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

by Mark Lawrence

  On its own, the falling price of oil wasn’t a fatal blow to Soviet finance. Unfortunately, there were more budgetary hardships to come. On April 26, 1986, the electro-energy station at Chernobyl—north of Kiev in present-day Ukraine—suffered a full meltdown, causing the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history. In addition to the widespread radioactive contamination and the incalculable human costs, the cleanup and relocation cost the government billions of rubles. Two years later, in December 1988, the Soviet republic of Armenia was rocked by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. More than twenty-five thousand perished, mostly in shoddily constructed Brezhnev-era buildings. The reconstruction costs further strained the government, so much so that “the leadership included losses of alcohol revenues alongside the cost of the Chernobyl disaster and the earthquake in Armenia as the major disruptions threatening the success of perestroika.’”33

  While economic historians are quick to fault the oil glut for the Soviet Union’s woes, few likewise consider the financial impact of the anti-alcohol campaign. Ed Hewett—President George H. W. Bush’s economic advisor on the Soviet Union—calculated that the declining oil prices had cost the Soviets thirty billion rubles. Based on numbers provided by Gorbachev’s outspoken prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, Hewett added another eight billion rubles for Chernobyl, unspecified expenditures for Armenian earthquake relief, and twenty-one billion in unanticipated expenditures for reforming healthcare, education, and other social initiatives tangentially related to the anti-alcohol campaign. For comparison, Ryzhkov estimated that lost tax receipts from vodka amounted to fifteen billion rubles in 1988 alone.34

  In sum, after three years of the anti-alcohol campaign, Soviets spent thirty-seven billion fewer rubles on government alcohol, creating a loss of tax revenues of at least twenty-eight billion rubles—which is to say, a loss similar to the collapse of world oil prices. Gorbachev admitted as much in a public speech in 1988: “Now that the world business cycle has changed and energy prices have fallen and we have been compelled to cut down the production and sale of wine and vodka to safeguard the social health of our population, the economy of our country is faced with a most serious financial problem.”35

  Since the communist Soviet Union did not have the tradable financial instruments of the capitalist world, the only ways to finance their budget deficit were either through foreign loans or monetary emission—simply printing more rubles to cover the difference. Like their ill-fated tsarist predecessors, the Soviets chose the latter.

  “I disagree with those who believe that we did not plan how to compensate for the loss to the state budget resulting from reduced alcohol sales,” claims Gorbachev in his Memoirs. “Special economic calculations took into account the losses to industry due to drunkenness. The plan was to reduce alcohol sales gradually (I emphasize—gradually), as it was replaced by other goods in circulation and sources of budget revenue.”36 Yet as we know, alcohol sales were reduced rapidly rather than gradually, and there were no alternative products to sop up the excess rubles.

  So, where did all of that money go? Where it always goes in times of drastic alcohol restrictions: underground.

  Signs of a home-brewing epidemic popped up quickly. As Ryzhkov had foreseen in his debates with the Politburo, Cuban sugar—a primary ingredient in home brewing—disappeared from store shelves. This “sugar panic” of 1988 prompted the imposition of strict rations the following year. The satirical magazine Krokodil even ran a political cartoon of a man with a gin-blossomed nose in an upscale restaurant ordering “300 glasses of tea. The sugar—on the side”!37 Better yet, a popular Soviet ditty invoked the bootleggers’ practice of igniting their drink to test its proof strength:

  O thank you, thank you, Cuba

  Every Russian does proclaim.

  A pint from every pound of sugar

  And it burns with bright blue flame.38

  According to Gorbachev’s lead economic advisor, Abel Aganbegyan, the straw that broke the camel’s back was not the original 1985 regulations, but a second round of retail restrictions and a further twenty-five percent price hike in July 1986, which unleashed the illegal production that eventually doomed the campaign. The state’s retreat from the market created a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to meet the demand with low-quality, black market samogon.39 It was the fulfillment of a popular, drunken shanty of the Brezhnevite past:

  Vodka now costs us five rubles

  Yet we ain’t gonna stop drinking.

  Give Brezhnev this message from us:

  We will even pay ten rubles a bottle—

  But if it goes up to twenty rubles—

  Well, then we’ll march on the Winter Palace

  And seize it once more.40

  Thanks to Gorbachev’s glasnost, the Soviets could no longer hide the resulting bad news in statistics. After two years of improving demographic numbers, the home-brewing epidemic hit with unmatched ferocity. In 1987 alone over forty thousand Russians were poisoned with illicit samogon, and another eleven thousand died from acute alcohol poisoning.41

  The most hard up drinkers turned to alcohol surrogates: from mouthwash, eau-de-cologne and perfume to gasoline, cockroach poison, brake fluid, medical adhesives, and even shoe polish on a slice of bread. In the city of Volgodonsk five died from drinking ethylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze. In the military, some set their thirsty sights on the Soviet MiG-25, which—due to the large quantities of alcohol in its hydraulic systems and fuel stores—was affectionately dubbed “the flying restaurant.” The measures also may have led to an upsurge in the use of illegal narcotics.42

  Before 1987 it could be argued that the tax losses and the people’s grumbling discontent was offset by palpable improvements in social health and morale. But with the explosion of home brew destroying even those gains, there was little reason to continue the restrictions. “In a country where vodka had become a currency more reliable than the ruble, and where drunkenness was a factor in over 70 percent of murders, vodka proved more powerful than Gorbachev,” writer Viktor Erofeyev commented after interviewing the former Soviet leader. “When he saw the poisoning statistics, he said he simply gave up.”43

  Tacitly admitting defeat, by 1989, the Politburo quietly rolled back the restrictions on alcohol sales. The dreary alcohol consumption stats quickly rebounded to pre-reform levels, as did the social indices: mortality was again on the rise, along with drunk driving deaths, suicides, homicides, and other crimes.44

  Unfortunately, the policy reversal was too late to save the Soviet budget, which had already entered a hyperinflationary death spiral. Gorbachev advisor Aganbegyan estimated that the effective loss of the state monopoly to the bootleggers cost the treasury some eight to ten billion rubles. Famed economist Nikolai Shmelev put it even more bluntly:

  According to my calculations, the government took two-thirds of the revenue from alcohol in the early 1980s and the moonshine producers one-third. Today, with the same level of per capita consumption, we have reversed these proportions. But by giving away its revenue to the bootlegger, the government in the last two years has sharply increased its budgetary imbalance and incurred a deficit which is today being covered in a most dangerous and unhealthy way, by the printing press.45

  Chechen economist and Speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov claimed it was only when the losses from the anti-alcohol campaign mounted “that useless money began to be printed, the source of the present inflation.”46

  In a tragic replay of how the treasury’s shortfalls contributed to the hyperinflation, shortages, and general discontent that claimed the Romanov dynasty, the irreparable hole blown in the budget by Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol restrictions prompted the Soviets to turn to the printing press—exacerbating the hyperinflation, shortages, and general discontent that doomed the Soviet autocracy. But there was another dimension to the demise of the Soviet Union: the national question.

  Q: What do you call the middle stage between socialism and communism?

 
A: Alcoholism.47

  While Marxism–Leninism predicted the withering away of national identities, the Soviets actively institutionalized and promoted national identity as the foundation of the federative union itself, creating an air of imperialism between Moscow and the non-Russian union republics. Residents of what would become the non-Russian former Soviet states—especially the Baltics and Caucasus that had a previous history of independent statehood—viewed the Soviet era as a period of forced bondage within a multinational empire. Every issue from the dangerous, Chernobyl-type nuclear installations to the alcoholization of society was decried as a “foreign” intrusion and quickly became surrogates for anti-Soviet, anti-Russian nationalism.48 Consequently, Gorbachev’s particular brand of vodka politics even hastened the decay of the tenuous center-periphery relations of the late Soviet era.

  In January 1988 the first inter-ethnic disorders erupted in the Caucasus over the status of Nargorno-Karabakh: a mountainous, predominantly Armenian enclave completely within the neighboring Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Skirmishes in the Karabakh capital of Stepanakert over ethnic-Armenian demands to return to “the mother country” of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic fueled anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan and escalating tensions that followed the Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris into their independent statehood. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet empire these tensions erupted into a devastating, all-out war and a “frozen conflict” in which Armenians won de facto—but not de jure—control over Karabakh.

  Yet before even the first blood was spilt in 1988, vodka was there. In 1986 Armenian Igor Muradian led a delegation to Moscow with a draft letter proposing to transfer Karabakh from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR. It was a delicate proposition, since it would open the pandora’s box of renegotiating many of the contentious, Soviet-drawn borders. Still, he persuaded nine high-ranking Armenians to sign. The most prized signature was that of Abel Aganbegyan, Gorbachev’s lead economic advisor, whose Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk produced copious amounts of research in support of the anti-alcohol campaign. Yet when Aganbegyan entered the room to sign the petition for the Karabakh transfer “he didn’t know where he was going and why they were taking him there, and before he signed he spent four hours there. During those four hours he drank approximately two liters of vodka.”49

  Even more important were the impacts that the anti-alcohol campaign had back in the Caucasus. With their Mediterranean climate, the Caucasus in general and Georgia in particular are known for their history of viniculture—even the serpentine curves of the Georgian alphabet are said to invoke the vine. Accordingly, the culture of alcohol consumption in the Caucasus more resembles the wine-drinking nations of southern Europe than the vodka-quaffing practices of Russia to the north. Still, wine was just as integral to daily life in the Soviet south, where the draconian anti-alcohol restrictions were met with even greater hostility.

  The autocracy’s “bureaucratic excesses” in the Caucasus resulted in the forcible uprooting of historic, centuries-old vineyards, even over the howls of local protestors. On the other side of the Black Sea in wine-drinking Moldova, sixty thousand hectares—or twenty four percent the republic’s vineyards—were destroyed. From Moldova and Crimea to Georgia and beyond, the anti-alcohol campaign was yet another callous imperial diktat that ravaged local customs and economies and sharpened nationalist sentiment.50 As throughout the Soviet periphery, the mismanagement from the center “led to nationalist calls for radical decentralization of economic authority and control, giving the nationalities control over their own economic destinies, and ultimately independence.”51

  In sum: just as vodka politics contributed to every widely acknowledged factor in destroying the tsarist empire of old, it likewise hastened the demise of the Soviet Union itself. From exacerbating nationalist tensions in the non-Russian republics and stoking discontent within the Soviet leadership to destroying the central financial pillar of the state, Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign was another important factor in the collapse of the Soviet regime. As Gorbachev himself lamented: “In our society people are more used to ‘revolutionary leaps’ than to diligent work over a long period of time. Alas, the anti-alcohol campaign became one more sad example of how faith in the omnipotence of command methods, extremism and administrative zeal can ruin a good idea.”52

  It is no joke to suggest that the Soviet autocracy’s vodka politics sowed the seeds of its own demise. Or, at the very least, it makes more sense than claiming that it was all the handiwork of American president Ronald Reagan. But for those who remain unconvinced, and hold fast to the dictum that the words of “the great communicator” somehow slew the Soviet monster from half a world away, consider the following:

  In the summer of 2011, professor Paul Kengor—arguably the dean of the school of Reaganology and author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism—penned an article titled “Predicting the Soviet Collapse” for the conservative magazine National Review. The article describes a long-classified 1983 CIA memorandum written by Reagan’s vice-chairman of the National Intelligence, Herbert E. Meyer. Recently released through the Freedom of Information Act, the eight-page, Andropov-era memo won Meyer the prestigious National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal and “ought to rank among the most remarkable documents of the Cold War,” according to Kengor.53 I am inclined to agree.

  Based on “highly credible research” by “Soviet specialists and generally well informed individuals I know, whose political views and affiliations range across the spectrum,” Meyer concludes in his once-secret memo that “time is not on the Soviet Union’s side.” Strangely, he never mentions the arms race Reaganologists usually cite in vanquishing the Soviet juggernaut. Instead he points to the Soviet Union’s debilitating vodka-driven health and demographic problems and the challenges they posed for future Soviet economic growth in a complex, multinational empire.

  Reagan was apparently moved by the “demographic nightmare” of falling birthrates and skyrocketing abortions. Meanwhile, Meyer’s forecast that “the Soviet economy is heading toward economic calamity” reinforced Reagan’s bold claim that Soviet communism would soon be dismissed “as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”54

  In corroborating Reagan, Kengor proudly concludes that “Herb Meyer deduced from solid research what Ronald Reagan had deduced by intuition.”55

  I contacted Herb Meyer about this solid, highly credible research that formed the backbone of his influential memorandum. Where did this inspired analysis come from?

  “My source was, indeed, Murray Feshbach,” Meyer kindly replied. This was the same Census Bureau researcher and Georgetown professor whose Soviet infant-mortality studies and worrisome predictions about alcohol’s demographic toll were being vindicated by the newly released statistical information under glasnost.

  “I got the information from Murray himself,” Meyer wrote. “I made it a point to chat with him from time to time, since he knew more about this issue than anyone at the CIA.”56

  So as it turns out, Reagan’s visionary condemnations about the weakness of the Soviet Union were informed less by abstract moral principles than by information from those who understood the very real consequences of Soviet vodka politics. And that’s no joke.

  19

  The Bottle and Boris Yeltsin

  The collapse of communism and the peaceful end to the Cold War were transformative events in world history. En masse the former satellite countries of Eastern Europe rejected their communist autocracies for democracy. By 1989 a global wave of liberalization crested with the euphoric toppling of the Berlin Wall and the defiant heroism of student protestors in Tiananmen Square. Between Beijing and Berlin stood the vast Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms effectively devolved power down to the fifteen republics that together made up the USSR, including the largest and most vital: the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Meanwhile, t
he Russian people joined the chorus of nationalist voices in the Baltic republics calling for greater autonomy within—and then outright independence from—the Soviet Union. As the old Soviet empire imploded there was optimism that—for the first time—Russia would join the global wave of democracy and self-determination. While the challenges would be monumental, for the first time in generations Russia had the opportunity to make a clean break with the autocratic—and alcoholic—political traditions of the past.

  Instead, Russia suffered a grueling economic and social collapse that became the most drunken period in all of Russian history—no mean feat. While the causes of Russia’s post-independence catastrophes are many and complex, they were only exacerbated by democratic Russia’s first president. Dubbed “a revolutionary who preserved tradition,” he both repudiated and restored Russia’s autocratic traditions at the same time.1 While espousing freedom and democracy, Russia’s first elected president was a product of the Soviet autocratic system of vodka politics through and through. So before the very real devastation of Russia in the 1990s can be addressed, we must first confront the man whose very name has become an international synonym for drunken excess: President Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.