When it came to the central paradox of vodka politics, namely, the state’s profiting from the alcohol trade: “vodka prices are fixed by the Soviet state at a level which facilitates the struggle against alcoholism,” if we are to believe the official line. “In the USSR the production of vodka is not governed by fiscal purposes and the income obtained from selling it accounts for an insignificant proportion of the state’s revenue.”23
Well, if the first step in Khrushchev’s thaw was his “Secret Speech” of February 1956, perhaps the second came three months later with the publication of the Soviet annual statistical handbook, The National Economy of the USSR. This statistical digest stood on the reference shelf of virtually every research library in the Soviet Union and abroad. They were flawed and incomplete, but for those who knew where to look, these figures told a dramatically different tale from the official narrative.24 Samizdat researchers in the Soviet Union and a small cadre of foreign specialists used these government data to highlight the gaping chasm between image and reality in social well-being.
The most detailed study was undertaken by a shadowy academic known only as A. Krasikov, who wrote a series of underground articles declaring vodka “Commodity Number One” in the Soviet Union. As it turns out, A. Krasikov was a pseudonym of former Izvestiya reporter Mikhail D. Baitalsky—whose true identity was only revealed after his death in 1978. “The late M. D. Baitalsky may rightly be considered one of the most talented publicists of contemporary, nonconformist, native literature,” declared his samizdat obituary.25 A Trotsky devotee, he secretly chronicled efforts to oppose Stalin’s rise in the 1920s. In the Great Purge of the 1930s Baitalsky was fired from Izvestiya, denounced by his wife, and sent to the notorious forced-labor camp at Vorkuta. Following a brief “respite” to the Eastern Front in World War II, he was sentenced to work in the scientific institute described in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle before being released in 1956 during Khrushchev’s thaw.
Like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, Baitalsky was a teetotaler who was alarmed that instead of combating alcohol as state propaganda claimed, the Kremlin was ramping up production to unprecedented levels. By 1960 vodka output was already double prewar levels, while beer production had quadrupled—and this according to the government’s own statistics!26 The official State Statistical Commission (Goskomstat) abstracts showed the upward march not only of alcohol production but also of a whole raft of related social indicators that did not bode well for the Soviet public—crimes, suicides, abortions, and even infant mortality numbers were actually increasing rather than decreasing.
When Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, the thaw in Soviet statistics ended as well. With vodka factories running full tilt, and Goskomstat chronicling the consequences, Brezhnev simply halted the publication of such embarrassing statistics. But that did not deter Baitalsky.
Unlike the unflattering statistics on infant mortality that simply vanished without a trace, Baitalsky noted that as soon as the statistical column on “alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages” disappeared, a separate column for “other foodstuffs”—which typically included spices, soybeans, mushrooms, and vitamins—suddenly expanded tenfold. If the state statistical handbooks are to be believed, by 1970 Soviets were spending 27 billion rubles every year on these “other foodstuffs,” of which he estimated that 23.2 billion was spent on vodka.27
Baitalsky also noted a staggering rate of growth in this miscellaneous category in contrast to the usually stable expenditures on spices, soybeans, and the like. Comparing these estimates with the other consumer expenditures—from household furniture to printed publications—he deduced that, at some twenty-three billion rubles spent per year, “Alcohol is, indeed, the leading commodity among all those purchased by our people. It has become Commodity Number One, with Number Two (‘clothing and underwear’) and Number Three (‘meat and sausages’) lagging behind not by half a length, not by half a billion rubles, but by 9 and 12 billion respectively.”28
Somehow, Baitalsky got his hands on an in-house report from Glavspirt, the chief administration of the alcohol industry. Even omitting beer, wine, illicit home brew and poisonous surrogates, these government figures on per capita vodka consumption (figure 16.1) show a dramatic—and damning—expansion of state alcohol production interrupted only by the horrors of total war. Against the Kremlin’s data blackout, even such fragmentary figures demonstrate both the staggering increase of alcohol consumption and the government’s role in promoting it. Back in the tsarist era in 1913, Russians drank an average of 7.75 liters of pure alcohol per year. While the Soviets claimed that alcoholism—as a remnant of the capitalist past—would wither away under communism, even after fifty years of “withering,” in 1967 the Russians were quaffing up to 9.1 liters of pure alcohol per person annually from state vodka factories alone.29
Figure 16.1 LEGAL VODKA PRODUCTION IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1928–1966. Source: Mikhail Baitalsky [A. Krasikov], “Tovar nomer odin,” in Roy A. Medvedev, ed., Dvadtsatyi vek: Obshchestvenno-politicheskii i literaturnyi al’manakh, vol. 2 (London: TCD Publications, 1977), 118.
Baitalsky further underscored vodka’s centrality to the autocratic state, estimating that more than ninety kopecks from every ruble spent on vodka went directly into the treasury, making vodka both the single largest and most lucrative sector of the entire Soviet economy.30 For the government, vodka is the perfect commodity.
Alcohol does not go bad, as meat and butter do, does not turn sour, like milk, does not go out of fashion, like clothes and footwear, does not require such elaborate packaging as china and porcelain. It has no need of refrigerators. It can be transported easily.… Alcohol does not demand much shop space: a single counter served by one shop-assistant will bring a food store a larger trade turnover than ten other counters with ten other shop-assistants. And, finally, stock-taking—that operation which testifies to the degree of trust which our state has learned to place in its trading apparatus—is incomparably easier to carry out where alcohol is concerned.31
While Russian autocrats and their motivating ideologies changed dramatically over the centuries, vodka politics has remained the fundamental pillar of the Russian state. Even while communist ideologues denounced the feudal roots of tsarist/capitalist oppression of the masses, the Soviets hypocritically embraced this core mechanism of psychological subjugation and financial exploitation through vodka. Of the entire 156-billion-ruble annual budget of the Soviet superpower, some eighteen billion—or twelve percent—was the net profit from the sale of vodka, wine, and beer. This amount could cover all expenditures on universal healthcare (9.3 billion) and their vaunted programs in science and technology (6.6 billion) with two billion to spare. Moreover, given the inelastic demand for alcohol, if the government felt a budget crunch it simply increased the price. “A bottle which yesterday cost 2 rubles today costs 2 rubles 10 kopecks—and by then end of the year, a billion more rubles are lying on the little saucer with the blue border,” as Baitalsky put it.32 No wonder a famous Russian allegory depicts Soviet finances as an island—terra alcoholica—defended by three whales: the ministry of trade (Mintorg), the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) and the ministry of finance (Minfin).33
Hard data were crucial because they were so rarely reported. Soviet journalists rarely made up stats, but they were masters of spin. As a former journalist, Baitalsky was well-versed in such trickery. When it came to potentially embarrassing statistics the Soviets relied on misdirection: reporting absolute statistics for foreign foes but only relative figures for the USSR. For example, Soviet reporters eagerly seized on “imperialist” Britain’s annual police reports of over a million crimes annually as evidence of Western decadence. They would compare that to a glowing report claiming that in the glorious USSR—as a percentage of all violent crime—murder plunged twenty percentage points (from, say, thirty percent to ten percent) from last year.
Catch the trick?
It sounds like the Soviets are doing better than their British rivals in tackling c
rime—but they aren’t. Think about it: if murders went from thirty percent of violent crimes to ten percent of violent crimes, all that means is that violent crimes that weren’t murders increased from seventy percent to ninety percent—which is to say it doesn’t tell us anything meaningful at all. While such stories were meant to ridicule British criminality, the real lesson was that—unlike in the Soviet bloc—in the West, the police were accountable to the people and that even embarrassing information was being reported openly for all to see.34
This was why nonconformist researchers combed statistical abstracts and arcane periodicals, pouncing on any statistics that weren’t couched as percentages of something else—especially concerning alcohol. “The significance of these figures is confirmed most convincingly by the very fact that they are concealed,” Baitalsky explained. “Unimportant facts are not hidden so carefully. On the other hand, the concealment of factual material concerning the question of drink hinders from the outset any attempt to fight against the increase in the consumption of alcohol, for society cannot combat an evil without knowing its locations and its dimensions.”35
Like most Soviet- and imperial-era critics, Baitalsky saw societal drunkenness as a symptom of a deeper, political disease: autocracy. Whether discussing crime or falling labor productivity, he claimed that vodka alone was not
the soil from which these phenomena grow. That soil is something different, which we are not allowed to name, and I shall not touch upon it. Alcohol serves as a sort of fertiliser. It is spread over and dug into the soil from which these phenomena grow. We sow the seed, and we produce this fertiliser on a generous scale and sell it at a big profit in the hundreds of millions of bottles, accompanying our trade with unctuous newspaper articles about the harmfulness of alcohol.36
Compounding the usual health and criminal consequences were the willingness of the state to lie through misinformation and a prostrate civil society’s complacency in accepting this state of affairs as somehow normal.37 This was not a product of the ruling ideology—capitalist or communist—but rather came from an unresponsive autocratic system, which had long used vodka to keep the people disoriented while profiting handsomely from their misery. And if sunshine is the best disinfectant—as the old cliché goes—then where better to start than by confronting such secrecy? That is exactly what Baitalsky had in mind. In his memoir, Notebooks for the Children, he writes:
Who is helped by keeping statistics a secret? The most unpleasant figures (honest figures, and not a percentage as compared with last year!) mobilize society. Hiding the scope of evil is the major reason for indifference to it. For all the savagery of the censors, truth cannot always be concealed.… The snow on a city sidewalk melts slowly from the sun all by itself. But scrape a bit of the sidewalk down to the asphalt and the black surface will begin to warm from the sun, and the snow—inch by inch—will begin to disappear. It is important that a thirst for knowledge be awakened in our youth; and the snow will not last for long.38
In a harbinger of things to come, he argued that revealing the truth about Soviet social and economic statistics in general—and those that concern alcohol in particular—would beget systemic reform of the autocracy itself. It is unfortunate that he died just a few short years before his prophecy came true.
Mirrors From Abroad
Dissidents weren’t the only ones frustrated by the lack of meaningful political information. At a time when foreign Kremlinologists—and Soviet citizens—sought clues about Politburo struggles by scrutinizing their seating arrangements for May Day parades atop the Red Square rostrum (which allegedly hid spreads of vodka and hors d’oeuvres), dedicated researchers in Washington sifted through mountains of reports for reliable statistical information.39
One such scholar was Murray Feshbach—an unassuming, owl-eyed researcher toiling for the U.S. Bureau of the Census—who had logged, tagged, and cross-referenced every tidbit of data on Soviet social problems since the 1950s. Little known beyond an “invisible college of specialists,” as an in-depth 1983 Atlantic Monthly article described him, Feshbach stood out as “one of the more unusual and, in his way, indispensable students of the Soviet Union.”40
Daily pouring over every bit of new social and health information published in dozens of Soviet newspapers, professional magazines, obscure health and economic journals, and hundreds of books annually, no other American matched Feshbach’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet Union. His biggest frustration was the same numerical sleight of hand that infuriated Baitalsky: “I used to admire the Soviets,” Feshbach said with a chuckle. “They could write a book of 500 pages and not say a single thing, not one thing. It was beautifully done; you really had to admire it. How could they do it? Lo and behold, they did.”41
Feshbach was a master of confronting Soviet deceptions with their own data. Sure, some indicators were no longer published for the Soviet Union as a whole—but in many cases they could still be found at regional and local levels, reported in distant media reports or arcane Soviet academic journals. First at the census department and later at Georgetown University (where your humble author had the distinct pleasure of working as his research assistant), Feshbach’s offices famously overflowed with piles of clippings from Russian newspapers, research bulletins, subscriptions to little-known Soviet trade journals, and even a mimeographed copy of Baitalsky’s original samizat manuscript of “Commodity Number One,” written under the pseudonym A. Krasikov.42
For more than half a century the boisterous and self-effacing Feshbach was the unofficial chronicler of the afflictions of Soviet, and then post-Soviet, society. In addition to a raft of insightful publications, Murray’s enthusiasm and investigations inspired a multitude of scholars writing about Russia, including the one you are currently reading. “Guys like this are diamonds,” explained author and New York Times journalist Hedrick Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his reports on the Soviet Union. “Reporters have learned that his feeling for the place is accurate, so they go back to him.”43
TYPICAL DOCUMENT FROM THE MURRAY FESHBACH COLLECTION. This 1984 Russkaya mysl’ article discusses a report from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk claiming that—if present trends continued—the average Soviet citizens in the year 2000 would drink fifty liters of vodka per year and that the USSR would have eighty million alcoholics. The handwriting at the top, declaring “Murray, have you seen this? Very interesting!” and “agrees with my estimates” on alcohol consumption, belongs to Vladimir Treml. Feshbach’s pencil highlights the link between the rise in alcoholism and infant mortality, the 1979 Siberian report that 99.4% of men and 97.6% of women drink regularly, including 95% of girls under the age of 18, and that of those receiving anti-alcohol treatment for the first time, 90% were not yet 15, and one-third were not yet ten years of age. Author’s personal collection.
Despite his appearances on 60 Minutes and C-Span and in People magazine, Feshbach’s name is not widely known, perhaps because his most provocative claims were as technical and modest as he was.44 In September of 1980 the Census Bureau in Washington released an unassuming report titled “Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s,” co-authored by Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach. The level of infant mortality is a primary barometer of national health in any country. In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviets proudly touted their falling rates as evidence of tremendous social progress. But when the numbers started trending in the opposite direction in the 1970s—like with alcohol data—the government did their best to hide them.
Cobbled together from a myriad of sources, the finding that the rate of infant deaths was not only rising but rising dramatically (up thirty-six percent from the beginning of the decade to 31 deaths per 1,000 live births) was a sensational—but well-reasoned—claim. The sudden reversal was attributed to a combination of social, economic, health, and medical factors, with maternal alcohol abuse foremost among them. Drawing from his vast archive of evidence, Feshbach even quoted Soviet health experts who linked ris
ing infant mortality to rising alcoholism and the growing reliance on abortions (the average Soviet woman had six during her lifetime) in lieu of birth control. One Russian study concluded that the mortality rate of infants born prematurely to drinking mothers with previous abortions was thirty times higher than that of full-term infants.45
The unassuming report caused an uproar. Back in Moscow, the Soviet planning agency Gosplan convened a rare press conference to dismiss the findings while state news broadcasts denounced the “lurid reports” from abroad. Yet without any fanfare, the Soviet Union’s longtime health minister, Dr. Boris V. Petrovsky, was suddenly relieved of his position. In subsequent C-Span television appearances, Feshbach dug up and cited Petrovsky’s own research that bluntly labeled alcoholism as “Illness Number Three” among Soviet women—just behind cancer and heart disease.46
Despite the bluster of Cold War politics, Russian scholars were keenly interested in such research. In the wake of the report, Duke University economist Vladimir Treml was cordially introduced—and warmly received—in Moscow as a “collaborator of Murray Feshbach” before the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.47 With a shared interest in alcohol’s economic impacts, Treml and Feshbach were longtime colleagues—sharing evidence, arguments, and manuscripts. Throughout the seventies and eighties Treml sought the truth about Soviet alcohol: What was being drunk? How much? And what were the consequences for the treasury and the people?
The first problem was simply determining how much people drank—combining both state vodka and illegal home brews (samogon). Treml developed models of Soviet samogon consumption—accounting for urban-rural population indexes (since home distilling was primarily done in rural areas), slicing-up the “other foodstuffs” statistics a la Baitalsky, and double-checking against regional consumption of sugar, flour, potatoes, and sugar-beets—the usual ingredients in illicit moonshine. His results—suggesting that the average drinking-age Soviet citizen imbibed thirty percent more than official production figures—is presented in figure 16.2. Such rigorous estimates were corroborated by Soviet statisticians, anecdotal evidence, interviews with Russian experts, and even defectors from Soviet officialdom. Even today Treml’s estimations are cited widely in Russia as more accurate than Soviet government statistics: Treml captured not only the true scope of the alcohol problem but also the magnitude of the black market that the Soviets had been battling since the very first hours of communist rule.48
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 36