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

by Mark Lawrence

  It was vodka that pushed Russia to the brink of war. Amid the public outcry, the government of Arthur Balfour delivered an ultimatum and prepared the British Mediterranean fleet to sink the Russian squadron en route to the Pacific. Russia was already stretched thin both on land and at sea; a war against the mighty British navy would have been disastrous. Ultimately, the British were satisfied only after repeated public apologies by the Russian government, the payment of indemnities to the fishermen, and the promise of an official inquiry.64

  Having narrowly averted war with the Brits, Russia still had the Japanese to contend with. But unfortunately, more embarrassments would follow.

  RUNNING AMUCK. November 16, 1904, cover of the satirical magazine Puck depicting Russia—clutching a jug of vodka—stumbling into war against a Japanese hornet. Note the injured John Bull character in the background. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

  Massacre At Mukden, Tragedy In Tsushima

  While the fleet was re-coaling in Madagascar, news reached the Russians that Port Arthur had surrendered to the Japanese on January 2, 1905. But that was not the end of the war. On land, the Japanese continued to beat Russian forces back north along the Russian Manchurian Railway, some two hundred and fifty miles inland to the city of Mukden—destined to be the site of the decisive battle of the war and one of the largest military conflicts in world history to that point.65

  Although the Russians outnumbered the Japanese and had secured defensive positions, a series of tactical mistakes and a drunken, demoralized army proved disastrous in a two-week battle involving up to a million combatants. Once the frontline troops faltered, it was all over. Medical encampments filled with the wounded and dying—once at the rear—were overrun by Russian regiments retreating in disarray. The collapse was so quick that the commissary stores could not be evacuated. Rather than setting them aflame to keep the goods out of the hands of the enemy, officials simply gave away the food and vodka, pouring it into the canteens and fur caps of the retreating troops. The results were predictable—the tottering, “beastly-drunk soldiers lost their rifles, shouted songs, and fell down and rolled in the dust. The bushes were filled with motionless bodies.”66

  Attempting to render medical assistance in such conditions was pointless. The medic Veresayev described the scene as follows:

  Drunken men were wallowing at each side of the road. A soldier would be sitting on a mound, his rifle between his knees, his head drooping. If you touched him on his shoulder, he would roll down like a bag. Was he dead? Was he sleeping a deep sleep from fatigue? His pulse was beating, his face was red, and he exhaled an odor of liquor.67

  In their retreat, Cossacks raided local distilleries and artillerymen grabbed as much liquor as they could carry. The more entrepreneurial troops charged fifty kopeks for a bottle of stolen cognac, rum, or port wine. In a moment of reflection, Veresayev pondered,

  Who were these commissary officials? Traitors, who had been bought by the Japanese? Scoundrels who wished to enjoy the complete disgrace of the Russian Army? Oh, no! They were only good-natured Russians, who could not comprehend the idea of personally putting fire to such a precious thing as liquor. All the subsequent days, during the period of the grievous retreat, our Army swarmed with drunken men. It was as though they were celebrating a joyous, universal holiday. It was rumored that in Mukden and in the villages Chinamen who had been bought by Japanese emissaries had been filling our war-worn, retreating soldiers with the devilish Chinese liquor, han-shin. Maybe that was so. But all the drunken soldiers whom I asked told me that they had received brandy, liquor, or cognac from all kinds of Russian stores which had been ordered to be burned. What was the use for the Japanese to waste money on the Chinamen? They had a more faithful and more disinterested confederate, and one that was more terrible to us.68

  Back in St. Petersburg, Russian papers broke the tragic news by describing how “the Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk that they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs.”69

  The stunning defeat was one thing; the quiet resignation of the military commanders, another. As the troops fell back from Mukden, foreign correspondents rode in the luxurious train of the Russian high command, where officers ordered rounds of champagne. “Through the windows could be watched the scene of headlong flight of the soldiers up the railway,” Frederick McCormick wrote. “The foreigners were plunged into a state of confused and sympathetic embarrassment, for in no country which any one of them represented was it possible to drink to such a state of affairs. But all thoughts of chagrin and mortification as far as the Russian officers were concerned seemed to vanish under the spell of the opportunity to drink.”70

  Mukden was yet another painful humiliation; it was not the last. Russia still had hope that—after eight months at sea—the Baltic Fleet would turn the tide of war. With Port Arthur in enemy hands, the fleet sailed for Vladivostok—Russia’s port on the Pacific—through the narrow Tsushima Straits between Korea and the Japanese mainland. On May 27, 1905, Admiral Rozhestvensky’s fleet was intercepted by Japanese admiral Togo Heihachiro. Less than twenty-four hours later, Togo was accepting the Russian surrender as all Russian battleships and most cruisers and destroyers lay on the sea floor.

  Inebriety was as pervasive in the navy as the army. On the Baltic Fleet’s long circumnavigation, drunkenness led to countless fights, thefts, insubordination, and more than a few drunken officers being lost overboard.71 In addition to the daily double charka rations, vodka celebrated victories and holidays, rewarded hard work, and prepared for battle. At Tsushima, a number of officials were drunk. Even in defeat, the demoralized sailors aboard the surrendered vessels that were fortunate enough to not be sunk defied orders and raided the ships’ wine cellars and alcohol stores.72

  Faced with a roiling revolution at home, and the demoralizing defeats at Mukden and Tsushima, Nicholas II sued for peace with Japan. In the resulting Treaty of Portsmouth mediated by American president Teddy Roosevelt, Russia ceded its lease to Port Arthur as well as the south half of Sakhalin Island to the Japanese.

  After the ratification of the peace, the Russian prisoners of war—including Admiral Rozhestvensky himself—were released from their internment at Kobe to proceed on to Vladivostok on the steamer Voronezh. But even before they could depart, trouble was brewing. Echoing revolutionary sentiments being expressed throughout Russia in 1905 (to be explored in the next chapter), the twenty-five hundred underfed soldiers and sailors “were agitated, singing revolutionary songs, swearing by the red banner hidden in a dark corner of the hold, and drinking vodka by the mugful.” Riots ensued, threatening the fifty-six officers with a full-fledged mutiny that required the intervention of the Japanese police. With order restored, the Russians finally set sail for Vladivostok.

  The scene that met them upon returning to Russia was even more surprising: as in many cities throughout Russia, Vladivostok was grasped by the “revolutionary spirit”—which is to say drunken mobs had been rioting for days, burning and looting much of the port city. Indeed, as McCormick explained: “The first cargo to arrive in Vladivostok after the ratification of peace was a shipload of alcoholic liquors. There was no other merchandise on board.”73

  In the end, the Russians were decisively beaten by a better organized, better equipped, and better prepared foe in the Pacific. Yet many observers focused far less on the triumphs of the rising Japanese empire than on the struggles of their waning imperial counterparts in Russia. “The chief enemy of an army is the nation’s moral diseases,” McCormick concluded from his experiences being embedded with the Russian military. “A great people with a great army, who could not defeat the Japanese in one single battle, must first have been the victim not of the enemy, but of themselves.”74 Indeed, this was the first occasion that a major European power had been defeated—and convincingly—by a non-European one. For many in Europe and America it was unthinkable that the great Russian war machine could be beaten so soundly by such
an “inconsequential foe” as Japan.75 And while the Japanese force was far more formidable than their contemporaries gave them credit for, mass drunkenness was clearly debilitating to Russia’s military machine.

  In what would become the international conventional wisdom before the Great War, the correspondent of the Neue freie Presse was even more blunt: “The Japanese did not conquer, but alcohol triumphed, alcohol, alcohol.”76 The unpleasant, but unavoidable lesson for Russia was that not only had the military become an agent in the alcoholization of society, but Russia’s system of autocratic vodka politics was severely hampering the geopolitical ambitions of its leaders.

  12

  Nicholas the Drunk, Nicholas the Sober

  Virtually every soldier in the imperial Russian military—uneducated peasant conscripts and aristocratic officers alike—drank with little regard for the consequences. As one observer noted, “the main occupation of the Hussar regiment is getting drunk.” Based at Tsarskoe Selo—the suburban residence of the royal family located south of St. Petersburg—he described the ridiculous behavior of the elite regiment’s leadership: “They would frequently drink all day and into the evening, to the point of hallucination,” believing themselves no longer humans, but wolves. The officers all “stripped naked and ran out into the streets of Tsarskoe Selo, which are usually deserted at night. They crouched on their hands and knees, raised their drunken heads to the sky and began to howl loudly.”

  Apparently such lupine behavior by the young commander was so common that it was not at all surprising to the old commissariat waiter, who understood his place in this routine. “He would carry a big tub out onto the porch and fill it full of vodka or champagne. The whole pack of officers would then rush on all fours to the tub and lap up the wine with their tongues as they yelped and bit one another. Occasionally, an intoxicated commander would have to be pulled down—naked—from the roof of his home, where he was howling at the moon or drunkenly serenading the merchant’s wife.”1

  Such behavior would be unbecoming for any regiment in a modern army. But this was no ordinary regiment: it was the elite Cossack cavalry of Russian Hussars. And the young leader who regularly drank to the point of believing himself a werewolf was no ordinary commander: he was Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov—the future Tsar Nicholas II.

  Nicholas is one of the most scrutinized and romanticized figures in Russian history: less for his accomplishments than for his tragic end. His reign was marred by one high-profile debacle after another: his constitutional concessions in the 1905 Revolution prompted by Russia’s embarrassing defeat to Japan temporarily forestalled the overthrow of the monarchy, but no concessions could save the tsarist system from the drubbing of World War I and the flames of revolution in 1917; neither could they save the deposed emperor and his family from being ruthlessly slaughtered at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries the following year.

  Generations of historians have recounted the misguided political and military decisions of Russia’s “tragically ignorant and weak” ruler who seemed predestined to lead his people to ruin.2 Yet few—if any—have sought the reasons for perhaps the most momentous political gaffe of them all: on September 28, 1914, Nicholas II did the unthinkable and declared that Russia would forever be sober, the first country to adopt prohibition. With one fell swoop Nicholas undid hundreds of years of vodka politics in Russia by knocking down the central pillar of autocratic statecraft—with disastrous consequences for the empire’s finances—and ultimately transforming one of the mightiest empires in Europe into a failed state.

  So, what prompted this young boozer—who dutifully confided to his diary how he would get so rip-roaring drunk that he needed to be carried home3—to become such a devout temperance convert that he forced abstinence on his people and in the process destroyed the most fundamental dynamic of Russian vodka politics? To answer that question we need to go inside the intimate world of Russia’s last royal family as they struggled with the challenges of a fast-changing political order.

  All In The Family—Sergei And Alexei

  Tracing the logic of any policy decision means parsing out the diverse social, political, and familial influences on the tsar himself. Sometimes this means delving into the complex dynamics of the royal family. Although they ruled one-sixth of the earth’s territory for over three hundred years, the Romanovs were still a just a family. Like any family, it was full of love and respect, petty rivalries and suspicions, honored elders and jealous children, favorite uncles and outcast cousins. Since by virtue of their birth many relatives held powerful military and governmental offices, the never-ending family drama often had political consequences. The few competent civilian ministers who rose through the imperial bureaucracy were often regarded with deep suspicion by the narcissistic royals.

  The tsarevich Nikolai Aleksandrovich was the eldest son of Tsar Alexander III—the gruff reactionary who surrounded himself with inebriate bootlicks and favor seekers as drinking companions. A bear of a man, Alexander would delight these friends with feats of great strength. His only weakness, it seemed, was his debilitating alcoholism. When he first fell ill with kidney disease and the tsarina forbade him to drink, he took to hiding his cognac in secret flasks sewn into his boots. Unexpectedly—though not surprisingly—Alexander succumbed to kidney nephritis and died while on vacation in the Crimea on November 1, 1894. He was four months short of his fiftieth birthday.4

  Expecting to rule another thirty years, Alexander III did little to prepare the young Nicholas II to lead. Consequently, the tsarevich led a sheltered life, had a shallow education, and preferred hunting, high society soirees, and the theater over the boring affairs of state. As a junior officer in his late teens Nicholas picked up the vices of the officer corps. “No one could fail to notice,” one contemporary noted, “that Nicholas Alexandrovich’s body was being poisoned by alcohol, and his face was becoming yellow, his eyes glistened unhealthily, and bags were beginning to form beneath his eyes, as is customary with alcoholics.”5

  The sudden death of his father forced the uninspiring twenty-six-year-old tsarevich to take the reins of power, however reluctantly. Over the intelligentsia’s calls for liberal reforms, Nicholas instead reaffirmed his dedication to absolute monarchy. Politically tone-deaf, Nicholas’s unwavering belief that he was empowered by God to lead Russia only accentuated his indifference to the plight of his own people. Appearing resolute in public, the “all-powerful” Nicholas was weak and indecisive in political matters, ceding great power and influence to his grand duke uncles—brothers of his father, Alexander III. Already in places of great authority by virtue of their birth, they were unafraid to bully the timid tsar in order to get their way.6

  Uncle Sergei Aleksandrovich was one of the four grand dukes. When the junior officer Nicholas was drinking himself into thinking he was a werewolf, Sergei was his major general and “actively encouraged the depraved debauchery” of the regiment.7 At Sergei’s urging, Nicholas married princess Alix of Hesse—younger sister of Sergei’s wife—becoming the tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. Sergei was the “favorite uncle and brother-in-law of the tsar,” and used his leverage over the tsar to great effect.8

  When Alexander III died in 1894, Grand Duke Sergei was the powerful governor general of Moscow, a position that put him in charge of planning a grand celebration for all Muscovites following the coronation of their new tsar, Nicholas II. This attempt to foster popular goodwill backfired spectacularly. Following the solemn coronation in the Kremlin’s Uspensky Cathedral in May 1896, a lavish, free banquet was to be held on the Khodynskoe Pole (Khodynka Fields) northwest of Moscow. Today, the fields have been overrun by drab Soviet-era apartment blocks, Dinamo Stadium, and the Khodynka Megasport Ice Arena, but in 1896 the Khodynka Fields, replete with trenches and gullies, served as training grounds for the imperial Moscow garrison. Nevertheless, it was thought that the fields were the only place that could reasonably accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Muscovites expected to celebrate the newly cr
owned tsar. A massive royal pavilion was erected, along with twenty pubs to dispense hundreds of barrels of free beer and souvenirs.

  From Moscow and villages throughout central Russia, thousands of peasants—many already drunk—showed up the night before the festivities. By morning, their numbers had swelled to almost a half million. Among the boisterous crowds a rumor spread that there was not enough alcohol for everyone, prompting a massive stampede across the uneven ground. Men, women, and children were knocked over and trampled underfoot. Thousands of injured people clogged the city’s few hospitals, but they were the lucky ones: 1,389 people were trampled to death at Khodynka Fields, which more closely resembled a European battlefield strewn with casualties than a celebration of the “mystical bond of mutual devotion and love uniting tsar and ‘people’.”9

  The new tsar was understandably distraught. Nicholas planned to cancel the remaining activities, call for national mourning, and retire to a monastery to pray for the victims. Yet the callous grand dukes urged him not to offend Russia’s sole European ally, France, by spurning the lavish ball already planned by their ambassador, the Marquis de Montebello. While Nicholas and the Tsarina Alexandra later visited survivors at area hospitals, doling-out a thousand rubles to each, the Grand Duke Sergei—Moscow’s Governor General and orchestrator of the event—neither visited the victims, nor the scene of the calamity, and denied any responsibility for the outcome. The superstitious peasantry saw this drunken tragedy an omen of an unhappy reign. For revolutionaries, the sight of the young emperor and his “German woman” celebrating amidst such a disaster underscored the shallowness of the tsar, and the glaring disconnect between the heartless autocracy and the needs of the people. Even at the very beginning of his reign, Russians referred to the tsar as “Bloody Nicholas” and Sergei as the “Duke of Khodynka.”10