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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  In late 2009 the Kremlin finally took notice, outlining a dramatic plan to halve Russian alcohol consumption within ten years through a combination of alcohol-control measures.5 In the meantime, health professionals both in Russia and abroad still investigate the wide array of negative implications of the demographic crisis: from a permanent drag on economic growth and the inability to field an effective standing army to social disarray and potential political disintegration.6 To be sure, the consequences of Russia’s addiction to alcohol are real, urgent, and truly a matter of life and death. However, such well-meaning government initiatives are doomed to fail without realizing that Russia’s societal alcohol addiction is only a symptom of the Russian state’s addiction to vodka revenues and the traditional role of vodka as an instrument of Russian statecraft—one that is a hallmark of autocratic rule.7

  While the source of Russia’s societal addiction to alcohol is to be found in autocracy, so too are the reasons for the state’s persistent inability to do anything meaningful about it. Over centuries, generations of Russia’s autocratic rulers nurtured society’s dependence on alcohol. Such practices have become deeply rooted in Russian culture and are not easily—or quickly—altered. Weaning Russia from the bottle will take generations, requiring consistent efforts to change perceptions of the appropriateness of getting drunk, altering destructive drinking habits, and overhauling Russia’s ramshackle healthcare infrastructure. However, since autocracies lack the legitimacy that comes from democratic procedures and guarantees of civil liberties, the Kremlin is under consistent pressure to deliver immediate (rather than long-term) results—to bolster its legitimacy. It should come as no surprise then that generations of Russian autocrats—tsarist, communist, and post-Soviet—have initiated “crash” sobriety initiatives and that each and every one failed within the span of a few months or years. Unfortunately, no matter how noble their aims, the government’s current efforts to slice Russian alcohol consumption by more than half by 2020 seems doomed to repeat this failure.8

  Alcohol And Autocracy In Russia

  It may seem strange that a book on the political history of alcohol in Russia should begin with Stalin and his inner circle. His reign marked neither the beginning of Russia’s long and contentious political relationship with vodka nor the height of Russia’s alcoholism. But what we find in Stalin’s Soviet Union of the 1920s through the 1950s is the merger of alcohol with the politics of authoritarian high-modernism, which most clearly illustrates the role of alcohol in the autocratic Russian system.

  Stalin inherited the vision of re-creating Russia from his revolutionary predecessor, Vladimir Lenin: the communist leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Not above using terror, Lenin orchestrated Red victory in a brutally destructive civil war through the 1920s—which effectively dissolved the prerevolutionary societal order—only to suffer a series of strokes that led to his premature death in 1924. As Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw it, the revolution was not simply the replacement of one ruling elite with another but an extreme makeover of economics, society, and culture according to the communists’ “high modern” design. Forced collectivization and mechanization were to rationalize agriculture in the service of the state; crash industrialization and electrification were to subjugate the totality of economic activity to the commands of the Soviet leadership. This physical transformation was to be accompanied by a cultural one: education, literacy, architecture, and city planning were all marshaled in the interest of creating a “new man” embodying the social ethics that inspired George Orwell’s 1984.9 Ideally, under Lenin and Stalin, the new Soviet culture was to promote modesty, punctuality, cleanliness, and sobriety—all great departures from the drunken, unwashed peasant produced by imperial Russia’s hated capitalist past.

  Despite his monumental brutality and bloodletting—the relentless purges, summary executions, gunpoint collectivization, famine, and mass deportations to forced labor camps—Joseph Stalin surprisingly still has admirers both in Russia and abroad.10 Some point to his accomplishments: leading a technologically inferior military to victory over the Nazi juggernaut in World War II and the simultaneous transformation of the Soviet Union from a war-ravaged, backward agrarian society on the periphery of Europe to a global superpower rivaled only by the United States. Whether they know it or not, these apologists are highlighting Stalin’s role in confronting the central problem of statecraft: making a complex society legible to the political leadership.

  In his classic work Seeing Like a State, Yale political anthropologist James C. Scott explains legibility as the government’s arranging the population to simplify the classic state functions: taxation, conscription, and preventing rebellion. All states engage in these core functions, and the development of the modern nation-state can be read as a history of extracting of societal resources (taxation and conscription), and neutralizing internal rivals.11 Accordingly, many of the stories in the following pages highlight how alcohol has been used in the Russian state-building project: to bolster the economic and military resources of the state and to bludgeon internal dissent.

  Under Lenin and Stalin, the Bolsheviks unveiled grandiose designs for the Soviet Union. Everything Stalin’s regime created—from its military and government buildings to collective farms and factory towns—was done on a gigantic scale.12 Yet a constant impediment to such high-modernist plans was the poverty and backwardness of a decimated countryside still recovering from decades of war, famine, and destruction. To ease recovery, Lenin made concessions to the overburdened peasantry in the form of his New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s, but he steadfastly refused to concede to alcohol and its corrupting influence on the new Soviet man. When confronted with the question of repealing the nationwide prohibition that had been in force since the last Romanov tsar, Nicholas II, decreed it as a wartime measure in 1914, Lenin refused, claiming that despite the badly needed revenues it would generate, reviving the vodka monopoly would lead Russia “back to capitalism rather than forward to communism.”13

  As the economy slowly recovered under NEP, illegal distillation of home-brewed vodka—or samogon—flourished, as did drunkenness, assaults, absenteeism in Soviet factories, and alcoholism within the communist party itself. Not only was such inebriety inconsistent with the vision of the new Soviet man, but the loss of billions of pounds of grain to illegal home distillation was unacceptable economic leakage—especially for a leadership that demanded iron discipline if they ever hoped to repel the imperialist forces of global capitalism that were unrelentingly scheming to snuff out their great communist experiment.14 While in 1923 Leon Trotsky—the firebrand founder of the Red Army—resolutely declared that there would be no concessions to alcohol, behind the scenes Trotsky’s Politburo nemesis Stalin was hatching plans to do just that. Just as Stalin fully consolidated his might as the Soviet Union’s unquestioned ruler, in 1925 he ended Lenin’s “noble experiment” with prohibition and reinstated the traditional vodka monopoly in the name of state finance. Perhaps more than any other move, Stalin’s sacrificing the “new Soviet man” to the economic interests of the state showed just how little difference there was between the proletarian Soviet autocracy and their bourgeois tsarist predecessors. The basic building blocks of statecraft transcend even the most revolutionary political upheavals, and in Russia, vodka politics is one of them.

  Vodka Statecraft

  All countries—democracies and dictatorships alike—extract resources from society, and most have utilized alcohol in that capacity. The foundation of the modern American state, for example, was built on taxes and tariffs on liquor. Indeed, immediately after passing the Bill of Rights, the very first item of business for America’s founding fathers was raising alcohol revenues.15 What makes Russian vodka politics different from the politics of alcohol in the United States or elsewhere in Europe is the longstanding legacy of autocratic government.

  “In European culture,” James Scott suggests, “the alehouse, the pub, the tavern, the inn, the cabaret,
the beer cellar, the gin mill were seen by secular authorities and by the church as places of subversion. Here subordinate classes met offstage and off-duty in an atmosphere of freedom encouraged by alcohol.”16 Indeed, the American Revolution was itself born in dank taverns of England’s thirteen colonies—away from the prying eyes of the British authorities. In the autocratic Russian context, however, the entire alcohol trade was controlled by the state, from production to sale in the local kabak, or “tsar’s tavern,” where even the tavern-keeper kissed the Orthodox cross to swear allegiance to the tsar.17 As a consequence, not only were the lucrative alcohol revenues siphoned off to the benefit of the state rather than entrepreneurs, but also Russians were deprived of that space for association and potential dissent against the ruling order. Under the Soviets, this dynamic was compounded by a paternalistic Communist Party leadership that used the excessive drinking of functionaries and rank-and-file party members as grounds for public castigation and outright purges.18 Here too, alcohol became another of the state’s weapons over the individual. In short, while the general contours of statecraft are similar across countries, the particular manifestations in terms of Russian vodka politics are numerous, including not only generating revenue but also stymieing dissent and promoting autocracy.

  Returning to his Seeing Like a State, Scott tries to understand why well-intended schemes to improve the human condition tend to go horribly awry. While he points the blame at statecraft and high-modernist ideology, that is only half of the equation: such human tragedies also require a determined authoritarian state and an incapacitated civil society, both of which are consistent hallmarks of Russia’s storied history.19 From Niccolò Machiavelli to Michel Foucault, political philosophers have enumerated the instruments states have at their disposal to influence society.20 And while democratic systems are considered more legitimate and hence less reliant on coercion to prevent rebellion, autocrats must utilize other mechanisms to keep society prostrate, off-balance, and unable to mount a challenge to power. I suggest that, in Russia, the process of autocratic state building atop a traditional spirit-drinking culture (as opposed to such lighter drinks as wine or beer) has created the particular dynamics—and tragedies—associated with vodka politics.

  Although constantly overlooked or dismissed by scholars, vodka is undoubtedly key to understanding the political history of Russia from its origins in early Muscovy right through the present day. Accordingly, this book chronicles the long and often contentious relationship between the Russian people and their government over the bottle and the common good. Virtually every Russian leader has confronted the opportunities and challenges of vodka, and virtually ever major event of historical importance has been tinged with alcohol in some way. Having already peered into Stalin’s inner circle, we’ll continue to look at liquor’s position in high politics, from the tsarist courts of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Nicholas II straight through to Boris Yeltsin in the post-Soviet period (chapters 3, 4, 12, 17, and 19). But this book is more than just a political biography of the bottle—we’ll explore the highly charged mystery of vodka’s origins, why it came to occupy such a central place in Russian politics and society, and how vodka is inexorably tied to that other ubiquitous Russian malady, corruption (chapters 6, 8, and 15). To the degree that vodka became an instrument of state domination, I’ll suggest how the liquor issue became a rallying point of organized resistance: from temperate peasants, revolutionaries, and Russia’s celebrated writers of the nineteenth century through the Soviet dissident movement a century later (chapters 9, 10, 14, 16, and 17). I’ll show how alcohol contributed to defeat in Russia’s most infamous wars and may well have even started one (chapter 11). I’ll examine vodka’s catalyzing role in Russia’s long history of coups d’état, from Catherine II’s overthrow of her husband Peter III in 1762 through the failed hardline putsch that sought to ouster Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 (chapters 5 and 19). I’ll argue that vodka politics—namely, the misguided attempt to institute drastic “dry laws”—hastened the demise of both the mighty Russian empire and its Soviet successor (chapters 13, 17, and 18). Bringing the book into the present day, I’ll untangle the legacy of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics, which, when combined with the economic crisis of the post-communist transition of the 1990s, produced a wholesale demodernization of Russia and demographic catastrophe categorically unlike anything seen before in world history. After considering the enormous challenges that depopulation and alcoholization present for the Kremlin, I will consider how presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have tried to confront the “liquor question,” and what—if anything—can and should be done, both now and in the future (chapters 20–24). It is my hope that this investigation will convince readers of the importance of vodka to understanding not only Russian culture but its history and politics as well.

  Both in Russia and abroad, the heroic/tragic weakness for vodka is widely thought to be the defining cultural characteristic of Russians—a natural ethnic trait going down almost to a genetic level. But quaffing potent vodka is just about as natural as downing its distilled cousins kerosene or rubbing alcohol. Since ancient times, the Slavs of the forest, taiga, and steppe drank fermented ales, meads, and kvas. The far more potent distilled vodka arrived much later, as the yoke of the modern autocratic state. The one consistency that has united Russia’s autocrats of the past five centuries—be they political reactionaries, radicals, or anything in-between—has been vodka politics. Vodka provided the financial foundation for the glorious expansion of the Russian empire and the might of its Soviet successor while also keeping political opponents and the Russian masses befuddled, divided, and docile. And when these political systems collapsed, vodka was there to make things worse—unimaginably worse.

  Understanding the enduring link between autocracy and alcohol is crucial to confronting the legacies of both. Russia’s storied addiction to vodka is not simply a social or cultural disorder; it is also a symptom of a deeper sickness—autocracy. It follows, then, that even in the post-Soviet period the repeated and unquestionably well-intentioned government efforts to wean Russians from the bottle will never fully succeed until the underlying illness—the autocratic system itself—is cured.

  Vodka Domination, Vodka Resistance

  Vodka politics is a pervasive feature of Russian autocracy—one that firmly embeds the state into culture, society, and private life. In normal settings alcohol is a respite: a temporary escape from the harshness of reality. Yet as a central pillar in Russian statecraft, apathy and disengagement further consolidate the power of autocracy. But if one cannot hide from state domination even in the bottle, what can can one do? One path would be to follow Lenin and the early Bolsheviks, who understood vodka as the means of domination of the capitalist class and abstained from all alcohol consumption in order to maintain their clarity of vision and purpose. The more brazen option is to speak truth to power by directly unmasking the dynamics of vodka politics for all to see.

  Here again, the most telling examples come from the Stalinist era of totalitarian domination. While the cold wind howled beyond the Kremlin walls during Russia’s long winter months, the Politburo’s drunken party often retreated to the film room to screen the latest movies in Stalin’s ever-growing personal collection of Russian and foreign movies—either imported for gold or captured as the spoils of war—usually until the dawn of the next day.21 Boasting such cinematographic pioneers as Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigory Aleksandrov, and Sergei Eisenstein, early Soviet films rivaled their Hollywood counterparts, and Stalin eagerly watched them all.22 Stalin was the Soviet Union’s top film critic and (with his inebriated entourage) the official censor for the entire domestic film industry. In Russia, acting and directing careers—and lives—were made or broken during Stalin’s late-night screening room.

  Unquestionably, Russia’s greatest contribution to cinema was the master director Sergei Eisenstein. Even in today’s Hollywood his litany of classic films, including The Battleship P
otemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and October has solidified Eisenstein’s place as one of the most influential directors in cinematic history.23 His pioneering work with camera angles, montage, and film editing have inspired generations of filmmakers worldwide; while even Eisenstein’s eccentric hairdo was emulated by David Lynch for the lead character in Eraserhead.24

  In the darkest days of Russia’s mortal struggle with Hitler, the world-renowned filmmaker unveiled his masterpiece Ivan the Terrible, which was commissioned by Stalin himself.25 The historical epic chronicled the rise of the sixteenth-century tsar Ivan IV, who vowed to unite, strengthen, and defend Russia against its enemies, both from without and within. On screen, Ivan Grozny (“the Terrible”) is a ruthless leader who wins the support of his Russian subjects by felling the khanate of Kazan and subduing the Polish and Livonian invaders from the west, in an obvious parallel to the Nazis. The movie was jingoistic propaganda: calling for a strong leader, national sacrifice, and defense of the motherland amid the horrors of World War II. Since the safest form of political discourse in any autocracy is to flatter the rulers,26 Eisenstein did just that, allowing his commentary on the tragedy of autocracy to become perverted into an apology for it. Stalin loved the film, admitting that he saw much of himself in Ivan. Bold and decisive, a “great and wise ruler” with “strong will and character,” Ivan the Terrible was presented as Stalin’s quintessential Russian leader. It ate Eisenstein up inside that his artistic vision had been hijacked to serve the interests of the state. Essentially appointed Stalin’s cinematic interpreter, the recalcitrant Eisenstein even won the Stalin Prize, first class, the country’s highest award for cultural achievement—the Soviet version of the Oscar. At the awards ceremony, Eisenstein collapsed from a mild heart attack, which only strengthened his premonitions that he would die an early death at the age of fifty.27