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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Vilyam Vasilyevich Pokhlebkin was last seen alive on March 26, 2000: the same day that a man with the same monogram—Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—was first elected president of Russia.

  After returning on the suburban commuter train from a meeting with his publisher in Moscow, Pokhlebkin was apparently followed from the train station, set upon by thugs, and brutally murdered in his own home. Pokhlebkin’s body—stabbed eleven times with a long-handled screwdriver—was found weeks later by his chief editor, Boris Pasternak (grandson of the world-famous author of Dr. Zhivago), who demanded that the police smash in the door to Pokhlebkin’s apartment after his dependably punctual writer suddenly stopped returning his letters.10

  According to the police investigation, none of Pokhlebkin’s most valuable possessions—his vast collection of rare manuscripts—were taken from the apartment. Moreover, according to the autopsy, Pokhlebkin had the equivalent of an entire bottle’s worth of vodka in his bloodstream—very suspicious, since despite his subject of expertise, Pokhlebkin never drank alcohol.11

  The brutal murder of Vilyam Pokhlebkin remains unsolved. Speculation continues to swirl over culprits and motives: some even alleging that he was murdered by a vengeful Pole in retaliation for securing “vodka” for the Soviets.12 As claimed by the producer of the 2005 investigative documentary Death of a Culinarian: Vilyam Pokhlebkin—which aired nationwide on Rossiya channel 1—“Pokhlebkin has reserved for himself a place in Russian history by saving Russia millions of dollars, perhaps tens of millions of dollars” by conquering Poland in this so-called vodka war. As the tragic stories of Pokhlebkin have grown, so has his legend.13

  Pokhlebkin Reconsidered

  “His name was magical. Legendary,” claimed an article in the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow) on the third anniversary of Pokhlebkin’s death. “Many believed it to be a pseudonym for an entire research institute, since one man could not know so much.” Moreover, the eulogy continued, if a debate ever erupted about Russian food or drink, “if one simply says to another ‘Pokhlebkin wrote it’—that was enough to end any dispute.”14

  Clearly, Vilyam Pokhlebkin is the unquestioned authority on vodka history. Over the past twenty years dozens of popular books and hundreds of articles and webpages—in Russian, English, and other world languages—have recounted his research and findings, his stories and anecdotes from the pages of Istoriya vodki, almost verbatim.15

  The problem is that Pokhlebkin is dead wrong, and much of his heralded Istoriya vodki is a complete fabrication.

  HISTORIAN VILYAM POKHLEBKIN (1923–2000). October 2, 1984. Source: RIA-Novosti/Prihodko

  “If you read this book,” wrote alcohol historian David Christian, “keep a bottle of strong vodka by your side to stun the more thoughtful parts of your brain.” His scathing 1994 review of Pokhlebkin in the flagship academic journal Slavic Review certainly pulled no punches. “The parts that are left should enjoy this eccentric collection of curious facts, crackpot hypotheses, phony statistics, anticapitalist polemics and stalinist snobberies without worrying if it all fits together.”16

  Christian soberly chronicles Pokhlebkin’s many inaccuracies and misleading conclusions, from his claims that no etymological dictionaries mention the word vodka to suggesting that unlike vodka, beers and mead were never subject to taxation. Beyond these, I have uncovered even more factual errors, from the sloppy—dating Ivan the Terrible’s establishment of taverns from 1533 instead of 1553—to the substantive, such as discussing the reign of Vasily III Temnyi (“the Blind”) in the 1420s, even though such a leader never existed. Perhaps he was referring to Muscovite grand prince Vasily III—but as we saw in Chapter 3, that Vasily reigned in the early 1500s, making Pokhlebkin’s timeline off by one hundred years! Whether from sloppy research or (in some cases) mistakes in translation, the sheer quantity of obvious historical inaccuracies casts serious doubt on Pokhlebkin’s authority and legend: a problem multiplied as his mistakes are renowned as unquestionable truths and reproduced far and wide.17

  David Christian’s manhandling of Russia’s culinary icon suddenly seems warranted, especially since Pokhlebkin’s “definitive” conclusion that vodka was discovered in Moscow in 1478 is far more precise than the sparse, murky evidence permits. “Most frustrating of all,” Christian writes, “Pokhlebkin often does not bother to offer evidence for his sometimes fascinating claims. How can we know if he is writing fiction or fact?”18

  Indeed, Pokhlebkin asks that his arguments be taken on trust—and for whatever reason, most Russians continue to extend him that trust. Many popular vodka books are composed not by trained historians, but rather by uncritical writers, journalists, and the culinary curious, like Pokhlebkin himself. Moreover, just as the front and back covers of Pokhlebkin’s Istoriya vodki are adorned with alluring bottles of Moskovskaya brand vodka, many such trade publications include page after page of nostalgic, full-page product placements for all manner of vodka brands—and often are printed by the publishing wing of Russia’s most famous distilleries. So perhaps the producers of such pop histories aren’t particularly interested in investigating the matter further.

  The biggest hoax of all is the so-called Soviet–Polish vodka war that allegedly prompted Pokhlebkin’s investigation. Against the backdrop of the international Peace Palace in the Hague, the nationally televised Death of a Culinarian documentary boldly proclaims: “The 1982 decision of the international arbitration in favor of the USSR indisputably secured the precedence of the creation of vodka as a uniquely Russian alcoholic drink, giving them the exclusive right to advertise under that name on international markets, with the Soviet export-advertisement slogan recognizing the founding: ‘Only vodka from Russia is genuine Russian vodka.’”19

  However, neither of the international courts of the Peace Palace—the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA)—ever heard such a case between the Soviets and their fraternal counterparts in communist Poland.20 According to Peter Maggs, a foremost expert on Russian trademark law and international commercial arbitration, “the USSR as a matter of principle did not submit to international state-versus-state arbitration, because it regarded—with considerable justification—the major international arbitration institutions as dominated by the capitalist West.”21

  This is not to suggest that there was no sparring over the geography of alcohol. As in previous battles over geographically specific alcoholic products, such as French champagne, cognac, and Bordeaux, it follows that similar disputes could arise over vodka. Throughout the 1970s, the Poles claimed that vodka had been drunk in Poland since the early fourteenth century and that by the sixteenth century distillation was taxed.22 But such a definitive, internationally recognized legal ruling “proving” beyond doubt that vodka originated in Russia simply never happened.

  Following the anti-Soviet rumblings of the Solidarity movement, one would expect that such a symbolic “victory” for the Soviets over their restless subordinates in Poland would make headlines globally—or at the very least in the Soviet Union. But even researchers at the Library of Congress could find no mention of it in the global press. Scouring the archives of the main Soviet newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiya, likewise uncovered nothing. In fact, no Russian periodical or academic journal ever mentions this alleged “case” until after the release of Pokhlebkin’s book in 1991.23

  Only recently have Russian writers stopped taking Pokhlebkin’s claims on faith and started to aggressively fact-check them. In his 2011 book Bolshoi obman (Grand Deception: Truth and Lies about Russian Vodka), Boris Rodionov concludes that virtually everything Pokhlebkin wrote about vodka was “a grandiose mystification.” Too many questions remained: If this dispute with Poland was so crucial to both Soviet finances and national pride, why wasn’t Pokhlebkin immediately given unfettered access to the Soviets’ vast archives? Why wasn’t this lone, outcast academic given an army of research assistants? And how could such a herculean research task be completed by
one man in just a few short months?

  Interviews with Yuri Zhizhin, the director of Soyuzplodoimport from 1974 to 1987, and Boris Seglin, the head of the firm’s legal department, confirmed that no one commissioned Pokhlebkin to undertake such research. Moreover, they claimed that the Poles had never taken the Soviet Union to any international court over vodka’s origins… ever.24 In a little-known 2002 interview, Zhizhin stated that Soviet relations with fraternal Poland had actually been quite amicable. The vodka question “was never even raised at the Coordination Council of Comecon”: the organization that oversaw trade among East European satellite states. “The volume of vodka traded between our countries was so small that such a dispute didn’t make sense,” claimed Zhizhin. “Since most of the world’s population already associates vodka with Russia, proving that we alone have the rights to the word ‘vodka’ is like trying to stake our claim to a perpetual motion machine. It’d be a waste of effort and money.”25

  As it turns out, not only wasn’t there such a legal dispute—there couldn’t have been, claims Peter Maggs, who has litigated international cases concerning iconic trademarks like “Smirnoff,” “Stolichnaya,” and even the likeness of the Hotel Moskva on the labels of Stoli.26 “It is a very clear principle of international trademark law that a generic term cannot be protected,” he argues. “And if there ever was a generic term, it is ‘vodka’.”27

  If the question was not raised within the Comecon, the only other international legal institution that could have adjudicated such a dispute between these two communist countries was the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which administers the main international laws regarding patents and intellectual property rights, including the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property that protects well-known trademarks. But “vodka” is not a valid trademark associated with a particular producer, such as “Levi’s,” “Toyota,” or “Coca-Cola.” The Paris Convention also lacks mechanisms to arbitrate intellectual property disputes between countries, which helped prompt the creation of the modern World Trade Organization. “Furthermore,” Maggs continues, “almost all international commercial arbitration is over contract disputes, and a trademark dispute is not a contract dispute.”28

  Taken together, these accounts finally explain why, in this “high stakes” diplomatic tiff, Poland never actually put forth a legal defense of their position (which probably would be based on the appearance of “wodka” in Polish court documents in 1405 and their taxing of distilled spirits the following century) and indeed why most Polish authorities have no knowledge of this “case” that Pokhlebkin alone claims they lost.29

  Perhaps most remarkable about Pokhlebkin’s fabrications is how they have been elevated to the status of legend: standing above serious scrutiny for two decades. While we may devise all manner of hypothetical intrigues about why the eccentric Pokhlebkin felt compelled to weave such intricate lies—both about the substantive origins of vodka and the reasons for undertaking his investigation—unfortunately such questions are doomed to lie forever unsolved, alongside the mysterious murder of Pokhlebkin himself.

  Back To Square One

  If the unquestionable Pokhlebkin is now to be questioned, we are back to where we were before we entered the Vodka Museum at Izmailovsky Park, asking again: “where does vodka come from?” Fortunately, there are other theories.

  Polish-American historian Richard Pipes has suggested Russians first learned distillation techniques from the Tatars of Asia in the sixteenth century. Whether by “pot distillation” where the alcohol was driven-out of fermented beverages in pots placed in a stove, or a “Mongolian still”—where they were left out to freeze so that ice could be removed from concentrated liquid alcohol—such indigenous experiments were crude. They were often fatal, too: producing highly concentrated “fusel oils”—poisonous liquids produced by incomplete distillation that are today used in industrial solvents and explosives. So it seems unlikely that vodka immigrated to Russia from the east.30

  Not all Russian historians agree with Pokhlebkin’s designated birthdate of vodka as 1478 or its birth place in Moscow. Some go back even further, dating vodka’s origins from the year 1250 in the ancient Russian city of Veliky Novgorod—the ancient trading outpost between the Hanseatic League and Byzantium. How did they come by this claim?

  In the early 1950s, Artemy Artsikhovsky—head of the archeology department of the prestigious Moscow State University—excavated the soil around ancient Novgorod. Deep in the waterlogged clay archeologists unearthed more than 950 well-preserved letters—written not on paper (as papermaking was not yet widely known), but etched into the bark of local birch trees. These resulting birchbark documents give a unique snapshot of everyday life in medieval northern Europe. Among these fragments of bark are numerous texts dating from the late 1300s (such as no. 3 and no. 689) that refer to the brewing of barley. While fermented beers, meads, and wines were known throughout northern Europe, distillation is an entirely different technology and constituted a historic technological achievement.

  It is tricky to interpret these documents, since they are not in Russian but, rather, an Ancient Novgorodian dialect of early Slavic and Finnish/Karelian languages. That issue notwithstanding, historian A. P. Smirnov (no relation to the vodka of the same name), focused particular attention on birchbark document no. 65, which clearly includes the letters that spell the word , pronounced vodja.

  Linguists agree that the word vodka is the diminutive form of the Slavic word for water: voda. Certainly vodja sounds a lot like the Russians’ dear “little water,” vodka. Since letter no. 65 dates from the mid-thirteenth century, therefore—according to Smirnov—this supposedly “most important document in the history of the production of vodka” dates its birth to 1250.31

  If this sounds like an even bigger stretch than Pokhlebkin’s fabrication, that’s because it is. First of all, Russian archaeologists determined that the stratum in which this document was found dates from the early fourteenth century at the earliest. Besides, any archeologist knows that fieldwork is never so precise as to pin down any specific year. As with Pokhlebkin, these scientists’ claims are far more precise than the evidence warrants. Second, Smirnov does not explain how or from whom the early Novgorodans learned the science of distillation, since 1250 predates the technique’s arrival even in Europe.

  NOVGOROD BIRCHBARK DOCUMENT NO. 3, CIRCA 1360–1380 C.E.

  Source: Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php?

  NOVGOROD BIRCHBARK DOCUMENT NO. 3, CIRCA 1360–1380 C.E.

  Source: Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php?

  NOVGOROD BIRCHBARK DOCUMENT NO. 689, CIRCA 1360–1380 C.E. (PART A). Source: Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php?

  NOVGOROD BIRCHBARK DOCUMENT NO. 689, CIRCA 1360–1380 C.E. (PART B). Source: Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php?

  NOVGOROD BIRCHBARK DOCUMENT NO. 65, CIRCA 1300–1320 C.E. The letters spelling can twice be seen in the bottom section, no. 65 b. Source: Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus, http://gramoty.ru/index.php?

  Finally, Smirnov’s interpretation rests on a complete distortion of the word vodja that is inconsistent with all linguistic scholarship. While Russian etymologists debate whether vodja (“he leads”) in the document has something to do with marriage, there is near-universal acknowledgment that the word is in fact a verb participle, not a noun. “Birchbark documents don’t give information about the early days of vodka,” insists Jos Schaeken, accomplished Slavic linguist and head of the international Russian Birchbark Literacy Project. “The idea of vodja = vodka should be rejected by every seri
ous scholar.”32

  So it seems we are back to square one, yet again.

  Tracing Vodka’s International Roots

  Debunking false histories is fun in its own right, but it doesn’t get us any closer to vodka’s true origins… or if there is such a truth at all. What do we know? Perhaps we need to delve deeper into the global history of alcohol.

  The first alcoholic beverages were relatively light fare: wines, meads, and beer. The natural process of fermentation, whereby yeasts interact with sugars in grape or other juices to create wine, was first observed in the Stone Age. Winemaking facilities recently unearthed in Armenia date from 4000 B.C.E. The Chinese fermented rice, honey, and fruit around 5000 B.C. Wines and beers have even been found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs.33 Yet for all the pleasure and anguish they bring, fermented beverages are relatively weak—a maximum of 15 percent alcohol by volume—when compared to the standard eighty-proof (40% alcohol) vodka that we find in liquor stores today.34 Reaching these higher concentrations can be done only through distillation—heating a fermented liquid mash above alcohol’s relatively low boiling point of 78°C. At that point the alcohol evaporates, leaving the water, mash, and impurities behind, which is then cooled and condensed in a separate container.

  Vodka—along with all modern spirits like gin, brandy, rum, and whiskey—can be traced back to the distillation by European alchemists of the twelfth century. While today we think of them as quixotic mystics forever seeking to turn metal into gold, medieval alchemists mined the scholarship of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabs for practical remedies for the body and mind, founding modern chemistry and medicine in the process. While ancient Arabs and Greeks had distilled fermented grapes, this process was only rediscovered by the alchemists in their attempts to create an elixir of longevity—a youth potion.35