Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  Stalin’s appetite for food and drink was immense. According to his third wife, Rosa, breakfast was a massive affair that began with drinking a quarter pint of vodka.

  After some salt herrings and raw onion he would have another quarter pint of vodka as a chaser. Then he’d have lamb chops, steak and potatoes. For lunch Stalin would start with a quarter pint of vodka, followed by a salt herring, lots of chopped raw onions, rounding this all off with another quarter pint of vodka. For dinner he’d start with Borscht rather than vodka, followed by smoked salmon, fried eggs, roast chicken, pork or venison. During the meal he usually drank a bottle of light Caucasian wine.11

  This description of gastronomic gorging is probably exaggerated, so too its drinks tally. Stalin drank for effect, but the performance was illusory. As the Soviet Union and Germany cooked up the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, Hitler sent his Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, to Moscow. Stalin and his visitor flattered each other with endless toasts of vodka and champagne. But an SS officer noticed that Stalin was filling his glass from a special flask and the German managed to do the same. It was water, not vodka. Stalin smiled weakly at the discovery of his secret.12 It was the smallest deception of the trip; the Germans had no intention of honouring their new alliance with the USSR and within two years Germany and the Soviet Union were at war.

  Stalin was not in fact much of a drinker, according to the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and he expected others to be sober. But the grind of war seems to have made him drink more. As the Germans were closing in on Moscow in October 1941, he hosted a lavish banquet at the Kremlin for a hundred guests, including the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. Champagne, vodka, wine and Armenian brandy clouded the reality of the catastrophe confronting the Soviet Union and there were thirty-two toasts to victory before the night was out, with Stalin drinking continuously from a small glass. And as the threat of defeat turned into the euphoria of inevitable victory, Stalin drank still more. When Charles de Gaulle visited Moscow in 1944, Stalin was a swaggering, bullying drunk. The Frenchman was there to negotiate a treaty of mutual assistance. Stalin threatened and humiliated the French and his own entourage to the accompaniment of endlessly clinking vodka glasses, at one point saying: ‘Bring out the machine guns. Let’s liquidate the diplomats.’ Stalin was, noted future President Nikita Khrushchev, ‘completely drunk’.13

  After the war, Stalin hosted drink-sodden bacchanals at his home in the Moscow suburbs. For the Soviet apparatchiks compelled to attend, these were death-dicing ordeals. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes, ‘as the evening went on, the toasts of vodka, pepper vodka and brandy became more insistent until even these iron-bellied drinkers were blind drunk’.14 The leaders of the vast Soviet empire staggered around, legless and vomiting. Forcing his party comrades to lose control with drink was a way for Stalin to tyrannise and humiliate them. Failure to drink, or saying a wrong word when drunk, could be met with a bullet to the head.

  As dawn approached, cars were summoned to carry the comatose comrades away. Once, on the drive home, Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin (a Soviet Defence Minister) slumped into their seats, relieved to have survived another ordeal: ‘One never knows’, whispered Bulganin, ‘if one’s going home or to prison.’15 As sadistic political drinking goes, Stalin has no rival.

  Today, annual consumption of alcohol in Russia is higher than anywhere else in the world. More than thirty thousand Russians die of alcohol poisoning every year. It was a problem allowed to grow in the Soviet Union left by Stalin. The state budget relied on the tax revenue from vodka to fill its coffers and successive Soviet leaders were wary of restricting its availability. But during the seventy years of Soviet rule, the country lost four times as much wealth in working hours lost to alcohol as it raised in revenue.16 An epidemic of alcoholism began to rot the country’s foundations and Russian life expectancy started to decline in the 1960s. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, recognised this and was the only one to try and eradicate vodka.

  Gorbachev had been horrified by the drinking he witnessed on his way up the Communist Party ladder. ‘In the course of my career I saw massive drunkenness in the Party. Brezhnev drank, especially at the beginning. Yeltsin even used the fact that he drank to attract women – “He’s just the same as we are!” Women couldn’t keep their hands out of his pants. But in the West they were afraid. He had his finger on the nuclear button.’17 Gorbachev’s efforts to curb Russian drinking were unpopular but effective. When he came to power in 1985 he closed 90 per cent of Moscow’s alcohol shops and shut down distilleries. The following year saw the highest number of births since 1962 and life expectancy rocketed. But by 1991 both the policy and the Soviet Union were gone. Russia’s first democratically elected leader, Boris Yeltsin, was a drinker who paraded his dependency on the world stage, to the amusement and horror of the watching press.

  Boris Yeltsin drank big. But until the late 1980s, he had not been known as an excessive imbiber. He enjoyed convivial, comradely libations rather than solitary glasses of vodka. But when he got the keys to the Kremlin, his intake increased. The presidential limousine carried a satchel containing drinks, shot glasses and appetisers that were replenished daily. By now his preference was for grass-flavoured Tarkhum vodka and cocktails of champagne mixed with cognac. Foreign leaders soon learnt to live with Yeltsin’s inebriation. During Bill Clinton’s first phone call to the Russian leader after becoming President, Yeltsin’s speech was slurred and he failed to follow what Clinton had to say. Over the next seven years, the White House was careful to put calls through to the Kremlin before the dinner hour in Moscow.18

  In the edgy, uncertain years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the two superpowers continued to point ten thousand nuclear warheads at each other’s cities, ready to launch within minutes. While the US President relieved the pressures of the job with the assistance of a White House intern, his Russian counterpart relied on alcohol to cope with his awesome responsibilities. Clinton and Yeltsin had a natural rapport, but the US President was well aware of his counterpart’s drinking.

  Interviews with Clinton published in 2009 revealed a drunken visit to Washington by Yeltsin in 1995. The Russian President was staying at Blair House, across the road from the White House. According to Clinton, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin late one night standing alone in Pennsylvania Avenue, dressed only in his underwear, trying to hail a cab. In slurring Russian he told them he wanted a pizza. The next night Yeltsin evaded security and made it down to the Blair House basement, where a guard mistook him for a drunken intruder.19 According to Taylor Branch, ‘President Clinton said [Yeltsin’s] escapes into alcohol were far more serious than the cultivated pose of a jolly Russia.’ But, unsure of his place or of the consequences, Clinton never counselled Yeltsin about the drinking. Instead, the US and the rest of the world had to hope that the Russian President’s alcoholism did not distort his decision making and tip the world into nuclear war.

  In fact, it once triggered a dramatic pledge of détente, when in 1997 Yeltsin said during a visit to Sweden that Russia would unilaterally cut its nuclear arsenal by a third. There was consternation at the Kremlin, and Yeltsin’s long-suffering press secretary had to explain that the President actually meant Russia was not cutting back its nuclear weapons at all. Two years later Yeltsin’s boozing was blamed when he blurted out a threat to ‘send a missile’ if the United States overstepped the mark during the Kosovo conflict. Again, his press spokesman had to mop up the confusion and extinguish the threat of his master’s statement.

  Boris Yeltsin’s drunkenness was visible at home and abroad. On 22 April 1993 he appeared at a rally in Moscow far from sober and an aide wisely removed the microphone from his hand before he could say anything dangerous or damaging. But one of the most memorable images of Yeltsin’s time in office dates from 31 August 1994. The Russian President was in Berlin to mark the departure of Russian forces from the former East Germany. He had been drinking enthusiastically since the morning and by the time
he arrived at the square in front of Berlin’s town hall he was banjaxed. A brass band from the local police was entertaining the crowds. Spotting a chance to have some fun, the Russian President commandeered the baton from the conductor. He flailed his arms around in an inebriated imitation of a band leader, leaning towards the musicians and jabbing his stick at various sections of the band. He later grabbed the microphone, leading a short rendition of a Russian folk song before giving a thumbs up to the crowd, blowing some kisses and staggering off the stage. Several of Yeltsin’s aides were tempted to resign immediately. Instead, they wrote him a letter telling him that his dependency on the ‘well-known Russian vice’ was damaging him and had to stop.

  During a trip to Britain in September of the same year, Prime Minister John Major took Yeltsin to a pub close to Chequers in the village of Great Kimble. When they knocked on the door asking the owner to open up, Yeltsin said he was the President of Russia. If that was true, said the landlord from behind the door, then he was the Kaiser of Germany. At dinner that evening Yeltsin arrived drunk and decided he didn’t want to sit where he’d been placed. The journalist Max Hastings described the scene: ‘He picked up his own table card, next door to that of Princess Alexandria, and deposited both the card and himself next to John Major, with whom he chatted amiably, if incoherently, all evening.’20

  The nadir came during a stopover visit in Ireland a month later. The presidential plane had circled inexplicably over Dublin for an hour before eventually landing at Shannon airport. There, on the tarmac, a delegation of dignitaries accompanied by a military band waited for the Russian President to appear. The door opened but nobody came out. Yeltsin was due to attend a lunch with the Irish Prime Minister, Albert Reynolds, and eventually his deputy emerged to report that the Russian President was too tired and ill to leave the plane. A magnanimous Reynolds said he completely understood that Yeltsin was only acting on doctor’s orders, and later in Moscow the Russian leader blamed his security team for not waking him up. But it was obvious to everyone else that Yeltsin had hit the hospitality hard on the flight over from Washington and was too drunk to leave the plane.

  In his memoir, Presidential Marathon, Yeltsin tried to explain the allure of drink to an under-pressure politician. ‘At a certain time, I sensed that alcohol is a means that rapidly relieves stress.’ But as his biographer Timothy J. Colton has written, ‘drinking immoderately and on the government’s time was a self-inflicted wound that brought no good to anyone’.21 Yeltsin’s drinking was embarrassing, certainly, and detrimental to his health. But Colton doesn’t believe it interfered with Yeltsin’s performance at foreign summits or influenced domestic policy decisions taken during his first term as President. It did, though, become a political liability. As Yeltsin’s health worsened, he finally forswore daily heavy drinking in 1996 after a quintuple heart bypass. But by then his boisterous drunken shenanigans had defined his image.

  There was of course more to Yeltsin than drink. Mounting a Moscow tank in 1991 to protect the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev made him a hero to many; and he defended the fledgling Russian democracy in 1993 when he ordered tanks to fire on the Russian parliament after it was occupied by hardline political opponents. But he also began a bloody, disastrous military campaign in Chechnya and oversaw a decade of economic chaos. Nor did he show any inclination to stem Russia’s alcohol dependency. Yeltsin abolished the state monopoly on vodka production and opened up the country to cheap imports. Perhaps his own drinking made him blind to the damage it was doing to everyone else. But his teetotal successor Vladimir Putin doesn’t have that excuse. By 2050, it is estimated, Russia’s population will be thirty million people fewer than it was in 2000 and life expectancy is falling again. The country’s vodka habit is crippling its future, but Russia’s political leadership is too timid to take away the bottle.

  Protocol and Alcohol

  Lord Lyons was a canny chap. ‘If you are given champagne at lunch there’s a catch somewhere,’ he observed.22 His job was to discern what that catch was. Britain’s ambassador to Paris from 1867 to 1887 knew that drink and diplomacy make a ready but risky mix. According to America’s urbane and intellectual ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson, a diplomat’s life comprises three ingredients: ‘Protocol, Geritol and alcohol’.

  In 2013 the Deputy US Ambassador to the United Nations for Management and Reform declared it was time the era of alcohol-driven diplomacy came to an end. It was, he said, difficult enough corralling representatives from 193 countries into agreeing the United Nations’ budget. But what made it even tougher was that many of the members turned up to meetings completely drunk. Joseph Torsella’s bold suggestion was that UN diplomats should desist from drinking before the deal was done. ‘We make the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone,’ Mr Torsella told the General Assembly’s Budget Committee.23

  Alcohol has long been present at the set-piece summits and embassy drinks parties that form the cornerstones of diplomacy. Perhaps the most important summits of the twentieth century took place towards the end of the Second World War – and at these tripartite meetings at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam the quantities of drink consumed were staggering.

  Elliott Roosevelt witnessed the first banquet of the Tehran conference in late 1943, at which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt coordinated the next stage of the war in Europe and Asia, including the planned invasion of France. As they hammered out a strategy, and tried to decipher each other’s motives, they ate and drank. Roosevelt later recalled one evening’s beverage list:

  Of course, vodka; and fortunately also a still light wine, light and dry, and a Russian champagne, to my taste very good. I say ‘fortunately,’ for there was no conversation without a drink; it would have been a contradiction in terms. The only way we talked was through the medium of proposing a toast. It may sound cumbersome, but if your staying power is good you find that it develops into quite a lot of fun.24

  The bacchanalia was repeated the next night on Churchill’s birthday at the British Embassy, an evening of countless toasts at which most of the conversation was done standing up on increasingly unsteady feet.

  It was the same in February 1945 at Yalta, the summit intended to shape the post-war world. The US Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, remembered how the ailing FDR had to endure a merry-go-round of toast-making on the first day of the summit. ‘There were dozens of toasts. I was highly amused to notice that Stalin would drink half of his glass of vodka and, when he thought no one was watching, surreptitiously pour water into the glass,’ Stettinius wrote four years later.25 It was at this first American-hosted dinner of southern fried chicken washed down with Russian champagne that Franklin Roosevelt revealed that he and Churchill called Stalin ‘Uncle Joe’. The Soviet leader was indignant and the mood was only lightened with more champagne.

  At a Russian-hosted dinner on 7 February, there was more relentless toasting, each leader taking it in turns to make ever more ludicrously gushing tributes to their allies. Raising his glass to Stalin, Churchill praised the ‘mighty leader of a mighty country, which took the full shock of the German war machine, broke its back, and drove the tyrants from her soil’.26 With dinner guests discreetly pouring vodka into plant pots and diluting their champagne with water, most successfully stopped the slide towards intoxication.

  That was the fear of Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger’s right-hand man, as he rolled the pitch for Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. It would be the first visit of any American President to the country and the rapprochement would be marked by a banquet at the Great Hall of the People. Americans would be watching every chopstick pinch and liquid toast up close on live television and the White House was worried about the drink. Specifically, mao-tai, China’s explosively strong rice wine. When he visited China a few months before the summit, Alexander Haig sampled the brew and fretted about its effect on Nixon. ‘Under no, repeat no, circumstances should the Pre
sident actually drink from his glass in response to banquet toasts,’ he cabled.27 Whether Nixon swallowed or not isn’t known, but he kept his eye on the prize and toasted in a new era of US–China relations without trouble, the high point of his presidency.

  Foreign policy during Bill Clinton’s presidency was dominated by war in the Balkans, brutal conflicts punctuated by all-night brandy-fuelled talks. Following Slovenia and Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 but this country of Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Slavs became a battleground of competing nationalisms and religions. For three years the Bosnian Serbs waged a genocidal war on the country’s Muslims and Croats, armed and supported by Serbia’s strongman President Slobodan Milosevic. NATO finally began bombing Bosnian Serb forces in the summer of 1995 following the massacre at Srebrenica and into this chaos barrelled the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Nicknamed ‘the Bulldozer’, Holbrooke combined table-thumping fury with charm and intellect, becoming one of the United States’ most famous post-war diplomats. In the autumn of 1995 his mission was to get the warring sides to the negotiating table and construct a peace in Bosnia. That involved many trips to Belgrade, where Slobodan Milosevic enjoyed subjecting foreign dignitaries and journalists to late-night drinking sessions. Milosevic was a whisky and cigars man and the talks were awash with alcohol.

  Richard Holbrooke wrote about his experience of Balkan diplomacy in his book To End a War, in which he recounts deal-making by drinks. The day is Friday 1 September 1995, the location a hunting lodge at Dobanovci, near Belgrade. An American delegation is meeting with Milosevic and his cronies for talks about ending the war in Bosnia: