Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  When I was a teenager, my dad confidently assured me that sickness from drinking to excess is so unpleasant that I’d never want to do it more than a few times in my life. Although I’m still struggling with that lesson, my father apparently learned it for good from his experiences in Moscow. At work on a Columbia University dissertation about the Soviet legal system, he spent some of his days visiting courtrooms. He bunked with a humorless roommate in a single room of a dormitory that formed one of the sprawling university building’s wings. It went without saying that the roommate had been selected for his political loyalty, but other students my father befriended in the dormitory were far livelier and more interesting. Nevertheless, he made certain to be out on the evening of the day they got their monthly stipends, and took pains to remain away at late as possible. That was to avoid being given a water glass full of vodka to drink, an inevitability if he arrived before his friends finished their evening in the usual way, passed out on their beds or the floor, often stacked like cordwood and stinking of vomit.

  Although the stipends were small, just over a ruble a day, the de rigueur party that followed featured sausage and cheese in addition to bottles of vodka. The revelry set the students back nearly half their stipends, forcing them to exist largely on free bread from the cafeteria for the last ten days of the month. They washed their meals down with “white nights” tea—hot water—part of a diet so grim that when they got their next stipends, there was no question they would need to celebrate again by drinking themselves into oblivion. So it went, in the traditional Russian pattern that had startled Western visitors to Russia in the sixteenth century: famine broken by loud, drunken feasts.

  Brezhnev’s ascent ended any hope that the creaking Soviet economy, which had slightly improved under Khrushchev, would be further reformed. Instead, spending on the military ballooned, and the only way the Kremlin could alleviate the consequences of that and even more crippling effects of the central planning system was to permit more goods and services to reach the vast majority of Soviets by closing its eyes to at least some of the growing corruption. Pilfering from state stores enabled shopkeepers to exchange cigarettes and food for, say, medical checkups or car tires. Proliferation of that kind of arrangement, which had previously only permeated the top levels of the state bureaucracy, enabled Brezhnev’s regime to plod on more or less unchanged until his death in 1982. However, it also reinforced the indolence and cynicism that had become widespread.

  After Khrushchev freed millions of political prisoners from the Gulag labor-camp system following Stalin’s death in 1953, there was no going back to the tyrant’s terror. Instead, the bleak Brezhnev era became mired in self-absorption. During the zastoi—the stagnation, as the period became known—Soviets showed outward loyalty to the Party but were largely free to criticize it among family and friends in the relative safety of their very cramped kitchens. Alcohol dulled the monotony of life.

  People used a sign language to discuss drinking on the street. Two fingers held at the neck meant someone was looking for someone else to split a bottle and its cost; three fingers meant three people. The state retail market being what it was, alcohol also became a hot commodity on the booming black market. A journalist named Vitaly Korotich—who would become the editor of the groundbreaking magazine Ogonyok, the Soviet equivalent of Life magazine, which began crusading for reform under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika years later—recently described the central role vodka played during those drab years:

  As a means of smoothing relations, as a bribe, an aperitif, a souvenir, medicine and, well, whatever else, vodka fulfilled many life goals. It ceased being just an alcoholic drink and became one of the most important aspects of Soviet life… The phrase, “You won’t get anywhere without a half-liter,” entered the professional lexicon. That’s how we lived.16

  Switching off became the easiest form of protest under a regime that still crushed dissent. Although his work became widely known only after his death in 1990, writer Venedikt Erofeev has since become one of the intellectual figures most closely associated with the drunks of the zastoi. Expelled from Moscow State University during his second year in the 1950s, Erofeev drifted around the Soviet Union, working a series of odd jobs that included laying telephone cables near Moscow. His prose poem Moskva-Petushki, which was completed in 1970 and first distributed as samizdat—self-published literature passed around in secret—describes an alcohol-soaked, hallucinatory day in the life of a character named Venichka Erofeev (after the diminutive form of Venedikt). Ostensibly the account of his train trip from Moscow to the suburban town of Petushki, eighty miles to the northwest, the short work is loaded with literary allusions and celebrated in Russia today for its brilliantly comic depiction of the Brezhnev era, which was so perversely stultified that severe alcoholism appeared to be the norm. Erofeev opens with his protagonist trying to remember the previous day, indistinguishable from most others.

  I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka [vodka] for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody’s dreamed up anything better so far.

  Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that—on Kalayev Street—another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e., it refreshed your parts but weakened your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts went all to hell. But I do agree it’s dehumanizing, so that’s why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some Albe-de-dessert [port] straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalayev Street.

  Of course, you’re saying: come on, Venya, get on with it—what did you have next? And I couldn’t say for sure. I remember—I remember quite distinctly in fact—I had two glasses of Hunter’s vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn’t have made it across the Sadovy ring road with nothing to drink, I really couldn’t. So I must’ve had something else.17

  Venichka has been fired from his job as a cable fitter after accidentally having sent out graphs charting his co-workers’ productivity relative to the amount of alcohol they’d consumed.

  Before my time, our production schedule looked like this: in the morning we would sit and play three-card brag for money (you know how to play brag?). Okay. After that we’d get up, unroll a drum of cable and lay it underground. Then, obviously, we’d sit back down and kill some time, each in his own way. I mean, everyone has a different temperament, different aspirations; one would be drinking vermouth; another, slightly more basic, Fraîcheur eau-de-cologne; and the ones with a bit of class would be on the cognac [from] Sheremetyevo airport. Then we’d go to sleep.

  And the next morning, well, first we’d sit down and have a drink of vermouth. Then we’d whip yesterday’s cable back up out of the ground and chuck it away, because it’d got soaked through, naturally.18

  Venichka’s innovation is to do away with the charade of laying any cable at all. Now a celebrated literary hero, his recipes for alcoholic drinks are the stuff of urban legend. (“Tears of a Komsomol [Communist Party youth group] Girl: lavender water, 15g; Verbena herbal lotion, 15g; mouthwash, Forest Water eau-de-Cologne, 30g; nail varnish, 2g; mouthwash, 150g; lemonade, 150g.”)

  Literature aside, vodka production increased eightfold between 1940 and 1980.19 The stagnation period, zastoinyi, came to be jokingly referred to as zastolnyi, or “at the table,” where most people consume their vodka. The authorities began cracking down on production in earnest only after the death of Brezhnev, a serious drinker, in 1982. He was replaced by former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who is believed to have initiated his own reforms, including those involving alcohol, because he had unique knowledge about the Soviet Union’s deep-seated problems, many of which were hidden from the people. Soon sales of liquor, as well as cologne and other liquids containing alcohol, were forbidden before 11:00 a.m.20

  But it wasn’t until the ascension of Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1985 that the Kremlin began waging serious war against alcoholism. Believed to have been encouraged by hard-liners in his regime, Gorbachev launched a major antialcohol campaign in May of that year, when the government enacted a series of resolutions called Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. Alcohol was banned at official functions, Party members and officials who visibly abused it were dismissed and liquor production was drastically curtailed. Millions of people were persuaded to join a temperance group called the All-Union Voluntary Society for the Struggle for Sobriety. Alcohol prices were increased and its sale was banned before 2:00 p.m.21 Even today, former Soviets shake with anger when they recall the closure of distilleries and the destruction of some of the USSR’s best vineyards in Ukraine and Moldova. Although alcohol consumption declined that year, the policy soon proved to be an utter disaster.

  As supplies dwindled, mass fights broke out in the huge queues that grew ever longer outside the increasingly fewer stores that sold alcohol. People began producing moonshine at home, mostly from sugar and yeast, which led to widespread shortages and rationing of those commodities. Many who weren’t already doing so turned to anything containing alcohol, including window-cleaning solvents and de-icing solution for airplanes, to quench their thirst.22

  Historian Sergei Roy writes that drug addiction grew along with the huge spike in alcohol poisonings. “I mean lethal ones, for who would bother to count the near-lethal writhing of wretches who felt sorry they’d survived? The number of lethal alcoholic poisonings grew fourfold immediately after the 1985 order, as desperate citizens started drinking anything remotely believed to contain alcohol: eau de cologne, lotions, toothpaste, glue, shoeshine, furniture varnish, nail varnish.”23

  Jokes multiplied along with hatred for Gorbachev: “Do you have this cologne?” a man at a barbershop asks, then exhales toward his barber. Shaking his head, the barber breathes back on his client. “No, only this kind.”

  Another man who has been waiting for hours in a queue for vodka decides to go to the Kremlin to give Gorbachev a thrashing instead. When he returns an hour later, a comrade still waiting in line asks how it went. The man shakes his head. “That line was even longer.”

  Gorbachev’s antialcoholism campaign was far from the first failure of its kind. Previous attempts ran into a central dilemma: although successive governments wanted to reduce alcohol production, they depended on liquor taxes for revenue, a paradox dating back four centuries, when such levies were first introduced as a way to reduce drinking. Gorbachev restricted vodka sales so that Russian workers would help shore up communism by returning to the assembly line, but his policy actually hastened the Soviet Union’s demise because it also caused a substantial drop in government revenues. Vodka taxes had at one point provided a quarter of the entire Soviet budget when prices for Moscow’s other main cash cow, oil for foreign export, began hitting all-time lows. By printing more money to make up some of the difference, the Kremlin did even more to worsen the inflation that accelerated the communist downfall.24

  The drive to increase revenues has undermined the goal of decreasing alcohol consumption since Ivan III established the first state alcohol monopoly in 1475. Ivan the Terrible introduced the first state kabak, or tavern, in the 1530s, and they were soon producing and selling spirits in major towns throughout the principality of Muscovy.25 Since profits went directly to the state treasury, officials were inclined to promote drinking.26 The English ambassador Giles Fletcher observed in 1591 that the tsar encouraged his subjects to drink in state-owned taverns, where “none may call them forth whatsoever cause there be, because he hindereth the emperor’s revenue.”27 Peter the Great later took the opposite approach, attempting to increase taxation by abolishing a state monopoly on alcohol production and encouraging private distillation. By time Catherine the Great assumed the throne in 1762, alcohol taxes accounted for a third of the state budget.

  And so on, through the reigns of Alexander I, Nicholas I and others. By 1862, the state was getting half its revenue from alcohol taxes.28 At the time, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, considered the father of Russia’s revolutionary movement, denounced his colleagues for supporting the vodka tax and thereby sacrificing their duty to “promote national honor, the moral welfare of the nation, justice and fairness… The only reason for its existence is monetary. Its sole purpose and concern is money, money, money.”29

  The issue prompted another great moralist, Chernyshevsky’s contemporary Fyodor Dostoevsky, to plan a novel he wanted to call The Drunkards. He later folded its characters into Crime and Punishment, whose Semyon Marmeladov remains one of Russia’s best-known alcoholic archetypes. The drunks of Russian literature such as Marmeladov and Venichka Erofeev tend to be viewed sympathetically, as people whose spirits are crushed by the social inequities of an oppressive state. They are variants of the “little man” in Russian literature, among them an impoverished and derided clerk at the center of Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.” Having scrimped and saved to buy a cherished new coat only to have it stolen, he dies from illness soon after a high-ranking official he approaches for help dresses him down for wasting his time.

  Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov, another low-ranking clerk, speaks in a ludicrously high-flown manner: his sole, pathetic gesture of dignity. The protagonist, Raskolnikov, first meets him in a tavern, where he observes that Marmeladov’s hands are dirty, his nails black and his filthy coat has one remaining button.

  His face was bloated from continual drinking and his complexion was yellow, even greenish. From between his swollen eyelids his little reddish slits of eyes glittered with animation. But there was something very strange about him; his eyes had an almost rapturous shine, they seemed to hold both intelligence and good sense, but gleams of something like madness showed in them as well.30

  Having squandered his destitute family’s money on drink and pawned his uniform, Marmeladov is afraid to return home, a tiny room he occupies with his wife and three small children. He confesses that he has just begged thirty more kopeks from a beloved older daughter, who has been sold into prostitution to raise money:

  “And surely she needs them for herself, now, eh? What do you think, my dear sir? Now she must take care to be always neat and clean. And that neatness, that special cleanness, costs money, you understand… Well sir, and I, her own father, took those thirty kopeks of hers for drink! And I am drinking it, sir! I have already drunk it all!… Now who could be sorry for a wretch like me, eh?”31

  No one, he concludes, rationalizing his behavior by claiming a thirst for suffering, the Russian crucible for spiritual purity. Like other alcoholics in Russian literature, Marmeladov’s character is comic, but his fate is more tragic than pathetic, his alcoholism a grotesque example of the humiliation to which characters are driven by the highly bureaucratic nature of St. Petersburg life. If Raskolnikov revolts against poverty by committing the novel’s central crime, his parallel Marmeladov accepts his fate, suffers and dies.

  Alcoholism continued spreading and the quality of vodka declining until the introduction of yet another state vodka monopoly in 1894 under the reforming Finance Minister Sergei Witte. During the so-called fourth liquor monopoly, hundreds of state distilleries, which maintained higher standards than even the top private producers, were built. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the government banned sales of all privately produced alcoholic drinks under a dry law meant to combat drunkenness among soldiers. Vodka continued to be sold widely nevertheless, chiefly in expensive restaurants, since the measure was largely seen as a ban aimed at the lower classes.32

  After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks put all private producers out of business by appropriating their assets. Some were transferred to Moscow State Wine Warehouse no. 1, which later formed the basis of the famed Kristall distillery.

  Although Lenin reduced alcohol production, Stalin lifted all restrictions by 1925, and deaths from drinking soon surpassed their prewar level.33 The dictator’s decision was explicitly meant
to raise revenues that would enable the communist regime to refuse foreign investment. “What’s better, the yoke of foreign capitalism or the sale of vodka?” Stalin is said to have asked. “Naturally, we will opt for vodka.”34 His policy came to be known as pyanyi budzhet (“drunken budget”).

  Half a century later, historian Sergei Roy wrote, the Soviet Union’s “alcoholic nightmare” could be explained by the role that liquor, along with oil, played as the “backbone of the nation’s budget.”

  Virtually all types of consumer goods were in short supply in the shops, but there was hardly ever a shortage of vodka, and people bought it not only because they were thirsty (although the nation’s innate thirst should by no means be underrated) but because there was little else to buy. Where supplies of vodka ran dry, all economic life came to a halt: The budget had no money to pay the workers’ wages with.

  Some economists pointed out that the Marxian “commodity-money-commodity” formula had degenerated into the “vodka-money-vodka” form especially adapted to the Soviet way of life. I’d go a step further and insist that vodka was money, or zhidkaya valyuta, “liquid currency,” as it was commonly called. Especially in the rural areas ordinary money would not buy you anything, while vodka—anything you might wish. On our trips through Siberia we regularly carried a goodish supply of spirt, or pure alcohol—practically the only means of obtaining transportation. With enough spirt, you could travel by helicopter even—always provided you could find a pilot sober enough to fly it, that is. Or take a babushka in a village who had to have her small plot of land plowed for planting potatoes, her principal subsistence crop. She just had to save a bottle of samogon hooch (vodka would be regarded as luxury) to pay the tractor driver, or her plot would go unplowed.35