Between communists and capitalists, “vodka was the supreme test of good government relations,” writes Bertrand Patenaude in his history of the ARA, The Big Show in Bololand—the Americans’ name for the exotic land of the Bolsheviks. The letters, diaries, and memoirs of the cowboys, college students, and former doughboys of the ARA repeatedly tell of the jarring discord between the needs of the starving population and the ostentatious local Bolshevik authorities on whom they relied to deliver their much-needed relief. Whether well-intentioned displays of traditional hospitality (as the Russians thought) or efforts to get the Americans drunk in order to rob them of their “dignified reserve” (as the Americans thought), throughout the famine zone the ARA was welcomed with festive banquets and copious amounts of liquor. Some were treated to 85-year-old port requisitioned from old imperial cellars; others were given bootleg kerosene seasoned with ammonia. In either case, ARA workers were struck by the “curious contradiction” that such prolific indulgence could take place in the shadows of the apocalyptical scenes of famine just beyond the commissars’ doors. “Just as incongruous,” Patenaude wrote, “was the fact that the sponsors of these events were representatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat, who it might have been thought would have banished banqueting to the irretrievable past. Instead, the proletariat’s parvenu vanguard seemed intent upon outdoing the defeated class enemy even in the social sphere, as if to demonstrate its suitability to rule the country.”38
The letters of ARA officer William Kelley describe life as the government’s guest in the Bashkir city of Sterlitamak. In one instance, a surreal banquet of Bolshevik leaders and four ladies began over a gallon of “the vilest” bootleg vodka.
With the first toast the fight was on, they fighting to get me drunk, and I determined to stay on deck.… Midnight found the bottle empty. The Commissar of Transport was oozing vodka at every port, but still cheerful and peaceful. [The government host] Bishoff was sick and very quiet. Churnishev was unperturbed. Lady No. 4 had been led away to bed. Nos. 2 and 3 were plainly drunk. The hostess, I must say, was well mannered and well poised throughout. I caught her eye once and we toasted each other quietly across the table.39
The next morning, with his head still pounding from the (alleged) beverages as he returned to the ARA offices, Kelley prided himself on at least not drunkenly blabbing something undiplomatic. “Along the road he passed the body of a soldier who had been killed during the night,” describes Patenaude, “through the crowd of onlookers he could see a ‘mass of human brains in the mud.’ Half a block down the road he came upon a group of children playing hopscotch at a place where the entire previous day had lain the corpse of a child, its clothing and flesh chewed up by dogs. It had been removed, but nearby lay an apparent successor, a woman lying on a doorstep.”40
Just as the socialists of 1891 were horrified at the tsarist regime’s callous indifference to its famine-stricken people, the new “Bolo” government was no different, even though their famine claimed ten times as many victims: capitalist or communist, both regimes were autocracies that transformed the hardship of drought into the tragedy of famine. “The difference between democracy and autocracy,” claimed relief-administrator Hoover, “is a question of whether people can be organized from the bottom up or from the top down.”41 Whether private agencies marshaling food relief to famine victims or grass-roots temperance organizations grappling with insobriety, that autocracies actively stifle bottom-up welfare initiatives goes far toward explaining why liberal democracies generally allay mass suffering while autocracies perpetuate it.
Vodka And NEP
The white forces having been vanquished on all fronts in the Civil War, the biggest threat to the new Bolshevik government came from the eternally suffering peasants themselves. Even in areas not decimated by war and famine, bands of peasants (and in the case of the Kronstadt garrison in 1921, even soldiers) rose up against the authorities. But since the landlords of old were gone, these became revolts against the state itself. Compounding the problem was the peasants’ hoarding and distilling of grain. Between the insurrections and hoarding, Lenin concluded that that the only way to save the communist revolution was to pacify the disgruntled peasantry.
Even as a counterrevolutionary mutiny among the Kronstadt sailors was being violently repressed, at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Lenin announced what would become known as the New Economic Policy: while the “commanding heights” of the economy—foreign trade, banks, and heavy industry—would stay in state hands, private commercial enterprises were legalized, and the forced grain requisitions were replaced with an in-kind tax, giving the peasantry the incentive to cultivate and sell surplus yields for profit. This strategic retreat from War Communism opened an economic “breathing space” that allowed both manufacturing and agriculture to rebound. To critics, it was a return to capitalism.42
Before an audience of hundreds of Communist Party delegates, Lenin argued that along with the “commanding heights,” vodka production should also not be ceded to the people. In this way, Lenin claimed alcohol was fundamentally different from other consumer goods like, say, toiletries: “I think that we should not follow the example of the capitalist countries and put vodka and other intoxicants on the market, because, profitable though they are, they will lead us back to capitalism and not forward to communism.” His sarcastic addendum that “there is no such danger in pomade” was met with laughter throughout the hall.43
In reality, the joke may have been on Lenin: beyond the congress hall in Moscow, very few Russians heeded the proclamation. Indeed, the ARA accounts of widespread illegal alcohol consumption even amid the horrors of famine testified to the indifference to Lenin’s prohibition throughout Russia. From outside the famine zone in Smolensk, the Pravda correspondent reported “an ocean of home brew,” as entire villages had essentially become spirit-distilling cooperatives, shipping liquor as far as Gomel and Bryansk provinces. From Ivanovo came reports of moonshiners popping up “like mushrooms after a rain.” “Everywhere you look, stills” was the word from Kursk. The writer, Anton Bolshakov, reported from Tver that virtually every household in the district was engaged in making samogon or home-brew. So prevalent was the practice in Tomsk that state prosecutors simply gave up. Illegal alcohol could even be found in Moscow’s kiosks, cafés, and restaurants—usually sold as “lemonade in an unsealed bottle.” Even in the shadow of the Kremlin anyone could buy samogon by simply “requesting ‘lemonade’ and winking at the salesman meaningfully.”44
Much of that liquor was never meant for human consumption. In Petrograd, the workers’ committee at the Atlas Metal Works complained that employees “drink methylated spirits, varnish and all kinds of other substitutes. They come to work drunk, speak at meetings, bawl inappropriate exclamations, prevent their more class-conscious comrades from speaking, paralyze organisational work, and the result is chaos in the workshops.”45 In Moscow, many warmed to “Eau-de-cologne No. 3.” According to the accounts of soldiers,
It was nothing but 100-proof alcohol, lightly scented. This eau-de-cologne is sold in flasks of 200 or 400 grams, or in other words: by the half-bottle or bottle.… Soldiers, artisans, clerks and officials stock up on this eau-de-cologne, go into the tea-houses, ask for a bottle of lemonade for the sake of appearances, pour some lemonade into a glass before filling it with cologne. Two flasks of it, and you’re drunk.46
When vodka—either genuine or bootleg—could not be found, Russians increasingly turned to surrogates. During the revolutionary struggle in Samara, a riotous mob got drunk on printers’ ink. Others quaffed shoe polish, rectified varnish, or medical and industrial alcohols. The preferred “drink for intellectuals” in Rostov-on-Don was the local eau-de-cologne.47 Foreigners frequently noted the lengths to which Russians would go for a drink. As part of his mission in the famine zone, Harold Fleming—a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar—wrote home describing a Russian wedding where the host handed out drinks in cups r
efashioned from ARA milk cans. “May I never have a disease such as will call for such a combination of fuel-oil, benzine, and kerosine, as that liquor was.”48 Most common was what the Americans called the “k-v cocktail”—a mix of kerosene and vodka, which they occasionally used to replace the gasoline in their supply trucks. There are good reasons that we generally don’t drink the same industrial alcohols we use to fuel our trucks, light our lamps or polish our shoes: they are poisonous. Not surprisingly, many Russian revelers fatally succumbed to these deadly surrogates.
The Bolsheviks knew full well about their growing problem with illegal alcohol and about their inability to do anything meaningful to stop it. Nevertheless, the new government continued to heave one rhetorical salvo after another against the evils of alcohol because—practical realities aside—prohibition was an issue of pivotal ideological importance. Often it was left to the founder and commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, to launch such ideological broadsides against vodka.
Before the Revolution, Trotsky was an outspoken critic of the tsar’s “drunken budget” that provided up to one-third of state income. Not only did vodka exploit the workers financially, it also distracted the workers from political activism and perpetuated the moral and financial bankruptcy that forever binds them to their capitalist oppressors. “The propertied classes and the state bear responsibility for that culture which cannot exist without the constant lubricant of alcohol,” the loquacious Trotsky argued. “But their historical guilt is still incomparably more terrible. Through fiscal means they turn alcohol, that physical, moral and social poison, into the main source of nourishment for the state. Vodka not only makes the people incompetent to manage their own destiny, it also covers the expenditures of the privileged. What a real devil’s system!”49
The Bolsheviks planned to turn the prohibition they inherited from their imperial predecessors as a weapon against that same system of capitalist alcooppression. As Trotsky wrote in Pravda—the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party—prohibition was “one of the iron assets of the revolution.”50 Without alcohol, Russians could turn to more productive tasks, express their real interests through communist political activism, and bring the state budget in line with the real needs of the people. For it was not simply a change in leadership that the communists had long desired but, rather, a dramatic change in all manner of social relationships. Years of war, revolution, chaos, and disorder destroyed the old capitalist structure of oppressor versus oppressed; the task that remained was to form the culture of a new species—Homo Sovieticus—with a culture that glorified modesty, honesty, and sobriety. In this world of reborn labor, the state would tutor society and wean the worker from the vices of old. When it came to alcohol, the bland sermonizing of temperance activism would be replaced with modern amusements promoted by the state—cinema, theater, education, and sports—to enlighten and satisfy the working class and to convince them that they no longer needed vodka to cure their boredom.51
So even as the Bolsheviks confronted piles of evidence that their prohibition was ineffective and practical voices called for reinstating the traditional vodka monopoly, temperance was such a crucial tenet of the new ruling ideology that it was difficult to imagine any capitulation to alcohol so long as chief ideologues like Lenin and Trotsky were in charge.52
The communists’ ironclad commitment to prohibition is even more striking when compared to their ideological concessions to capitalist markets as part of the New Economic Policy, which only exacerbated the problem of black market hooch. Under War Communism, to avoid having their harvests forcibly requisitioned, many peasants turned to distilling. Now given control over their own (after-tax) surpluses, even more of the peasant’s grain went to the still.53 But why would so many risk hard labor or even death if they got caught? Were they just that hard-up for a drink?
Surely—to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Roaring Twenties—there will always be guys wanting a drink, whether in Russia, America, or elsewhere. Basic economic theory suggests (and global experiences confirm) that restricting the supply only drives prices higher and brings the insatiable allure of ever-greater profits along with it. But neither simple economics, nor the inability of the new government to exercise their authority, nor even allusions to the allegedly “eternal” Russian penchant for drink, can explain the widespread proliferation of illegal distillation.
We must consider the role of official corruption—borne of the tsarist vodka trade—which remained entrenched in the early Soviet era.54 As in the past, most moonshiners knew they had little to fear from the local authorities other than pressure for a periodic bribe. Plus those bribes were repaid with tip-offs about upcoming raids. In many cases, the authorities were themselves complicit in the local alcohol trade, just as in the imperial past. In the first half of 1918, for example, the Commissariat of State Control discovered over thirty places where the local communist governments legalized vodka sales in contravention to the official law. Regional soviets occasionally even fixed local prices for samogon.55
The collapse of the economy from years of war and devastation also contributed to the illegal practice. For many, their traditional trades—centered on flax, cloth, and grain—had been destroyed, leaving samogon as the only viable source of income.56 What’s more, vodka was often not just the source of income and a primary household expenditure; frequently it was the medium of exchange, too. Thanks to hyperinflation, the ruble was worthless. As in earlier centuries when money meant nothing, the value-holding, nonspoiling, easily divisible, and even more easily consumable vodka stepped in as a surrogate currency. And as in the past when the economy faltered, Russians turned to unofficial exchanges—barter, blat, and pomoch’ (chapter 8)—just to survive.
IN THE FIGHT AGAINST SAMOGON (CIRCA 1920S). “Homebrewing ruins peasant farming, destroys a man’s health, harms his offspring and leads to crime.” The bottle contains statistics on the health of alcoholics, as well as birth defects, while practical equivalents of the 200 million pud (3.3 million metric tons) and 140 million rubles are tabulated at right. Note the priest (holding the icon) and kulak atop the still, reveling in the peasant’s misery and bondage to the bottle. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.
In order get a complete picture of conditions in the countryside, in 1923 the high-ranking Central Committee sent an official delegation to interview typical peasants in Kursk province. Their report affirmed the centrality of vodka in village life. “A peasant needs samogon or vodka, it does not matter which. For example, if one needs to build a house, one can never find workers; but if there is vodka or samogon, you treat the neighbors to it, and the house is soon ready.”57
That the countryside was swimming in alcohol despite the draconian dry law was hardly surprising to the investigators, nor was vodka’s durability as a medium of exchange. If there was one surprise for Moscow, it was how unreceptive the peasantry was of the new Soviets’ high-minded cultural revolution. “Do not rely on the peasants in your battle with samogon,” one interviewee bluntly told the commissars: “Do it yourselves.” Such ungrateful—and clearly capitalist—sentiments only confirmed the leadership’s suspicions that the conservative peasantry remained ignorant, backward, and a dangerous source of potential counterrevolution.58
With the economy finally showing signs of life, in March 1922 Lenin rose before the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party to defend NEP against critics who saw it as selling out their hard-won communist revolution to the principles of capitalism. With famine raging, Lenin remained resolute that—ideologically unpalatable as it was—NEP’s pragmatic concessions were the only way forward. Yet he remained steadfast that there would be no compromise with vodka: “If under present conditions the peasant must have freedom to trade within certain limits, we must give it to him, but this does not mean that we are permitting trade in raw brandy. We shall punish people for that sort of trade.”59
Lenin’s threats were only a prelud
e: the relatively lax attitude toward distillation in the countryside was soon met by a systemic clampdown. The new 1922 criminal code categorically outlawed private distillation. Anti-alcohol propaganda was ratcheted up. Particularly during the high tide of drunkenness around Christmas and Easter, the Soviets stepped up “shock campaigns” against home brewing. Police conducted more than forty thousand searches in fifty-two provinces during the winter of 1922, busting over twenty-three thousand private distilling and confiscating over sixteen thousand stills. The seventy-eight thousand Easter-time searches the following spring produced similar yields. “Wanted” signs advertised rewards for information leading to uncovering secret operations, and both police and informants were paid handsomely. Statistics from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs recorded 904,078 cases of illicit brewing in 1922–23 alone. Yet moonshining was so widespread that these shock campaigns were—as one observer described it—like “shooting a cannon at sparrows.”60
Despite the difficulties of enforcement, Lenin held firm to his revolutionary prohibition until the end—which was not long in coming. Less than a month after his rousing defense of NEP and prohibition, in April 1922, a surgeon finally succeeded in removing the bullet that had been lodged in Lenin’s neck since an assassination attempt four years earlier. A month after the surgery, Lenin suffered the first in a series of debilitating strokes that threw the country’s leadership into disarray. A second stroke in December 1922 paralyzed his right side, at which time Lenin—the illustrious revolutionary leader and unquestioned ruler—withdrew from politics. A third stroke in March 1923 left him mute and bedridden until his death from complications from a final, massive stroke on January 21, 1924, at the age of fifty-three.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 31