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

by Mark Lawrence

  5. Leonid I. Brezhnev, “Otchetnyi dokad Tsentral’nago Komiteta KPSS, XVIV s’ezdu Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza. Doklad General’nogo sekretarya TsK tovarishcha L. I. Brezhneva, 30 marta 1971 goda,” Pravda, March 31, 1971; Nikita Khrushchev, “Razvitie ekonomiki SSSR i partiinoe rukovodstvo narodnym khozyaistvom: Doklad tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva na plenume TsK KPSS 19 noyabrya 1962 goda,” Pravda, Nov. 20 1962.

  6. Steven Staats, “Corruption in the Soviet System,” Problems of Communism 21 (Jan.–Feb. 1972): 47. Kasha is a traditional Russian cereal or porridge commonly made from buckwheat. See also Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976), 120.

  7. Samuel M. Smucker, The Life and Reign of Nicholas the First, Emperor of Russia (Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1856); Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1978), 156.

  8. This quote by President Dmitry Medvedev is in particular reference to Russia’s “eternal corruption.” Timothy Frye, “Corruption and Rule of Law,” in Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, ed. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, and Andrew Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010), 92.

  9. Edward Crankshaw, Russia without Stalin: The Emerging Pattern (London: Viking, 1956), 74–75; Alena Ledeneva, Stephen Lovell, and Andrei Rogachevskii, “Introduction,” in Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, ed. Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 5–9.

  10. Leslie Palmier, “Bureaucratic Corruption and Its Remedies,” in Corruption: Causes, Consequences and Control, ed. Michael Clarke (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 207. Other commonly accepted definitions of corruption can be found in Joseph S. Nye, “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review 61, no. 2 (1967): 421; Shleifer and Vishny, “Corruption,” 599.

  11. 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), 60. Similar numbers were reported by Olearius some four decades earlier. Samuel H. Baron, ed., The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), 198–99.

  12. David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 200. See also George Tennyson Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 11.

  13. Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 119–20; Christian, Living Water, 31, 195. This section draws from Living Water and David Christian, “Vodka and Corruption in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation,” Slavic Review 46, no. 3/4 (1987).

  14. Paul Bushkovitch, “Taxation, Tax Farming and Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 37, no. 3 (1978): 390–91; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 61; Christian, Living Water, 33.

  15. Sergei M. Troitskii, Finansovaia politika russkago absoliutizma v XVIII veke (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 214; Aleksandr P. Pogrebinskii, “Finansovaya reforma nachala 60-kh godov XIX veka v Rossii,” Voprosi istorii, no. 10 (1951): 74–75, and Ocherki istorii finanasov dorevolyutsionnoi Rossii (XIV–XX vv.) (Moscow: Gosfinizdat, 1954), 99.

  16. 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), 97–98; Gordon B. Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12. On vodka revenues under Peter the Great see Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz, Dnevnik kammer-iunkera Berkhgol’tsa, vedennyi im v Rossii v tsarstvovanie Petra Velikago, s 1721–1725-y god, trans. I. Ammon, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Tipograpfiya Katkova i Ko., 1858), 2:239.

  17. Distillation was long a privilege reserved for the gentry, who sold their vodka to state wholesalers. Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, The Russians of To-Day (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), 33.

  18. “Koe chto ob otkupakh, Kolokol list 10, 1 marta 1858 g.,” in Kolokol: Gazeta A. I. Gertsena i N. P. Ogareva (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962), 79.

  19. Vasilii A. Kokorev, “Ob otkupakh na prodazhu vina,” Russkii vestnik, book 2, Sovremennaya letopis’ (1858): 42; cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 481.

  20. Christian, Living Water, 136.

  21. Ekonomicheskii ukazatel’ 41 (Oct. 1858); cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 473. See also Saltykov, Tchinovnicks, 98.

  22. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, 158; cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 474, 76.

  23. Christian, Living Water, 150.

  24. Gregory Feifer, “Corruption in Russia, Part 1: A Normal Part of Everyday Life,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Nov. 27, 2009, http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1889394.html (accessed Oct. 22, 2010).

  25. Russkii dnevnik, no. 51 (March 7, 1859); cited in: Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 482–83.

  26. Quoted in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104–5. On raiding roadside inns see Svedeniia 3:282; cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 483. On peasant extortion see Murray, Russians of To-Day, 31.

  27. 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), 145.

  28. “Koe chto ob otkupakh, Kolokol list 10, 1 marta 1858 g.,” 79.

  29. Ibid., 80. Natal’ya E. Goryushkina, “‘Imeyu chest’ dolozhit’, chot vzyatki polucheny’: K voprosu ob otkupnom vzyatochnichestve v Rossii,” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy tret’ei mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 26–27 oktyabrya 2012), ed. Mikhail V. Teplyanskii (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU v g. Ivanovo, 2012), 127.

  30. N. Herséwanoff, Des Fermes d’eaux-de-vie en Russie (The Eaux-de-Vie Farms in Russia) (Paris, Bonaventure: 1858), 22–23; cited in Christian, Living Water, 148.

  31. This being one of Saltykov’s favored euphemisms. Saltykov, Tchinovnicks, 95, 100.

  32. Svedeniya 3:248; quoted in: Christian, Living Water, 136. For contemporary parallels see Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? 161.

  33. Svedeniya, 1:35, from Polnoe sobranie zakonov, 2nd series, 12444; cited in Christian, Living Water, 106.

  34. “Koe chto ob otkupakh, Kolokol list 10, 1 marta 1858 g.,” 80.

  35. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, 155; cited in Christian, Living Water, 148–49.

  36. Quote from “Koe chto ob otkupakh, Kolokol list 10, 1 marta 1858 g.,” 80. On Nicolas’s inquiry see Christian, Living Water, 154.

  37. Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 192.

  38. V. Fedorovskii, “Podolsko-Vitebskii otkup,” Sovremennik (1859), Mar. “Sovremennoe obozrenie,” 1; cited in Christian, Living Water, 110. Tavern keeper regulations from 1841 can be found in ibid., 113. Also see Ivan Pryzhov, Istoriya kabakov v Rossii (Moscow: Molodiya sily, 1914), 59–74.

  39. V.K——ov, “Vopros o prodazhe vina,” Russkii mir, no. 19 (May 15, 1859); cited in Christian, Living Water, 136. On “special vodkas” see Vestnik promyshlennosti, no.4 (Oct. 1858), 18; cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 481.

  40. Hosking, Russia, 105.

  41. Christian, Living Water, 62–63.

  42. A. Korsak, “Nalogoi i vinnyi otkup,” Russkayagazeta, no. 9 (1858); cited in Christian, “Vodka and Corruption,” 481–82.

  43. Nikolai I. Turgenev, Rossiya i russkie (Moscow: Knigoizdatel’stvo K. F. Nekrasova, 1915), 212 Christian, Living Water, 114.

  44. Baron August Freiherr Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources, trans. Robert Fai
re, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1856), 2:408. See also H. Sutherland Edwards, “Russian Tea and Tea-Houses,” in Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 277. Indeed, as Adam Olearius suggested in the mid-1600s, “the best cure among the common people… is vodka and garlic.” Baron, Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 162.

  45. Luigi Villari, Russia under the Great Shadow (New York: James Pott & Co., 1905), 169. See also Sergei Stepniak, Russia under the Tzars (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), 20–21; 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), 252. More generally see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2011), 145.

  46. D. MacKenzie Wallace, Russia (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877), 541–42. See also Hosking, Russia, 209; Sir John Maynard, The Russian Peasant and Other Studies (New York: Collier Books, 1942), 66, 75.

  47. Murray, Russians of To-Day, 24–26.

  48. Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 213. On taking a sin on the soul see Wallace, Russia, 541–42. See also Hosking, Russia, 209. A stark parallel with the not-so-subtle influence of vodka on contemporary Russian jury trials can be found in the opening lines of Ellen Barry, “In Russia, Jury Is Something to Work Around,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010, A1.

  49. V. Polivanov, “Zapiski zemskogo nachal’nika,” Russkaya mysl’ 9–10 (1917): 32; cited in Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, 213.

  50. See f. 586, op. 1, d. 117, l.41; and f. 586, op. 1, d. 120, l.62, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF) (State archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow; cited in Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, 213.

  51. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, 221.

  52. Sergei Stepniak, The Russian Peasantry (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), 202–5; similarly, see 176, 88.

  53. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, 253–60; Stephen P. Frank, “Popular Justice, Community and Culture among the Russian Peasantry, 1870–1900,” Russian Review 46, no. 3 (1987): 247–49.

  54. Verney, “Rural Life in Russia,” 246–47.

  55. Murray, Russians of To-Day, 16, 34, 231. See also Wallace, Russia, 97–99. 56. Saltykov, Tchinovnicks, 99–100.

  56. Saltykov, Tchinovnicks, 99–100.

  57. Stepniak suggests that corrupt clergy could use their “monopoly” on religious sacraments as an instrument of holy extortion. Stepniak, Russian Peasantry, 230–31.

  58. Ioann S. Belliustin, Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 129–30.

  59. Ibid., 130–31.

  60. Ibid., 139–40; Wallace, Russia, 97–98. Olearius related identical accounts in the 1630s, with some drinking until “the soul is given up with the draught.” Baron, Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 143. See also William Richardson, Anecdotes of the Russian Empire in a Series of Letters Written, a Few Years Ago, from St. Petersburg (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1784), 61.

  61. Baron, Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 144–46. Vladimir Lenin related similar tales of the rural clergy in the 1860s in “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905–1907 (1908),” in Collected Works, vol. 13: June 1907–April 1908 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 385.

  62. Belliustin, Description of the Clergy, 114. See also Smucker, The Life and Reign of Nicholas the First, Emperor of Russia, 199; Stepniak, Russia under the Tzars, 58. The “All steal” proverb quoted in Georg Brandes, Impressions of Russia, trans. Samuel C. Eastman (Boston: C. J. Peters & Son, 1889), 148.

  63. Nathan Haskell Dole, Young Folks’ History of Russia (New York: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1903), 521.

  64. “Koe chto ob otkupakh, Kolokol list 10, 1 marta 1858 g.,” 79; Haxthausen, Russian Empire, 2:174–75; Hosking, Russia, 105–6. On “coercion-intensive” statecraft see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Press, 1990), 87–91. On the importance of the article on agenda-setting: Christian, Living Water, 264–65.

  65. Levin and Satarov, “Corruption and Institutions in Russia,” 113–14. On the state and the ruling class in Russia see Donald Ostrowski, “The Façade of Legitimacy: Exchange of Power and Authority in Early Modern Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 3 (2002): 536–39; John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–9.

  66. See Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? 50–84.

  67. Feifer, “Corruption in Russia, Part 1: A Normal Part of Everyday Life,” and Part 3: How Russia Is Ruled,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Nov. 28 2009, http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1890170.html (accessed Oct. 22, 2010); Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Russia’s Acquiescence to Corruption Makes the State Machine Inept,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 158; Michael Bohm, “Thieves Should Go to Jail!” Moscow Times, Oct. 8, 2010, http://themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/thieves-should-go-to-jail/418993.html (accessed Oct. 11, 2010); Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System, 12; Dev Kar and Sarah Freitas, Russia: Illicit Financial Flows and the Role of the Underground Economy (Washington, D.C.: Global Financial Integrity, 2013), 22.

  68. David M. Herszenhorn, “Text of Navalny’s Closing Remarks in Russian Court,” New York Times, July 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/world/europe/text-of-navalnys-closing-remarks-in-russian-court.html (accessed July 6, 2013).

  69. Ibid.

  70. P. V. Berezin, Na sluzhbe zlomu delu (Moscow: I. N. Kyshnerev i Ko., 1900); Mikhail Fridman, Vinnaya monopoliya, tom 2: Vinnaya monopoliya v Rossii, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Pravda, 1916), 2:70–74. On the tenacity of bribery and corruption under Alexander III, see Dole, History of Russia, 521.

  71. Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Russia under Alexander III. And in the Preceding Period, trans. J. Morrison, ed. Felix Volkhovsky (New York: Macmillan, 1893), xxii–xxiii (emphasis in original).

  72. Ibid., xxiii.

  73. Frye, “Corruption and Rule of Law,” 94.

  74. Quoted in Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.

  75. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works, 193.

  76. Feifer, “Corruption in Russia, Part 1.

  77. Levin and Satarov, “Corruption and Institutions in Russia,” 130.

  78. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? 252–55. Different perspectives of Putin’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign are provided in “Is Russia’s Anti-Corruption Drive the Real Thing?” Voice of Russia Weekly Experts’ Panel–13, Feb. 12, 2013, http://english.ruvr.ru/experts13 (accessed Feb. 15, 2013).

  Chapter 9

  1. See, for instance: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 65–95.

  2. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 103; Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer and the Knout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 316; David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 186.

  3. Janet Hartley, “Provincial and Local Government,” in Cambridge History of Russia: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, ed. Dominic Lieven (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 473; Sergei M. Troitskii, Finansovaia politika russkago absoliutizma v XVIII veke (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 53.