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

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Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 69

by Mark Lawrence


  10. David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century (Boston: Lexington Books, 2003), 177. See also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995).

  11. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 34–35.

  12. Ibid., 41. See also Donald R. Kelley, The Solzhenitsyn–Sakharov Dialogue: Politics, Society, and the Future (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 91; Christopher Moody, Solzhenitsyn, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 27d.

  13. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 650. See also Jay Bergman, Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 183.

  14. Andrei Sakharov, Sakharov Speaks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 42–43, 148. See also Andrei Sakharov, My Country and the World, trans. Guy V. Daniels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 23, 44.

  15. Sakharov, Memoirs, 54.

  16. Ibid., 274; see also 109, 362, 480, 506.

  17. Ibid., 506. This echoes the anti-alcohol sentiments conveyed in his 1970 plea to Brezhnev. Denny Vågerö, “Alexandr Nemtsov’s Pioneering Work on Alcohol in Modern Soviet and Russian History,” in A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia, ed. Aleksandr Nemtsov (Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2011), 18.

  18. Andrei Sakharov, “Sakharov’s Reply to Solzhenitsyn,” War/Peace Report 13, no. 2 (1974): 3. They were hardly alone in this respect, as Oliver Bullough shows in his investigation of dissident priest Father Dmitri Dudko, who likewise railed against the alcoholic system. Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 83–88.

  19. Alexander Nazaryan, “Susan Orlean, David Rembick, Ethan Hawke, and Others Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books,” Village Voice, Dec. 3, 2008, http://www.villagevoice.com/2008–12-03/books/susan-orlean-david-remnick-ethan-hawke-and-others-pick-their-favorite-obscure-books (accessed Aug. 8, 2011). Apparently Venedikt Vasilievich is of no relation to the other two V. Erofeyevs mentioned thus far in this book: Viktor and Vladimir. 20. VenediktErofeyev, Moscowto the End of the Line (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1980), 24.

  20. Venedikt Erofeyev, Moscow to the End of the Line (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1980), 24.

  21. Ibid., 35–36.

  22. I. I. Lukomskii, “Alcoholism,” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 218. See also Walter Connor, “Alcohol and Soviet Society,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (1971): 571.

  23. A. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” in The Samizdat Register, ed. Roy A. Medvedev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 102.

  24. Cullen Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1983, 48–49.

  25. From Poiski No. 3 (1978); quoted in Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror, trans. Marilyn Vogt-Downey (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 431. Other biographical details are drawn from ibid., xii–xiii.

  26. Tat’yana Prot’ko, V bor’be za trezvost’: Stranitsy istorii (Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1988), 130. Baitalsky bans drinking in his own home in Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 105.

  27. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” 94–95. On the disappearance of Soviet infant mortality statistics see Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, “Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s,” in United States Bureau of the Census, Series P-95, No. 74 (Washington, D.C.: US Bureau of the Census, September 1980), 4.

  28. See also Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” 101.

  29. A. Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II),” in Dvadtsatyi vek: Obshchestvenno-politicheskii i literaturnyi al’manakh, ed. Roy A. Medvedev (London: TCD Publications, 1977), 118–19; A. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 2),” in The Samizdat Register, ed. Roy A. Medvedev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 175–76. On homebrew see: Arkadii T. Filatov, Alkogolizm vyzvannyi upotrebleniem samogona (Kiev: Zdorovya, 1979).

  30. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” 101; Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 113; Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II),” 128. For similar economic assessments see R. W. Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 286–88.

  31. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” 105–6.

  32. Ibid., 109. In a follow-up article Baitalsky upped these estimates to 26 billion rubles spent on alcohol every year, with 19.2 billion going to the state or roughly eleven percent of the entire operating budget of the Soviet state. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 2),” 171; Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II).”

  33. V.A. Bykov, “Videt’ problemu vovsei eeslozhnosti: Sotsial’nye fakory p’yanstva i alkogolizma,” EKO, no. 9 (1985): 26; cited in Daniel Tarschys, “The Success of a Failure: Gorbachev’s Alcohol Policy, 1985–88,” Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. 1 (1993): 9.

  34. See Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II),” 138–39.

  35. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 1),” 114.

  36. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 2),” 188. Similarly see Robert G. Kaiser, Russia: The People and the Power (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 82.

  37. Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II),” 147–48. See also Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 396.

  38. Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 238–39. Similarly see Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II),” 150.

  39. On seating arrangements atop the rostrum see Stephen Kotkin, “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 49.

  40. Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” 34.

  41. Ibid.: 42. See also “Murray Feshbach Discusses Quality of Life in the Soviet Union,” C-Span. org, Feb. 11, 1985, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PoliticalDiscussion254 (accessed Aug. 23, 2011.)

  42. See “Murray Feshbach Discusses Quality of Life in the Soviet Union” and Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 128–37.

  43. Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” 35.

  44. See, for instance, “Murray Feshbach Discusses Quality of Life in the Soviet Union.”

  45. Davis and Feshbach, “Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s,” 6, 11. See also Murray Feshbach, “The Soviet Union: Population Trends and Dilemmas,” Population Bulletin 37, no. 3 (1982). These estimates were later reprinted in the USSR during glasnost: B. M. Guzikov and A. A. Meiroyan, Alkogolizm u zhenshchin (Leningrad: Meditsina, 1988); Vladimir V. Dunaevskii and Vladimir D. Styazhkin, Narkomanii i toksikomanii (Leningrad: Meditsina, 1988), 66–72.

  46. Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” 38; “Murray Feshbach Discusses Quality of Life in the Soviet Union.” More generally see John Dutton Jr., “Causes of Soviet Adult Mortality Increases,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 4 (1981): 548–52.

  47. Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” 38.

  48. On estimates and corroboration, see Vladimir Treml, Alcohol in the U.S.S.R.: A Statistical Study, Duke Press Policy Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 47–60; Prot’ko, V bor’be za trezvost’, 135; Stanislav Strumilin and Mikhail Sonin, “Alkogolnie poteri i bor’ba s nimi,” EKO, no. 4 (1974): 37. See also Vladimir Treml, “Alcohol in the Soviet Underground Economy,” Berkeley–Duke Occasional Papers on the Second Economy in the USSR No. 5, December (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985): 4.

  49. Murphy, “Watching the Russians,” 38. Per 100,000 population, the percentage of Soviet alcohol-poisoning deaths was around 19.05, as compared to 0.17 in the United States. See also Anatolii Kapustin, Alkogol’—vrag zdorov’ya (Moscow: Meditsina, 1976), 38–42.

  50. Aleksandr Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii: Noveishii period (Moscow: URSS, 2009), 205.

  51. See letter from Vladimir Treml to Murray Feshbach, Oct. 23, 1981, p. 2, Murray Feshbach alcoholism archive (author’s personal collection).


  52. Vladimir Treml, “Alcohol in the U.S.S.R.: A Fiscal Dilemma,” Soviet Studies 27, no. 2 (1975): 166. Also see Connor, “Alcohol and Soviet Society,” 586; Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v 1959 g. (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1959), 646; Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v 1962 g. (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1962), 520; Prot’ko, V bor’be za trezvost’: Stranitsy istorii, 130. Also see Raymond Hutchings, The Soviet Budget (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 36; Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976), 121–22.

  53. See, for instance, “Murray Feshbach Discusses Quality of Life in the Soviet Union.”

  54. Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 66. See also David Powell, “Soviet Union: Social Trends and Social Problems,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 38, no. 9 (1982): 24.

  55. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 145. See also Eduard Babayan, “Ne ostupis’…” Izvestiya, Oct. 16 1982, 3; Igor Birman, Secret Incomes of the Soviet State Budget (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 158.

  56. Pravda, April 14, 1970; cited in “Alcoholism in the Soviet Union,” Radio Liberty Dispatch, June 1, 1970, 1, Murray Feshbach alcoholism archive.

  57. Kathryn Hendley, “Moscow’s Conduct of the Anti-Alcohol Campaign: A Comparative Analysis, 1972–1986” (M.A. thesis, Georgetown University, 1987), 30–68; Krasikov, “Tovar nomer odin (II).”

  58. Leonid I. Brezhnev, “Rech’ na XVIII s’ezde Vsesoyuznogo Leninskogo Kommunisticheskogo Soyuza Molodezhi, 25 aprelya 1978 goda,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, tom 3: 1976—Mart 1981 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1981), 302. More generally see Pavel V. Romanov, Zastol’naya istoriya gosudarstva rossiiskogo (St. Petersburg: Kristall, 2000), 413.

  59. See Trelford, “A Walk in the Woods with Gromyko,” 23; Viktor Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis: Opyt khudozhestvennoi eskhatologii (Moscow: Zebra E, 2008), 12; Aleksandr Nikishin, Vodka i Gorbachev (Moscow Vsya Rossiya, 2007), 244. Even Gorbachev recounts the story, in his Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 220–21.

  60. See chapter 7, note 8.

  Chapter 17

  1. Rolf H. W. Theen, “Party and Bureaucracy,” in The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era, ed. Erik P. Hoffman and Robbin F. Laird (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1984), 147.

  2. Edwin Bacon, “Reconsidering Brezhnev,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, ed. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 9–11; Ben Fowkes, “The National Question in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev: Policy and Response,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, ed. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 70.

  3. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 5–7, 251.

  4. Martin Ebon, The Andropov File (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 30; Vladimir Solov’ev and Elena Klepikova, Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 250.

  5. “Vopros o tom, kto budet sleduyushchim gensekom, reshalsya nad telom umershego Brezhneva,” Loyd, Nov. 9, 2007, http://loyd.com.ua/articles/item-1973.html (accessed May 5, 2012); Larissa Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994), 209–11; Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001), 115; Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384, 426–28.

  6. Yuri V. Andropov, “Vstrecha s moskovskimi stankostroitelyami, 31 yanvarya 1983 goda,” in Izbrannye rechi i stat’i (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1983), 221–30; Nicholas Daniloff, “Kremlin’s New Battle against Drunks and Slackers,” U.S. News and World Report, Jan. 31, 1983, 32.

  7. Kathryn Hendley, “Moscow’s Conduct of the Anti-Alcohol Campaign: A Comparative Analysis, 1972–1986” (M.A. thesis, Georgetown University, 1987), 73–79.

  8. Vladimir Treml, “Price of Vodka Reduced for Economic and Health Reasons,” Radio Liberty Research, RL 450/83, Nov. 30, 1983, 2; Aleksandr Nikishin, Vodka i Gorbachev (Moscow Vsya Rossiya, 2007), 87; Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.

  9. Archie Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 66.

  10. Konstantin U. Chernenko, “Vysokii grazhdanskii dolg narodnogo kontrolera: Rech’ na Vsesoyuznom soveshchanii narodnykh kontrolerov 5 oktyabrya 1984 goda,” in Po puti sovershenstvovaniya razvitogo sotsializma (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1985), 264.

  11. Vladimir Solov’ev and Elena Klepikova, Behind the High Kremlin Walls (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986), 42; Ilya Zemtsov, Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989), 172; Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 55.

  12. Lawrence K. Altman, “Succession in Moscow: A Private Life, and a Medical Case; Autopsy Discloses Several Diseases,” New York Times, March 12, 1985.

  13. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 611.

  14. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 37. Also see Nikishin, Vodka i Gorbachev, 82-83.

  15. See Mikhail Gorbachev, “Sel’skii trudovoi kollektiv: Puti sotsial’nogo razvitiya (iz stat’i opublikovannoi v zhurnale ‘Kommunist’ No. 2 Za 1976 God”), in Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, tom 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1987), 131–32; and “Sovershenstvovat’ rabotu s pis’mani trudyashchikhsya: Iz doklada na Stavropol’skogo kraikoma KPSS 4 aprelya 1978 goda,” in Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, tom 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1987), 168. On Kulakov see Valerii I. Boldin, Krushenie p’edestala: Shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 228.

  16. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda: Doklad na Vsesoyuznoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii ‘Sovershenstvovanie razvitogo sotsializma i ideologicheskaya rabota partii v svete reshenii iyun’skogo (1983 g.) Plenuma TsK KPSS,’ 10 dekabrya 1984 goda,” in Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, tom 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1987), esp. 71–82; Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 78–81; Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Free Press, 1991), 37.

  17. Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR: 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997), 69. On Thatcher see Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 453.

  18. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 453; Rupert Cornwell, “Obituary—Grigory Romanov: Gorbachev’s Chief Rival for Power,” The Independent, June 9, 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/grigory-romanov-gorbachevs-chief-rival-for-power-842814.html (accessed September 11, 2011).

  19. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 145.

  20. Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution: The Struggle for Power in the Kremlin (New York: Pharos Books, 1992), 29.

  21. Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 56.

  22. Roxburgh, Second Russian Revolution, 29. Also see Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1990), 100. See also former U.S. diplomat Dick Combs’ description of how “Romanov’s true colors emerged” during a misunderstanding over a toast after “a fair amount of alcohol was consumed” in Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe: The Cold War’s End and the Soviet Unions Fall Reappraised (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 77.

  23. Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 141.

  24. Donald Trelford, “A Walk in the Woods with Gromyko,” Observer, April 2, 1989, 23. Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 6; Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin, 76.

 

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