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

by Mark Lawrence

  Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of the British ambassador in Petrograd described the fearful chaos in the snows of December.

  Even as far down the Quay as the Embassy the air was infected with the reek of spirits, and everywhere drunken soldiers lay about, broken bottles littered the streets, the snow was stained rose red and yellow in many places where the wine had been spilt. All through the town the drunken hordes spread themselves, firing indiscriminately at each other or anybody who molested them. Scenes of indescribable horror and disgust took place, the crowds in some instances scooping up the dirty, wine-stained snow, drinking it out of their hands, fighting with each other over the remains.… A drunken soldier stood before one of the huge fires that burned at the corners of all the streets, a broken bottle held in one hand, a pistol in the other, while a Red Guard leaning on his gun watched him with an indulgent smile. Singing and laughing the soldier swayed, perilously near to the leaping flames, now and then pointing his pistol at the passers-by, cursing them, or laughing at them as they drew nervously away. Still a little farther along another soldier lay face down in the snow, an empty bottle still clutched in one hand, while two little boys stood nervously at a distance, and a third, more courageous, tried to loosen the fast-clasped fingers from the bottle, to see perhaps whether there were a few drops left.14

  Before his newspaper Novaya zhizn’ (New Life) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship (and before he himself became a Bolshevik apologist), in 1917 the liberal writer and critic Maxim Gorky reported how the communist mob looted alcohol stores nightly, falling into the mire “like pigs,” covered in blood from smashed liquor bottles. As for the official claim that “bourgeois provocation” was to blame for the drunken disorder? “It is a blatant lie.” Gorky argued it was the product of the socialist revolution itself—devoid as it was of social consciousness.15

  Whatever their source, the constant threat of drunken pogroms was perhaps the new government’s most immediate challenge. “What would you have?” the exasperated People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, told a reporter, throwing up his hands. “The whole of Petrograd is drunk.”16

  The new communist government—the Military Revolutionary Committee—took quick and drastic action by forming a new internal security organization to confront the drunken disorder: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter revolution and Sabotage—often referred to simply as the Extraordinary Commission or by its Russian initials “Ch” and “K”: the “CheKa.” Later reorganized as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and then as the Committee for State Security (KGB)—the Soviet secret police was associated with the darkest horrors of totalitarian terror. The most fearful symbol of Soviet repression and intimidation was a massive, fifteen-ton “Iron Felix” statue erected in 1958 in front of Stalin’s NKVD headquarters at the notorious Lubyanka Prison in downtown Moscow. This despised monument to the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was among the first statues toppled when communism collapsed in 1991.

  Long before his likeness was immortalized in iron, Dzerzhinsky was charged with mercilessly suppressing the counterrevolutionary vodka threat. “The bourgeoisie perpetuates the most evil crimes,” Lenin wrote Dzerzhinsky in December 1917, “bribing the cast-offs and dregs of society, getting them drunk for pogroms.”17 In Petrograd, all alcohol producers were to immediately disclose the whereabouts of their liquor stores or stand trial before the Military Revolutionary Court. Bootleggers were to be shot on sight. The mammoth collection of liquors and vintage wines in the Winter Palace wine cellars—valued at $5 million ($91 million in 2013 dollars)—was flooded by an emergency fire battalion, drowning those soldiers too drunk to escape. The frigid waters did little to deter would-be thieves, so the entire collection was later removed to the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt that defended the approaches to the capital and dutifully smashed by Red sailors there.18

  “The men who wanted that wine were so mad for it that even machine guns would not keep them back. So the comrade in charge turned the machine guns on the bottles and destroyed them,” described American journalist Anna Louise Strong. “The wine rose to the tops of his hip-boots so that he was wading in it. He used to be a drinker himself before he became a Communist and it hurt him to see that good wine destroyed. But it was necessary to preserve order in Petrograd.”19

  The seriousness of vodka’s counterrevolutionary threat was also chronicled in American socialist John Reed’s famous firsthand account, Ten Days that Shook the World. Reed even reproduced a Bolshevik order posted throughout the neighborhoods of Vasily Island, just across the Neva River due west of the Winter Palace.

  The bourgeoisie has chosen a very sinister method of fighting against the proletariat; it has established in various parts of the city huge wine depots, and distributes liquor among the soldiers, in this manner attempting to sow dissatisfaction in the ranks of the Revolutionary army.

  It is herewith ordered to all house committees, that at 3 o’clock, the time set for posting this order, they shall in person and secretly notify the President of the Committee of the Finland Guard Regiment, concerning the amount of wine in their premises.

  Those who violate this order will be arrested and given trial before a merciless court, and their property will be confiscated, and the stock of wine discovered will be

  BLOWN UP WITH DYNAMITE

  2 hours after this warning,

  because more lenient measures, as experience has shown, do not bring the desired results.

  REMEMBER, THERE WILL BE NO OTHER

  WARNINGBEFORE THE EXPLOSIONS.

  —Regimental Committee of the Finland Guard Regiment20

  With the city under martial law, Lenin appointed both a commissar to combat drunkenness and pogroms and an official anti-riot committee to aid Dzerzhinsky and his chekists’ fight against alcohol. Together, their confrontations with drunken instigators often escalated into pitched street battles involving machine guns and armored cars. Outside the Petrov Vodka Factory, for instance, Red Guard detachments sworn to be “sober and loyal to the revolution” clashed with unruly and drunken elements of the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, leaving eleven dead.21 The normally reliable Preobrazhensky Regiment assigned to guard the liquor warehouses “got completely drunk.” The Pavlovsky Regiment also “did not withstand temptation.” Other assigned guards likewise “succumbed.” Armored brigades ordered to disperse inebriated crowds “paraded a little to and fro, and then began to sway suspiciously on their feet.”22 Scenes like these were repeated in Moscow, Saratov, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod, and throughout Russia in the tumultuous months following the October Revolution, forcing authorities to use only their most loyal and untouchable Red Guards to quell the counterrevolutionary alco-disorder. “The duty of the Red Guard,” according to its own pledge, “includes the struggle with drunkenness so as not to allow liberty and revolution to drown in wine.”23

  Such extreme countermeasures against vodka were hardly new. A decade earlier, during the so-called dress rehearsal Revolution of 1905, socialist battalions were often infiltrated by royalists and extremists, including the ultra-nationalist “Black Hundreds,” which terrorized would-be revolutionaries by inciting violent pogroms with vodka. Even then, Lenin preached vigilance: “Prepare for the decisive struggle, citizens! We will not allow the Black-Hundred government to use violence against Russia,” he declared. “We shall order our army units to arrest the Black-Hundred heroes who fuddle ignorant people with vodka and corrupt them; we shall commit all those monsters… for public, revolutionary trial by the whole people.”24

  Whether aspiring for power in 1905 or maintaining power in 1917, such “practical” defenses only hardened Lenin’s intellectual disdain for alcohol. Like many early socialists, he derided alcohol as a tool of capitalist domination of the working classes, especially in Russia (chapter 10). For Lenin, the imperial liquor trade was an “unparalleled and shameless exploitation of the peasantry”; the noble landlord was “a usure
r and robber, a beast of prey,” and “village bloodsucker” for promoting the booze trade.25

  “Death is preferable to selling vodka!” Lenin declared prior to the revolution. True to his prohibitionist principles, he held fast to that conviction after seizing power.26 Even with vodka’s counterrevolutionary threat subsiding, Lenin’s ruling Sovnarkom, or Council of People’s Commissars (“commissar” being proletarian-speak for the bourgeois title of “minister”), nationalized all alcohol production facilities and existing alcohol stocks. In 1919, the Sovnarkom forbid distilling “by any means, in any quantity and at any strength”—punishable by confiscation of all property and a minimum of five years in Siberian labor camps.27

  Such draconian penalties were necessary for a Bolshevik government in a fight for survival. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) freed Russia from the nightmare of World War I—and all it cost them was control of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and most of present-day Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. But the horrors of the Great War were replaced by the tragedy of civil war: of Russia’s vast territories, the Bolsheviks effectively controlled only those areas from Petrograd on the Baltic southeast to Astrakhan on the Caspian. In the Urals to the east, the “reds” fought against the “white” royalist forces of Adm. Aleksandr Kolchak and a legion of Czech volunteers. In the Caucasus and Central Asia to the south, they faced British and Turkish forces, white Cossacks, and an indigenous Basmachi rebellion. To the southwest were the white armies of Anton Denikin, Cossacks, Ukrainian separatists, and a well-armed anarchist movement. In the west, they confronted Poles, Germans, and the white armies of Nikolai Yudenich. From the northwest, the Finns advanced on Petrograd. American and British forces occupied the arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the north.

  From 1917 through 1923 the Bolsheviks had their hands full. Lenin’s right-hand man Leon Trotsky hastily assembled a Red Army of five million men: mostly peasants and former imperial soldiers who often joined only out of fear that they or their families would be taken hostage or shot—a common terror tactic on both sides.

  In this light, the Bolsheviks’ anti-alcohol measures seem only slightly less draconian. This was “War Communism”: everything in their control was mobilized for victory. Trade was abolished. All industries were nationalized. To feed the urban workers, food was requisitioned from the rural peasantry at gunpoint. Bootleggers who distilled grains into vodka were declared enemies of the revolution for sabotaging the state’s food supply and often were imprisoned or shot. Even so, hundreds of thousands of tons of grain were annually made into alcohol, often with the connivance of corrupt local Bolshevik officials. In one town in south-central Russia alone, authorities discovered that the peasants had distilled vodka from grain that could have fed a city of ten thousand people.28 This system may have delivered Red victory in the civil war, but it also produced unthinkable desperation and hardship.

  Misery

  As the civil war wound down, the human misery left in its wake is difficult to fathom, much less quantify. Four disastrous years of world war killed upwards of three million Russians. The ensuing civil war, red terror, white terror, and Cheka executions claimed at least as many. Another two million fled the country. Then came epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and Spanish flu claiming millions more. Years of total war destroyed both infrastructure and authority: people did not know who might come the next day to take their food, forcibly conscript them, or senselessly terrorize them. There were no schools, no transportation. Struggling to survive, hungry orphans roamed the rubble-strewn streets of deserted cities. Moscow lost over half its population—Petrograd lost two-thirds. Most fled to the countryside, but even there they had no incentive to farm or produce, as anything they reaped would likely be torn from them. In the early 1920s, Russia’s agricultural output was less than half of what it was before the Great War—with its factories in ruins, industrial output was less than twenty percent. Within a decade, the national income of Russia—one of the world’s greatest powers—was only forty percent of what it was in 1913, “a fall of the productive forces,” as one economic historian describes it, that “is unexampled in the history of mankind.”29 And to this laundry list of horrors, we now add famine.

  As the Bolsheviks consolidated control in the spring of 1921, the Volga basin grappled with a crippling drought. In normal times a peasant family held a small surplus of grain to get through a bad harvest: they might go hungry, but they wouldn’t starve. But with the terror of War Communism, all grain that wasn’t forcibly seized by “collection squads” was distilled into vodka, leaving desperate millions to face starvation.

  Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership admitted that “we actually took from the peasant his entire surplus, and, sometimes we took not only the surplus but part of his necessary supply in order to meet the expenses of the army and to support the workers.” With the news of drought in the Volga region, Lenin concerned himself not so much with the threat it posed to the peoples’ welfare but to the government itself—announcing to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921: “If there is a crop failure, it will be impossible to appropriate any surplus, because there will be no surplus.” He added, “since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means of satisfying their own hunger, the government will perish.”30

  As a part of his NEP, or New Economic Policy, Lenin relented: strategically retreating from the bayonet-point requisitions of War Communism to in-kind taxation, NEP left some surplus for the peasants to sell at market, providing a “breathing space” for Russian agriculture to recover. But for the starving millions along the Volga, it was already too late. Within months Russia would be rocked by the deadliest famine in modern European history. Diseased and dying livestock was set upon by children with distended bellies; the weathered, gaunt-faced men who piled corpses like cordwood into mass graves ate grass, tree bark, or worse. In the city of Samara alone, ten butcher shops were closed for peddling in human flesh.31

  This was not the first devastating famine in Russia, and it would not be the last. A generation earlier in tsarist Russia a hard freeze followed by extended drought created a famine that claimed a half-million souls in 1891–92. Yet it was the famine’s all-too-human causes and the callous indifference of the tsarist government that galvanized many critics—including Lenin—into steadfast opponents of the old regime. That fall, peasants rushed to sell their meager harvest to pay their taxes, debts, and liquor bills—glutting the market and driving down grain prices, forcing the peasants to sell even their precious reserves to get by. By mid-winter, their food stocks were gone. In a vicious cycle, the only means of survival was by going deeper in debt to the local pawnbroker or landlord, but that only increased the peasant’s burden and narrowed next year’s margin of survival.

  The tone-deaf government response, which included resurrecting the imperial spirits monopoly that “contributed so much to its impoverishment and demoralisation” at the hour of the peasantry’s greatest need, drew the ire of many both in Russia and abroad.32 Even the relief efforts were exacerbated by alcohol: both the food to tide the needy over until the next harvest and the seed grain needed to grow it was often “either drunk up in the taverns or sold to speculators at an unusually low price.”33

  The situation in 1921 was an eerie echo to the famine thirty years earlier, especially concerning alcohol. In both cases—despite the widespread food shortage—vodka was everywhere. While providing a temporary psychological respite for both the victims and aid providers, vodka—and the clandestine distillation of grain to prevent its requisition—was partially to blame for the misery. As before—even amid widespread hunger—both the relief provisions and the seed grain necessary for future crops were often distilled by bootleggers into vodka. In the heart of the famine zone, one aid worker explained: “The principal distraction of the villages (grown wild as they are) is generally drink, which fills up all the hours of all the holidays and festivals. No idea can be formed of the huge extensio
n of secret vodka-distilling; it has pervaded Russian life throughout and is a calamity both for the national morals and the national health.”34

  Famine politics are fascinating in their own right. Amartya Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research into the causes of poverty, has argued that famines are never caused by crop failures alone but rather are symptomatic of autocratic political systems that can easily ignore the needs of their citizens.35 This resonates with the thesis of this book: Russia’s society-wide addiction to alcohol is not only a social and cultural problem in its own right but is also symptomatic of a deeper political illness—an autocratic state that benefits from alcoholic excess and is consequently hostile to grass-roots activism that promotes the interests and welfare of society.

  There is perhaps no clearer illustration of these dynamics than the American Relief Administration (ARA) expedition to alleviate the Russian famine of 1921–22. A quasi-governmental aid agency directed by future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, the ARA delivered food and relief supplies to war-ravaged Europe during and after the Great War. Along with the International Committee of the Red Cross and Britain’s Save the Children Fund, Hoover and the ARA answered an appeal by famed writer Maxim Gorky (who by now had become reluctantly allied with the communist leadership), pleading that millions were at risk of starvation.36 Following delicate, high-level negotiations with the new Bolshevik government, the ARA was permitted to extend its reach into the famine-ravaged Volga area, where they had to tread a thin line: if they were seen as strengthening Lenin’s communist regime, they would run afoul of American public opinion and lose their logistical support. But if the Russians viewed the Americans as using aid to destabilize the Bolshevik government, they would be evicted, leaving millions more to die. Still, by 1922, ARA kitchens were feeding nearly eleven million Russians a day.37