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

by Mark Lawrence

  Gorbachev did not rock the boat when Chernenko succeeded Andropov, but he made waves by highlighting the need for thoroughgoing economic, political, and legal reform. Hidden between the usual invocations of Marxism-Leninism in his landmark December 1984 speech on ideology, Gorbachev suggested wide-ranging reforms—from market-like incentives and greater enterprise autonomy to greater openness and self-government throughout the party—to remedy the economic slowdown. In candid discussions with his future foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev went further: agreeing that “Everything had gone rotten” in the Soviet system. “It has to be changed.”16

  Gorbachev’s main contender for the top post was Grigory Romanov (no relation to the old royal family, though conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confessed she would have loved to have seen a Romanov return to rule Russia). At sixty-two, Romanov was the second-youngest Politburo member and—had he been selected—would also have been the first general secretary born after the Revolution. Like Gorbachev, the long-time first secretary of the powerful Leningrad region was a smart, competent organizer empowered by Andropov. Responsible for the military and defense industry, he had a portfolio that overshadowed Gorbachev’s base in agriculture. And while Gorbachev assumed a greater role under the ailing Chernenko, it was Romanov who was nominally the second secretary.

  In terms of age, competence, and ability there was little separating Gorbachev and Romanov. Indeed, Romanov had more power and responsibility within the party, and his amicable links to Brezhnev’s retinue arguably made him an even more desirable alternative for the remaining old guard.17

  The primary difference between the two—and potentially the deciding factor—was personal temperament. Unlike Gorbachev, Romanov was a raging alcoholic. Beyond his daily drunkenness were damaging rumors that he abused his power as Leningrad party chief by commandeering Catherine the Great’s priceless dinner service for his daughter’s wedding, where in the ensuing bacchanal it was smashed by the revelers. Romanov denied such rumors—blaming his opponents for trying to discredit him. Yet Thatcher had heard it even in London and admitted that the rumor colored her opinion of his candidacy.18

  Politburo members were more aware than anyone of Romanov’s temperament and indiscretions, which were heavily reminiscent of the Brezhnevite past. Andropov was “perfectly aware that Grigory Vasilievich Romanov was a narrow-minded and insidious man, with dictatorial ways, and he recognized that at Politburo meetings Romanov rarely came up with a sound proposal or idea,” at least according to Gorbachev’s account.19 Others in the Politburo affirmed that “he proved to be incompetent” and that “his style showed traces of vozhdizm [authoritarianism].”20

  “We were different kinds of people, and we had different outlooks,” wrote the teetotaling junior Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, describing his strained relations with Romanov and his Brezhnevite drinking buddies.21 Such divisions grew deeper with reports from Leningrad that a drunken Romanov—with a pop singer girlfriend thirty years his junior—was apprehended by a Finnish patrol vessel as their boat somehow strayed into Finnish waters in the Baltic. On Romanov’s last official visit to Helsinki just weeks before Chernenko’s death, he got so drunk that “the Soviet embassy doctor had been required to restore him to a condition suitable for making a speech.”22

  This was a far cry from Gorbachev’s temperate temperament: even during the well-lubricated banquets of the Brezhnev era, Gorbachev limited himself to two glasses of wine—never more—before diplomatically deflecting pressures to drink.23 How much Romanov’s alcoholism and dictatorial personality harmed his candidacy is difficult to tell, but his vices certainly accentuated Gorbachev’s virtues.

  Firsthand accounts largely agree that the weighty endorsement of longtime Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was the determining factor in the selection of Gorbachev as general secretary. Known in the West as “Mr. Nyet,” the hard-nosed diplomat seemed an unlikely ally from the old guard, but as it turned out, Gromyko was even more “dry” than Gorbachev. In circumstances eerily similar to Gorbachev’s, Gromyko gave up drinking at a very young age after his boyhood friend nearly died from sneaking bootleg samogon.24 Gromyko shared not only Gorbachev’s disdain for liquor but also his conviction that the Soviet system desperately needed fundamental reform—starting with vodka politics.

  In his Memoirs, Gromyko described working closely with Gorbachev and having “intensive discussions on the most varied aspects of domestic and foreign policy” with the experienced and capable reformer.25 And so when Gromyko rose to sing Gorbachev’s praises, not a voice was raised in opposition. Gorbachev was selected unanimously.

  Historians widely assume that that the Soviet economy was such a mess that whoever came to power in 1985 would face the same need for a major overhaul, and that the only thing that prevented it was the older generation. Accordingly, the subsequent reform program “was not a personal whim of Gorbachev” but, rather, “a natural result of the emergence of a new generation of leaders.”26

  But there was nothing “natural,” “inevitable,” or “inescapable” about reform just because there was demand for it.27 There also needed to be a supply: a leader willing to initiate reforms. Otherwise the stagnant Soviet system could have continued to limp along, just as it had under the three previous leaders. Suggesting that the younger generation was united in demanding reform—and that the older generation was uniformly against it—is not just misleading; it is wrong. There were influential members of the older generation—like Andropov and Gromyko—who understood the need for change. Likewise there were those in the younger generation, including Romanov, who were more content with the stability, corruption, and alcoholism of the Brezhnevite past.

  From Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan in 1928 through the Twelfth Five-Year Plan in 1986, the most consistent predictor of the willingness to undertake meaningful reforms of the Soviet administrative-command economy was not age or generation, but rather the leader’s relation to the bottle. It follows, then, that the more important impetus to reform was not that Gorbachev was young but that he was dry.

  Why I’m Glad I’m Not Gorbachev

  Another Western misconception about Gorbachev is that Time magazine’s “Man of the Decade” was somehow a closet democrat—a “mole” who rose to the heights of the Communist Party only to institute political reforms like perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization) for the sake of liberty and freedom.

  Gorbachev was indeed an ambitious reformer, but his primary focus was economic rather than political. He did not want to destroy communism; he wanted it to work better. Appreciating his reign in terms of vodka politics clarifies these momentous changes and suggests that even the commonly accepted timeline for reform needs to be reappraised accordingly.

  The conventional wisdom is that Gorbachev unveiled his radical perestroika reforms at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in the spring of 1986—one short year after coming to power. The openness of glasnost—with greater freedom of speech and the relaxation of censorship—followed shortly thereafter. Then in 1987 came the multi-candidate elections and liberalization of demokratizatsiya, which weakened the coercive capacity of the state and eased the Soviet Union into Trotsky’s famed “dustbin of history.”

  Rushing to dissect these momentous undertakings, most accounts mention only in passing that—just like his mentor, Andropov—Gorbachev’s very first initiative was an all-out war on alcohol. Given the centrality of vodka to Russian statecraft, Gorbachev’s wide-ranging (and ultimately disastrous) anti-alcohol campaign was more than a footnote to history: it was a dramatic and fundamental break with the legacies of the past that had a huge impact on subsequent political reforms the fate of the Soviet Union itself.

  May 17, 1985: six short weeks after Gorbachev assumed power, the front page of Pravda announced a sweeping campaign against alcohol. “The population is not being instilled with a spirit of sobriety and is insufficiently informed abo
ut the harm the use of alcoholic beverages causes to the health of the present, and especially future generations,”28 the mouthpiece of the party boldly declared. The ensuing Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism began by ramping up anti-alcohol propaganda. As in the past, these conventional tactics addressed only the symptoms of societal alcoholism rather than the disease. In admitting the failure of previous campaigns under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov, it was clear that Gorbachev would go further… much further. A national temperance society was created. Recreational outlets and medical treatment facilities—both voluntary and compulsory—were expanded. Alcohol sales were dramatically restricted and production slashed. “This is one problem that I will get the better of,” the energetic new general secretary privately declared.29

  This was the most comprehensive anti-alcohol movement since the Society for the Struggle against Alcoholism (OBSA) of Nikolai Bukharin and Yury Larin in the 1920s (chapter 15). Like the OBSA of old, the Kremlin decreed a new All-Union Voluntary Society for the Struggle for Temperance. Even the OBSA’s monthly journal, Trezvost i kultura (Sobriety and Culture) was dusted off and published under the exact same name. Within months it had over six hundred thousand subscribers, and the Temperance Society magically enrolled over fourteen million “voluntary” members in four hundred and fifty thousand branches in factories, collective farms, schools, and other facilities. The Society’s charge of promoting workplace sobriety, rooting out home brewing, and ensuring compliance with anti-alcohol regulations were likewise reminiscent of the OBSA of the 1920s.30

  At the time, Swedish economist Anders Åslund noted a certain neo-Stalinism in Gorbachev’s battles, describing the war against alcohol as “a full-fledged disciplinary campaign of the old style, staged with impressive stamina.”31 But it was not just the state-sanctioned organizations, the swelling of their ranks through “cattle-drive techniques of recruitment,”32 or even the ubiquitous propaganda that were reminiscent of the past—it was demanding sobriety by dramatically restricting vodka itself.

  Under no circumstances could vodka be sold to minors under age twenty-one. Alcohol was prohibited near schools, hospitals, public transport, sports arenas, and rehabilitation centers. The number of retail alcohol outlets was slashed, as were their hours. To reduce workplace alcoholism, liquor could be bought only after 2:00 p.m. Liquor stores closed at 7:00 p.m. and all weekend, leading to long lines and disgruntled customers.

  The state manufacture of vodkas, liqueurs, and wines was dramatically reduced. Prices were jacked up too. To sop up the rubles not spent on vodka and encourage healthier lifestyles, fruits, juices, jams—as well as sporting goods, athletic facilities, and artist supplies—were expanded. Laws against home brewing were strengthened: the manufacture or possession of samogon or distilling equipment could earn a three hundred ruble fine or two years in a labor camp.33

  In a final throwback to the 1920s movement to create a “new Soviet man,” Communist Party members were expected to be paragons of sobriety. Alcoholism became grounds for many—especially older—communists to be purged from the ranks. “The demands of the the Party are unequivocal,” stated Pravda in no uncertain terms. “The calling of a Communist, and all the more so of an executive, is incompatible with this vice.”34 As in the 1920s, Party members who fell victim to vodka were shamed publicly, as the details of their drunken offenses were published for all to see.35

  The most famous victim of the anti-alcohol housecleaning was Gorbachev’s heavy-drinking former rival, Grigory Romanov. Just weeks after losing the top job, Romanov again disgraced himself publicly—this time getting sauced at the March 1985 Hungarian Party Congress. During the first week of the anti-alcohol campaign Romanov was dismissed while away on vacation. “I let him know quite bluntly that there was no place for him in the leadership,” Gorbachev recalled. “He did not like this, but there was nothing he could say to change things.” With his career effectively over, Romanov quietly wept.36

  While using alcoholism as a pretext for purging undesirables harkened back to the Stalinist past, other moves were far more novel: official receptions at local and regional governments, Soviet embassies abroad, and even in the Kremlin itself were bone dry, much to the dismay of communist officials and visiting dignitaries. Still, the temperate Gorbachev led his anti-alcohol crusade by example—for the first time suggesting that not even the party elite was above the law.

  Perhaps the most dramatic break with the autocratic past was through glasnost. Rather than a synonym for Western-style freedoms of speech, thought, or conscience, glasnost simply denotes “openness” or “frankness” in discussing public affairs. It wasn’t freedom for freedom’s sake but rather constructive criticism to supplement economic reforms. The thinking was: How could we fix the economy if people are too afraid to talk about what ails it?

  Historians generally date glasnost from Gorbachev’s symbolic telephone call to dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1986. Sakharov, the famous (and dry) dissident, and his wife Elena Bonner, had been under close KGB surveillance in the closed city of Nizhny Novgorod—then known as Gorky—on the Volga following their public protests against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. By telling the famed dissidents that they were permitted to return to Moscow, Gorbachev “conveyed to reformers and liberals not only that this regime would deal with opponents differently than had previous regimes, but also that the great physicist had been right all along.”37

  Yet even before such symbolic gestures, glasnost had already begun in earnest with the open publication of long-suppressed social statistics—a move that dissident Mikhail Baitalsky would certainly have applauded, were he still alive. In January 1986 the reports on the previous year’s progress toward fulfilling the five-year plan acknowledged—for the first time—that alcoholic beverages were indeed sold in the Soviet Union. The official economic forecasts followed suit.38

  More importantly, the first Gorbachev-era issue of the Goskomstat statistical abstract for 1985 (released in August 1986) saw the return of thirty pages of long-suppressed social and economic data, including those that reflected poorly on Soviet progress. Figures on life expectancy at birth—64 for men and 73 for women—meant that Soviets were still dying on average ten years younger than their counterparts in the industrialized West. The controversial infant mortality figures also also published—26 per 1,000 was slightly less than the estimates provided by Western demographers like Murray Feshbach and Christopher Davis but still confirmed the Soviets’ deteriorating health and welfare. Later volumes not only acknowledged the existence of a “second economy” in the Soviet Union; they attempted to measure it. Subsequent publications released hard figures on crime, abortions, suicides, and executions that had not been seen since the 1920s.39 Openly publishing such troubling statistical data was an open admission of the difficult reality that Gorbachev and his reformers faced.

  Perhaps most shockingly, the 1985 abstract finally revealed alcohol sales figures, which showed that alcoholic beverages constituted a full quarter of all retail trade in the Soviet Union. “The figures made it clear,” wrote Stephen White in his comprehensive history of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, “for the first time so far as official statistics were concerned, that the output of vodka and other hard liquors had more than trebled between 1940 and 1980.”40 Between 1962 and 1982, alcohol consumption increased 5.6 percent per person per year.41 This was a bombshell wrapped in numbers. Not only did the official figures confirm worst-case estimates by Soviet dissidents like Mikhail Baitalsky and Western economists like Vladimir Treml—it exceeded them.

  This statistical glasnost was a boon to anyone looking to understand Soviet social challenges—and it was painting an ugly picture of vodka and the decline of the Soviet economy. The costs of alcohol to Soviet productivity reached fifteen to twenty percent of all economic output. With new public surveys suggesting that twenty-five percent of Soviet factory workers regularly came to work already having a drink or two of vodka, it is clear why Go
rbachev’s first reform to jumpstart the moribund economy was to confront alcohol.42

  Most historians consider the economic restructuring of perestroika and the openness of glasnost as two sides of the same coin. But if we are to really appreciate Gorbachev’s reforms, we need a different metaphor. His approach can better be thought of as a three-legged stool of perestroika, glasnost, and the anti-alcohol campaign. Each element was reinforced by the others and strengthened by them in turn.

  Indeed, if glasnost was the frank and constructive dialogue about confronting the ills of the Soviet system, glasnost did not begin with the symbolic phone call to Sakharov—it began with the earlier truth telling about alcohol and public health. The open acknowledgment of these problems distinguished the Gorbachev regime from all predecessors. For Gorbachev, glasnost was necessary to show his fellow countrymen—and indeed the rest of the world—the scope of the problems to be confronted through perestroika. And since releasing such information was necessary to bolster support for his anti-alcohol policy, vodka and glasnost were inexorably intertwined.

  It did not end there. When it comes to glasnost about state finances, historians point to the importance of Gorbachev’s speech at the June 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee. “Take for instance the state budget,” Gorbachev argued. “From the outside, everything looks in order—incomes cover expenses. But how is that achieved?”