LITHOGRAPH DEPICTING THE FINAL FRENCH ATTACK ON THE MALAKHOFF HILL, 1855 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/William Simpson.
Still, over the ensuring months the heroic defenders of Sevastopol repulsed five separate allied assaults on Russian positions, inflicting heavy losses on both sides. Finally, on their sixth assault, the French successfully overran the city’s last defenses and captured Malakhov Hill on September 8, 1855. The city of Sevastopol surrendered the following day.
The Crimean War was an embarrassing defeat: Russian battle casualties topped one hundred thousand, with another three hundred thousand succumbing to disease, malnourishment, and exposure.41 Among those casualties might be listed Tsar Nicholas I himself, whose military fixation and despair took a dramatic toll on his health. In the spring of 1855, while reviewing troops departing for Crimean battlefields, the tsar contracted pneumonia and died shortly thereafter.
Soon diplomats mingled in Paris while negotiating peace terms, as did former belligerents on the battlefield. A diary entry of British soldier Henry Tyrrell dated Sunday, April 6, 1856, paints a vivid picture:
The great objects of attraction to-day were the Russians, who…wandered into every part of our camp, where they soon made out the canteens. By one o’clock there were a good many of them “as soldiers wish to be who love their grog.” A navvy [British manual laborer] of the most stolid kind, much bemused with beer, is a jolly, lively, and intelligent being compared to an intoxicated “Ruski.”… Their drunken salute to passing officers is very ludicrous; and one could laugh, only he is disgusted at the abject cringe with which they remove their caps, and bow, bareheaded, with horrid gravity in their bleary leaden eyes and wooden faces, at the sight of a piece of gold lace. Some of them seemed very much annoyed at the behavior of their comrades, and endeavoured to drag them off from the canteens; and others remained perfectly sober. Our soldiers ran after them in crowds, and fraternised very willingly with their late enemies.42
Indeed, the French, British, and even the Turkish soldiers happily drank with their newfound Russian friends. At the end of each night’s revelry the Russians returned to their encampments across the deep Chernaya River, which could be crossed only by means of fallen trees—quite a challenge even when sober! Cossack patrols used ropes to pull drunks half-dead (and occasionally fully so) from the water. “Down they came, staggering and roaring through the bones of their countrymen (which in common decency I hope they will bury as soon as possible), and then, after elaborate leave-taking, passed the fatal stream,” Tyrrell wrote. “General Codrington was down at the ford, and did not seem to know whether to be amused or scandalized at the scene.”
The British posted guards along the roads to keep “all the drunken Ruskies out of the town” and sentries along the cliffs and harbors “to prevent them coming in after their jollification at the bazaar.” And still they came—especially the more affluent Russian officers who bought huge quantities of champagne and liquor that cost half as much in the allied camps as in the Russian ones.43
Clearly the embarrassment of pervasive drunkenness contributed to humiliating military defeat in Crimea. Alexander II’s consequent political reforms—abolishing serfdom and the corrupt tax farm—did not stop the state from profiting from the drunkenness of its people, including the lowly peasant conscripts. Only in 1874 did Russia finally scrap Peter the Great’s village quota system for universal conscription, requiring six years of military service for all men. Unfortunately, this reform also universally conscripted Russians to the bottle: even peasants who never touched vodka before enlisting often returned home as drunkards. Later studies found that some 11.7 percent of St. Petersburg workers began drinking vodka only in the military.44 Ultimately, universal conscription became just another tool in the alcoholization of Russian society.
Even in peacetime alcoholism in the ranks was epidemic. Expressly blaming the vodka ration, one military physician estimated that seventy-five percent of the soldiers in infirmaries were there due to alcohol poisoning and that between ten and forty-four percent of all military deaths were attributable to alcohol. “Was he drunk?” became the medic’s standard first question for treating any accident or ailment. But the military brass wasn’t listening. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the imperial ministry of war flatly denied that there was any alcohol problem at all, much less one caused by the troops’ vodka rations.45
The insobriety and ineptitude of the tsarist military was a disaster waiting to happen. And if Crimea suggested that alcohol was a major problem, Japan proved it.
Stumbling Toward Defeat In The Far East
Just as the imperial double-headed eagle peered both west toward Europe and east toward Asia, by the early twentieth century Russia’s imperial ambitions brought it into conflict not only with European powers but increasingly with Asian ones as well. Following combined efforts to suppress the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the empire of Japan held much of Korea while Russia occupied Chinese Manchuria, including Port Arthur (today, Lüshunkou) on the Liaodong Peninsula—Russia’s coveted ice-free port on the Pacific. Previously occupied by Japan before an eight-nation European alliance forced its concession to Russia,46 Port Arthur was crucial to propagating influence in the Far East. The opening salvo in the Russo-Japanese War was a surprise nighttime torpedo attack on the Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904. Japan hoped to strike quickly before Russian reinforcements could arrive from Europe across the still-incomplete Trans-Siberian Railway.
Reinforcements were slow in coming and not simply due to Russia’s anemic infrastructure. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of unwilling sons, husbands, and fathers to fight and die in the Far East unleashed drunken pandemonium at assembly points. Torn from their villages and families, some committed suicide rather than enlist. Officers shot themselves with rifles, slit their own throats with knives, hung themselves, or worse: in his memoirs, military physician Vinkenty Veresayev described how a widower with three dependent children broke down before the military council.
“‘What shall I do with my children? Instruct me what to do! They will all die from starvation without me!’”
“He acted like a madman,” Veresayev recalled: “shouted and shook his fists in the air. Then he suddenly grew silent, went home, killed his children with an axe, and came back.
“‘Now take me’” said the recruit. “‘I’ve attended to my business.’
He was arrested.”47
Beyond such extreme cases, the tearful send-offs at assembly points often turned into orgies of mayhem, as recruitment officers corralled drunken conscripts with bayonets. With surprising frequency commanders were overwhelmed by the drunken masses, as vodka-fueled mobs ransacked local taverns and businesses and murdered recruitment officers.48
Even when recruits were corralled into the trains the drinking did not stop. From the luxury of the officers’ car Veresayev reported that in the cramped, musty cars of the common soldiers, drinking went on day and night. “Nobody knew how or where the soldiers got the vodka. But they had all they wanted.” Not surprisingly, easy access to alcohol and weapons was a recipe for tragedy.
“‘Have you heard this story?’” Veresayev’s traveling companion asked. “‘Officers just told me at the station that soldiers yesterday killed Colonel Lukashóv. They were drunk and started shooting from the cars at a herd that was passing by. He tried to stop them, and so they killed him.’
“‘I heard it differently,’” Veresayev calmly replied. “‘He treated the soldiers very brutally and they promised before departing that they would kill him on the way.’”49 In either case, the long trip across the vast Siberian landmass was marred with drunken misfortune—and more would be waiting on Far Eastern battlefields.
Even more than in the Crimea, coverage by embedded journalists was unflattering for the Russian side. On his first visit to Port Arthur, Associated Press war correspondent Frederick McCormick first noted the grandeur of the Russian ships i
n the small, crowded port; and second, the “pile of perhaps ten thousand cases of vodka” by the train station. Journalists found alcohol in the barracks, in the officers’ quarters, and on the battlefield. In the ensuing battle of Port Arthur, Russian troops stumbled into battle drunk. Correspondents described the entire Manchurian campaign between Russia and Japan as a “scuffle between a drunken guardsman and a sober policeman.”50
The chief engineer of the Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, Evgeny Politovsky, would not survive the Russian war in the Far East, but his diaries did. On October 7, 1904, he wrote of how many were more willing to follow vodka than follow their commanders.
The crews of the ships at Port Arthur asked leave to go to the advanced positions, and returned under the influence of liquor. No one could understand how they became drunk. In the town liquors were not sold, and yet men went to the advanced positions and returned intoxicated. At last it was discovered, and how do you suppose? It appears that the sailors went to the front in order to kill one of the enemy and take away his brandy-flask. Just imagine such a thing. They risked their lives to get drunk! They did all this without thinking anything of it, and contrived to conceal it from the authorities.51
As in Crimea, it was not just the common foot soldier who got tipsy, but their commanders as well. As a guest of the Russian military command, McCormick described his encounter with a drunken Cossack colonel who threatened to shoot him for refusing to drink vodka and wine.52 As an outsider, McCormick was appalled—both at the unimaginable quantity of alcohol the commanders consumed and their complete nonchalance about Russia’s staggering battlefield losses.
Up to this time, although the troops had been continually beaten, the army seemed outwardly, at least to the casual observer, as care-free as possible. In the back court in the International Hotel captains, colonels and generals could be found any day, and occasionally from late morning breakfast to late at night, repeatedly greeting each other with kisses through their heavy beards and making merry over liquor, champagne and beer. It reminded one of Port Arthur just before the opening of the war. Every night had its orgy, and out of these grew many troubles for the commander-in-chief. It seemed to be a natural characteristic to begin breakfast with champagne. A young officer… would begin in the morning on a bottle of liquor, and at night was always certain of being carried out to his room by the Chinese waiters. It took a fortnight by military process to transfer him from the army base to the rear. A staff officer and three companions, who mixed their champagne with beer and vodka, and among them could not raise fifty rubles with which to pay their bill, would monopolize the hotel.53
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Port Arthur was a repeat of the disaster at Sevastopol—both in terms of the drunkenness and corruption. “The Russian appears to devote himself to champagne as to the very elixir of life,” McCormick reported. “The thirst for this liquor was the cause of the very gravest charges of corruption against the Red Cross department and the quartermaster’s department, both of which handled quantities of it. Such a demand was created for this drink that the price advanced to nearly ten times the normal, and the opportunities for profit were irresistible to those officials who had control of the champagne supplies.”54
Some drunken havoc was to be expected, McCormick surmised, from a system of universal conscription that had could not weed out those unfit for service.55 As in the Crimea, this inebriated, incompetent, and corrupt military force was dealt one embarrassing blow after another. By mid-1904, the Japanese had blockaded the Russian fleet, and besieged the port, while scoring land victories at the Yalu River.
Something dramatic had to be done. And odds were, it wouldn’t be good.
What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?
The young Tsar Nicholas II and his top brass grew frustrated. Reinforcements were slow in coming. In addition to the mobilization fiasco, supplying the war effort had clogged Russia’s frail infrastructure—including the still-incomplete, single-rail Trans-Siberian Railway—bringing commerce to a standstill.56 If the front could not be reinforced by land, perhaps it could by sea! Nicholas turned to his uncle, Grand Duke Alexei Aleksandrovich—who commanded the entire navy despite spending “less time on the fleet than he did on drinking bouts and various love affairs.”57 In 1904, Nicholas and Alexei authorized the most harebrained military scheme ever: sending forty-five ships from the Baltic Fleet to the Pacific to take on the Japanese. To get there, these ships had to circumnavigate the entire Eastern Hemisphere—from their home ports in the Baltic Sea, around the Iberian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, through the Dutch East Indies, and up the Chinese coast. This epic eighteen thousand mile journey was the longest voyage of a coal-powered battleship fleet in history.
Under the command of Adm. Zinovy Rozhestvensky, the voyage was a microcosm of the hubris and misfortune of Nicholas’ entire reign (see chapter 12): beginning with drunken tragedy and ending in epic disaster. Upon setting sail from Libau in October 1904, Rozhestvensky’s newly commissioned flagship the Knyaz Suvorov, with its largely inexperienced crew, immediately ran aground, while one of its escorts lost its anchor. After the anchor was retrieved and the flagship re-floated, a destroyer rammed the battleship Oslyaba, which had to return for repairs.58
Incredibly, things got even worse in open water. Rumors circulated that the Baltic and North seas were teeming with Japanese torpedo boats that, despite all evidence or logic (torpedo boat squadrons have an extremely limited range), had allegedly completed the improbable eighteen-thousand-mile voyage from the Far East, around Siam, Ceylon, India, and Africa to mine the waters of Northern Europe.
Upon approaching the coast of Denmark, a local fishing vessel was dispatched to relay consular communications from Tsar Nicholas II. Mistaking the vessel for a Japanese fighter, the fleet opened fire, though due to the appalling standards of Russian gunnery, the two fishermen made it through unharmed to deliver the imperial communique: Admiral Rozhestvensky—Congratulations! Your exemplary performance has earned you a well-deserved promotion.
Before continuing on from Denmark, the heavily inebriated captain of the repair ship Kamchatka hysterically claimed to have been attacked “from all directions” by up to eight Japanese torpedo boats that no one on the other ships ever saw.59
Yet the fleet saved its greatest embarrassment for the Dogger Banks—a rich fishing area between Denmark and England. On the evening of October 21, the captain of the Kamchatka—again drunk by all accounts—mistook a nearby Swedish ship for a Japanese torpedo boat and radioed that his ship was under attack. Nearby were a number of British fishing trawlers, which through the fog of alcohol were mistook for Japanese warships, which (again) somehow made the unfathomable eighteen-thousand-mile journey to engage the Russians in the North Sea. These unfortunate and unarmed vessels were met by the full fury of the fleet’s thunderous guns. As Russian spotlights panned across the British trawlers, the fishermen hurriedly splayed their catch across their bows to show they were no threat. Despite the all-out barrage, only one British ship was sunk and three fishermen killed.60 In the confusion, several Russian ships signaled that they had been hit by Japanese torpedos while sailors on others scurried about hysterically, claiming they were being boarded by Japanese raiders.
Belatedly realizing their mistake, the fleet’s battleships then trained their heavy-calibre fire on the real enemy—an approaching formation of actual warships. Unfortunately, it turned out that these were in fact Russian cruisers from their own formation including the Dmitry Donskoi and the Aurora.
As an aside: the Aurora later gained fame for her catalyzing role in the October Revolution of 1917. Her sailors defied orders to put to sea, and a blank shot from its forecastle gun signaled the assault on the Winter Palace. Some Aurora sailors joined in the storming of the Winter Palace, while most stormed a nearby tavern.61 Today, the Aurora is moored in the Neva River in St. Petersburg as a museum ship—but on that October night in the Dogger Banks she saw her first mil
itary action… against her own drunken fleet.
Both the Aurora and the Dmitry Donskoi sustained modest damage in the attack. Further damage was saved only by the incompetence and incapacitation of the artillerymen themselves: the battleship Orel, for one, fired more than five hundred artillery shells in the incident without ever landing a single hit.62
The British were understandably livid. Relations were already strained by Russians seizing neutral British commercial steamers in the Pacific theater. This was the the last straw: an unprovoked attack against unarmed civilians was an act of war. Admiral Rozhestvensky’s reaction did not help: rather than assess injuries or assist the victims, Rozhestvensky simply sailed on, acknowledging the incident only days later while off the coast of Spain. As news of the event spread, so did international outrage. According to one reporter, “In the United States, in France, and even in Germany, unsparing reprobation of a deed so unjustifiable was freely uttered, and the belief was confidently expressed that the only possible explanation was to be found in the undiscipline and probable drunken frenzy of the Russian naval officers.”63
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 24