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

by Mark Lawrence

  History’s Revenge

  With Satan at its center, the deepest circle of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy is reserved for traitors. Just one step up in the eighth circle are the fraudsters: crooks, thieves, and corrupt politicians boiling in the sticky pitch of their own dark secrets. Alongside them are prognosticators and false prophets—their heads twisted backward, forever looking back on their failed predictions. So while we should perhaps tread lightly in making bold political prognostications, we can at least understand the constraints imposed on the Kremlin by Russia’s demographic past.

  In 2010 the United Nations released its new long-term population projections. Despite such recent improvements as increased fertility and decreased mortality under Medvedev and Putin, Russia’s population will likely shrink from 143 million today to roughly 125 million by 2050 (figure 24.1). This would drop Russia from the seventh most populous nation to the eleventh—barely beating out Vietnam.6

  How do they come up with estimates so far into the future, and how can they possibly be reliable? Well, demographers consider fertility and mortality statistics for all age cohorts, figure in migration, and calculate a range of optimistic, pessimistic, and likely scenarios. As it turns out, these projections hit the mark ninety-four percent of the time.7 When they miss, it usually is due to big surprises: the unexpected baby boom after World War II made earlier American projections look foolishly low. The grim reality of the HIV/AIDS epidemic made African population projections from the 1980s look far too rosy. And as figure 24.1 shows, demographers from the 1980s could not foresee the demodernization that decimated Russia and its heavy-drinking post-Soviet neighbors.

  Figure 24.1 RUSSIAN POPULATION PROJECTIONS TO 2050. Sources: Iris Hoßmann et al., Europe’s Demographic Future (Berlin: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2008), 3; United Nations, “World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision,” http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/country-profiles/country-profiles_1.htm (accessed March 17, 2012); Rosstat, “Izmemenie chislennosti naseleniya po variantam prognoza,” http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/population/demo/progn1.htm (accessed March 17, 2012); Sergei Scherbov and Wolfgang Lutz, Future Regional Population Patterns in the Soviet Union: Scenarios to the Year 2050, IIASA Working Paper No. WP-88-104 (Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA, 1988), 14–15; Svetlana Soboleva, Migration and Settlement: Soviet Union, IIASA Working Paper No. WP-80-45 (Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA, 1980), 130; Anatoly Karlin, personal correspondence, March 19, 2013.

  Unlike the African AIDS epidemic, however, Russia’s demographic wounds were self-inflicted: the culmination of centuries of bad governance through vodka politics. The exhaustive 2009 study in The Lancet concluded that, were it not for vodka, Russia’s mortality figures would look more like those of Western Europe instead of resembling war-torn areas of sub-Saharan Africa.8 Were it not for vodka, Russia could have at least escaped the gut-wrenching post-communist transitions of the 1990s with a healthier population—more like the Hungarians with their wine or the Czechs with their beer—instead of being mired in demographic decay.

  Consider Poland: a neighboring hard-drinking Slavic nation with its own storied vodka traditions. Poland also suffered the pain of post-communist transition. Yet while Yeltsin and Putin ignored the vodka epidemic in the 1990s and 2000s, Poland consistently increased excise taxes on the far more potent vodka as part of a concerted effort to migrate to safer, fermented wines and beers. Partly as a consequence, Poland has not suffered the same demographic calamity that has befallen Russia. When communism collapsed in Poland, sixty-one percent of alcohol consumed was in the form of distilled spirits. By 2002, it was down to twenty-six percent. Even despite the “stress” of transition, male life expectancy in Poland jumped four full years. In Estonia, the proportion of alcohol consumed in the form of vodka dropped from seventy-two to thirty-three percent over the same time frame. Male life expectancy increased 1.5 years. Meanwhile, in the absence of a real alcohol policy in Russia, vodka’s share of alcohol consumption increased from sixty-six to seventy-one percent and male life expectancy plummeted by five years. Today, Poles and Estonians still drink a lot, but far less of it is in distilled forms like vodka. As a consequence, male life expectancy for both Polish and Estonian men is north of seventy years or a full decade longer than their vodka-soaked neighbors in Russia.9

  Meanwhile, the Kremlin seems content to settle for band-aid solutions that treat symptoms of vodka politics rather than the disease. Even while the government undertakes yet another well-intentioned campaign against alcohol, it hypocritically promotes increased vodka production by well-connected insiders. Meanwhile, the finance ministry implores citizens to impale themselves on the bottle for the greater glory of the state.

  At some point, this madness must end.

  Even if we limit ourselves to just the last two decades since the collapse of communism, clearly the single greatest obstacle to a normal, healthy, and wealthy Russia is the legacy of the state’s own vodka politics. Despite improvements under Medvedev, Russia still loses some fifteen thousand people every year to alcohol poisoning—that’s more than the number of soldiers sacrificed during the Soviets’ entire ten-year debacle in Afghanistan (1979–89). Since the Soviet Union collapsed, some six hundred thousand people have died directly as a result of vodka: more than the total number of military deaths in imperial Russia’s nine eighteenth-century wars.

  Alternatively we can look to the projections of what Russia would have been were it not for the vodka-laced demodernization of the 1990s. In 1988 Sergei Scherbov and Wolfgang Lutz projected that the population of the Russian Republic—then within the Soviet Union—would be some one hundred eighty million by the year 2050 (figure 24.1).10 If we subtract the reasonable, mid-range estimate of the United Nations of 125 million from what should have been around 180 million, it leaves a difference of 55 million people. That is more than three times the number of soldiers killed in every Russian war, ever. In other words, by 2050 the Russian population will only be two-thirds of what it should have been were it not for the alcoholization and demodernization of the past twenty years—all legacies of vodka politics.

  This, then, is what Russia could have been—or what economists would call the “opportunity cost” of vodka. To this lost fifty-five million since the collapse of communism, one could add perhaps hundreds of millions more lost to the bottle over the five-hundred-plus years since the tsars first started pushing the more lucrative and more potent distilled alcohol over the lighter beers, ales, meads, and wines indigenous to Russia.

  Just consider what Russia could have been—how great it could have been—had its rulers not consistently encouraged the people to drink such a potent concoction to benefit the state. Consider the combined economic contributions of another fifty-five million people—especially if one-third of them were not getting drunk at work.11 Consider the potential contributions to commerce, science, or the arts that another healthy fifty-five million people would bring. As Russia’s population would have expanded, so too would its wealth, its tax base, and its capacity to innovate and modernize. It would have no problem staffing its military and would not have to rely on immigrants to bolster its demographic prospects. But that is all gone—Russia’s potential and ambitions have been drowned at the bottom of the bottle, by its own unwitting government.

  Instead, Russia’s once-and-future president Vladimir Putin confronts a bleak future on the vodka front—one that he did precious little to fix during his previous two terms. The government’s own statistics project that, even with generous immigration from the other former Soviet republics, by 2030 the number of Russians between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five will shrink from 102.2 million to 91.1 million. The dwindling working-age population will put a brake on economic growth, since there will be far fewer productive workers. We know that younger employees are especially important to technological innovation—but with fewer younger workers, the Russian economy will be even more hamstrung by the old, outmoded, and corrupted labor patterns of th
e past, putting it at a further competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. Under normal circumstances, the policy response would be to invest in modernization and growing the productive capital stock—but this option is stymied by Russia’s rampant, systemic corruption, which is itself a legacy of vodka politics (chapter 8). Encouraging research and development would be another option, but according to Russian scientists, fundamental science in the country is in a “catastrophic” condition—still largely isolated from international research trends.12 The picture is bleak: without profound change, the Russian economy will become less dynamic and less productive, reinforcing the country’s reliance on selling off its mineral, oil, and gas wealth, with well-placed oligarchs investing the profits from them in more attractive locations abroad. And—if this journey has taught us anything—if there is another crisis in these lucrative resource sectors, the Kremlin will increasingly revert to vodka revenues, making the situation even worse.

  As we’ve seen, Russians did not always drink vodka: when Prince Vladimir of Kiev famously declared that “drinking is the joy of the Rus’, we cannot exist without it,”13 he wasn’t talking about vodka. The traditional drinks of Russia were naturally fermented beers, ales, meads, and kvas. The imposition of the more potent, artificial, distilled spirits came only with the imposition of the modern autocratic state, which used vodka to siphon off society’s wealth into the treasury, making vodka the central pillar of Russian autocratic statecraft. Vodka, autocracy, and corruption in Russia have been inseparably intertwined ever since.

  Russia is a nation that has achieved greatness despite vodka, certainly not because of it. If Russia truly wants to regain its place among the great world powers, it will have to confront its greatest challenge ever: the deeply rooted traditions of vodka politics itself. How great could Russia be without this debilitating political curse?

  One Final History Lesson

  One of the great virtues of historical investigation is to use the past to inform the politics of the present with an eye to the future. Yet history is not simply populated by events and people, but also by ideas and innovations forgotten as we haughtily bask in the wisdom of the present. Especially when it comes to the struggle with alcohol, it may be time to dust off some lessons of the past. Consider, if you will, the following account from 1904, which traces the origins of public drunkenness to autocratic edicts…

  which made the distilling and selling of spiritous liquors a State monopoly, and one of the principal sources of public revenue. The consumption of spirits was encouraged in every way in order to increase the receipts of the Treasury. Public servants knew they might count upon favour by inducing people to drink by every means in their power. Tea and coffee were prohibited to prevent undesirable competition; beer was unknown, wine rare; and the Government produce reigned supreme. As a writer of the time puts it: “A stream of cheap liquor was made to flow over the country, and was poured down the throats of the people, making every Swede a drunkard, and of drunkenness a national blemish.”14

  Wait… did he say Swede?

  Yes! While today Sweden is one of the healthiest and least corrupt countries on earth—chock full of pragmatic, blonde, Volvo-driving, post-industrial progressives—just one hundred and fifty years ago it was written off as a backward country, full of drunken blonde peasants hopelessly mired in a swamp of state-sponsored distilled brännvin. If the astronomical rates of vodka consumption in Russia today have any historical parallel, it would certainly be with the Swedes of old. With per capita consumption rates north of twelve liters of pure alcohol per year, Sweden had “the sad distinction of being the most drunken country in Europe.”15

  Beyond the social and economic losses caused by widespread drunkenness, Swedish modernization suffered under a corrupt royal autocracy. While there was widespread recognition of the alcohol problem, any grass-roots response was consistently undermined by both the state and the alcohol producers, who combined to safeguard their financial benefits from drunkenness. Sound familiar?

  Yet by the early twentieth century the Swedish economy was growing steadily, along with an increasingly vibrant civil society. Swedish healthcare facilities were thriving, and the death rate was “probably the lowest in the world, or at all events in Europe.” Foreign commenters hailed the halving of Swedish alcohol consumption as nothing less than “one of the greatest victories of a nation over itself.”16

  What happened?

  For one, there was widespread popular concern over mass drunkenness. From humble beginnings as a mutual support community like Alcoholics Anonymous, the Swedish Temperance Society (Svenska Nykterhetssällskapet) began lobbing for tighter government restrictions on alcohol, culminating in the Licensing Act of 1855.17

  Arguably, an even more important innovation arose that same year: Sweden’s second largest city, Gothenburg, adopted a municipal liquor-dispensary system that quickly gained global fame as a supremely effective tool against societal drunkenness. The genius of this so-called Gothenburg System was that it did not take aim at drunks themselves or even the social harms they created. Instead, it focused on the ever-present allure of tremendous profits that encouraged the state, liquor producers, and the saloon keepers to keep harmful liquor flowing down the peoples’ throats.

  Here’s how it worked: the village would charter a private company—normally headed by the town’s most respected citizens—with the charge of regulating the local liquor traffic in the interest of the community. For their investment, the company shareholders received a strictly limited return of five percent yearly, with the bulk of the profits turned over to local agricultural and philanthropic organizations that promoted community well-being. Not only did the system enable temperance-minded citizens to have a real, tangible impact on community sobriety, but the greater resources flowing into civic organizations led to a blossoming of local grass-roots activism.18

  The system was a resounding success. Thanks to the Licensing Act, alcohol was restricted in accordance with the wishes of the local population—with some rural governments even voting themselves dry by refusing to issue any liquor licenses at all. Prices were gradually raised and availability restricted in the interest of local sobriety, leading to a steady decrease in alcohol consumption and its antecedent ills. Alcohol revenues helped expand health, welfare, agricultural, and community services that benefited drinkers and nondrinkers alike while also encouraging greater civic engagement.

  Hoping to emulate Gothenburg’s successes, cities and towns throughout Scandinavia adopted the system of “disinterested” municipal dispensary by the 1870s. News of reduced drunkenness, crime, and bootlegging, along with the prosperity and moral rejuvenation of Swedish communities, spread across Europe and North America, where more and more cities and states adopted the system. As early as 1859, even the Russian revolutionary democrat Nikolai Chernyshevsky advocated dumping the drunkenness- and corruption-inducing vodka tax farm for a system of local control like in Sweden.19 Across the Atlantic, various American states had experimented with outright prohibition since the “Maine Law” of 1851—most were plagued by illegal moonshining, corruption, and disrespect for the rule of law, often leading to repeal. Disillusioned by prohibition’s obvious failures, many American temperance advocates looked to the Gothenburg System as a practical blueprint for advancing sobriety. (Why the United States later doubled down on a well-known policy failure by adopting nationwide prohibition is one underlying puzzle of my previous book, The Political Power of Bad Ideas.20)

  You can probably see where I am going with this. Without question, the anti-alcohol initiatives begun under President Dmitry Medvedev have been well-intentioned (as have most previous, failed, anti-alcohol measures). We can only applaud the continuing efforts to raise alcohol prices, limit hours of sale, control advertising, and expand awareness through modern public relations campaigns. But even beyond the hurdles presented by the financial needs of the state and the vested interests of entrenched cronies, the effectiveness of su
ch reforms will inherently be limited by the fact that they only address the symptom of widespread drunkenness rather than the disease of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics. Russia’s drinking problem is the product of a centralized state that historically debauches and disempowers its own people. If the Kremlin is truly serious about overcoming vodka politics—and its resulting depopulation and decline that bedevils Russia’s future ambitions—they first have to be aware of those dynamics. Then they have to do something meaningful about it.

  Ever since Boris Yeltsin did away with the Soviet vodka monopoly in 1992, virtually every Russian alcohol-policy debate has revolved around resurrecting it in the interest of state finance—and always in the guise of defending public health. In 1997 Yeltsin pleaded that “if people spend money on vodka, that money should go to the treasury, not to crooks.” His ambitious Foreign Minister Evgeny Primakov then quickly proposed a vodka monopoly. The Kremlin aspirations of Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov the following year also included renationalizing vodka.21 When Vladimir Putin instead ascended to the presidency in 2000, he built Rosspirtprom to establish monopoly control over the vodka market, though his attempts to consolidate its position backfired spectacularly (chapter 22). Still, the siren beckons: when alcohol poisonings spiked in 2006, United Russia leaders called for a monopoly. When Medvedev launched his anti-alcohol campaign, his top health official, Gennady Onishchenko, lobbied for the vodka monopoly, shortsightedly arguing that “the budget would benefit and counterfeit alcohol would cease to exist. When there is a state monopoly, this area can be regulated in a tougher and more effective way.”22 Even in the contentious 2012 elections, Putin’s conservative opposition—the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the communist Gennady Zyuganov—agreed about the necessity of a vodka monopoly in order to restore the former glory of the Russian state.23