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

by Mark Lawrence

  61. Churchill, World Crisis, 66. On the circumstances of Lenin’s death see Gina Kolata, “The Death of Lenin: Tracking a Suspect,” New York Times, May 8, 2012, D5, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/health/research/lenins-death-remains-a-mystery-for-doctors. html (accessed May 8, 2012).

  Chapter 15

  1. Will Rogers, There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia & Other Bare Facts (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), 110–11.

  2. Yu. Chanin, “Po staroi, po nikolaevskoi,” Pravda, Sept. 13, 1922, 5. See also A. L’vov, “Eto ne proidet,” Pravda, Sept. 7, 1922, 1, and “Nuzhno li sokhranit’ vinokurennuyu promyshlennost’?” Pravda, Sept. 8, 1922, 1; “Samogonshikov von iz rabochikh domov!” Pravda, Sept. 13, 1922, 5.

  3. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Letter to the Congress (December 23–31, 1922) [Lenin’s ‘Testament’],” in The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 119–20.

  4. Leon Trotsky, “Vodka, tserkov’, i kinematograf,” Pravda, July 12, 1923, 1. On the 1923 Central Committee meeting see Aleksandr Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii: Noveishii period (Moscow: URSS, 2009), 61.

  5. Anna Louise Strong, The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (August 1921 to December 1923) (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 158–59.

  6. L’vov, “Eto ne proidet,” 1; an English version (with emphasis) from Strong, First Time in History, 162–63.

  7. Strong, First Time in History, 164–65 (emphasis in original); see also 161.

  8. Joseph Stalin, “Pis’mo Shinkevichu (20 marta 1927 g.),” in Sochineniya, tom 9: dekabr’ 1926–iyul’ 1927 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 191.

  9. Helena Stone, “The Soviet Government and Moonshine, 1917–1929,” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 27, nos. 3–4 (1986): 372. See also Marie-Rose Rialand, L’alcool et les Russes (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1989), 108; Gregory Sokolnikov et al., Soviet Policy in Public Finance: 1917–1928 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 195–96.

  10. William Henry Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age (New York: Little, Brown, 1934), 351–52.

  11. Strong, First Time in History, 158.

  12. Stalin, “Pis’mo Shinkevichu (20 marta 1927 g.),” 191–92. See also Joseph Stalin, “Beseda s inostrannymi rabochimi delegatsiyami: 5 noyabrya 1927 g.,” in Sochineniya, tom 10: 1927 avgust–dekabr’ (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952), 232.

  13. Translated version in Strong, First Time in History, 168.

  14. Stalin, “Pis’mo Shinkevichu (20 marta 1927 g.),” 192.

  15. Stalin, “Beseda s inostrannymi rabochimi delegatsiyami,” 232–33.

  16. Ibid., 233–34.

  17. Quoted in Ellen Barry, “Bulldogs under the Rug? Signs of a Putin-Medvedev Rift,” New York Times, May 9, 2011, A6.

  18. Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 84.

  19. On the economic needs for vodka see f. 733 (Tsentral’noe upravlenie i ob”edinenie spirtovoi promyshlennosti, Gosspirt), op. 1, l.107–108; f. 733, op. 1, d. 1, l.1–56, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE) (Russian State Archive of the Economy), Moscow. On the five-year plans for increased vodka output see RGAE, f. 733, op. 1, d. 143a, l.1–156; RGAE, f. 733, op. 1, d. 144, l.1–216; Ivan Viktorov, Spirtovaya promyshlennost’ SSSR (Moscow: Snabtekhizdat, 1934), 15.

  20. Stalin, “Beseda s inostrannymi rabochimi delegatsiyami,” 232–33. See also R. W. Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 121–24.

  21. Emmanuil I. Deichman, Alkogolizm i bor’ba s nim (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1929), 143.

  22. RGAE, f. 733, op. 1, d. 144, 1.1; translated in Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 93.

  23. Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 93. See also S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 93–94.

  24. See f. 5515 (Narodnyi komissariat truda), op. 20, d. 7, l.29, 32, 43, 46, 48, 50, 52–53, 117, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF) (State archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow. See also GARF, f. 5467 (TsK Profsoyuza derevoobdeloinikov), op. 11, d. 179, l.1–14; GARF, f. 5467, op. 14, d. 108, l.17–20. On alcoholism statistics see RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR), op. 1, d. 490, l.9–10.

  25. Transchel, Under the Influence, 112; T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 120–25.

  26. The high caliber of the founding members signaled a high level of government and party support. Neil Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR: The 1920s Campaign against Illegal Spirits,” Soviet Studies 38, no. 3 (1986): 360–61.

  27. See concluding speech of E. I. Deichman, “Vsesoyuznyi sovet protivoalkogol’nykh obshchestv v SSSR,” in Bor’ba s alkogoloizmom v SSSR (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe meditsinskoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 87–88; also see Deichman, Alkogolizm i bor’ba s nim, 164–200. See also Leo M. Glassman, “Russia’s Campaign to Keep Ivan Sober,” New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1933, 6–7; Association against the Prohibition Amendment Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, box 4, Glassman File.

  28. Irina R. Takala, Veselie Rusi: Istoriia alkogol’noi problemy v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2002), 209–16; Transchel, Under the Influence, 90. Relatively little is known about the OBSA, as its archives were destroyed during the siege of Moscow in World War II: bombed and sunk while being evacuated by boat down the Moscow River.

  29. Transchel, Under the Influence,, 146–47. K. V. Beregela, “Obshchestvo bor’by s alkogolizmom: poslednii etap syshchestvovaniya (1929–1932 gg.)” 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), 182–4.

  30. Letter 62: Sept. 1, 1930; see Joseph Stalin, Pis’ma I.V. Stalina V.M Molotovu, 1925–1936 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Rossiya molodaya, 1995), 209–10; an English translation is in Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, eds., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 208–9. On completely abolishing the monopoly see Stalin, “Beseda s inostrannymi rabochimi delegatsiyami,” 233.

  31. Lih, Naumov, and Khlevniuk, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, xiv, 209.

  32. Stone, “Soviet Government and Moonshine,” 374. See also Izvestiya, March 9, 1923, p. 1; quoted in Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR” 362. On the “scissors crisis” see Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 304.

  33. Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age, 352.

  34. Alkogolizm—put’ k prestupleniyu, ed. A. Gertsenzon (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura, 1966), 21–23; cited in Walter Connor, “Alcohol and Soviet Society,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (1971): 572. See also Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 91–92.

  35. Rogers, There’s Not a Bathing Suitin Russia, 111.

  36. GARF, f. 374 (Narodnyi komissariat raboche-krest’yanskoi inspektsii SSSR), op. 15, d. 1291, l.18–22. See also Sokolnikov et al., Soviet Policy in Public Finance: 1917–1928, 194.

  37. Stone, “Soviet Government and Moonshine,” 374. On Stalin at Potsdam see Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 53. While accurate figures are scarce, a general scholarly consensus is forming around a combined death toll from collectivization, dekulakization, famine, and disease of around ten to 12 million. See Alec Nove, “Victims of Stalinism: How Many?” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 268.

  3
8. Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 86; Rappaport, Joseph Stalin, 43. This association actually goes back even farther, to the imperial period. See Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, trans. David L. Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 154.

  39. V.Ts.I.K. decree 35, art. 468. See Boris Segal, The Drunken Society: Alcohol Use and Abuse in the Soviet Union (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), 45.

  40. Yakov M. Sverdlov, “O zadachakh sovetov v derevne: Doklad na zasedanii VTsIK 4–go sozyva 20 maya 1918 goda,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, tom 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959), 216.

  41. Quoted in Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 82. More generally see Seema Rynin Allan, Comrades and Citizens (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 117; Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life, abridged ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 39.

  42. Mariya Degtyareva, “Sobor novomuchenikov, v butovo postradavshikh,” Pravmir.ru, May 21, 2010, http://www.pravmir.ru/sobor-novomuchenikov-v-butovo-postradavshix-2 (accessed May 12, 2012); Segal, Drunken Society, 40; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 84; David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 59. Exiled kulaks were often given drunken public sendoffs. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 58.

  43. Lynne Viola, “The Second Coming: Class Enemies in the Soviet Countryside, 1927–1935,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65. The great dissident writer Solzhenitsyn describes a similar situation: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 3:359.

  44. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 168. See also Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Random House, 2000), 136.

  45. Report to Kolkhoz Center on collectivization in Belorussia, Sept. 26, 1930, f. 7486s, op. 1, d. 102, ll.226–25 ob, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE) (Russian State Archive of the Economy), Moscow; cited in Siegelbaum and Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life, 49. This too was a repeat of the practices of War Communism. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 46.

  46. Rappaport, Joseph Stalin, 48. On livestock sere Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 151.

  47. Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 161.

  48. Joseph Stalin, “Golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov. K voprosam kolkhoznogo dvizheniya (2 marta 1930 g.),” in Sochineniya, tom 12: aprel’ 1929–iyun’ 1930 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952), 199.

  49. Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 117; Transchel, Under the Influence, 152.

  50. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998), xxxviii.

  51. Vadim Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniya v XX veke (Moscow: Russkaya panorama, 2004), 20–21; Anne Leland and Mari-Jana Oboroceanu, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics” (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2010), 2, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf (accessed July 28, 2011).

  52. Lilian T. Mowrer, Rip Tide of Aggression (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1942), 165; Aleksandr Nikishin, Vodka i Stalin (Moscow: Dom Russkoi Vodki, 2006), 170–71.

  53. Quoted in Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 198.

  54. Quoted in ibid.

  55. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 429.

  56. Charles W. Sutherland, Disciples of Destruction (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987), 354; Bob Carroll, The Battle of Stalingrad (San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 1997), 42.

  57. Segal, Drunken Society, 73.

  58. Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 11.

  59. For wartime vodka production figures, see Nikishin, Vodka i Stalin, 226; Segal, Drunken Society, 71; Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 119; Takala, Veselie Rusi, 245–49. See also chapter 22.

  60. Quoted in Laurence Rees, War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin (New York: New Press, 1999), 86.

  61. Bradley Lightbody, The Second World War: Ambitions to Nemesis (London: Routledge, 2004), 109.

  62. Segal, Drunken Society, 73.

  63. “British Open ‘Second-Best Front’ in Hot Libyan Desert as Nazis Smash at Moscow in Winter Gales,” Life, Dec. 1, 1941, 30.

  64. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning, vol. 2 of the Memoirs of Anthony Eden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 350–51. On Voroshilov see Hugh Dalton, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Cape, 1986), 341.

  65. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 131.

  66. Personal communication reported in Segal, Drunken Society, 74.

  67. Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010), 180.

  68. Segal, Drunken Society, 75.

  69. Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniya v XX veke; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 40th Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xvi.

  70. Joseph Stalin, “Vystuplenie tovarishcha I. V. Stalina na priyome v kremle v chest’ komanduyushchikh voiskami Krasnoi Armii (24 maya 1945),” in O Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soyuza (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1946), 173–74. Also see Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 224.

  Chapter 16

  1. Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166–71.

  2. Max Hayward and Edward L. Crowley, eds., Soviet Literature in the Sixties: An International Symposium (New York: Praeger, 1964), 191.

  3. David Burg and George Feifer, Solzhenitsyn (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), 49. See also Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 431, 604.

  4. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Matryona’s House (1959),” in Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 35–40.

  5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward, trans. Rebecca Frank (New York: Dial, 1968), 267–68.

  6. Ibid., 209.

  7. Alexander Elder, Rubles to Dollars: Making Money on Russia’s Exploding Financial Frontier (New York: New York Institute of Finance, 1999), 70–71.

  8. Donald Trelford, “A Walk in the Woods with Gromyko,” Observer, April 2, 1989, 23. See also Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986) (New York: Times Books, 1995), 281.

  9. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, “The Unknown Brezhnev,” Russian Politics and Law 42, no. 3 (2004): 47.