The Russian people’s worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth, later claimed Winston Churchill. “Their next worst—his death.”61 A cult-like veneration of the hero Lenin quickly ensued: the old imperial capital of Petrograd (née St. Petersburg) was quickly renamed Leningrad in his honor. Back in Moscow, Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum on Red Square, where he has lain—part revered icon and part macabre tourist attraction—ever since.
Lenin’s gradual fade from politics cast the future of NEP, prohibition, and the leadership of the country into doubt. With no clear line of succession and no one individual able to fill Lenin’s shoes, the party’s collective Politburo leadership confronted a decade-long succession struggle from the very first stroke. By the end of the 1920s, the Georgian-born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili—better known to the world as Stalin—had outmaneuvered Trotsky and his other rivals to become the unquestioned leader of this newly proclaimed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Many of Stalin’s policies were a dramatic break from Lenin’s—perhaps none more so than his decision to repeal the prohibition on alcohol and resurrect Russia’s centuries-old system of autocratic vodka politics.
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Industrialization, Collectivization, Alcoholization
“The Russian Peasant may be Illiterate, but he is not what you would call Dumb,” noted American satirist Will Rogers in the late 1920s. Equal parts cowboy, actor, comedian, and philosopher, the Oklahoma-born Rogers was the foremost social commentator of the age. Writing in his telltale easygoing, folksy style, Rogers clearly identified the new Soviet regime’s most pressing challenge: the peasant.
“He knows what’s the use raising anything if you can’t trade it or sell it for what you want,” Rogers wrote. “Sometimes he hides it; but, anyhow, he is not selling it, and that has got the whole Communistic Party about cuckoo right at this minute.” While NEP freed the peasantry to live off the land they cultivated, the problem—as Rogers astutely noted—was that “the old Boys in town has got to get enough nourishment from whatever the farmer raises to make those brotherhood-of-man speeches on. The old farmer just grinds his extra up into Vodka, lays in a lot of wood and hibernates for the winter.”1
Within the Communistic Party leadership, opinions differed on the vodka problem, which was now inextricably intertwined with other pressing challenges: promoting industrial development and subduing the independence of the peasantry. Even though the Bolsheviks outlawed opposition parties and factionalism within the party itself, policy debates, proclamations, and even rumors were routinely printed in the party’s official newspaper, Pravda. In September 1922 Pravda reported that the government was considering reintroducing the old vodka monopoly in the interest of financial solvency. In the closed-door meetings, Mikhail Kalinin—the nominal head of state—reportedly declared that “we have no choice” about building the new Soviet state on the same vodkapolitik principles as the imperial system they worked so hard to overthrow: “we’ve got to do it!”2 Yet even while recovering from his first stroke, Lenin was resolutely opposed: vodka would never return so long as he had anything to say about it. But in December 1922 Lenin suffered his second stroke, forcing his withdrawal from politics and intensifying the behind-the-scenes rivalries in the Politburo. As it turns out, of all the political challenges, the vodka question perhaps most starkly divided his potential successors, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.
Vodka And The Politics Of Succession
From his deathbed, Lenin dictated a political testament to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, which painted unflattering characterizations of the very Politburo members he had entrusted to rule collectively after his passing. Chief propagandist Nikolai Bukharin: too young. Red Army leader and heir-apparent Leon Trotsky: capable but arrogant. Recently appointed Secretary General Joseph Stalin: too rude. Being in charge of personnel and administration, “Comrade Stalin,” Lenin noted, “has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.” As a postscript, Lenin even suggested “that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from the post and appointing another man in his stead.”3
Stalin, however, was a master of interpersonal intrigue, as later scenes around his dinner table would attest. Despite a public facade of unity, throughout the late 1920s Stalin deftly outmaneuvered first Trotsky and then all other Politburo rivals to emerge as the unquestioned leader. As Stalin consolidated power his own policies—especially toward vodka, the peasantry, and industrialization—eclipsed those championed by Lenin and Trotsky.
When it came to liquor, Lenin’s apparent successor Trotsky sought to continue his prohibition with unmatched zeal. In a 1923 Central Committee meeting Trotsky condemned building socialism on a drunken budget before declaring: “to develop, strengthen, organize and complete the anti-alcohol regime in the country of reborn labor—that is our task. Our cultural and economic success will increase as alcohol consumption falls. There can be no concessions.”4 Yet behind the scenes, concessions to alcohol were already being made by Stalin, who was busy unseating Trotsky from any position of authority. Light wines had already been legalized in 1921, beer in 1922, and all drinks of less than twenty percent alcohol in early 1923. Still, the legalization of weaker, fermented wines and beers did little to stop the flood of distilled vodka and samogon inundating in the countryside.
In chronicling the difficulties of NEP, American journalist Anna Louise Strong dedicated an entire chapter of her First Time in History to the Bolshevik war on alcohol. She even interviewed Nikolai Semashko—the diminutive, stubbly bearded Commissar of Health—about the apparent retreat on alcohol:
We are not bothering with wine and beer yet, because our worst enemy is samagonka, this vile illicit drink that is being made so widely now in Russia. It is against samagonka that our main attack is at present. Wine is not a worker’s or peasant’s drink; it is too expensive. It makes a show in the cafés of Moscow and it brings in money to the government. But only the profiteers and the rich can buy it. It is not undermining the health of the masses of the people. So it is not so dangerous as samagonka.… But wine also must be stopped eventually.5
When, in late 1922, an influential economist suggested reintroducing the vodka monopoly, he was publicly dressed down on the pages of Pravda as a dangerous counterrevolutionary. “He proposes to get rid of the bankruptcy in our budget. But he would drive that bankruptcy into the bodies and minds and souls of our people,” so spoke the Party. “We have made many concessions because of our poverty, but such a concession as the surrender of our national soberness you will not get. This shall not pass.”6
In both word and deed, Trotsky led the charge for maintaining and even expanding prohibition, despite its glaring shortcomings. When word came to Military Commissar Trotsky that officers of a distant regiment celebrated the fifth anniversary of the revolution with a wine banquet, he court-martialed not only the regimental commander but also his direct superiors for permitting such lenient attitudes toward alcohol in their ranks. News of every crackdown was broadcast widely as part of the Party’s anti-alcohol propaganda. “It is no longer sufficient merely to prohibit; we must organise both repressive and educational measures,” Trotsky declared in an interview. In his usual firebrand style he defended the necessity of continuing the fight.
In the scattered villages, where the peasants are making it at home, it is impossible to use repressive measures on every house. But this industry develops like other [capitalist] industries. Very soon some man, richer and shrewder than the others, begins to make it for sale. He becomes a petty exploiter of vice, a corrupter of his village. The children and the women hate him for taking their food by debauching their men folk. Men like this we can arrest and punish.… As our strength in organisation grows, we can carry our repressions farther. But no repressions will solve the problem at the root. The basic cause is the emptiness of the peasant’s life and this must be filled by highe
r standards of culture, by education and recreation and wholesome social life.7
It is ironic that within two years the “richer and shrewder” man who would become the corrupter and “petty exploiter of vice” was Trotsky’s principal rival, Joseph Stalin. In October 1924, just months after Lenin’s death, a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party again took up the liquor question. Even as the corpse of Russia’s great revolutionary was being embalmed for display on Red Square, his successors were resurrecting the vodka monopoly Lenin so loathed and the principles of vodka politics he had fought so resolutely against.
“Some members of the Central Committee objected to the introduction of vodka,” Stalin later wrote of the debate—most likely referring to Trotsky—“without, however, indicating alternate sources of revenues needed for industry.”8 Twelve months later, on October 1, 1925, the Soviets officially repealed the failed, decade-long experiment with prohibition and returned legal vodka to its historic position as the central pillar of Russian statecraft.
Actually, the new government vodka went on sale four days late, on October 5: since the military draft took place during the first days of the month, the Soviets wisely delayed in the hopes of a more orderly call-up.9 Yet what ensued was anything but orderly. “It seems that Moscow took the restoration of vodka of pre-war strength as a huge holiday, which had to be properly celebrated,” chronicled American communist-turned-dissident William Henry Chamberlin.
The recent resumption of the sale of vodka at the pre-war alcoholic strength of 40 per cent was the signal for a wild orgy of a considerable part of the Muscovite population. Long waiting lines have been forming outside the shops where the fiery liquor is sold, and it is no uncommon sight to see a customer pull the cork out of his bottle and gulp down the entire contents amid a circle of envious and enthusiastic onlookers. There has been an enormous increase in public drunkenness during the two weeks since the sorokgradusni (40 per cent) went on sale. Excessive use of the new stimulant has caused a number of deaths, and the police have had their hands full attending to cases of drunkenness and disorderly conduct. In some cases parties of boisterous merrymakers have boarded street cars and created so much disturbance that they had to be removed by force.10
Officially, the vodka monopoly was reinstated in the interests of public health, the same reason as its late-imperial predecessor: with thousands of deaths annually from potent samogon and poisonous surrogates, a nationwide monopoly was supposedly the only way to ensure safer, high-quality alcoholic beverages.11 Naturally, that argument was a red herring: it was not simply that the people were drinking, or even what they were drinking, that concerned the government but, more importantly, who was selling them the liquor and deriving the profits. In the Politburo, Stalin proposed getting the profits out of the pockets of the moonshiners and into the treasury.
Repeal put Stalin in a tenuous ideological position—with the veneration of Lenin at a fever pitch it seemed that his successors were undoing the great revolutionary’s work, even as he lay in state in a temporary wooden mausoleum just beyond the Kremlin walls. At a time when every decision had to be justified in terms of Lenin’s unquestionable wisdom, Stalin had to argue that Lenin would have supported this most un-Leninist repeal… somehow.
In a March 1927 letter to a communist named Shinkevich, Stalin claimed that Lenin had actually favored the vodka monopoly. Even in public, storyteller Stalin later explained how, when the government failed to secure badly needed foreign loans at the Genoa Conference in 1922, “Comrade Lenin said several times to each of us that… it would be necessary to introduce a vodka monopoly, which was particularly necessary to stabilize the currency and maintain industry.”12
None of the other members of the Bolshevik leadership ever mentioned such conversations with Lenin. It would have been a most memorable discussion, since Lenin was uncompromising when it came to vodka. “Whatever the peasant wants in the way of material things we will give him, as long as they do not imperil the health or morals of the nation,” Lenin famously declared late in life. “But if he asks for ikons or booze—these things we will not make for him. For that is definitely retreat; that is definitely degeneration that leads him backward. Concessions of this sort we will not make; we shall rather sacrifice any temporary advantage that might be gained from such concessions.”13
Although Lenin’s words were crystal clear, Stalin stuck to his story—repeatedly claiming that, in private, Lenin secretly told him that it was okay to sell out the moral achievements of the revolution in the interest of state finance. “Which is better: enslavement to foreign capital or the introduction of vodka?” Stalin pronounced. “Naturally, we decided on vodka, because we figured that if we have to dirty our hands a little for the cause of the victory of the proletariat and the peasantry, we would resort even to this extreme in the interest of our cause.”14
Just one week before formally expelling his rivals Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev from the Communist Party on November 12, 1927, Stalin gave his final, emphatic argument to an audience of European workers’ delegations. When a French representative questioned how the monopoly could be reconciled with the fight against drunkenness Stalin explained:
In general, I think that it is difficult to reconcile them. There is undoubtedly a contradiction here. The Party is aware of this contradiction, and deliberately created it, fully cognizant that this contradiction is itself the lesser evil.… Of course, in general, it would be better to do without vodka, because vodka is evil. But that would mean temporarily going into bondage to the capitalists, which is an even greater evil. Therefore, we chose the lesser evil. Today, the state revenue from vodka is over 500 million rubles. Giving up vodka now would mean giving up that income, and there is no evidence to suggest that this would reduce drunkenness, since the peasants would produce their own vodka, and poison themselves with samogon.15
Strangely, Stalin concluded his widely reprinted statements to the delegates by blaming them for the vodka monopoly, since it was an emergency response to the Soviets’ inability to secure Western loans. “I think that we would probably not have to deal with the vodka question or many other unpleasant things, if the West-European proletariat took power into their hands and gave us the necessary assistance. But what is to be done?” Stalin mused. “Our West-European brothers apparently do not want to take power yet, so we are forced to do the best we can with what we have. But that is not our fault, it is fate. So as you can see, some of the responsibility for the vodka monopoly lies with our West-European friends.”16 His playful foreign scapegoating was reportedly met with laughter and applause.
It was a much different situation for Stalin’s domestic scapegoats: his previous Politburo rivals and their followers. Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev were expelled from the party alongside Trotsky in 1927, only to be put on show trial as foreign spies plotting a “Trotskyist” conspiracy to overthrow the government. Their executions in 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Purge, as thousands of loyal communists were arrested and killed on trumped-up charges in order to stamp out dissent within the Communist Party. Meanwhile, while in exile in Mexico, Trotsky remained a prolific writer and scathing critic of Stalin’s totalitarianism as selling out the true principles of communism… that is, until an undercover Stalinist agent smashed his skull with an alpine climbing axe in 1940.
Seemingly, Winston Churchill aptly compared Soviet power struggles to bulldogs fighting under the carpet: “An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath, it is obvious who won.”17
Vodka And Industrialization
Once firmly ensconced in power, Stalin radically and fundamentally recast virtually every aspect of Soviet life. All elements of this extreme social makeover—including crash industrialization, a revolution in culture, war on the peasantry, totalitarian terror, and Stalin’s personality cult—reinforced each other.18 Yet historians have largely overlooked how vodka politics helped hold together such dis
parate cultural, social, economic, and political transformations.
According to Karl Marx, communist revolution was the inevitable response to the hardships of industrial capitalism. So the only socialist civilization ever envisioned was an industrial one. The Bolsheviks were well aware that their Russia was overwhelmingly rural and understood the need to industrialize rapidly—the bigger and heavier the industry, the better. Even as the Soviets recovered from war and famine, ambitious plans were devised to accelerate productivity and make the young state militarily self-sufficient, culminating in the First Five-Year Plan in 1928. To meet such goals (a year early!) by 1932, the economic planning agency Gosplan dictated a ludicrous expansion of iron, steel, coal, and oil output—necessary to build armaments, tanks, tractors, railways, and heavy machinery.
Rapid industrialization required two things that Stalin lacked: money and men. More to the point, it necessitated a source of investment revenue and a competent, disciplined urban workforce. Vodka was crucial to both—and Stalin knew it.19
A communist pariah in a still-capitalist world, the Soviet Union could not get investments or loans from abroad, so they turned instead back to the vodka trade that had provided inexhaustible revenues to their imperial predecessors. If Stalin is to be believed, the move was done primarily for industrialization. “When we introduced the vodka monopoly, we were facing the alternatives: either go into bondage to the capitalists, having ceded to them a number of our most important plants and factories, getting in return the necessary funds to allow us to carry on; or to introduce the vodka monopoly in order to get the necessary working capital for developing our own industry with our own resources, and avoid going into foreign bondage.”
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 32