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

by Mark Lawrence

  4. Kahan, Plow, the Hammer and the Knout, 319–20; John P. LeDonne, “Indirect Taxes in Catherine’s Russia, I: The Salt Code of 1781,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 23 (1975): 162–63.

  5. John P. LeDonne, “Indirect Taxes in Catherine’s Russia, II: The Liquor Monopoly,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 24, no. 2 (1976): 203.

  6. Ibid; Troitskii, Finansovaia politika, 214.

  7. Sergei F. Platonov, Ivan the Terrible, trans. Joseph Wieczynski (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International, 1974), 118; Johann Danckaert, Beschrijvinge van Moscovien ofte Rusland (Amsterdam, 1615), 63; cited in James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 86; Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 221.

  8. Samuel H. Baron, ed., The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), 143.

  9. William Coxe, Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark, Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries, 3 vols. (Dublin: S. Price, 1784), 3:63–66.

  10. Robert Ker Porter, “Excerpts from ‘Travelling Sketches in Russia and Sweden’,” in Seven Britons in Imperial Russia: 1698–1812, ed. Peter Putnam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), 312–13.

  11. Hannibal Evans Lloyd, Alexander I: Emperor of Russia; or, a Sketch of His Life, and of the Most Important Events of His Reign (London: Treuttel & Würtz, 1826), 118–19.

  12. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave [1845] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 74–76. Many thanks to Emmanuel Akyeampong for this reference.

  13. Astolphe Custine, marquis de, Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia: 1839 (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 437.

  14. Baron August Freiherr Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources, trans. Robert Faire, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1856), 2:174–75, 408–09. Also see Hosking, Russia, 106.

  15. Audronė Janužyte, “Historians as Nation State-Builders: The Formation of Lithuanian University, 1904–1922” (academic diss., University of Tampere, 2005), 22. Likewise see Piotr S. Alekseev, O p’yanstve s predisloviem gr. L. N. Tolstago (Moscow: 1891), 93.

  16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard D. Heffner, abridged ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 201. On the history of the transnational temperance movement see Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31–61.

  17. Henry M. Baird, The Life of the Rev. Robert Baird, D.D. (New York: A. D. F. Randolph, 1866), 195. See also Baird’s correspondence from St. Petersburg to the American Sunday School Union, Oct. 20, 1840, in the Presbyterian Historical Society, American Sunday School Union Papers, 1817–1915, reel 45 series I, C:1840B, no. 200–202. On “religious sects” see Dawson Burns, Temperance History: A Consecutive Narrative of the Rise, Development and Extension of the Temperance Reform, (London: National Temperance Publication Depot, 1889), 120, 255; Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, The Russians of To-Day (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), 19.

  18. Egidijus Aleksandravičcius, Lietuviųu atgimimo istorijos studijos, tom 2: Blaivybė Lietuvoje XIX amziuje (Vilnius: Sietynas, 1991), 61. On Bishop Motiejus Valančius and temperance in Kaunas guberniia see Janužyte, “Historians as Nation State-Builders,” 21. In Poland and western Ukraine see Boris Savchuk, Korchma: alkogol’na politika i rukh tverezosti v Zakhidnii Ukraini u XIX - 30-kh rokakh XX st. (Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine: Lileya-NV, 2001), 138–230. See also Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemma of Dissidence in East-Central Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), 18; Patrick Rogers, Father Theobald Mathew: Apostle of Temperance (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1943).

  19. AleksandraviĆius, Blaivybė Lietuvoje XIX amžiuje, 72; Christian, Living Water.

  20. Christian, Living Water, 295; David Christian, “A Neglected Great Reform: The Abolition of Tax Farming in Russia,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 105.

  21. Christian, Living Water, 325–26; derived from reports in Svedeniya 2:235–237.

  22. V. A. Fedorov, “Liquor Tax Rebellion (Trezvennoe dvizhenie),” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 101.

  23. Ivan Pryzhov, Istoriya kabakov v Rossii (Moscow: Molodiya sily, 1914), 50–51; John Stearns, Temperance in All Nations: History of the Cause in All Countries of the Globe (New York: National Temperance Society and Publication House, 1893), 329–33.

  24. D. MacKenzie Wallace, Russia (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877), 99. See also 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), 93.

  25. Moskovskie vedomosti, no. 62, March 13, 1859; translated in Christian, Living Water, 314.

  26. Murray, Russians of To-Day, 29–30. Similarly, see Fedorov, “Liquor Tax Rebellion (Trezvennoe dvizhenie),”, 101.

  27. Quoted in Christian, Living Water, 348.

  28. Fedorov, “Liquor Tax Rebellion (Trezvennoe dvizhenie)” 101.

  29. Christian, “A Neglected Great Reform,” 107–9; Aleksandr P. Pogrebinskii, “Finansovaya reforma nachala 60-kh godov XIX veka v Rossii,” Voprosi istorii, no. 10 (1951): 78–82; W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), 62; Walter McKenzie Pinter, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 78.

  30. Translated in Christian, Living Water, 357. See also ibid., 349; Christian, “A Neglected Great Reform,” 108.

  31. Quoted in: Christian, Living Water, 349.

  32. Ibid., 350.

  33. Ibid., 361–64; Irina R. Takala, Veselie Rusi: Istoriia alkogol’noi problemy v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2002), 92–93.

  34. Mikhail Fridman, Vinnaya monopoliya, tom 2: Vinnaya monopoliya v Rossii, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Pravda, 1916), 2:70–75; P. V. Berezin, Na sluzhbe zlomu delu (Moscow: I. N. Kyshnerev i Ko., 1900); Christian, Living Water, 374–79; Pinter, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 78–80.

  35. Fridman, Vinnaya monopoliya, tom 2, 2:65–66. Perhaps the most detailed investigation of consumption is V. K. Dmitriev, Kriticheskie issledovaniya o potreblenii alkogolya v Rossii (Moscow: V. P. Ryabushinskii, 1911). See also Stanislav I. Smetanin and Mikhail V. Konotopov, Razvitie promyshlennosti v krepostnoi Rossii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proect, 2001), 184–90.

  36. See Switzerland Bureau fédéral de statistique, Question de l’alcoolisme. Exposé comparatif des lois et des expériences de Quelques états étrangers, par le Bureau fédéral de statistique (Berne: Imprimerie K.-J. Wyss, 1884), esp. 672.

  37. Murray, Russians of To-Day, 30–33.

  38. Luigi Villari, Russia under the Great Shadow (New York: James Pott & Co., 1905), 250.

  39. Georg Brandes, Impressions of Russia, trans. Samuel C. Eastman (Boston: C. J. Peters & Son, 1889), 144.

  Chapter 10

  1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 9.

  2. On the state see ibid., 11. On religion see Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.

  3. See also Joseph R. Gusfield, “Social Structure and Moral Reform: A Study of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (1955): 225. I have found no evidence that the passage originated with Karl Marx himself. Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, vol. 1 (New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1916), 166.

  4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991), 927.

  5. Friedrich Engels, Th
e Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 127–29.

  6. David Christian, “Accumulation and Accumulators: The Metaphor Marx Muffled,” Science and Society 54, no. 2 (1990), and, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 37.

  7. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Viking, 1996), 129; Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (London: Routledge, 2003), 407; M. Grigoryan, “N. G. Chernyshevsky’s World Outlook,” in N. G. Chernyshevsky: Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 9.

  8. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 135.

  9. “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.

  10. Ibid; Baron August Freiherr Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources, trans. Robert Faire, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1856), 2:174–75; Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 105–6. On “coercion-intensive” statecraft see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 87–91.

  11. Perhaps the sapient reader will agree. Joseph Frank, Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 187. See also Andrew M. Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?: A Reevaluation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 13.

  12. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 129.

  13. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1983), 215–16.

  14. Robert H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974), 55.

  15. Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? A Reevaluation, 13.

  16. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 285; Frank, Through the Russian Prism, 188–89.

  17. Georgii V. Plekhanov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958), 4: 159–60; Marx, Capital, 19; William F. Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 216.

  18. “Sombre Monsters—or, How to Blow up a Country,” Nicky’s What (Russian history blog), May 10, 2010, http://nickyswhat.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/sombre-monsters-or-how-to-blow-up-a-country (accessed March 17, 2011).

  19. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, A Vital Question; or, What Is to Be Done? trans. Nathan Haskell Dole and S. S. Skidelsky (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1886), 2–3, 139. In what follows, I alternate between translations from different centuries to deliver what I feel to be the most accurate and accessible interpretation to a contemporary readership.

  20. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done? trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 52, 64.

  21. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done? 12, 115–16, 18 (1886 edition).

  22. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done? 93 (1993 edition).

  23. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done? 116 (1886 edition).

  24. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya sistema (Sovremennik, 1858),” in Izbrannye ekonomichesie proizvedeniya, tom 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 668; the original was written under the pseudonym L. Pankrat’ev, “Otkupnaya sistema,” Sovremennik, no. 10 (1858). See also Marc Lee Schulkin, “The Politics of Temperance: Nicholas II’s Campaign against Alcohol Abuse” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), 28. On Pankrat’ev see: T. I. Pecherskaya, “Avtor v strukture syuzhetnogo povestvovaniya (“Povesti v povesti” N. G. Chernyshevskogo),” Raznochintsy shestidesyatykh godov XIX veka. Fenomen samosoznaniya v aspekte filologicheskoi germenevtiki, Jan. 28, 2004, http://rassvet.websib.ru/text.htm?no=15&id=11 (accessed May 11, 2011).

  25. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya sistema,” 682.

  26. Ibid., 670, 679

  27. Ibid., 671–72.

  28. Ibid., 678. See also chapter 7, note 46.

  29. Ibid., 685–87.

  30. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done? 212 (1886 edition).

  31. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, Chto delat’? Iz rasskazov o novykh lyudyakh (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1948), 242. Further clues are provided by Chernyshevsky’s reference to the grud’—alternatively translated as “chest” or “lungs.” At least a half-dozen times in the novel Chernyshevsky writes that the alcoholics (or reformed alcoholics) have (or once had) some unspecified sickness of the grud’. Yet rather than the tuberculosis of the lungs—the common diagnosis of heroines in nineteenth-century European literature—in the first sentences of his Sovremennik exposé on the tax-farm system, Chernyshevsky repeatedly invokes sicknesses and ulcers of the grud’, suggesting “in actuality, we have in our chest a very serious ulcer” (v samom dele, u nas na grudi yazva dovol’no vrednogo kachestva). Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya Sistema,” 667.

  32. See chapter 7, note 8.

  33. Edvard Radzinsky, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 161–62; Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 216; Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 280–81.

  34. Radzinsky, Alexander II, 162.

  35. Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoyevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), 58; Peter Sekirin, “Literary Journals and “Innocent” Novels: The Period of Transition,” in The Dostoyevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries’ Memoirs and Rare Periodicals, ed. Peter Sekirin (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1997), 145; Frank, Dostoevsky, 155; Walter G. Moss, Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (London: Anthem, 2002), 80.

  36. Lantz, Dostoyevsky Encyclopedia, 58.

  37. Indeed, the first few dozen pages of the book present a veritable exposé on drunkenness in which the pawnbroker, the tavern keeper, and their drunken customers are explicitly interconnected. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. George Gibian, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 6–23.

  38. Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 184–85; Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 55–56.

  39. Donald Fanger explicitly notes the important influence of the liquor debates on Dostoevsky’s masterpiece in Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 184–85. See also Leonid P. Grossman, “Gorod i lyudi Prestupleniya i nakazaniya,” in Prestupleniya i nakazaniya, ed. Fyodor Dostoevsky (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1935), 23.

  40. Dostoevsky’s letter of June 8, 1865, is reprinted as an addendum in Crime and Punishment, 476.

  41. Miller, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey, 55.

  42. Cited in Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–8.

  43. Reprinted in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 487–88. See also Miller, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey, 57.

  44. See Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 113–14.

  45. To be fair, Tolstoy’s Tak chto zhe nam delat’? (“Then what must we do?”) is not quite identical to Chernyshevsky’s Chto delat’? For Tolstoy on Chernyshevsky see Hugh McLean, In Quest of Tolstoy (Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies, 2008), 110; Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 25 n.10. On Tolstoy’s realism see György Lukács, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” in Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others (London:
Merlin, 1972), 126–205. On Tolstoy and the Russian state see Fedor Stepun, “The Religious Tragedy of Tolstoy,” Russian Review 19, no. 2 (1960): 157–58. Ironically, Chernyshevsky often defended Tolstoy’s early works against accusations of downplaying pressing social problems. Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 58.