Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  In his own words Khrushchev later recalled:

  He literally forced us to drink! Among ourselves we had brief discussions about how to bring the supper or dinner to an end more quickly. Sometimes before supper or dinner, people would say: “Well, what’s it going to be today, will there be a drinking contest or not?” We didn’t want to have such contests because we had work to do, but Stalin deprived us of that opportunity. … Stalin himself would just drink a glass of cognac or vodka at the beginning of the dinner and then wine. … Everyone felt repelled by this; it made you sick to the stomach; but Stalin was implacable on this matter.23

  So is it any wonder that virtually every member of the Soviet Politburo of the 1940s was a drop-dead alcoholic? It was not because alcoholism was hardwired into their DNA but, rather, because they were products of a political system that compelled drunken excess. Stalin’s inebriated inner circle, including Khrushchev, Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, and Anastas Mikoyan was a collection of some of the most ruthless thugs the world had ever seen—yet all of them were made to drink against their will to keep them off balance and prevent them from plotting to topple the paranoid secretary general. “Stalin forced us drink a lot,” Mikoyan confirmed in his memoirs, “apparently to loosen our tongues, so that we couldn’t control what we said, and he would later know who was thinking what.”24

  According to one of Stalin’s biographers, “Forcing his tough comrades to lose control of themselves became his sport and a measure of dominance.”25 The toughest of them all was Stalin’s executioner, Lavrenty Beria—the sadistic head of the secret police who was notorious for cruising in his black limousine to select women (reportedly upwards of two hundred) from the streets of Moscow to be delivered to his apartment, where he would fill them with alcohol and rape them. When the tables were turned, however, Beria despised being forced to drink for someone else’s pleasure. Still, not only did he drink, but he also made others do so out of servility to Stalin. Khrushchev’s fading tapes recount Beria’s predicament: “We’ve got to get drunk,” said Beria, “the sooner the better. The sooner we’re drunk, the sooner the party will be over. No matter what, he’s not going to let us leave sober.”26 Like Beria, everyone tried their best to endure—or, better yet, avoid—Stalin’s loathsome drinking bouts.

  Not surprisingly, by the late 1940s the constant drinking caught up to Khrushchev, who began having kidney trouble. While Stalin was initially sympathetic to doctors’ orders for Nikita to abstain from alcohol, Beria butted in that he too had kidney troubles but that he drank anyway, without a problem. “So I was deprived of my defensive armor (that I couldn’t drink because of my bad kidneys): no matter, drink! As long as you’re walking around, as long as you’re alive, drink!”27

  Others had different coping strategies. Khrushchev’s wingman, Anastas Mikoyan habitually slunk away to steal a quick nap during the nightly revelry—before he too was ratted out by Beria. “Want to be smarter than the rest, don’t you?” Stalin loomed: “see that you don’t regret it later.”28 Khrushchev told how Mikoyan, along with Beria and Malenkov, even persuaded Kremlin waitresses to replace their wine with juice of the same color, that is, until Stalin’s deputy Politburo candidate Aleksandr Shcherbakov exposed them. Khrushchev recalled:

  Stalin was furious that they were trying to deceive him, and he made things hot for Beria, Makenkov, and Mikoyan. All of us were angry with Shcherbakov because we didn’t want to drink all of that wine. We drank to get Stalin off our backs, but we wanted to keep it down to the minimum as not to ruin our health and not become drunkards.29

  Shcherbakov—Stalin’s toady drunkard—died from a heart attack two days after the Nazi surrender, May 10, 1945, at the ripe old age of forty-four. While Stalin valorized him, Khrushchev and the rest of the circle “knew that he died from drinking too much in an effort to please Stalin and not because of any insatiable urge of his own.”30 Likewise, Andrei Zhdanov—once thought of as Stalin’s heir apparent—died less than three years later at fifty-two, to the end ignoring his doctors’ frequent warnings to stop drinking. It was clear to all that this situation was disastrous both for their work and their physical health. “People were literally becoming drunkards, and the more a person became a drunkard, the more pleasure Stalin got from it.”31

  STALIN AND HIS POLITBURO COLLEAGUES WALKING THE KREMLIN GROUNDS. 1946. From left, Anastas Mikoyan, Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, and Vycheslav Molotov. Photo by Samari Gurari.

  While the drunken Politburo meetings usually began at the dinner table, they rarely ended there. In the warm days of summer, when the northern sun shines well into the evening, the Politburo’s dreadful dacha dinners often moved outdoors to take in the fresh air and serenity of the countryside. On such occasions, Khrushchev, along with Soviet major general Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, made a habit of pushing Soviet deputy defense commissar Grigory Kulik into a nearby pond. The bungling Kulik was fair game, since everyone knew that Stalin had long before lost respect for the “always half-drunk bon vivant” whose inept leadership on the Leningrad front in World War II allowed the Nazis to completely encircle Russia’s second capital.32 A bull of a man, the enraged and sopping wet Kulik would chase Khrushchev and Poskrebyshev around the entire estate before they ducked to hide in some nearby bushes. The drunken bootlick Poskrebyshev (by Stalin’s daughter’s account, also the most prodigious vomiter of the group) was pushed into the pond so frequently that the guards feared the Soviet leadership might drown and quietly had the lake drained. “If anyone tried something like that on me, I’d make mincemeat of them,” Beria threatened, while Stalin simply beamed: “You’re like little children!” By all accounts, this infantilism delighted Stalin.33

  Like generations of tsars before him, as the self-styled patriarch of all Russia, “Uncle Joe” cultivated the father figure image. But of course a man only becomes a father when he has children. Just as with his inner circle, alcohol was instrumental not only in keeping Soviet society weak, divided, and off balance, but also reliant on the state, like children to a father.34

  This, then, was the apprenticeship of Nikita Khrushchev. While he never cultivated the same sort of marionette theater among his own inner circle after succeeding Stalin, life in the viper pit weighed heavily on him until his last days:

  People might say that Khrushchev is washing dirty linen in public. But what can you do? Without washing dirty linen, there would be no clean linen. Clean linen gets its cleanness and whiteness by its contrast with dirty linen. Not only that; the conditions of Stalin’s home life were closely interwoven with our work life. Apparently this is something that is almost inevitable when a country is actually being run by one person, and as a result, it’s difficult to separate personal circumstances from public affairs.35

  In the aging recordings of his memoirs, Khrushchev makes an important point: in autocratic governments, the personal and political are inexorably interwoven. It would be one thing if such drunken revelry went on day and night among in the peasants’ kabak (tavern) or the bars of the urban factory workers, but it is a completely different matter when it happens at the highest ranks of government—and the government of one of the world’s true superpowers. Moreover, if this sort of instrumental use of alcohol was an isolated event, then maybe we could be forgiven for dismissing it as some sort of minor, albeit chilling, footnote to world history. However, they sad fact is that Stalin’s use of alcohol was not unique among Russian rulers—but was part of a very long and storied history. From the Romanov tsars through the Soviets and even into the post-Soviet period, the use and abuse of alcohol is crucial to understanding the dynamics of autocratic rule in Russia.

  Just as Stalin used alcohol to keep his subordinates divided, fearful, confused, and off balance, so too the Soviet leadership continued a longstanding autocratic tradition of utilizing vodka to keep society in check: drunken, divided (atomized), and unable to mount a challenge to its power.36 The communists, in particular, kne
w this well. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were explicit in condemning drunkenness as a consequence of capitalist oppression. Accordingly, Vladimir Lenin and the generation of revolutionaries that brought Bolshevism to Russia abstained from liquor in order to cast off the shackles of capitalist domination.37 So it is more than a little ironic that the Soviet dictatorship, on behalf of the proletariat, enslaved the people with vodka even more than their bourgeois predecessors had.

  That liquor could be used to keep the people drunk, divided, and passive is only one reason the autocracy came to rely on vodka; another is that the alcohol trade is incredibly lucrative. Distilled spirits like vodka are particularly cheap and easy to produce, so from the government’s standpoint, being the bartender to an entire country of alcoholics has the added advantage of generating state revenues on a truly massive scale. Meanwhile, unlike many North Atlantic countries where the tavern was a raucous refuge from the prying eyes of the authorities, in Russia the drink trade was traditionally a government monopoly, so taverns and liquor outlets were the eyes and ears of the state. Taken together, preventing rebellion, providing defense, and extracting resources from society are three of the most vital aspects of statecraft. In Russia, however, these traditional functions are given an unusual twist, as none of them can be fully addressed without reference to alcohol.

  Vodka has a very long political history, and it is no coincidence that the rapid expansion of the early Muscovite state occurred simultaneously with the harnessing of vodka’s unmatched revenue potential. From the feudal and bourgeois eras of Russia’s imperial past to its socialist and now post-socialist eras, vodka has been the keystone of state finance. In the early years, with Russian authority spread thin over a vast, yet sparsely populated landmass, the authorities farmed out the vodka tax—selling to the highest bidder the right to a total monopoly on the local liquor trade. In the interest of maximizing this vital and reliable income stream, the government increasingly looked the other way from the systemic corruption created by the system—the same corruption that bedevils Russia today. In fighting the abuses of the tax farmer and looking to secure ever-greater revenue for the treasury, the state attempted all manner of taxation, licensing, and monopoly regimes—using vodka to squeeze every last kopeck out of the weary peasantry. “The ways in which the state has obtained revenue from vodka have changed over the course of time,” noted Soviet dissident Mikhail Baitalsky in the 1970s, “but the essential character of the vodka trade has not changed.”38

  Russian leaders—“great” and not-so-great—have come and gone. Through tumultuous, bloody, and revolutionary transformations, the Russian state has been built, destroyed, and rebuilt in different images. But through it all, the one constant has been vodka. At the height of Russia’s tsarist empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alcohol revenues constituted fully one-third of the entire operating budget of the Russian state—enough to cover the full costs of fielding and maintaining the largest standing army in Europe with enough left over to construct the royal family’s opulent Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.39 Even into the late twentieth century—when alcohol revenues were at best an afterthought to state finance in most European states—Soviet Russia was still reaping in the neighborhood of 170 billion rubles every year from vodka—over one-quarter of all the income to the Soviet state.40

  “The financial interests of the state hold the producers of vodka in a grip no less powerful than that which vodka itself has on its consumers,” the dissident Baitalsky concluded. “The state has never enjoyed such a fabulous income from the alcohol business as it enjoys today.”41 Indeed, for at least the past five hundred years the enduring strength of the Russian state itself cannot be understood without reference to alcohol.

  Likewise, the persistently anemic state of Russian civil society has roots in vodka politics. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, temperance movements throughout Europe and North America provided one nexus of grassroots activism—along with the suffragist and labor movements—that cultivated a vigorous civil society. But not in Russia. Throughout Russian history, whether tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet, attempts to stem the flow of alcohol (thereby threatening the central pillar of the state), either through civic temperance organizations or top-down government initiatives on behalf of public health, were halfhearted at best and, at worst, were forcibly scuttled. Here too vodka politics is both cause and consequence—perpetuating the particular dynamics associated with Russian statecraft.

  In anticipation of vodka’s five-hundredth anniversary, Viktor Erofeyev, the accomplished Russian writer and son of Stalin’s translator, penned an article—part lamentation and part tribute—to vodka, what he called “The Russian God.” For a Russian, he wrote, the very mention of the word elicits a range of emotions—romanticization for some, consolation for others—but ultimately none are indifferent: “More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god.” And like any deity, vodka is wrapped in a sense of almost-mystical allure—a “pagan stupor” that calls to the lonely soul with a mix of lust and shame.42

  Yet the impact of drinking is not borne simply by the individual enticed by vodka’s siren song. Drinking is a social activity, and its effects—domestic violence and drunken driving to hooliganism and premature death—are social in nature. And inasmuch as these social impacts require government attention, the entire cycle of alcohol—from production and sales to consumption and effects—is fundamentally a political issue. Indeed, as Erofeyev suggested: “Vodka has taken control of the will and conscience of a substantial sector of the Russian population. If you add up all the time that Russians have devoted to vodka and gather together all the vodka-fueled impulses of the soul—the fantasies, the dreams, the weeklong binges, the family catastrophes, the shamefaced hangovers, the murders, suicides, and fatalities (favorite Russian pastimes include choking on your own vomit and falling out of a window)—it becomes clear that behind the official history of the Russian state there exists another dimension.”43

  This book seeks to uncover that dimension.

  This, then, is nothing less than the secret history of the Russian state.

  Vodka Politics

  Just as vodka is the touchstone of Russians’ social lives, vodka politics—encompassing both policy decisions to manipulate alcohol consumption and the influence of alcohol on political developments—is a central fulcrum of statecraft in Russia. Historically, vodka has been a main exchange point between Russian state and society, and just as vodka is simultaneously the solace of the downtrodden and the reason for their poverty, vodka is both one way the Russian state imposes itself on the individual and how society avoids the state. The might of the tsarist empire was largely built on vodka, and when the empire fell to the flames of revolution, vodka politics was partly to blame. Vodka helped keep the Russian people docile and passive, yet vodka has played a role in every Russian coup d’état and hastened every Russian revolution. Vodka has toasted international peace and helped bring Russia to the brink of war. Vodka has occasionally saved Russia from foreign invasion but, more often, hastened its military’s defeat. And just as vodka politics facilitated the demise of the imperial Russian empire, a century later it helped do-in its Soviet successor as well. Vodka is not only the source of immeasurable revenue; it also is used as currency. After the collapse of communism, vodka facilitated the wholesale demodernization of Russian economy and society while unleashing a demographic catastrophe unlike anything before seen in the peacetime history of the world. In so many ways then, vodka politics is key to understanding Russia’s tumultuous past, present, and future.

  Today, Russia’s greatest political challenge isn’t terrorism, nuclear confrontation, or navigating the ever-changing global economic landscape—it is confronting the health and demographic crises produced by centuri
es of autocratic vodka politics. Before modestly rebounding in recent years, average male life expectancy in Russia during the 1990s fell to fifty-nine years—a level on par with Ghana. The primary culprit is unquestionably vodka. More than cardiovascular diseases, more than AIDS, more than tuberculosis or even cancer, study after study has laid the lion’s share of the blame on vodka.1 In announcing his anti-alcohol campaign in 2009, then-president Dmitry Medvedev bemoaned that, on average, Russians drank a “mind-boggling” eighteen liters of pure alcohol per year, roughly twice that of the United States and about ten liters more than what the World Health Organization considers healthy. In practical terms, this means that the normal Russian drinking man downs 180 bottles of vodka per year—or a half bottle per day … and that is the average.2

  In the waning days of Soviet power, Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew military forces from the quagmire of Afghanistan, referring to the decade-long occupation as a “bleeding sore” on the underbelly of the Soviet Union: an unending drain on badly needed resources.3 Over ten years in Afghanistan, the Soviets lost some fourteen thousand men. By contrast, directly or indirectly, Russia has lost more than four hundred thousand victims to alcohol every year since the collapse of communism, combined with life-expectancy figures for the average Russian man cratering at 57.6 years in 1994. Exhaustive health studies have concluded that Russia’s vodka epidemic was the cause of more than half of all premature deaths in the 1990s. According to the country’s foremost health experts, if you are a Russian, there is about a one-in-four chance (23.4%) that your death will have something to do with alcohol. No wonder Vladimir Putin consistently refers to Russia’s resulting demographic crisis “the most acute problem facing our country today.”4