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

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by Mark Lawrence


  42. Feshbach, “Russia’s Population Meltdown,” 15; Twigg, “What Has Happened to Russian Society?” 150; Garrett, Betrayal of Trust, 130. See also “Teenagers’ Health Worsens—Rf Chief Pediatrician,” ITAR-TASS Daily, May 12, 2012.

  43. “Fact of Life in Russia,” “60 Minutes, CBS News, May 19, 1996.

  44. Doklad o sostoyanii zdorov’ya detei v Rossiiskoi Federatsii (po itogam Vserossiiskoi dispanserizatsii 2002 goda) (Moscow: 2003), 31–59; cited in Murray Feshbach, “The Russian Military: Population and Health Constraints,” in Russian Power Structures: Present and Future Roles in Russian Politics, ed. Jan Leijonhielm and Fredrik Westerlund (Stockholm: FOI, Swedish Defense Research Agency, 2007), 138–42; personal correspondence with Murray Feshbach, Feb. 18, 2012. Also see “Russia’s Alcohol Consumption More Than 100% above Critical Level,” RIA Novosti, Sept. 24, 2009. http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090924/156238102. html (accessed Sept. 28, 2009).

  Chapter 22

  1. Moscow Distillery Cristall webpage, http://www.kristall.ru/page.php?P=1 (accessed Nov. 8, 2010). On the history of Stolichnaya see also Vladimir Ul’yanov, “Vodka Stolichnaya: Kak vse nachinalos,” Popsop.ru, May 27, 2008, http://popsop.ru/2155 (accessed Nov. 8, 2010); Viktor Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis: Opyt khudozhestvennoi eskhatologii (Moscow: Zebra E, 2008), 26.

  2. Aleksei Sivov and Igor’ Ivanov, “U ‘Kristalla’ dvoitsya,” Izvestiya, Aug. 5, 2000, 2.

  3. Nikolai Pavlov, “Violent DTS at Kristall,” Current Digest of the Russian Press 33, no. 52 (2000): 13; originally published in the Rossiiskaya gazeta, Aug. 15, 2000, 2.

  4. Nikolai Petrov, “Kak v kaple vodki: Politika, finansy, regionalizm,” in Regiony Rossii v. 1999 g.: Ezhegodnoe prilozheniye k politicheskomu almanakhu Russii, ed. Carnegie Center Moscow (Moscow: Gendal’f, 2000), 143; Sophie Lambroschini, “Stand-Off at Vodka Distillery Continues,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Aug. 8, 2000, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1094494.html (accessed Feb. 2, 2012).

  5. “Putin’s Inauguration Speech,” BBC News, May 7, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/739432.stm (accessed Nov. 5, 2010).

  6. Nikolai Chekhovskii, “Gosmonopoliya na zhidkuyu valyutu,” Segodnya, Sept. 9, 2000, 2; AFI, “Aktsii ‘Kristalla’ perevedeny v federal’nuyu sobstvennost’,” Segodnya, Sept. 13, 2000, 5.

  7. Marshall I. Goldman, Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 98–99.

  8. “Natsional’nyi proekt ‘Dostupnyu alkogol’,” Ekspert Sibir’, Feb. 19, 2007, http://expert.ru/siberia/2007/07/rynok_alkogolya_editorial/ (accessed Aug. 27, 2013); translated in: Anna Bailey, “Explaining Rosalkogol’regulirovaniye. Why Does Russia Have a New Federal Alcohol Regulator?” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy vtoroi mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 28–29 oktyabrya 2011), ed. Nikolai V. Dem’yanenko (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU v g. Ivanovo, 2011), 105.

  9. Jim Heintz, “Vodka Dispute Shows Russia Chaos,” Sept. 26, 2000, AP News Archive, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2000/Vodka-Dispute-Shows-Russia-Chaos/id-d45f0cd2f85248828e5368441009fcf0 (accessed Aug. 6, 2013); Fred Weir, “In Russia, Hostile Takeover Takes on a New Meaning,” Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 8, 2000, http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/0808/p7s2.html (accessed Feb. 12, 2012).

  10. Pavlov, “Violent DTS at Kristall,” 14; Aleksei Sivov, “Ognennoi vodoi ne razlit’,” Izvestiya, Aug. 7, 2000, 20.

  11. Lambroschini, “Stand-Off at Vodka Distillery Continues.”

  12. Ibid.; Aleksandr Nikonov, “Kristall’nyi vopros,” Ogonek, Aug. 14, 2000, 20; Ekaterina Kats, “Kristal’no gryaznyi skandal,” Segodnya, Aug. 7, 2000, 1–2; Il’ya Khrennikov and Nikolai Chekhovskii, “Operatsiya ‘burya v stakane’,” Segodnya, Aug. 10, 2000, 2.

  13. Heintz, “Vodka Dispute Shows Russia Chaos.”

  14. Lambroschini, “Stand-Off at Vodka Distillery Continues.”

  15. Chekhovskii, “Gosmonopoliya na zhidkuyu valyutu,” 2; Dmitrii Khitarov, “Dobro i kulaki,” Itogi, Oct. 24, 2000, 4.

  16. Aleksei Makarkin, “Sdavaite vodku, grazhdane,” Segodnya, May 30, 2000, 2.

  17. The Gusinsky raid took place May 11, 2000—predating the similar raid on Kristall. David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, revised and updated (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 477–78.

  18. Ol’ga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, “The Sovietization of Russian Politics,” Post-Soviet Affairs 25, no. 4 (2009): 287.

  19. Masha Gessen, “The Wrath of Putin,” Vanity Fair, April 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/04/vladimir-putin-mikhail-khodorkovsky-russia (accessed May 5, 2012).

  20. Angus Roxburgh, Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 289; Robyn Dixon, “Business Rivals Don’t Mix in Standoff at Vodka Plant,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2000/aug/08/news/mn-629 (accessed Feb. 12, 2012). On the organization of raids under Putin and Medvedev see Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 140–41.

  21. Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 188–92.

  22. See ibid., 96, 113.

  23. See chapter 1; Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.

  24. Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51; Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 19.

  25. Interview with Lyudmila Putina, in Putin, First Person, 150.

  26. “Russian Politicians Learn to Say Goodbye to Vodka,” Pravda, March 19, 2008, http://english.pravda.ru/history/19–03-2008/104564-russian_vodka-0 (accessed Feb. 10, 2010).

  27. Boris El’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ACT, 2000), 315.

  28. Some contend the bombings were actually part of a FSB coup d’etat to bring Putin to the presidency. Putin’s foremost accuser, former FSB whistleblower Aleksandr Litvinenko, was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London in November 2006. Aleksandr Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (New York: Encounter Books, 2007).

  29. Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 31–32.

  30. Lilia Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 36–41.

  31. The connotation obviously depends on the position of the author. See Treisman, Return, 232; Anders Åslund, “Putinomics,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, Dec. 3, 2007, http://www.iie.com/publications/opeds/oped.cfm?ResearchID=852 (accessed Feb. 14, 2012). Also see Sean Guillory, “A Genealogy of ‘Putinism’,” Sean’s Russia Blog, Dec. 23, 2007, http://seansrussiablog.org/2007/12/23/a-geneology-of-putinism (accessed Dec. 12, 2010). On Russian “semi-feudalism” see Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Russia’s Acquiescence to Corruption Makes the State Machine Inept,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 158.

  32. Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and Collapse of the Soviet State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 265.

  33. Consider the “notorious” Nenets distiller, Aleksandr Sabadash: Aleksei Vasilevetskii, “V Sovet Federatsii prishla bol’shaya vodka,” Kommersant’, June 26, 2003, http://kommersant.ru/doc/391593 (accessed March 17, 2013).

  34. Virginie Coulloudon, “Putin’s Russia: A Confusing Notion of Corruption,” Working Paper, Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University, August 2003, 10–11.

  35. Nikolai Petrov and Darrell Slider, “The Regions under Putin and After,” in After Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, ed. Stephen K. Wegren and Dale R. Herspring (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 66–70.

  36. Yuli
a Latynina, “Inside Russia: Heavyweights Still Waging Centralization,” Moscow Times, Sept. 20, 2000; cited in: Anna Bailey, “Explaining Rosalkogol’regulirovaniye,” 105. See also Nina Petlyanova, “Soobrazili na svoikh,” Novaya gazeta, March 4, 2011, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/6856.html (accessed Aug. 27, 2013).

  37. New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

  38. Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, “Federalism in Russia,” in Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, ed. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, and Andrew Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010), 61. On the weakness of samoupravlenie, or local self-government, see Tomila V. Lankina, Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 141–43; Peter Reddaway and Robert W. Orttung, eds., The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal-Regional Relations, 2 vols. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Vladimir Gel’man, “The Politics of Local Government in Russia: The Neglected Side of the Story,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 3, no. 3 (2002).

  39. Artyom Gil et al., “Alcohol Policy in a Russian Region: A Stakeholder Analysis,” European Journal of Public Health (2010): 1. More generally see Judyth Twigg, “Health Care under the Federal Reforms,” in The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal-Regional Relations, ed. Peter Reddaway and Robert W. Orttung (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 420–22.

  40. Gil et al., “Alcohol Policy in a Russian Region,” 3–4.

  41. Ibid., 5–6.

  42. Michele A. Berdy, “Chernomyrdin’s Linguistic Legacy,” Moscow Times, Nov. 12, 2010.

  43. David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 60; Kaj Hobér, The Impeachment of President Yeltsin (Huntington, N.Y.: Juris, 2004), 60–71.

  44. Satter, Darkness at Dawn, 61–63.

  45. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Sovietization of Russian Politics,” 290–91; Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 48.

  46. Mikhail Myagkov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Dimitri Shakin, The Forensics of Election Fraud: Russia and Ukraine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71–137; M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 30–81; Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 299–300.

  47. Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 25.

  48. Sakwa, Putin, 103–4; Vicki L. Hesli, “Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in Russia: The Political Landscape in 1999 and 2000,” in The 1999–2000 Elections in Russia: Their Impact and Legacy, ed. Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15–16.

  49. Daniel Treisman, “Russian Politics in a Time of Economic Turmoil,” in Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, ed. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, and Andrew Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010), 46–51.

  50. Richard Stengel, “Choosing Order before Freedom,” Time, Dec. 31, 2007, 45.

  51. Kathryn Hendley, “The Law in Post-Putin Russia,” in After Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, ed. Stephen K. Wegren and Dale R. Herspring (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 87–93; Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 295.

  52. Richard Sakwa, “Putin’s Leadership,” in Putin’s Russia, ed. Dale R. Herspring (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 24–29; Alexandr Dugin, “The World Needs to Understand Putin,” Financial Times, March 12, 2013, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67fa00d2-874b-11e2–9dd7-00144feabdc0.html (accessed March 12, 2013).

  53. Allen C. Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7; Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 294.

  54. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Sovietization of Russian Politics,” 293; Sakwa, “Putin’s Leadership,” 29; Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 63.

  55. Nikolai Troitsky, “Viktor Chernoymrdin: The End of Two Eras,” RIA-Novosti, Nov. 3, 2010, http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20101103/161203286.html (accessed Feb. 29, 2012).

  56. See, for instance, Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189.

  57. Alcohol poisonings in Russia in 2008 were 16.9 per 100,000, according to Goskomstat: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/population/demo/dem5_bd.htm/.

  58. Michael Specter, “The Devastation,” New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2004, 61.

  59. “Russians Lose a Centimeter,” Moscow Times, May 23, 2007; Tom Parfitt, “Spin Doctors Reinvent the ‘Nano-President’,” The Observer, March 1, 2008; Murray Feshbach, “The Russian Military: Population and Health Constraints,” in Russian Power Structures: Present and Future Roles in Russian Politics, ed. Jan Leijonhielm and Fredrik Westerlund (Stockholm: FOI, Swedish Defense Research Agency, 2007), 138–47; “Teenagers’ Health Worsens—RF Chief Pediatrician,” ITAR-TASS Daily, May 12, 2012.

  60. Vladimir Putin, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly,” May 10, 2006, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2006/05/10/1823_type70029type82912_105566.shtml (accessed Nov. 11, 2011).

  61. Ibid.; Fred Weir, “Russia’s Shrinking Population Mars Putin’s Superpower Ambitions,” Global Post, Nov. 3, 2011, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/russia/111102/russia-population-superpower-health-soviet-union (accessed Nov. 12, 2011.)

  62. Cited in Graeme P. Herd, “Russia’s Demographic Crisis and Federal Instability,” in Russian Regions and Regionalism: Strength through Weakness, ed. Graeme P. Herd and Anne Aldis (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 46. See also Aleksandr Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii: Noveishii period (Moscow: URSS, 2009), 136.

  63. Ibid., 281–82.

  64. Ibid., 288.

  65. Shevtsova, Russia—Lost in Transition, 54.

  66. “Arkady Rotenberg,” thishousewillexist.org, http://thishousewillexist.org/arkadyrotenberg.php (accessed Feb. 20, 2012); Simon Shuster, “Vladimir Putin’s Billionaire Boys Judo Club,” Time, March 1, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2055962,00.html (accessed Nov. 11, 2011).

  67. Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis, 27.

  68. Evgeniya Al’bats and Anatolii Ermolin, “Korporatsiya “Rossiya”,” Novoe vremya: The New Times, Oct. 31, 2011, http://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/45648/ (accessed Nov. 11, 2011). Also see Richard Sakwa, The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 209.

  69. Erofeev, Russkii apokalipsis, 28. Petlyanova, “Soobrazili na svoikh.”

  70. Ibid.; “Rosspirtprom to Become Federal Brand,” Kommersant’, Nov. 22, 2006, http://www.kommersant.com/p723749/vodka_Rosspritprom (accessed Nov. 15, 2010.) On Zivenko see http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/75/2004/LIR.jhtml?passListId=75&passYear=2004&passListType=Person&uniqueId=L23U&datatype=Person (accessed Feb. 20, 2012); Alex Nicholson, “New Shot Fired in Vodka Battle,” SPI Group Media Stories, Jan. 14, 2004, http://www.spi-group.com/about-spi-group/company-news/media_stories/new-shot-fired-in-vodka-battle-the-moscow-times-14–01-2004 (accessed Feb. 20, 2012). see also: Petlyanova, “Soobrazili na svoikh.”

  71. Yuliya Yarosh and Il’ya Bulavinov, “Arkadii Rotenberg: Nikto ne mozhet skazat’, chto ya kogo-to unizil, u kogo-to chto-to otnyal,” Kommersant’, April 28, 2010, http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1361793 (accessed Feb. 20, 2012).

  72. See http://www.forbes.com/profile/arkady-rotenberg (Accessed Feb. 20, 2012).

 

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