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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  ILYA REPIN’S IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND HIS SON. Oil on canvas. 1885. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  In March of 1584 the weary and demented tsar—fat from gluttony and aged beyond his years from drink—collapsed over a chessboard in his quarters. There was at once a great outcry: doctors called for vodka and aqua vitae to revive him while others called for marigold and rosewater. It was all for naught: Russia’s terrible drunken sadist was no more.36

  Like all the grand dukes of Muscovy, the body of Ivan the Terrible is entombed in the Cathedral of the Archangel in the Kremlin. Yet unlike the graves of his predecessors, which litter the public sanctuary, Ivan’s tomb is hidden from public view behind the grand iconostasis, where he lies in seclusion alongside his sons Ivan and Fyodor. Yet perhaps the most fitting epitaph of Ivan’s life and reign is not on his grave, but in the writings of his confidant-turned-critic Andrei Kurbsky: “He did not force people to bring sacrifices to idols, but ordered them together with himself to be in concord with devils and forced sober men to drown in drunkenness, from which spring up all evil things.”37

  Peter the Great: Modernization and Intoxication

  In the hundred years following the death of Ivan and the end of the Rurik dynasty, Russia’s autocratic system plunged into chaos, only to slowly reemerge about a new royal family, the Romanovs. Through a succession of fragile leaders, Russia changed very little, before the late seventeenth century, when Peter the Great forcibly modernized Russia’s medieval cultural practices and byzantine political and economic institutions, turning Russia into a formidable European military power and a true multinational empire. Yet while many valorize Peter’s progressivism and modernism, one tradition that endured was the centrality of alcohol to Russian statecraft. In many ways, Peter had more in common with Ivan the Terrible and Russia’s medieval past than the popular “modernizer” image would suggest.

  Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov, ruled for thirty of those tumultuous years (1645–1676). His major accomplishments consisted of quelling riots and rebellions across the country, including a series of tavern revolts in 1648. A quiet, pious, and temperate leader, even he utilized alcohol to coerce his courtiers into desired behavior. The English court physician Dr. Samuel Collins noted that while the tsar drank very little wine, he took great pleasure in seeing his boyars “handsomely fuddled.” From his throne in the banquet hall, Tsar Alexei “delivers out of his hand a Chark of treble or quadruble Spirits, which are able to take away his breath who is not accustom’d to them.”1 Those boyars who failed to attend morning prayer were unceremoniously “baptized”—dunked in water then forced to drink three draughts of vodka. Although the nobles detested, they rarely protested; instead they in turn made their foreign visitors and ambassadors as drunk as possible.2

  Tsar Alexei’s domestic tranquility was shattered by the death of his beloved wife Maria weeks after she bore him their thirteenth child. Understandably distraught, the tsar often left the cold, lonely palace to dine and drink at the warm houses of his close friends. Maybe the alcohol had gone to his head, but at the estate of his advisor Artamon Matveyev, Tsar Alexei became enraptured by Natalia Naryshkina—Matveyev’s buxom servant who plied the sovereign with vodka and caviar.3 In 1671 the two were wed, and the following year she bore him a son. While celebratory wines and fruits were distributed to military officers outside the Kremlin walls, inside the tsar himself poured the vodka for the nobles and officials, who toasted the health of the young Peter Alexeyevich Romanov.4 An integral part of the alchemist’s wares, vodka was among the elixirs of health and vitality that the tsar took regularly, and he ensured that his wife and children imbibed it regularly as well.5

  With two older brothers—Fyodor and Ivan—ahead of him, it was unlikely that young Peter would ever ascend to the Russian throne. When the forty-seven-year-old Tsar Alexei died from a cocktail of ailments leading to kidney and heart failure, the nimble-minded, yet physically impaired Fyodor III was crowned tsar.6 When he died at the age of twenty without a male heir, Russia was again thrown into crisis as the families of Alexei’s first and second wives vied for power, with much of the outcome determined by a disgruntled group of palace guards known as the streltsy, or “shooters.”

  In the resulting Moscow Uprising of 1682, rival conspirators whipped up riots in the capital with rumors that the tsarevich Ivan had been strangled by the Naryshkin clan in order to place nine-year-old Peter alone on the throne. Joined by mobs of drunken peasants who rioted and looted Moscow, the streltsy mob burst into the Kremlin, slashing and hacking to death many powerful boyars, including his mother’s former guardian Artamon Matveyev as well as two of Peter’s uncles, who were butchered in the presence of the horrified tsarevich Peter. For days, Russia’s feuding royal families—and the entire Russian government—were held hostage by the rampaging streltsy.

  The Danish ambassador to Moscow, Butenant von Rosenbusch, recounted how the streltsy ransacked his residence on a false rumor that he was harboring a fugitive before hauling him through the riotous streets to the palace to plead his innocence. “God be praised! I am not guilty,” protested the diplomat to his captors. “I have a clear conscience and do not doubt that as soon as I go to the castle you will let me go. Then if you will accompany me home again I will treat you to as much brandy [vodka] and beer as you like, but since the streets are full of your comrades who do not know anything about me you must take care that none of your men who meet me do me any harm.”7

  The streltsy agreed, and with this shrewd promise of alcohol, the terrified ambassador bought an escort of fifty bodyguards to lead him through the mob to the Kremlin. Once inside the Kremlin gates, von Rosenbusch suddenly stopped: a rival streltsy group dragged past the naked and beaten body of the fugitive the ambassador was accused of harboring. Continuing on to a packed palace square, von Rosenbusch was summarily dismissed and sent home by the recently widowed Tsarina Natalia Naryshkina and her daughter, the Princess Sophia.

  Returning to his residence, the Dane’s entourage had swollen to 287 thanks to rumors of the promises of alcohol. True to his word, the ambassador served them all as much vodka and beer as they could drink. Drunk on power and vodka, the streltsy then turned on their captive, demanding money. “Content us well, or we will leave no life in thy house. Dost thou not know that we have the power? Everything must tremble before us; and no harm can come to us for that.”8

  Even the royal family trembled before the mutinous streltsy, and like the ambassador they did everything possible to pacify them. To debunk the rumor that the tsarevich had been strangled, they presented Ivan V to the mob—alive and unharmed. They conferred upon the garrison the honorary title of “Palace Guard.” Finally, in the courts and corridors of the royal palace, the streltsy were treated to liquor-adorned feasts at the rate of two regiments per day, receiving vodka from the hand of Princess Sophia herself, who stroked the egos of the truculent streltsy by lauding their loyalty and fidelity. Raising a toast to the princess, the inebriated rebels thus swore allegiance to her, and with vodka the uprising was subdued—and important lessons about the instrumental power of alcohol learned.9

  A compromise was quickly brokered to reestablish order: the teenage Ivan V—beset by both physical and mental disabilities—and his ten-year-old half-brother Peter I would be crowned co-tsars, with Sophia ably acting as regent for both. Yet as Peter grew older and more ambitious, Sophia did not relinquish power willingly. Seven years after the 1682 uprising, while Peter was encamped with his loyal Russian armies at the Troitsk Monastery in Sergeyev Posad—the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church some forty-five miles northeast of Moscow—Sophia again turned to the streltsy. In 1689, while her frail brother Ivan V ladled out vodka to the soldiers, boyars, and other officials, Sophia gave an impassioned plea for their allegiance against her half-brother Peter.10 All for naught—the boyars, the remaining streltsy, and even Ivan instead allied themselves with Peter. Sophia was arrested and forced to the convent at Novodevich
y. Never interested in politics, the quiet Ivan V died in 1696, leaving Peter the sole tsar. Two years later, following another failed streltsy insurrection to place her on the throne, Sophia was forced to become a nun—this time flanked by one hundred armed guards. In a scene more reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible, the young Tsar Peter interrogated and condemned hundreds of streltsy. Determined to forever root out insubordination, he disbanded the streltsy. Scores of alleged conspirators were tortured, branded, hanged, beheaded, or broken on the wheel by the tsar’s orders, frequently in his presence.11 In Russia, the differences between “the Great” and “the Terrible” are less than one might think.

  If all of the leaders of Russia past and present were to go round for round in a drinking contest, Peter the Great would undoubtedly be the last man standing. Surviving accounts suggest that Peter had a herculean capacity for both work and drink: reportedly downing thirty to forty glasses of wine daily, he was nonetheless lucid enough to enact sweeping domestic reforms and make Russia a formidable European power. According to these legends, even in his early teens Peter drank a pint of vodka and a bottle of sherry over breakfast, followed by about eight more bottles before going to outside to play.12 Certainly such astronomical quantities should be met with some skepticism, as they far exceed the amount of liquor that would trigger death by alcohol poisoning. Still, it is clear that Peter was a heavy drinker, even by Russian standards.

  By the time he wrested complete control of Russia from his sister Sophia, the teenage Peter already had an entourage of boyar princes, confidants, and advisors from his youth, which was spent primarily at the royal estate of Novo-Preobrazhenskoe northeast of Moscow. Like most boys, the young Peter played war games with his friends—but instead of toys, Peter and the sons of fellow nobles used actual soldiers in their military maneuvers. As Peter matured, so too did his band of warriors, and his Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards became the first and most accomplished regiments of the imperial Russian Army.13

  Since his father died when Peter was only three and his mother was preoccupied with dynastic infighting, Peter’s upbringing was left to his tutor, Nikita Zotov, and his governor, Prince Boris Golitsyn, who routinely took Peter to the so-called “German quarter”—the eastern fringe of Moscow that housed the city’s settlers from Western Europe. It was there—surrounded by drunks and whores—that the young co-tsar learned to drink.14

  Whether in the taverns of the German quarter, the garrison at Preobrazhenskoe, or the royal court in the Kremlin, Peter became fast friends with those who shared his intestinal fortitude, before appointing them to positions of power regardless of qualifications. Paul Yaguzhinsky, the son of Moscow’s Lutheran church organist, met Peter in the German quarter, where he impressed the young tsar with his vivacity, work ethic, and capacity for strong drink. Peter made him Russia’s first procurator-general. With his perennial good humor, Yaguzhinsky was “the only man in Russia who could stand before the Emperor, even in his worst moods, without trembling.”15

  Fyodor Apraksin served in the Semenovsky regiment. Uneducated, unable to speak foreign languages, and having never sailed at sea, Apraksin seemed an odd choice to head Peter’s new admiralty that was crucial to Russia’s naval ambitions. However, Peter’s drinking companion was reported to have downed 180 glasses of wine in a three-day span—a (likely embellished) feat he repeatedly boasted to foreign ambassadors.16

  From the rival Preobrazhensky regiment arose Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, a lowly, semi-literate soldier. Versatile, energetic, and loyal—Menshikov shared the tsar’s sense of humor and immense capacity for alcohol, quickly becoming Peter’s favorite. There is some suggestion that Peter and his “Aleksasha” were more than just friends: the Preobrazhensky chancellery hinted that the two “lived in sin.” Moreover, in 1698, a drunken merchant was arrested for blurting out that Peter took Menshikov to his bed “like a whore.”17 Whatever their personal relationship, Menshikov became Peter’s personal envoy and most trusted confidant.

  Back in the German quarter, Peter met the gregarious Swiss mercenary François “Franz” Lefort, who became perhaps the greatest enabler of Peter’s alcoholism. Lefort endeared himself to the young tsar by his frankness, unselfish friendship, outgoing personality, and legendary drinking abilities. Peter covered Lefort’s debts, promoted him to positions of political importance, and even built him a palace in the German quarter. After long days of royal politics, Peter escaped nightly to Lefort’s den, where he “soon found himself contentedly sitting in a haze of tobacco smoke, a tankard of beer on the table, a pipe in his mouth and his arm around the waist of a giggling girl.” In 1692 the young (married) tsar took a warming to one of Lefort’s concubines, Anna Mons—daughter of the German wine merchant. “The easy-mannered beauty was exactly what Peter wanted: She could match him drink for drink and joke for joke.” She would become the tsar’s mistress for the next eleven years.18

  Lefort did much more than simply provide Peter with wine and women: he also coordinated Peter’s so-called Grand Embassy of 1697–98—a massive diplomatic mission to Western Europe by 250 Russian ambassadors, officials, and attendants who accompanied the young tsar, who traveled incognito under the name Peter Mikhailov. During their European tour, Lefort met the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, on whom he made an indelible impression: “[Alcohol] never overcomes him, but he always continues master of his reason… no one can rival him… he does not leave his pipe and glass till three hours after sunrise.”19

  Historians have long highlighted just how significant Peter’s impressions of Europe turned out to be: the shipbuilding and nautical expertise learned from Dutch shipbuilders and English admirals shaped Russia’s naval ambitions; knowledge of European science, customs, and governance prompted Peter’s westernizing reforms. Yet rarely do they mention the impressions Peter’s entourage left on Europe, which often involved huge tabs for alcoholic feasts at all manner of inns, taverns, and guesthouses—and all left unpaid. In one day with Admiral Peregrine Osborne, the marquis of Cærmarthen—Peter’s newfound English drinking companion, whom Peter rewarded with a monopoly on importing tobacco into Russia—local nobles marveled how the young tsar “drank a pint of sherry and a bottle of brandy for his morning draught; after that, about eight more bottles of sack, and so went to the playhouse.”20

  Upon their first meeting in 1697, English king William III ingratiated himself to the young tsar with the gift of an exquisite royal yacht. Yet their relationship ended badly when, at their final drunken banquet, Peter’s favorite pet monkey (who always sat on the back of the tsar’s chair) became agitated and attacked the king. More unpleasant surprises were in store for William even after his Russian guests departed—later receiving a bill from the aristocrats whose residences housed the raucous delegation during their stay. “The in-door habits of Peter and his retinue were, it appears from the estimates of damages, filthy in the extreme,” concluded one government survey, chronicling the soiled linens, broken furniture and windows, and slashed curtains and paintings. The returning hosts were livid to find the destruction of their prized gardens, including a prized holly hedge—nine feet high, five feet thick and four hundred feet long—that had been perforated by wheelbarrows. “I can hear the laugh of Peter, as with brute force, stimulated by drink, he drove the wheelbarrow with Prince Menzikoff [sic] upon it, into the prickly holly hedge, five feet in thickness,” ruminated one nineteenth-century writer.21

  Upon returning to Moscow, Peter spent more evenings dining with Lefort than in the Kremlin palaces. Since his modest residence was too small to continually host the tsar’s banquets, Peter commissioned a massive addition to Lefort’s estate: a magnificent stone mansion replete with wine cellars and a banquet hall that could hold fifteen hundred drunken revelers. Much as Stalin had his dacha and Ivan had his fortress at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, so too Peter created an unofficial capital and private counter court free of traditional Kremlin rules and conventions.22

 
From a fraternity of drinking companions, this motley collection of distinguished regents, retinues, youthful guards, and foreign adventurers evolved into Peter’s “All-Mad, All-Drunken, All-Jesting Assembly,” which openly mocked the traditions and mannerisms of the imperial court. Indeed, many in his raucous “Jolly Company”—foreigners and guards of low birth—would never have been allowed in the traditional court in the first place.23 Whether at the imperial residence at Preobrazhenskoe, Lefort’s clubhouse in the German district, or the noble residences of Moscow and later St. Petersburg, this “Jolly Company” traveled everywhere with Peter—drinking, feasting, and debauching, much to the horror of Russian conservatives.24

  A typical drunken banquet at the mock court began around noon and often lasted for days. The good-natured Peter enjoyed seeing his friends drunk; the squeamish were considered suspect and lost the tsar’s favor. Peter’s toasts began immediately—starting with vodka followed by rounds of strong wines and English beers—served in massive glasses so that “every one of the guests is fuddled before the soup is served up.”25 As liquor unleashed their inhibitions, the revelers made grandiose speeches and raised innumerable toasts, each met with a blast of trumpets or artillery salvos over the cheers and fisticuffs of the rambunctious crowd. The more prodigious drinkers partied through the night in rooms strewn with the snoring bodies of those consumed by alcohol—who later emerged reanimated to drink and feast again.

  Lampooning the ceremony and titles of the traditional court, Tsar Peter created a code of conduct for the masquerades at his new counter court—going so far as to personally beat his dearest Aleksasha Menshikov for forgetting to remove his sword before dancing. But the most dreaded penalty was the “Great Eagle”—a massive, ornate, double-handled goblet filled with 1.5 liters of vodka, to be downed on the spot. Many a visiting dignitary or lady of high standing watched in horror as besotted nobles were dragged home from the banquet by their inebriated lackeys after their turn with the Great Eagle.26