Chapter 7
1. One noteworthy recent exception is Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2013), who sees the roots of Russian intemperance in the post–World War II Soviet political system.
2. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Esprit De Lois (Paris: Libraire de firmin didot freres, 1856), 194.
3. William Hepworth Dixon, Free Russia, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Berhard Tauchnitz, 1872), 1:254. Similar notions can be found in the works of novelist Nikolai Gogol; see Lady Frances Verney, “Rural Life in Russia,” in Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 247. See also D. MacKenzie Wallace, Russia (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877), 98.
4. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev, “Vvedeniye: Alkogol’naya katastrofa: kak ostanovit’ vymiranie Rossii,” in Alkogol’naya katastrofa i vozmozhnosti gosudarstvennoi politiki v preodolenii alkogol’noi sverkosmertnosti v Rossii, ed. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev (Moscow: Lenand, 2010), 24–25; Frank Jacobs, “442—Distilled Geography: Europe’s Alcohol Belts,” Strange Maps (blog), Jan. 30, 2010, http://bigthink.com/ideas/21495 (accessed Feb. 23, 2010). The term “geoalcoholics” is borrowed from Alex De Jonge, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (New York: Morrow, 1986), 19–20.
5. The first Russian vineyards were planted in Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in 1613, beginning a modest domestic trade in wine. H. Sutherland Edwards, “Food and Drink,” in Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 260–61; Igor Smirennyi, Ivan Gorbunov, and Sergei Zaitsev, Pivo Rossiiskoi Imperii (Moscow: Ayaks, 1998), 9–14; Stanislav I. Smetanin and Mikhail V. Konotopov, Razvitie promyshlennosti v krepostnoi Rossii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proect, 2001), 169–71.
6. Nathan Haskell Dole, Young Folks’ History of Russia (New York: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1903), 108.
7. The ninth-century Arabian traveler Ahmad Beh-Fodhlan Ibn al Abbas Ben-Assam Ben-Hammad even described the ubiquity of alcohol and drunkenness in Russian pagan rituals. Dole, Young Folks’ History of Russia, 52.
8. Ivan Pryzhov, Istoriya kabakov v Rossii (Moscow: Molodiya sily, 1914), 10; Horace Lunt, “Food in the Rus’ Primary Chronicle,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 24.
9. René J. Dubos, Pasteur and Modern Science, ed. Thomas D. Brock (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Microbiology Press, 1998), 54–60.
10. See, for instance, Ernest H. Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue, 1926), 3:910–39.
11. “Flavored Vodka Fuels Vodka Volume and Sales,” Reuters, Oct. 11, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/11/idUS149559+11-Oct-2012+PRN20121011 (accessed Feb. 13, 2013).
12. Victor Erofeyev, “The Russian God,” New Yorker Dec. 16, 2002; Viktor Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis: Opyt khudozhestvennoi eskhatologii (Moscow: Zebra E, 2008), 19–20. Similarly, see Selina Bunbury, Russia after the War, 2 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1857), 2:156–57; Andrei Makarevich, Zanimatel’naya narkologiya (Moscow: Makhaon, 2005), 9–10.
13. Vladimir P. Nuzhnyi, Vino v zhinzni i zhizn‘ v vine (Moscow: Sinteg, 2001), 15–16.
14. David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 25.
15. George Vernadsky, “Feudalism in Russia,” Speculum 14, no. 3 (1939): 301; K. V. Bazilevich, Gorodskie vosstaniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVII v.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscoe: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’noekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1936), 39–40; Richard Hellie, “Early Modern Russian Law: The Ulozhenie of 1649,” Russian History 2, no. 4 (1988). On the importance of history to drinking patterns see V. A. Terekhina, ed., Profilaktika p’yanstva i alkogolizma (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literaturna, 1983), 28.
16. This section draws largely from Christian, Living Water, 26–33; Pryzhov, Istoriya kabakov v Rossii, 27–40.
17. Rodionov suggests that this early distilled polugar was fundamentally different from “modern” rectified vodka, which he dates from 1895. Boris V. Rodionov, Istoriya russkoi vodki ot polugara do nashikh dnei (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), 43–81. To avoid confusion I will refer to both distilled and rectified products as vodka.
18. Boris V. Rodionov, Bol’shoi obman: Pravda i lozh‘ o russkoi vodke (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2011), 413; William Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization: 1800–1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 26.
19. Vilyam Pokhlebkin, Istoriya vodki (A History of Vodka) (Moscow: Tsentpoligraf, 2000), 100. This becomes one of Pokhlebkin’s arguments for the timing of vodka’s birth, as the prosperity of the three-field system gave rise to vodka production, or vice versa. Ibid., 144, 51–54. Distilling as a primary link between state formation and economic prosperity has been borne out in historical comparison. Charles van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic,” History Workshop 1, no. 2 (1976).
20. Boris Segal, Russian Drinking: Use and Abuse of Alcohol in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1987), 30; Paul Bushkovitch, “Taxation, Tax Farming and Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 37, no. 3 (1978): 391.
21. Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth: 1591, facsimile ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 43–44. The Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoi presents a remarkably similar description in Petr Pervyi (Kishinev: Kartya Moldovenyaske, 1970), 22.
22. On torture in early imperial Russia see Jean Chappe d’Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie, fait par ordre du roi en 1761, contenant les Mœurs, les Usages des Russes, & l’État actuel de cette Puissance; &c. (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1769), 193–94; Edward Peters, Torture, expanded ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 95–96.
23. Samuel H. Baron, ed., The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), 198, 42.
24. Ibid., 144.
25. Christian, Living Water, 30–31, 39. See also Mikhail E. Saltykov, Tchinovnicks: Sketches of Provincial Life, from the Memoirs of the Retired Conseiller de Cour Stchedrin (Saltikow), trans. Frederic Aston (London: L. Booth, 1861), 99. On indirect rule and Russian internal colonization see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2011), 145.
26. This is largely in line with Etkind’s thesis on the state’s “internal colonization” of early Russia. Etkind, Internal Colonization, 65. See also Mikhail Ya Volkov, Ocerki istorii promyslov Rossii vtoraya polovina XVII–pervaya polovina XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 25–27; Richard Hellie, Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 106; Christian, Living Water, 33, 36, 47.
27. McKee quoted in Richard Weitz, “Russia: Binge Drinking and Sudden Death,” Eurasianet. org, Dec. 15, 2010, http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62577 (accessed Dec. 17, 2010). See also http://csis.org/event/new-insights-catastrophic-level-mortality-russian-men.
28. Iosaphat Barbaro, “Viaggio alla Tana,” in Barbaro i kontarini o Rossii: K istorii italo-russkikh svyazei v XV v., ed. Elizaveta Ch. Skrzhinskaya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), 133; V. Z. Grigor’eva, Vodka izvestnaya i neizvestnaya: XIV–XX veka (Moscow: Enneagon, 2007), 16.
29. Ambrogio Contarini, “Viaggio in Persia,” in Barbaro i kontarini o Rossii: K istorii italo-russkikh svyazei v XV v., ed. Elizaveta Ch. Skrzhinskaya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), 204–5.
30. Vladimir B. Bezgin, “Alkogol’ v obydennoi zhizni russkogo sela (konets XIX–nachalo XX v.,” NB: Problemy obshchestva i politiki, no. 3 (2013). http://www.e-notabene.ru/pr/article_549.html (accessed July 15, 2013). David Christian, “Traditional and Modern Drinking Culture
s in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 1, no. 1 (1987): 66–67; R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 84–85; Vera Efron, “Russia, Yesterday,” in Drinking and Intoxication: Selected Readings in Social Attitudes and Controls, ed. Raymond G. McCarthy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, 1959), 131.
31. Quoted in: Paul Bushkovitch, “The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Russian Review 49, no. 1 (1990): 12–13.
32. Segal, Russian Drinking, 47–48.
33. Sergei M. Soloviev, History of Russia, vol. 12: Russian Society under Ivan the Terrible, trans. T. Allan Smith (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International, 1996), 211. The Domostroi also stipulated that women “must be preserved from intoxicating beverages” and only drink nonalcoholic beers and kvas. Ibid., 208–9. See also Grigor’eva, Vodka izvestnaya i neizvestnaya: XIV–XX veka, 18.
34. Carolyn Pouncy, The “Domostroi”: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 157.
35. Soloviev, History of Russia, vol. 12: Russian Society under Ivan the Terrible, 70. Similar practices were noted by Adam Olearius during his visits in the 1630s. Baron, ed., Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 270.
36. Samuel Collins, The Present State of Russia, in a Letter to a Friend at London; Written by an Eminent Person Residing at the Great Czars Court at Mosco for the Space of Nine Years (London: John Winter, 1671), 23–24. On the Zemskii Prikaz see John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121–28.
37. Quoted in Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis, 21. On Coyet see also Bushkovitch, “Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court.”
38. Wallace, Russia, 98. See also Selina Bunbury, Russia after the War, 2 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1857), 1:102–3; Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, The Russians of To-Day (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), 16; Georg Brandes, Impressions of Russia, trans. Samuel C. Eastman (Boston: C. J. Peters & Son, 1889), 39. Famed dramatist Anton Chekov depicts similar scenes in fiction: Anton Chekhov, “Peasants,” in The Oxford Chekhov, ed. Robert Hingley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 217–18.
39. Baron, Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 145. Similarly, see Collins, Present State of Russia, 19.
40. Esther Singleton, ed., Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 249–50. I changed Vodki to vodka.
41. A. Preobrazhenskii, “Volost’ Pokrovsko-Sitskaya Yaroslavskoi gubernii Molozhskago uezda,” in Etnograficheskii sbornik, ed. Imperatorskoe russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1853–1864), 103–4; quoted in Christian, Living Water, 77. Similar vodka indoctrination persisted through the Soviet period. Gordon B. Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 47. See also chapters 16 and 17.
42. Andrei P. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii, “O krepostnom sostoyanii,” in Graf P. D. Kiselev i ego vremya: Materialy dlya istorii Imperatorov Aleksandr I-go, Nikolaya I-go, i Aleksandra II (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya M. M. Stasyulkvicha, 1882), 312. Many thanks to David Christian for this reference.
43. Cited in Christian, Living Water, 76.
44. Grant Podelco, “Holiday Sobriety: ‘There Is No Worse Enemy for a Russian Than Himself’,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Dec. 28, 2012, http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-alcohol-vodka-holiday-smoking—drinking-abuse/24811093.html (accessed Jan. 2, 2013). See also Associated Press, “In Russia, New Year’s Celebrations Last 10 Days,” National Public Radio, Jan. 7, 2011, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=132733640 (accessed Jan. 8, 2011); Agence France-Presse, “Russians Advised to Celebrate Dry New Year Holiday,” Inquirer.net, Jan. 2, 2011, http://www.inquirer.net/mindandbody/health-beat/view.php?db=1&article=20110102-312131 (accessed Jan. 3, 2011).
45. Paul Goble, “Drunkenness a ‘More Terrible’ Threat to Russia Than Terrorism, Moscow Psychiatrist Says,” Window on Eurasia (blog), Dec. 19, 2009, http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/12/window-on-eurasia-drunkenness-more.html; Artem Serikov, “Pochemu P’yanstvo Strashnee Terrora?” WIN.ru (blog), Dec. 18, 2009, http://www.win.ru/topic/3053.phtml (both accessed Dec. 20, 2009). One could also add pominki, the remembrance service forty days after the passing of a love one, which was likewise “accompanied by great debauchery.” J. M. Buckley, The Midnight Sun, the Tsar and the Nihilist (Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., 1886), 302.
46. Baron August Freiherr Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources, trans. Robert Faire, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1856), 2:175. On zapoi see also David A. Leon, Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, and Martin McKee, “Alcohol and Russian Mortality: A Continuing Crisis,” Addiction 104, no. 10 (2009): 1631–34; David A. Leon et al., “Hazardous Alcohol Drinking and Premature Mortality in Russia: A Population Based Case-Control Study,” The Lancet, June 16, 2007, 2002–4; Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya sistema (Sovremennik, 1858),” in Izbrannye ekonomichesie proizvedeniya, tom 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 678.
47. E. Protas’ev, “O poroke, svoistvennom krest’yanam i prepyatstvuyushchem uluchsheniyu ikh byta,” Zhurnal zemlevladel’tsa 9, no. 6 (1858): 7; translation in Christian, “Traditional and Modern Drinking Cultures in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation,” 76; see also ibid., 62–63.
48. Murray, Russians of To-Day, 34–35.
49. Luigi Villari, Russia under the Great Shadow (New York: James Pott & Co., 1905), 231; Christian, Living Water, 95–96.
50. Pokhlebkin, Istoriya vodki, 104.
51. Christian, Living Water, 36; Etkind, Internal Colonization, 145–46.
52. Nikolai I. Pavlenko, “K voprosu Ob evolyutsii dvorianstva v XVII–XVIII vv,” in Voprosy genezisa kapitalizma v Rossii, ed. Vladimir V. Mavrodin (Leningrad: Leningrad Universitet, 1960), 61–65.
53. Christian, Living Water, 37; van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut.”
54. Christian, Living Water, 47.
Chapter 8
1. Julia Ioffe, “The End of Putin: Alexey Navalny on Why the Russian Protest Movement Will Win,” Foreign Policy, Dec. 28, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/28/the_end_of_putin (accessed Jan. 1, 2012).
2. Carol J. Williams, “Russia Set to Make Olympic History—for Spending, Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9 2013, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/lafg-wn-russia-olympics-costs-controversy-20130208,0,2858111.story (accessed Feb. 13, 2013). Julia Ioffe, “Net Impact: One Man’s Cyber-Crusade against Russian Corruption,” New Yorker, April 4, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_ioffe#ixzz1hrtTCJaa (accessed Jan. 1, 2012); Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index, 2012,” http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results (accessed Feb. 13, 2013); Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn, and Claudio E. Montenegro, Shadow Economies All over the World: New Estimates for 162 Countries from 1999 to 2007, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5356 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank: 2010): 29.
3. Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19–25; “57% Rossiian schitaiut narkomaniiu pervostepennoi’ problemoi’,” Rossiiskaya gazeta, Nov. 8, 2010, 13; Gregory Feifer, “Corruption in Russia, Part 2: Law Enforcers Often the Worst Offenders,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Nov. 28, 2009, http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1890104.html (accessed Oct. 22, 2010); Will Englund, “Russian Corruption Takes on a Life of Its Own,” Washington Post, Oct. 26, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/26/AR2010102601429_pf.html.
4. See Mark Levin and Georgy Satarov, “Corruption and Institutions in Russia,” European Journal of Political Economy 16,
no. 1 (2000): 116; Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, “Corruption,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (1993): 615.
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