and had to be paid well—to the tune of over three million rubles per year in combined salaries. The system aspired to meritocracy: well-performing regulators received bonuses while incompetence, nepotism, and corruption would be punished. Still, elements of the old system endured. For one, the tavern remained untouched as the central exchange point between the village and the state, and the tyranny of the unscrupulous tselovalnik, or tavern keeper, continued unabated. Also, many of the tax farmers who had long profited handsomely from the drink trade simply moved into the lucrative practice of distilling—since it was effectively no longer monopolized by the nobility—and colluded to hide much of their actual production to avoid paying the excise tax.34
The greatest continuity, however, was the state’s reliance on vodka revenues. As figure 9.1 demonstrates, from the introduction of the excise system in 1863, government revenues crept upward steadily before being replaced by a state vodka monopoly in 1894 (at which time they increased even more dramatically).
Did the demise of the tax farm lead to cheaper vodka prices, and an “orgy of drunkenness,” as the defenders of the old system warned? At first, perhaps: with their tax farms expiring and with warehouses of vodka to dispose of before the introduction of new taxes and market competition, the years around 1863 saw a spike in alcohol consumption. Overall, though, the years of imperial Russia’s excise tax experiment generally saw a gradual decrease in alcohol consumption (see figure 9.2).
The slight decline of consumption and simultaneous increase in alcohol revenues in the late nineteenth century hints at the autocratic state’s steady retreat from laissez faire principles to reestablish a greater presence in the vodka market. Liquor licenses in 1865, for instance, cost all of 10 rubles—twenty years later, they had risen to 1,100 rubles, leading to fewer outlets. In another effort to squeeze out every kopeck, the government increased the excise tax in 1864, 1869, 1873, 1881, 1885, 1887, and 1892, leading to gradual decreases in consumption.35
Figure 9.2 ESTIMATES OF RUSSIAN PER CAPITA CONSUMPTION OF 40-PROOF VODKA, 1863–1914 Sources: L. I. Dembo, Ocherk deyatel’nosti komissii po voprosu ob alkogolizmeza 15 let: 1898–1913 (St. Petersburg, Tip. P. P. Soikina, 1913), 163; Mikhail Fridman, Vinnaya monopoliya, tom 2: Vinnaya monopoliya v Rossii. (Petrograd: Pravda, 1916), 66, 265, 444; Nikolai Osipov, Kazennaya prodazha vina (St. Petersburg: E. Evdokimov, 1900), 77; J. Y. Simpson, Some Notes on the State Sale Monopoly and Subsequent Prohibition of Vodka in Russia (London: P. S. King & Son, 1918), 32.
Many countries of Europe and North America achieved similar decreases in alcohol consumption but by different means: political reform coupled with grass-roots temperance activism.36 Yet while the vodka market was heavily regulated, it was at least nominally free—unlike the tsar’s subjects. With civic activism still outlawed, ordinary Russians could scarcely hope to stand up to the imperial alco-state. For all of the modernizing reforms of Alexander II, the state still largely relied on alcohol revenues (figure 9.1) and would not tolerate any threat to the state’s finances, no matter how well intentioned. If temperance were to succeed, the Russian state would fail—it was as simple as that.
“In 1865 the people fancied that because they were no longer serfs they could not be treated so unceremoniously as of yore,” wrote British journalist Eustace Clare Grenville Murray about Russia’s temperance aspirations, “but they found out their mistake. They were simply dealt with as insurgents, and though not beaten, were fined, bullied, and preached at till there was no spirit of resistance left in them.” Written in 1878, Murray’s Russians of To-Day explained:
A person may also be severely punished for not getting drunk, as a certain Polish [!] schoolmaster whom we met one day disconsolately wielding a besom on the quays in company of a dozen kopeckless rogues who are being made examples of because they have no friends. The crime of our schoolmaster was that he lifted up his voice in his school and in tea-shops against “King Vodki,” and tried to inveigle some university students into taking a temperance pledge. He was privately warned that he had better hold his peace, but he went on, and the result was that one evening as he was walking home somebody bumped against him; he protested; two policemen forthwith started up, hauled him off, charged him with being drunk and disorderly, and the next day he was sentenced to sweep the streets for three days—a sentence, which fortunately does not involve the social annihilation which it would in other countries.
The fact is that in Russia you must not advocate temperance principles; the vested interests in the drink trade are too many and strong. Nobody forces you to drink yourself; the Raskolniks, or dissenters, who are the most respectable class of the Russian community and number 10,000,000 souls, are in general abstainers, but they, like others, must not overtly try to make proselytes. There are many most enlightened men who hate and deplore the national vice, who try to check it among their own servants, who would support any rational measure of legislation by which it could be diminished; but if one of them bestirred himself too actively in the matter he would find all his affairs in some mysterious fashion grow out of joint. Authors and journalists are still less in a position to cope with the evil, for the press censors systematically refuse to pass writings in which the prevalency of drunkenness is taken for granted.37
Even after winning their emancipation, the peasantry of late-imperial Russia knew little more of freedom than that of their forefathers. Instruments of mass servility can take many forms—so even when it came time to put away the whips and chains, vodka remained. Indeed, the bottle proved to be an even more durable and effective means of maintaining dominance and control. Not only did it mollify the people; it made a tremendous profit in the process.
“It must be remembered that the policy of the Russian Government has
always been to keep the State wealthy at the expense of the population. Ever since Ivan the Terrible the Tzars have been fabulously rich princes of a very poor country.” Writing in 1905, Italian diplomat and historian Luigi Villari explained that “it enables the Government to undertake great schemes of territorial expansion while keeping the people in a state of economic subjugation and rendering them incapable of rising against their rulers. Of course the final object is to increase the wealth and the importance of the whole Empire, but everything is done from a narrow bureaucratic point of view, so that the end is apt to be forgotten in the elaboration of the means.”38
The macabre beauty of building such a system on a foundation of vodka was that the peasant did not see vodka as the source of his bondage but, rather, as an escape to freedom.39 The bottom of the bottle promised sweet annihilation from life’s boundless disappointments and hardships. For the drinker, there was no escape: the only escape from slavery was a different slavery—one disguised as freedom. For the state, it was an almost perfect system—so long as the state need not concern itself with the well-being of its society. Of course, only autocracies can completely disregard the interests of their peoples, which is why it is necessary to understand vodka politics as an intractable and enduring element of Russia’s autocratic system, from its very beginning to the present.
10
The Pen, the Sword, and the Bottle
The sapient reader, to this point, has likely already discerned a particular affinity between the thesis that Russia’s feudal autocracy used vodka to both suppress and exploit the poor for the benefit of the state and the brash, anti-capitalist polemics of later generations of socialist revolutionaries. This begs the question: if vodka truly was how the imperial Russian state exploited its society, wouldn’t Karl Marx or some of his Russian followers have something to say about it? As it turns out, they did. In fact, just as it is difficult to discuss feudalism without Marxism, it is also tough to discuss both communism and the anti-tsarist literature of Russia’s “golden era” without the vodka that served as an unmistakable symbol of the corrupt autocracy itself.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” began German philosopher Karl Marx and his coauthor Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto (1848).1 In its most basic form, Marxism argues that history can best be understood as conflict between the rich (bourgeoise) and the poor (proletariat), with the former exploiting the latter. In feudal societies—where the economic and legal power of a noble derived from the subjugation of his peasants—the links between exploiter and exploited were obvious. Marx argued that this exploitation continues into capitalist societies, where bourgeois landlords and factory owners owed their riches to the sweat and toil of the peasants and shop floor workers. As Marx’s theory of historical development metamorphosed into the political ideology of communism—promoting the overthrow of the bourgeois minority by the more numerous proletariat—the working classes would cast off those institutions that have long kept them under the boot of the rich capitalists.
Those institutions are many. Marx considered the state itself as merely a “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Even religion was an instrument of bourgeois domination: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” Marx said. “It is the opium of the people.”2 The people had other opiates too, and alcohol was foremost among them. “Drink is the curse of the working classes” was a common rallying cry for both Marxists and temperance advocates, who both preached abstinence as a cure for poverty. Others took a more tongue-in-cheek approach, instead siding with Oscar Wilde’s 1893 proclamation that “work is the curse of the drinking classes.”3
Karl Marx never wrote much about Russia. Why would he? In his time, Eastern Europe was largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution and its inherent hardships and exploitations. Better to focus on places where capitalism and its abuses were most perverse—Britain, France, and Marx’s native Germany—where a working-class revolution seemed far more likely. Still, Marx did consider alcohol as one mechanism of subjugation. “The specific economic form in which unpaid labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude,” he wrote in Das Kapital, “as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production and hence all of its specific forms.”4
Engels went further in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. His vivid, firsthand study describes the putrid residences and deplorable working conditions of Manchester and Liverpool and the resulting disease, decay, and immorality of urban capitalism. That the workers “drink heavily is to be expected,” Engels explained:
On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter.… And when their money is spent, the drunkards go the the nearest pawnshop [to] pawn whatever they possess.…When one has seen the extent of intemperance among the workers in England, one readily believes Lord Ashley’s statement that this class annually expends something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating liquor; and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic relations which follow may readily be imagined.5
Not surprisingly, Engels lays the blame for drunken destitution solely with the system of capitalist exploitation that cares nothing for the enlightenment and happiness of the average worker. Along with Marx, Engels also highlighted the bourgeois state’s monopolization of the means of production—vodka production, in our case—as driving the dominance of the proletariat by the bourgeois state.6 So even though Marx never wrote much specifically about Russia, many educated eighteenth-century Russians read his general critiques of capitalism as describing the tsarist system to a tee.
In fact, an entire spectrum of opponents to absolute monarchy—from moderate liberals wishing for representative democracy to radical nihilists—all drew on Marx’s condemnation of capitalist domination. As opponents of tsarism, they likewise all suffered the heavy-handed wrath of Russia’s conservative autocracy. To sneak past government censors and avoid the suspicions of the okhrana—the tsar’s secret police—all manner of critics were forced to bury their anti-autocratic messages deep in their writing. Why do we still pour over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel about a double murder, Crime and Punishment? Partly because it is about much more than just a double murder! Literature could speak truth to power without the power necessarily hearing. This is why early revolutionaries—from Aleksandr Herzen to Nikolai Chernyshevsky—wrote both fiction and literary criticism. The “thick” literary journals in which social commentaries were published alongside fiction became conduits of revolutionary ideas. Indeed, Herzen’s journal Kolokol (The Bell) was the first to publish the Communist Manifesto in Russian, which unleashed a firestorm of debate in educated circles throughout the empire.7
Just as literature provided a veil to criticize tsarism, highlighting lower-class drunkenness and exposing the corruption of the vodka administration constituted a frontal attack on the entire autocratic system. Not surprisingly, vodka politics was a popular theme in the “greats” of Russian literature.
In 1847, pro-Western Russian liberal Aleksandr Herzen emigrated from Russia, never to return. From self-imposed exile in London he became immensely influential as the first independent Russian political publisher. Believing political legitimacy lay with the people and that all oppression originated with the tsarist state, Herzen called for a genuinely democratic social revolution. Clandestinely smuggled and ci
rculated in Russia, his journal Kolokol bashed the corruption of the tsarist system in general and the vodka tax bureaucracy in particular.8
As was noted back in chapter 8, it was a series of scathing 1858–59 Kolokol articles on the corruption radiating from the the vodka tax farm that made abolishing it a hot political topic. Just a few short years after the Communist Manifesto, the denunciation was unabashedly Marxist: “By tolerating and enabling the tax farmer, the government is consciously robbing the people—dividing up the spoils with the tax farmers and others who have participated in the crime.”9
To be clear: it wasn’t just that the system bred corruption, but that the state actively promoted the poverty, drunkenness, and backwardness of its own people. “Upon closer inspection,” concluded the Kolokol exposé, “the treasury receives so little benefit in proportion to the losses of the people, that all would likely say with revulsion—was all of this worth the soiling of our conscience and honor?”10 Even after such broadsides prompted the abolition of the medieval tax farm system, writers of all political persuasions continued to use vodka as a call to reform the autocracy… or even overthrow it.
The Best, Worst Novel Ever
If Russians truly looked to literature for political cues, which writer was most influential? Leo Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Ivan Turgenev? Surprisingly, none of the above; arguably it was Nikolai Chernyshevsky and his novel What Is to Be Done?—“a book few Western readers have ever heard of and fewer still have read,” according to Stanford professor Joseph Frank. “No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? in its effect on human lives and the power to make history. For Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.”11
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 19