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

by Mark Lawrence

  Meanwhile, the costs of enforcing prohibition rose dramatically. Think of the murderous reign of the gangster Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago: the conventional wisdom among historians is that Russian prohibition also begot rampant moonshining and smuggling but it actually took years for it to become pervasive.47 A stack of letters and telegrams in the archives of the ministry of finance tells a much different story: already by the first months of 1915, Finance Minister Bark was buried under an avalanche of reports describing an explosion of illegal activities: alarms of a “broad increase in the clandestine trade in alcohol” from neighboring Manchurian territories were sounded from Russia’s Far East. Reports from the taiga proclaimed that “secret distilling is increasing completely unimpeded,” while memos from every region of Russia chronicled a disturbing increase in underground distilling. In the last half of 1914 alone, the ministry of agriculture uncovered some 1,825 illegal distilleries, while the following year, the excise department discovered 5,707 cases of illicit distilling48—all underscoring the authorities’ need for dramatic reinforcements to keep Russia dry.

  Then came the military fallout. Whether sacked by marauding recruits in mobilization riots or by deserters looting stores, distilleries, and private residences, the imperial government was liable for the destructive actions of their officers and conscripts, and the gentry class demanded compensation for their losses. Given their political influence, they often got it. Most straightforward were the instances when military commanders destroyed alcohol warehouses, stores, and production facilities near the front so as not to tempt insubordination. In perhaps history’s biggest example of “you break it, you bought it,” gentry alcohol producers presented the treasury with the bill for their lost alcohol stocks. With the Russian army backpedaling furiously, and the zone of mandatory destruction of alcohol marching steadily eastward across Russia’s populous western territories—the expected remuneration ran into the millions, if not tens of millions, of rubles.49

  Thus, far beyond simply starving the imperial treasury of its single greatest source of revenue in the midst of Russia’s grandest military engagement, prohibition bled the treasury dry by paying for alcohol the government was destroying. The combined effect was predictably tragic: by deepening the government’s debts, prohibition exacerbated wartime inflation, which compounded the political, economic, and social crises that ultimately doomed the entire regime. Vodka politics may not have single-handedly caused the downfall of the tsarist government, but it certainly hastened its fall.

  Alcohol And Infrastructural Paralysis

  A final alleged cause of revolution was the infrastructural paralysis that accompanied the total war raging on Russian territory. Russia’s infamously cold winters discouraged travel while the spring thaw and rains turned the country’s dirt roads into impassable bogs, increasing the reliance on Russia’s anemic railway network to both supply the war effort and maintain the traditional exchange of food and grain from Russia’s rural provinces for manufactured goods produced in its cities. As it turns out, Russia’s overburdened railroads failed spectacularly on both counts: woefully undersupplying the forces at the front and preventing grains from being delivered to cities from the countryside, leading to food shortages and even starvation.50 Certainly, alcohol could not have contributed to this problem too… or could it?

  As it turns out, many enterprising gentry distillers did not complacently let their investments—their alcohol stocks—fall victim to roving hordes, or worse: sit idle until the cessation of hostilities. The tsar’s prohibition barred distillers from selling their wares at home, but that did not prevent them from selling their alcohol to foreign markets. Some distillers even secured promises from the imperial government to open new markets in foreign countries to compensate for prohibition at home.51 Many well-connected Russian elites inked deals to ship their alcohol to Russia’s primary ally, France. The only problem was the front: from the Gulf of Riga in the north to the mouth of the Danube in the south (and later from the outskirts of Petrograd to the mouth of the Don), the war zone and trade embargo halted all east-west commerce in Europe, while Entente warships shut down all maritime commercial traffic in the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean seas.

  Embattled distillers planned to load their massive stores of alcohol into railway cars—chronically in short supply—from threatened territories near the front (Petrograd, Vilnius, Poltava, and Kuban districts), first to safer locations away from the hostilities and then north to the White Sea ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk for the long sea voyage to markets in France.52 Foreign observers remarked that “enormous quantities have been exported to France” in such a manner.53 Emboldened by Russia’s initial and ephemeral victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Galicia in 1915, a convention of potato growers and alcohol manufacturers in Minsk gleefully noted that these newly “liberated” territories were technically outside the purview of the prohibition decree. Subsequently, “The representatives of the Russian Government promised to pave the way for the Russian alcohol industry and trade toward the Galician territories,” and “The assembly decided to take up at once the necessary steps for an extensive export trade of Russian alcohol to Galicia.”54

  This is how Russia’s groaning railway infrastructure—rather than adequately supply front-line combatants or provide sustenance to its beleaguered cities—became clogged with trainloads of vodka. Most mind-boggling of all were plans by distillers in the Kharkov and Poltava regions—today in east-central Ukraine—to load their wares onto scarce rail cars for a 7,000 km trip across the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific port city of Vladivostok and from there by sea to markets in Japan and coastal China.55 Amid nationwide suffering and total war, such schemes to save alcohol at all costs defied all rational comprehension and only exacerbated the infrastructural paralysis.

  Finally, the elimination of the vodka trade disrupted the traditional urban-rural trade cycle: Russian peasants traditionally exchanged their agricultural surpluses for manufactured goods, vodka foremost among them. With vodka illegal and other commodities in short supply due to the war, the village had little incentive to trade with the city, as the peasant either hoarded grain, distilled it himself (samogon), or sold it to the few private distilleries that operated through 1916 in hopes of capturing a greater market share following a swift conclusion to the war.56 According to historian David Christian, the subsequent “failure of peasant producers to market their surpluses was, of course, a major cause of the grain shortages in major towns which helped provoke the urban insurrections which brought down the Tsarist government in February 1917.”57

  In retrospect, Tsar Nicholas’ biographer, Sergei Oldenburg, summed up the bizarre and unprecedented decision to adopt prohibition by autocratic decree.

  During the first days of the war, the most difficult domestic problems seemed amenable to easy solutions. The Emperor, therefore, seized the opportunity to carry through a bold reform which in past years had been especially dear to His heart, namely the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages.… Only wartime conditions, which upset all normal budgetary considerations, made it possible to adopt a measure that amounted to a renunciation of the state’s largest source of income. Before 1914 no other nation had adopted such a radical measure in the struggle against alcoholism. It was a grandiose scheme, quite unheard of.58

  It goes without saying that Nicholas was tragically unaware of the myriad of different ways that this fateful decision would hasten his downfall. By exacerbating grain shortages, further stressing the transportation system, and irreparably debilitating the treasury, the tsar’s prohibition decision stoked the already red-hot embers of revolution—to say nothing of the increased resentment for the tsar among the working classes, who did not appreciate being forced to quit “cold turkey” from what was, in many cases, their sole solace.59

  Historians may never fully agree about which factor—social discontent, military pathologies, economic and financial problems, or infrastru
ctural breakdown—was most important in bringing about the end of the Russian empire. Yet a good case can be made for vodka politics—the pervasiveness of alcohol in late-imperial Russian society and its abrupt prohibition—in catalyzing the overthrow of the centuries-old Romanov dynasty. Indeed, astute observers of the day noted as much, bluntly concluding that the “chief contributory cause to the revolution was the prohibition in 1914 of the sale of spiritous liquors.”60

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  Vodka Communism

  “The very nearest future will be a period of a heroic struggle with alcohol,” proclaimed Leon Trotsky—the firebrand Bolshevik ideologue and founder of the Red Army. Shortly after the communists seized power he warned: “If we don’t stamp out alcoholism, then we will drink up socialism and drink up the October Revolution.”1

  Of course, Marxists of all stripes had long criticized alcohol as the means by which the bourgeois capitalists leached their wealth from the oppressed working class, especially in tsarist Russia (chapter 10). When Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks replaced Europe’s most conservative monarchy with the world’s first communist state, everything was bound to change: all political, economic, social, and even cultural relations were to be re-cast—including Russia’s relationship to the bottle.

  Yet before the Bolsheviks could take on Russia’s deeply rooted alcohol dependence, there were more pressing concerns—namely, taking and holding political power in an environment of unimaginable chaos, suffering, and despair.

  The Two Revolutions

  While certainly not the sole factor, Nicholas II’s disastrous alcohol prohibition unquestionably hastened the empire’s undoing. Following the tsar’s famed prohibition telegram of September 1914, the imperial parliament—or Duma—began to codify the declaration into law. With deaths and desertions mounting on the war front and discontent brewing at home, in 1916 the Duma passed a bill making Russian prohibition permanent and absolute. Yet by the time it could be officially submitted to the emperor for ratification there was no tsar left to send it to.2

  By the bitterly cold January of 1917, Russian war casualties topped six million. Thousands of exhausted soldiers deserted monthly, joining civilian refugees from war-torn areas into a disaffected and disgruntled mass of millions flowing steadily eastward. Even without the stench, death, and misery of trench warfare, things weren’t much better away from the front lines: food shortages threatened both famine and rebellion.3

  On International Women’s Day—February 23—women textile workers went on strike in Petrograd. Their simple demands for bread and an end to the war resonated with a war-weary population. Within days, hundreds of thousands of protesters clogged the thoroughfares of the capital, clashing with the police—culminating in a massacre on Nevsky Prospect when a training detachment of nervous, young recruits opened fire into the crowd. As the emboldened mobs grew larger, and potentially more dangerous, the military defied orders to fire on unarmed civilians. The government was paralyzed. Meanwhile, a council of soldiers and leaders of labor unions were organized by socialists into the so-called Petrograd Soviet (Council) that quickly gained legitimacy as an alternative political authority. En route to the capital from the front, the tsar’s train was stopped by rebellious soldiers and railway workers. With his people and military against him, and Grand Duke Nikolasha “on his knees” beseeching him to abdicate his throne, Nicholas II did so, bringing the Romanov dynasty to its end.4

  With the police in hiding or defying orders, mobs laid siege to police stations, government ministries, and the tsar’s prisons. There was little opposition to the hundreds of thousands of workers, mutinous soldiers, and recently liberated criminals roaming the streets of Petrograd. Armed gangs looted homes, shops, and liquor stores. Some commandeered motor cars—which they promptly crashed, since few knew how to drive, especially through a haze of pilfered vodka.5 Hundreds died, and thousands more were injured in the February Revolution, yet there was a sense that things could have been much worse. With the monarchy gone, the mood in the capital was largely festive—even euphoric—a state that foreign observers chalked up to prohibition and the relative paucity of alcohol: “If vodka could have been found in plenty, the revolution could easily have had a terrible ending.”6

  The tsar’s abdication decapitated the old political order. With the royal family gone, who was in charge of the country? Actually, the imperial institutions and bureaucracy were still in place, and—even before the official abdication—members of the imperial Duma had already hastily organized a new “temporary” or Provisional Government. Yet while foreign powers enthusiastically recognized the liberal, self-appointed Provisional Government as the Russian power de jure, the de facto political power lay with the socialist Petrograd Soviet, which both represented and directed the soldiers and workers—first in the capital and then throughout the country.

  At the center of this system of dual power was Aleksandr Kerensky—a moderate, Socialist Revolutionary Duma deputy who had a foot in both camps: being elected as vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and as minister of justice (and later minister of war) in the Provisional Government. Trying to guide this unwieldy arrangement was like skiing with each ski pointed in a different direction—and Kerensky was going downhill fast. Socialists in the Petrograd Soviet demanded an immediate end to the disastrous war, land reform, and giving control of factories to the workers. Meanwhile, the Provisional Government continued many of the tsar’s unpopular policies, including fighting the war (so as not to disappoint Russia’s wartime allies) and the alcohol prohibition.7

  The mostly sober and orderly spring of 1917 gave way to a summer of increasingly drunken disorder as more drubbings at the front, mutinies in Petrograd, and government gridlock eroded Kerensky’s support. By the fall, the Provisional Government—holed up in the immaculate Winter Palace of the tsars—had no supporters left to defend it.8

  As Kerensky’s legitimacy waned, the power of the Bolsheviks was on the rise. Lenin and a group of exiled Bolsheviks arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station from their European exile in April. By summer, they had secured control of the Petrograd Soviet and set about overthrowing the Provisional Government in the name of the workers and peasants.9

  Relative to its importance in changing the course of world history, the October Revolution itself was rather mundane. The night of October 24–25 was just like any other in the strife-weary city. Restaurants and theaters in the capital were open and conducting a brisk business, even as the Bolsheviks quietly seized control of strategic assets: government offices, train stations, and major newspapers. The popular image of a dramatic communist advance on the Winter Palace putting Kerensky to flight is more a product of Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film adaption October than a reflection of actual events. In fact, the Winter Palace was stormed by a relatively small and disorganized group of revolutionaries—many of whom bypassed the priceless works of art and other royal treasures to instead loot the imperial wine cellars. Were it not for the Bolsheviks ability to maintain power, the events of that night would have been just another episode of instability among many in wartime Russia.10

  Once the Provisional Government fled, jubilant soldiers and sailors drank themselves into oblivion. “In the wine cellars of the Winter Palace, which were the first to be smashed, many unfortunate souls have already died from overdrinking,” wrote Lenin’s confidant Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. “Crates of wine were thrown into holes in the river ice, but crazed people dove in after it, and drowned in the Neva trying to catch that cursed potion. From there a drunken pogrom erupted, as with furious and rabid joy the crazed and drunken crowd stormed private apartments throughout the city.”11

  War correspondent for the San Francisco Bulletin Bessie Beatty described how the night the Winter Palace cellars were looted, “we thought the whole populace was going to be killed; but it later developed that the sounds we had taken for shots were nothing more fatal than popping corks, and the soldiers who lay on the white snow were not dead, but merely dead drun
k.”12

  At a national conference of workers’ and soldiers’ soviets held the following day, Lenin triumphantly proclaimed the beginning of a new socialist order—vowing to withdraw Russia from the war and nationalize land in the name of the peasants. The new era had begun.

  But the old system would not go so quietly into the “dustbin of history.” While the Bolsheviks had a tenuous hold on the capital, the same could not be said throughout the vast Russian landmass, where communist “red” forces confronted royalists, conservatives, and others intent on defending the old imperial “white” order. Ever mindful of the relative ease with which both the weak tsarist and provisional governments were overthrown, Lenin was determined not to meet the same fate through counterrevolution. What the Bolsheviks had that their opponents lacked was discipline—and they knew that the biggest threat to discipline was vodka. Therefore, the first order of business in communist Russia was to affirm the prohibition inherited from their bourgeois predecessors.

  This anti-alcohol paranoia was well founded, as throughout November and December Petrograd was rocked by liquor riots—mostly among the soldiers—that threatened the stability of the new regime. The new communist leadership quickly discovered that Petrograd was “mined” with over eight hundred wine cellars: one alone held 1.2 million bottles. In desperate need of foreign credits, the Bolsheviks first thought to sell these collections—including vintage wines and champagnes aged hundreds of years—to English and American customers. But events were moving too fast. A detachment of the liberal Constitutional Democrats sowed insubordination among the revolutionary guard by telephoning barracks with rumors of free alcohol at various locations throughout the city, which predictably degenerated into drunken chaos.13