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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Even the imperial ministry of finance was complicit. In 1859 it ordered governors to turn a blind eye to such abuses in the interest of squeezing every kopeck for the treasury: “A certain increase in the sale of imported beverages at higher prices does not breach the tax farm regulations and should not be regarded as an abuse on the part of the farmers, but is rather the consequence of the calculations necessary for the successful transfer to the Treasury of 366,745,056 silver rubles, which the farmers are obliged to surrender over the present four-year period.”40

  TRADITIONAL LUBOK WOODCARVING: FARNOS AND PIGASYA IN THE TAVERN. Mid-eighteenth century. The red-nosed drunkard Farnos and his wife Pigasya address the local tavern keeper in verse, part of which translates as: “Yesterday when we were here, we went broke on drinking beer. When we drank till we got dizzy, spending money was quite easy. Now, with headaches, we do whine, and we’ve come to get some wine. Bring us then, don’t torment more, beer and vodka like before. And later we’ll be glad to pay or maybe thresh you like the grain.” Translation by Alexander Boguslawski, http://tars.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/Lubok/lubfools.html.

  Another scheme to stretch one’s vodka allotment was to simply water it down. An unscrupulous tavern keeper (as most of them were) could easily dilute one bucket of 40-proof vodka into two buckets of 20-proof vodka. Even selling the drinks at the low, government-mandated price, the proceeds from one bucket would go to the tax farmer and on to the state; the rest would go into the bartender’s pocket. While drinkers expected some watering down, there were limits, as customers paid for round after round without ever getting drunk. During Russia’s notoriously frigid winters, one recourse was for the customer to simply set his vodka outside. Since standard 40-proof alcohol only freezes at -27°C (-17°F), if the customers found that their drinks had turned to ice, the busted tavern keeper could potentially have a riot on his hands!41 More often, however, the deception was begrudgingly accepted: “Moses may have worked a miracle when he drew water from a rock,” mused one nineteenth-century drinker, “but to turn water into gold requires no miraculous powers at all.”42

  Under-measuring shots was another tried-and-true tactic, which could bolster the tavern keeper’s profits another ten percent. Once bartenders introduced progressively smaller glasses, the state imposed strict controls on the size of containers, but even then undermeasuring was the norm. If—for whatever reason—a customer actually received a full measure of vodka, he often poured some back into a special container kept by the barman as an in-kind gratuity.

  In rural Russia, where money was scarce, such in-kind, barter, and credit transactions were common. But since the tavern keeper could not pay the tax farmer in IOUs, pawned clothing, livestock, or stolen goods, the networks of rural credit further entrenched the tavern keeper as the corrupt linchpin in the local economy:

  They sell on credit, and in autumn they are paid back in cattle, grain, hay, and other products, not at commercial prices, but at values fixed by the traders, who miss no opportunity to make huge profits. Quite often a peasant will pay 1½ puds [54 pounds] of flax for a bucket of vodka, allowing it to be weighed, usually when not in a sober condition, on the trader’s scales.… Often, the tavernkeepers travel, under the cover of the autumn nights, around the local villages with casks to gather the fruits of their work. In such cases, they get the householders, their workers and their women and even children drunk, and make themselves masters of the house.43

  Corruption Creeps Everywhere

  While perhaps the most odious, the tavern keeper was hardly the sole source of corruption in the villages. Tax collectors, conscription officers, and gentry land agents all conducted their daily business in the tavern over rounds of vodka. Even the parish doctor received kickbacks for prescribing vodka as a cure for every imaginable ailment. Recounting his impressions of Russia in 1843, German agriculturalist Baron August von Haxthausen described how “in the Crown villages the officials conspired with the brandy farmers, who bribed them for their connivance. Every communal and cantonal meeting was held before the brandy-shop, and all business transacted glass in hand.”44

  In this way, the corrupting influence of the vodka trade permeated even the most enduring institutions of Russian village life: the self-governing village commune (obshchina). Rather than individual farmsteads, most peasant land was held collectively in a system of mutual dependence against the threat of famine or crop failure. The village was governed by an assembly, or mir, which managed the commune’s affairs by adjudicating disputes, allocating the parcels of tillable land, and doling out the burdens of taxation and conscription imposed by the state. Such collective responsibility for taxes encouraged idleness and drunkenness over industry, as the hardworking peasant had to make up for his inebriated neighbor’s slack.45

  The peasant commune was no less corruptible than the rest of the autocratic system. Communal affairs were often decided in the tavern by a noisy majority, and almost any communal decision “may be obtained by ‘treating the Mir’—that is to say, by supplying a certain amount of vódka.”46 As one nineteenth-century commentator noted: “Of vodki there is always enough in the Mir, for it is a means of government. It circulates by the pailful at election time; it is plentiful on saints’ days, when if not drunk, the men might muster and grumble about their hardships; it comes forth again in mysterious abundance whenever, from some cause or other, the mayor gets into evil odour and wants to regain his popularity.”47

  The village court was likewise not above reproach: litigants often treated judges to drinks at the tavern or dropped off half-buckets of vodka at their homes as a “gift.” Peasants had good reason for claiming that any elder “takes a sin on his soul” upon becoming a village judge—corruption was so entrenched that one report from Smolensk explained that offering vodka as a “fee” for hearing a court case is itself “considered a law.”48 Many village taverns even had an open tab for township judges, to be paid by litigants. Often the bill would be paid twice, once by the plaintiff and once by the accused.49 If that were not enough to achieve the desired judgement, witnesses could be persuaded to alter, retract, or even invent their testimonials. “There are persons who, for a bottle of vodka, will serve as a witness in any kind of case,” claimed one nineteenth-century account in the Russian state archives. “Bribing witnesses or getting them drunk takes place everywhere, and [peasants] are so used to this that it is considered natural.”50

  Peasants risked financial ruin with a losing court judgement, as village elders usually confiscated the culprit’s tools, livestock, and even clothing to sell at auction or at the tavern in exchange for vodka.51 Nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary Sergei Stepniak explained how even a sober, honest peasant—so confident of his innocence that he needn’t stoop to bribery—succumbed to the tavern after the corrupt village judges regardless found against him in a civil dispute:

  I promised the inn-keeper to sell him my hay, at two copecks a stone, provided he would give me [vodka]; and I drank and drank till I lost my senses… from that time forth I was a lost man. Lost—absolutely lost! The tavern grew to be my only consolation. I began even to steal! Everything went from bad to worse.…I shall end in the galleys, take my word for it.52

  While vodka was often the source of a peasant’s damnation, it occasionally was also his redemption. Once the community’s punishments were levied, the accused was obliged to buy rounds of drinks at the tavern, symbolizing acceptance of the punishment and legitimacy of the customary institutions of village self-governance. By treating the village to drinks, a thief won both forgiveness and re-admittance to the community. One story from Oryol province tells of a peasant, Mikhail, who was found guilty of stealing sheep and was required to buy the village elder and his friends a half-bucket (about six liters) of vodka at the tavern. Quickly downing the offering, they promised Mikhail clemency in exchange for another half-bucket, which he reluctantly bought. Now thoroughly sauced, the judge and his friends berated Mikhail, until he snuck ba
ck home, which enraged the elders. After finishing their drinks, they went to Mikhail’s home, angrily rejected his pleas for forgiveness, and demanded more vodka. When Mikhail cursed them as drunks and thieves, they requisitioned a wheel from his wagon to be sold for vodka. They then tethered a heavy sack of oats to his back and leading the humiliated Mikhail through the village streets back to the tavern, where he was forced to pawn his clothes for another three liters. With this last offering, the village leaders finally let him off with a stern reprimand—things would end much worse if he ever so insulted the community by stealing again.53

  Holy Riot: Vodka And The Church

  Speaking of redemption, you might think that if any institution was above corruption and inebriety, it would be the Orthodox Church. You’d be wrong. “The drunkenness in all classes strikes Russian statesmen with dismay,” wrote Lady Frances Parthenope Verney—influential writer and elder sister of Florence Nightingale, “and the priests and the popes, are among the worst delinquents. They are fast losing the authority they once had over the serfs, when they formed part of the great political system, of which the Tsar was the religious and political head. A Russian official report says that ‘the churches are now mostly attended by women and children, while the men are spending their last kopeck, or getting deeper into debt, at the village dram shop.’”54

  As the ecclesiastical wing of the Russian political system, it makes sense that even the local clergy came to worship vodka almighty. Whether from the tax farmers or gentry distillers, local priests at first got a small cut of all of the drink sold in their parish, later replaced by lump-sum payments “nominally as an Easter gift, but on the tacit understanding that they are to push the sale of vodki by every means in their power. The pious men do not go the length of urging their parishioners to get drunk,” claimed one account, “but they multiply the church feasts whereon revelry is the custom; they affirm that stimulants are good for the health because of the cold climate, and they never reprove a peasant whose habitual intemperance is notorious.”55

  In his Provincial Sketches, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin claimed that even the contracts the vodka farmers negotiated with the imperial senate expressly commanded all parish priests to strictly observe every saint’s day, fête, and royal birthday. Heeding the call of the church bells, the pious peasants abandoned the field for the festival or sanctuary, after which they received their benediction in drunkenness and debauchery at the nearby tavern, leaving the harvest to rot in the fields.56

  Even communal hospitality undermined the authority of the Orthodox priests. One traditional practice was that of pomoch’, or, quite literally, “help.” Ideally, pomoch’ entailed the voluntary collaboration of the community for the benefit of the local parish priest, whose only income came from meager fees for blessings and administering sacraments.57 From basic maintenance of the sanctuary and residence to raising crops to support his family, there simply was too much work for the priest alone.

  The problem is that Russian peasants were not predisposed toward the degree of voluntarism we might associate with an Amish barn-raising. The priest often begged for help, which was only forthcoming if booze was involved. As nineteenth-century Russian parish priest Ivan Bellyustin explained:

  Pomoch’ is inconceivable without vodka. The work begins with vodka; it continues with vodka; it ends with vodka. In this case the misfortune is twofold: if you do not give the peasant plenty to drink, he will work poorly out of annoyance; if you do, he will work poorly because he is so inebriated that he cannot work well.… Thus cultivation of the land through pomoch’ provides the priest with the worst possible support. Grain that he obtained from the soil costs him as much as it would if he bought it. Thus all his pains, toil, anxieties go virtually unrewarded. That is why most priests would have abandoned the soil long ago if only it were possible.58

  Compounding the problem, the moral authority of the priest—along with any entreaties to temperance—was undercut by the fact that on pomoch’ Sundays he himself poured the liquor until his parishioners were drunk. If the priest ever browbeat his flock for their drunkenness, he would surely never get their “help” again. So in order to get the fields plowed and repairs done, the priest would take a drink—then another, and another—until he became just as sodden as his sinful flock. Meanwhile, the drunken handiwork was often so shoddy that it had to be redone almost immediately, beginning the whole sad process anew. In the end, the priest spent an unforgivable amount of money on vodka and materials and got nothing but headaches and hangovers.59

  The Orthodox Church’s multitude of holidays presented further opportunities for the priest’s undoing. During Easter, for instance, the village priest proceeded from house to house with his holy icons. At each peasant hut the distinguished guest was offered food and drink. Lest he offend the master of the house and ensure never receiving his help in the future, the priest dared not refuse the gift of vodka. “By the time he has gone through the whole village even the most cautious, sturdiest soul hardly has the strength to perform his duty,” Bellyustin reported. “A priest who is less cautious or whose constitution is weaker simply passes out. And what scandals do not occur when the priest is in such a condition!”60

  How could the clergy ever escape such omnipresent intemperance? As early as the 1630s Adam Olearius described inebriated priests who stumbled through the streets dispensing blessings in their underwear, having pawned their cloaks. “Since such spectacles may be seen daily,” he claimed, “none of the Russians are astonished by them.”61 Two and a half centuries later, Bellyustin painted a similar picture of the typical village priest as the ever-present, unwanted, and drunken guest who long ago surrendered his piety to drunkenness, bribery, and thievery. These pervasive, corrupting influences provide insight into the infamous Russian proverb: “All steal except Christ” (and its blasphemous addendum: “and He would too, if his hands weren’t nailed to the cross.”)62

  Virtually the only group beyond reproach was the sect of so-called “Old Believers,” who were persecuted as heretics for resisting the seventeenth-century ecumenical reforms of the Russian church. These most conservative “schismatics” (raskolniki) of the Orthodox faith fiercely rejected the alterations to sacred texts and traditional rites that followed the great church schism (raskol) of the mid-seventeenth century as well as such modern social innovations as tobacco and distilled liquors. As a result, while the Russian authorities openly oppressed—exiled, imprisoned, even tortured—the Old Believers as a threat to both church and state, in their seclusion they established a reputation for incorruptibility, industriousness, temperance, and integrity. It is a blunt, yet telling illustration that the imperial Russian state would for so long and so vociferously condemn those dedicated to honesty, purity, and sobriety as a threat to the corrupt system of autocratic governance, which promoted thriftlessness, indolence, and inebriety.63

  Since feudal Russia was so vast, so poor in capital, and so lacking in effective administration, such coercion-intensive measures like vodka tax farming made sense. Unfortunately, continuing to rely on the unscrupulous tax farmers to quench the insatiable thirst of the imperial treasury only entrenched Russia’s twin miseries of alcohol and corruption. “Upon closer inspection,” concludes the influential Kolokol exposé that placed tax reform on the political agenda, “the treasury receives so little benefit in proportion to the losses of the people, that all would likely say with revulsion—was all of this worth the soiling of our conscience and honor?”64

  A Tenacious Legacy

  Corruption is a weed that grows in the cracks between the public and the private, between the political and the economic. So it makes sense that the roots of this weed go down all the way to the feudal origins of the Russian state, where these distinctions were blurred: when the interests of the state reflected those of the ruling classes and private profits were interlaced with public taxes in the name of the state.65

  But what does this history lesson tell us about Russia’s corru
pt governance sistema today and the prospects for Navalny and the anti-corruption movement? Today, as back then, the divisions between politics and business in Russia are horribly blurred. Kremlin politics has taken on a distinctly feudal character—a ruling caste dominating a system of vassals in which political loyalty and profitable public positions are bought and sold. Then, as now, corrupt practices among the political leadership provide a model for the rest of society—which in turn casts doubt on who is actually in control: the government or the agents of corruption? Then, as now, the state is saddled with an inefficient, corrupt, and ever-growing bureaucracy that nobody designed and nobody seems to control.66 Now, as then, the resulting economic incentive is to invest in bribes rather than legitimate business practices to spare harassment by the authorities, which only further entrenches these practices. Now, as then, this systemic corruption hinders economic development by obstructing investment and inhibiting trade.67

  Intriguingly, there is implicit acknowledgment by contemporary Kremlin opponents that now, as then, vodka politics is part of the problem. In his closing defense of a politically motivated embezzlement trial in July 2013—allegedly orchestrated to discredit him and prevent him from holding future office—Alexei Navalny declared he would “do everything possible to defeat this feudal regime… under which 83 percent of national wealth belongs to 0.5 percent of the population.” Navalny challenged the judge, those assembled in the courtroom, and those watching the live online broadcast to consider what benefits they’ve seen from skyrocketing oil and gas revenues over the past decade.