Ironically, if Sergei had one redeeming feature it was his patronage of temperance. In addition to holding figurehead positions with the state-sponsored Guardianship for Public Sobriety, the grand duke and duchess actively promoted temperance through generous donations, public appearances, and even establishing clinics to treat alcoholics. Yet many—even within the royal family—found Sergei obstinate, arrogant, an antisemitic “reactionary chauvinist,” and “a complete ignoramus in administrative affairs.”11 In that regard, at least, Sergei was hardly unique among grand dukes who combined incompetence and inebriety to unwittingly undercut the legitimacy of the tsarist government itself.
Consider another of the tsar’s uncles, Grand Duke Alexei Aleksandrovich Romanov. With a lifelong interest in maritime affairs, Alexei was made commander-in-chief of the Russian navy even though he preferred the life of a drunken playboy. “Fast women and slow ships” aptly summarized his military career.12
Of all the grand dukes, Alexei Aleksandrovich was certainly the best known to Americans of the day, thanks in large part to his raucous visit to the United States in the 1870s. The highest ranking Russian royal to ever visit the United States, Alexei was wined and dined by the cream of East Coast society, including President Ulysses S. Grant. The grand duke declared his desire to participate in an authentic “Wild West” buffalo hunt. His American host—former Civil War general Philip Sheridan, famous for carrying out a scorched-earth policy similar to that of William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea—graciously obliged, going so far as to create “Camp Alexis,” a veritable Potemkin village on the Nebraska plain. The “authentic” frontier conditions at the sumptuous camp included a brass band, the finest foods and wines, and crate upon crate of champagne. The once-fearsome chief Spotted Tail and his Lakota tribesmen were paid to act as stereotypical Indian savages, and Alexei was taught how to hunt on the open prairie by none other than Gen. George Armstrong Custer and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Their “genuine” Wild West hunts were interrupted promptly at lunchtime by caterers with wagonloads of sandwiches and champagne.
American newsmen followed Custer and Cody as they taught their royal guest to hunt buffalo on his twenty-second birthday. (Apparently nursing a hangover from the previous day, General Sheridan couldn’t keep pace with the others.) Upon bagging his first buffalo, the grand duke cut off its tail and whirled it around his head with joy. “Within moments, champagne corks were popping again,” described one journalist in tow. “The fun continued with displays of Indian dancing, feasting and drinking copious amounts of liquor,” which strengthened the camaraderie between the Americans and their guest but also threatened to tear them apart: completely wasted, Alexei and Custer openly competed for the affections of Spotted Tail’s daughter—much to the anger of the proud Lakota chief.13
After a week of drunken hunting, the grand duke continued westward to Denver, the camp was dismantled, and the Sioux went home. But Alexei had so much fun that he demanded another hunt and even shot at buffalo from the window of his train car. Custer spared no time in telegraphing Fort Wallace for horses, wagons, food, provisions, and most importantly, “every kind of liquor and champagne” they could find, as the Russian delegation was running low on booze. At their camp near Kit Carson, Colorado, even the servants, soldiers, and cooks joined the hunters in their revelry. In a scene reminiscent of Russian defeats in Crimea and Manchuria, reporters noted that “Champagne bottles, liquor bottles, and every other kind of bottle littered the ground. That battlefield showed more ‘dead ones’ than the hunting-ground did buffaloes.”14
Happier to raid a brothel than an armada, Alexei somehow became commander of the entire Russian navy. Like the other grand duke, he wasn’t afraid to use his leverage over his tsar-nephew, who was scared that even mentioning the need for military reforms would upset his favorite uncle.15 Together with the tsar, Alexei welcomed the war with Japan as a cakewalk in which he’d surely bask in his navy’s glorious victory. It was Alexei who authorized the quixotic mission of the Baltic Sea Fleet that ended at the bottom of the Tsushima Straits. Drunk and indisposed at key moments in the Japanese War, Alexei was a commander in no sense of the word—forever blaming anyone but himself for the drunken and inept performance of his sailors.16 Following the destruction of his entire fleet at Tsushima, Alexei resigned in disgrace in June 1905 and spent his remaining years living the playboy lifestyle in Paris.
The unresponsiveness of the monarchy and the demoralizing defeat to the Japanese prompted the workers’ strikes, peasant riots, and military mutinies that led to the full-blown Revolution of 1905. Ironically, it was Nicholas’ temperance-minded uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, who caught the full fury of the uprising. As the powerful governor general of Moscow, Sergei felt himself to be a high-profile target for terrorist revolutionaries who had already claimed scores of high-ranking military and government officials. He resigned the governorship and fled to the security of the Kremlin under the cover of night. On the afternoon of February 17, 1905, his worst fears were realized when Sergei’s carriage entered the Kremlin and passed by the Chudov Monastery (yes, the same “Miraculous” Monastery where vodka was alleged to have been born), when a member of the so-called Combat Detachment of the Socialist Revolutionary Party lobbed a nitroglycerin bomb into his lap, blowing the grand duke to bits. His wife, the grand duchess, was one of the first arrivals to the horrific scene of blood-soaked snow littered with shrapnel, flesh, and “a ghastly crimson mess where the torso had been.” Still adorned with his royal rings, the grand duke’s fingers were later found on the roof of a nearby building.17
The Hangover Of 1905
The assassination of Grand Duke Sergei was only part of the roiling Revolution of 1905 that threatened to overthrow the entire autocratic order. The tsar and tsarina dared not even leave their residence at Tsarskoe Selo to attend the funeral, so real was the threat that they too would be cut down. All Russia was in disorder following the events of “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, 1905—when the Imperial Guard opened fire on thousands of peaceful protesters outside the Winter Palace as they delivered a petition for better pay, better working conditions, and an end to the disastrous war with Japan.
Nicholas could not understand why his meager concessions and unfulfilled promises were not enough to quiet the strikes, rebellions, insubordination, and assassinations. In May, the Baltic Fleet was mauled by the Japanese at Tsushima. Just as Grand Duke Alexei resigned his naval command in disgrace in June, insurrections rocked the naval bases of Sevastopol, Kronstadt, and Vladivostok before culminating in the famous mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin in Odessa harbor. The slain Grand Duke Sergei’s replacement as governor general of Moscow was likewise assassinated by the combat detachment. Things were getting out of hand, and fast.
The last line of defense for the royal family was the St. Petersburg military district and its commander, the Grand Duke (yes, another grand duke) Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov (the younger), first cousin of the tsar. Growing up, cousin Nikolai was given the affectionate diminutive “Nikolasha” to differentiate him from little “Niki”—the future tsar. “Microcephalitic in figure, a hunter by inclination, a fool and incorrigible alcoholic,” Nikolasha was colonel of the Hussar regiment where werewolf Niki also learned to drink. Older than the tsar by twelve years, like the other grand dukes the conservative, military-schooled Nikolasha wielded tremendous influence over the young tsar as a trusted confidant and advisor, and their relationship bred jealous intrigues among the royal family. Rightly or wrongly, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich was blamed for much of the misfortune under the reign of the last tsar.18
With riotous (and frequently drunken) mobs threatening outright revolution, Nicholas II faced a stark choice: accede to popular demands for a legislature and constitution or violently crack down on his own people. With the military on the verge of complete mutiny, Nicholas implored Grand Duke Nikolasha—the only figure who commanded the soldiers’ respect—to assume the role of military dictator. Refusing,
Nikolasha drew his service revolver to his temple and threatened to shoot himself on the spot if the tsar did not acquiesce to a constitutional monarchy to end the unrest. This dramatic display was instrumental to adopting the historic October Manifesto, which granted Russia a weak representative parliament (the Duma) based on universal suffrage and a bill of rights protecting basic civil liberties. The concessions staved off the demise of tsarism… at least for the time being.19
Inching back from the brink of disaster, educated segments of Russian society and government took stock of what had just happened. When it came to laying blame, many faulted alcohol: military experts focused on the drunken mobilization, the ineptitude and intoxication of the armed forces, and the vodka-fueled pogroms that targeted state liquor stores at the outset of the Revolution of 1905. Financiers looked at the sporadic liquor boycotts of 1905–6, where socialist-minded workers swore off vodka and picketed taverns to strike at the government’s purse. Across the board tsarist officials agreed that alcohol was enemy number one.20 Grand Duke Nikolasha obsessively set about remedying these deficiencies—abolishing the traditional vodka ration (charka), forbidding alcohol sales in military stores, and limiting the hours of restaurants near military encampments. Should the need arise, the military was prepared to take even more drastic actions to prevent the drunken disorder of the past.21
It was not just the Russians who had learned the lesson. In what I have elsewhere described as “the cult of military sobriety,” the high command of virtually every army on earth viewed alcohol as public enemy number one. Even the tsar’s cousin—Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany—boldly proclaimed in 1910 that victory in the next European war would go to the army that was most sober.22
Beyond the military, the civil rights enshrined in the October Manifesto unleashed the pent-up temperance activism that had been building since the boycotts of the 1850s. “Words were straining to be free but were held back in vices,” wrote Dr. Aleksandr Korovin in October 1905. “We spoke earlier of drunkenness but not in connection with the circumstances that generated it.” No longer muzzled by censorship, writers who once masked their criticism of the government with allusions to alcohol now freely joined their foreign counterparts in laying blame for the poverty, ignorance, and drunkenness of the Russian people squarely on their government.23
Shortly before his untimely death in 1894, Tsar Alexander III charged his young Minister of Finance Sergei Witte with reforming the system of excise taxes that had been levied on vodka since the abolition of the tax farm in the 1860s. Gradually replacing the excise tax system with a crown monopoly on the retail sale of vodka, Witte declared that his system “must be directed first of all toward increasing popular sobriety, and only then can it concern itself with the treasury.”24
While the gentry reclaimed their right to distill alcohol, it could only be sold to the state, which controlled the entire retail market—ostensibly in the interest of temperance—while simultaneously making a hefty profit. In a now-familiar pattern, the allure of easy money was too great, and the cause of temperance was sacrificed to the interests of the treasury. The tsar’s “drunken budget” became a favorite target of critics and revolutionaries, including Vladimir Lenin. In 1913, even Sergei Witte—the architect of the vodka monopoly—condemned his own creation, claiming it had been corrupted by his replacement as minister of finance, Vladimir Kokovtsov.25
Also under fire after 1905 was the handmaiden of the imperial vodka monopoly—the Guardianship of Public Sobriety (Popechitel’stvo o narodnoi trezvosti). This sole nationwide temperance organization was an appendage of the ministry of finance and as such never promoted abstinence from vodka, only “moderation.”26 For true advocates of temperance like Tolstoy, the Guardianship was an abomination: its activities were dictated from on high, making it unable to tap into whatever zeal for temperance existed at the local level. Ever mistrustful of grass-roots activism, the Guardianship and its leaders refused to cooperate with the smattering of small, independent, genuine temperance societies emerging from elite intelligentsia circles concerned with peasant health and welfare, the concerned medical community, or even the church.27 When the powerful Witte went to meet with Tolstoy, who made temperance the cornerstone of his civic religion (see chapter 10), Tolstoy angrily refused to even meet him. “Temperance societies established by a government that is not ashamed that it itself sells the poison ruining the people through its own officials seem to me to be either hypocritical, silly, or misguided—or perhaps all three—something with which I can no way sympathize,” Tolstoy wrote. “In my opinion, if the government really was making every effort for the good of the people, then the first step should be the complete prohibition of the poison which destroys both the physical and spiritual well-being of millions of people.”28 Tolstoy was hardly alone: both liberal and conservative parliamentarians, such as representative Mikhail Chelyshev of Samara, openly derided the Guardianship and the “drunken budget” on the floor of the new Duma itself.29
The politicization of the alcohol question was on full display at the First All-Russian Congress on the Struggle against Drunkenness held in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1909–10. Officially convened by President of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin, thousands of delegates representing all manner of interests were invited to discuss the alcohol problem. Representatives of the church, physicians’ groups, women’s groups, trade unions, village zemstva and city dumas confronted officials from the ministry of finance, the Guardianship of Public Sobriety, ministers, and members of the state Duma. Alongside other workers’ representatives, Lenin sent a Bolshevik delegation to the congress. As you might expect, conflict was inevitable. The scene devolved into angry confrontations between supporters of the system and their radical opponents. The clergy angrily stormed out, rabble-rousing workers’ delegates were arrested, and scholars who linked alcoholism to poverty were barred by the police from presenting their research. The Congress’s final report on the liquor monopoly was unequivocal: “Down with the whole system.”30 Reported widely, the debates drew considerable interest throughout the empire—especially the workers’ condemnations of the Guardianship and vodka monopoly for enriching the state and the landlords at the expense of the people. Before 1905, Russia’s autocratic vodka politics could only be alluded to; after 1905 the system was laid bare for all to see.
Many in the tsar’s inner circle were steadily pushing the tsar toward temperance. Nicholas held fond memories of his uncle Sergei, who actively patronized temperance before his untimely detonation. His widow was still active in the cause, as were Aleksandr, Prince of Oldenburg, Prince Meshchersky, and the Grand Duke Konstantin, all of whom pleaded with the tsar to wean the treasury from its unhealthy reliance on vodka revenues while weaning his subjects from their unhealthy reliance on alcohol.
No consideration of palace intrigues under the last tsar would be complete without the “Mad Monk,” Grigory Rasputin. The story of how this dubious Siberian mystic won influence with the royal family for his “miraculous” ability to heal the hemophilia of the tsarevich Alexei is well known. Equally well known are Rasputin’s infamous debauches: his tremendous clout won him many female admirers within the aristocracy, who willingly partook in the drunken orgies of this “holy man” who preached grace through sin.31 So it is quite ironic that the strongest admonishments to temperance and prohibition came from Russia’s most infamous drunken and lustful debaucher. “It is unbefitting for a Tsar to deal in vodka and make drunkards out of honest people,” Rasputin bluntly said. “The time has come to lock up the Tsar’s saloons.”32
It seems that, over time, such entreaties—both public and private—persuaded Tsar Nicholas II that the vodka monopoly was the root of Russia’s economic, social, and political problems. After the upheavals of 1905, the tsar’s excessive drinking moderated greatly. To his ministers, the normally hands-off tsar expressed dissatisfaction over efforts to combat drunkenness and demanded research on the liquor question. By the 1910s, Nich
olas was a full convert: on an extensive tour of his domain in 1913, he claimed to be moved by “the painful pictures of public distress, the desolation of homes, the dissipation of economies, the inevitable consequences of drunkenness.”33
In January 1914 Nicholas fired the man synonymous with the loathsome monopoly—Finance Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov—for ruthlessly squeezing every last ruble from the vodka trade. In his stead Nicholas appointed Pyotr Lvovich Bark, with the charge of no longer making “the treasury dependent on the ruination of the spiritual and economic forces of the majority of My faithful subjects.” Bark’s mission to reform the very foundations of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics would be preempted by the outbreak of World War I later that year, which led to the demise of the entire tsarist system itself.34
Great War And The Royal Family
On June 28, 1914, the presumptive heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip—a nineteen-year-old nationalist dedicated to the liberation of the south Slavic (Yugoslav) peoples from Austrian rule. The entanglement of military alliances in the Balkans quickly drew all of the major European powers into a conflagration that would claim sixteen million lives, devastate an entire continent, and see the Romanov dynasty sacrificed to the flames of revolution.
Exactly one month after the assassination Austria declared war on Russia’s ally, Serbia. When Russia mobilized for war, Austria and Germany declared war on Russia, too. While Britain, France, and later the United States joined with Russia in fighting the so-called Central Powers on the Western Front, Russia stood alone in confronting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in the east.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 26