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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Dostoevsky’s diaries contain fragments from early drafts of The Drunkards, including the following exchange, which sounds downright Chernyshevskian:

  —We drink because there is nothing to do.

  —You lie!

  —It’s because there is no morality.

  —Yes, and there is no morality…

  —Because for a long time there has been nothing to do.41

  Were that not enough to make his position clear, Dostoevsky privately confided: “The consumption of alcoholic beverages brutalizes and makes a man savage, hardens him, distracts him from bright thoughts, blunts all good propaganda and above all weakens the will, and in general uproots any kind of humanity.”42 A close reading of Crime and Punishment clearly reveals Dostoevsky’s denunciation of alcohol as an impediment to the blossoming of Russian society.

  Contemporaries read it that way, too—including the great Tolstoy, author of such classics as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Tolstoy admired Crime and Punishment more as a temperance parable than psycho-thriller. Tolstoy demanded that it was alcohol that clouded Raskolnikov’s judgment and led to his inhuman axe murders: “The greatest possible lucidity of thought is particularly important for the correct solution of the question which arises,” wrote Tolstoy, “and it is then that one glass of beer, one smoked cigarette can impair the solution of the problem, hinder its solution, deafen the voice of the conscience, and cause the question to be decided in favor of one’s lower animal nature, as it was with Raskolnikov.”43

  In his famous 1890 essay, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” Tolstoy invoked Raskolnikov to argue that humans have both a physical and a spiritual existence and that they turn to alcohol and drugs to suffocate their higher spirituality, concluding that the entire purpose of drinking was to blind one’s own conscience and put oneself in the state of mind to rape, murder, and rob.44 Like his predecessors, Tolstoy was a literary realist who exposed social and political inadequacies, and as with Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky, vodka topped that list. Since his international celebrity status afforded him greater leeway with the censors, Tolstoy wrote straightforward nonfiction essays in which he need not cloak his words.

  While Tolstoy admitted hating the “bedbug-stinking” Chernyshevsky and his dangerous radicalism, when in 1886 he composed his foremost political treatise he gave it a familiar-sounding title: What Is to Be Done? Even given their profound personal and political disagreements, both similarly condemned the tsarist autocracy and capitalist order for profiting from the misery of the lower classes.45

  While conventional Marxists highlighted the plight of urban factory workers as the oppressed proletariat, Tolstoy looked to the rural peasantry: “freed” from serfdom, but still burdened by the local landlord, the state, the village commune, and above all, by vodka. “Observe toward autumn how much wealth is gathered together in villages,” Tolstoy began.

  Then come the demands of taxes, rents, recruiting; then the temptations of vodka, marriages, feasts, peddlers, and all sorts of other snares; so that in one way or other, this property, in all its various forms, passes into the hands of strangers, and is taken first to provincial towns and from them to the capitals. A villager is compelled to dispose of all these in order to satisfy the demands made upon him, and the temptations offered him, and, having this dispensed his goods, he is left in want, and must follow [to the cities] where his wealth has been taken.46

  Once there, the peasant is tempted by sin and alcohol, leading even the most temperate to succumb to drunkenness, poverty, and ruin.

  “Let us not deceive ourselves,” Tolstoy wrote in laying bare the motivations of the capitalist bourgeoisie,

  all that [the worker] makes and devises he makes and devises for the purposes of the government or of the capitalist and the rich people. The most cunning of his inventions are directly aimed either at injuring the people—as with cannon, torpedoes, solitary confinement cells, apparatus for the spirit monopoly, telegraphs, and so forth, or… for things by which people can be corrupted and induced to part with the last of their money—that is, their last labour—such as, first of all vodka, spirits, beer, opium, and tobacco.47

  Tolstoy went to great lengths to underscore how vodka was both the source of the peasant’s poverty and the autocracy’s wealth.

  Count Tolstoy’s inward dedication to the common people was matched by an outward one. Born into affluence and plenty, Tolstoy chose to till the land by hand with a simple scythe in a simple tunic, as peasants had done for ages. In the peasant’s blind faith he sought salvation from his own spiritual restlessness and doubt. “Was it reason that helped them to bear the burden of their existence?” asked Tolstoy biographer Henri Troyat. No—it was their unquestioning Christianity. “They drew their courage from the most simple blind faith, as taught by the pope in the little country church with the tarnished gilt cupola. God, like vodka, was to be swallowed at a gulp, without thinking.”48

  Tolstoy emulated everything about the peasant except their reliance on alcohol, which clouded their spiritual endeavors. To that end, in 1887, Tolstoy built his own temperance society, the Union against Drunkenness (Soglasie protiv p’yanstva), consisting of adherents who pledged not only abstinence from alcohol but also to publicize its harmful effects. As with previous grass-roots temperance activities, the tsarist autocracy refused to officially recognize the organization.

  Tolstoy’s temperance was both a moral statement and a political one, as he chastised the Russian Orthodox Church for relations with the tsarist state that hindered the spiritual and material advancement of the people. True Christian dedication—Tolstoy maintained—was based on universal love rather than dogmatism. His resulting pacifism would inspire world leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., and since the state was the sole instrument of warfare, this necessitated also that Tolstoy take an anarchist position against the autocracy. In 1901, the Orthodox Church officially excommunicated the great writer for such blasphemy.49

  Blackballed by both church and state, Tolstoy’s authority only grew. One popular joke held that Russia had two tsars: Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy.50 His Christian-anarchist philosophy drew followers both at home and abroad, and his church was built on a foundation of temperance. “Intoxication,” he wrote, “no matter of what kind, is the sin, abandonment to which makes struggle with any other sin impossible; the intoxicated person will not struggle with idleness, nor with list, nor with fornication, nor with the love of power. And so in order to struggle with the other sins, a man must first of all free himself from the sin of intoxication.”51

  It is impossible to understand Tolstoy without his opposition to alcohol: it was not just the cornerstone of his religion; it was also the basis for his fearless opposition to the Russian autocracy. In November 1896 Tolstoy angrily rebuffed a request to meet with the powerful finance minister, Sergei Witte. Instead Tolstoy wrote Witte—the architect of Russia’s newly reestablished vodka monopoly—arguing that “the chief evil from which mankind suffers and the disorders of life come from the activities of the government.… The government not only permits but encourages the manufacture and distribution of the poisonous evil of liquor, from the sale of which comes one-third of the budget. In my opinion, if the government really was making every effort for the good of the people, then the first step should be the complete prohibition of the poison which destroys both the physical and the spiritual well-being of millions of people.”52

  It seems we have now come full circle. Despite Tolstoy’s deep loathing for Chernyshevsky and the radicalism he inspired, their critiques of autocracy through vodka are virtually indistinguishable. But instead of facing banishment to Siberia for their opposition, many Tolstoyans within the government—and even the royal family—welcomed the old man’s wisdom, imploring him to advise Tsar Nicholas II to “help save Russia.” Tolstoy replied in the starkest possible terms, writing directly to the tsar that both His state and His alcohol monopoly were guilty of shackling the people. This tension
between the autocracy and the people’s progress and well-being could not continue. “That is why it is impossible to maintain this form of government, and the orthodoxy that is attached to it, except by violence,” he concluded.53

  Tolstoy never received a reply from the tsar, though the number of plainclothes secret police observers around his Yasnaya Polyana estate outside Tula increased markedly. Despite the similarity of their denunciations, the state could hardly send the famed Tolstoy to the same Siberian exile that left Chernyshevsky a broken man—leaving him instead to wander the countryside as a monkish and tormented sage in a threadbare peasant’s sheath.54

  Taking It To The People

  Tolstoy wasn’t alone in seeing Russia’s peasantry as victims of autocracy, capitalism, and vodka. While the count embarked on a lifelong spiritual journey to the countryside, other educated city folk made sporadic—and ultimately unsuccessful—excursions to “the people” in hopes of inciting them to topple the tsar.

  Many of these would-be revolutionaries were less inspired by Tolstoy’s pacifism and other-serving Christian asceticism than by the single-minded revolutionary abstinence of Chernyshevsky’s heroes in What Is to Be Done? They gave up alcohol, sex, and worldly pleasure as distractions not from spiritual enlightenment (as per Tolstoy) but, rather, from the cause of proletarian revolution. Leaving their comfortable urban dormitories, many so-called narodniki (populists) went to the countryside—not to learn from the simple peasant as Tolstoy did—but to overcome their simplicity and ignorance that caused their oppression and misery. All the peasants needed, the narodniki thought, was a vanguard of Chernyshevskian “great men” to lead them to revolt. Eventually scuttled by the imperial authorities, the movement ended in complete failure, partly because its valorization of the rural poor was misplaced. Once in the countryside, the narodniki came face to face with the obstacles of autocracy: namely, a population hopelessly mired in superstition and vodka.55

  In the tradition of literature-as-political-commentary, another great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev, published his last novel, Virgin Soil (1877), on this very theme. Early on Turgenev describes the reality of the village that confronted the narodniki newcomers.

  It was Saturday evening; there were few passing in the street; but, on the other hand, the taverns were crammed. They could hear hoarse voices, drunken singing, mingling with the nasal sound of an accordion.… At times, a peasant, with his shirt and waistcoat open, his belt loosened, on his head a winter cap, of which the top hung down over his back like a bag, would be seen staggering out of the tavern, resting his chest against one of the shafts and standing there still, groping about with his hands, as if seeking for something; or else it was some puny, feeble factory hand, his cap all awry, his feet bare—his boots being left in pawn at the tavern—who, after staggering a little, would stop, scratch his neck, and, with a sudden exclamation, retrace his steps.

  “That’s what’s killing the Russian peasant,” gloomily professed Turgenev’s hero Markelov—“vodka.” As they pass tavern upon tavern, his coachman morosely notes “It’s to drown sorrow.”56

  Reminiscent of Chernyshevsky’s implication of alcohol as the primary affliction of the old order, Turgenev’s narodniki likewise diagnose the condition of Russia in prose.

  Sleep.

  It was long since I had seen the place of my birth, but I found there no change. Deathlike torpor, absence of thought, roofless houses, ruined walls, filth, and vileness, and poverty, and misery, the insolent or sullen looks of slaves, all is as before.…the peasants are sleeping the sleep of death; the gather in the harvest, they toil in the fields—they sleep; they thresh the corn, still sleeping; father, mother, and children all asleep. He who beats and he who is beaten, both sleep. The tavern alone is awake, its eye always open. And clasping between its five fingers a jug of brandy, its head toward the North Pole, its feet at the Caucasus, sleeps in an eternal sleep—

  Russia, the holy country!57

  Turgenev was no fan of the socialists’ “to the people” campaign, portraying them as fish out of water, especially in the village tavern. “I went into six taverns,” complains Alexei Nezhdanov, the main narodniki protagonist. “I can’t bear that drug vodka! How can our peasants drink it as they do? It is inconceivable! If it is necessary to drink vodka in order to simplify ourselves, then no, thank you!” Underscoring the culture clash the revolutionaries encountered, Turgenev concludes: “What hard work it is for an ascetic to bring himself into contact with real life!”58

  In many ways, the culmination of the story comes when the revolutionary Nezhdanov gets uproariously drunk in the tavern, invoking the “slumber” of the peasantry as he incites them to riot:

  “Hulloh!” he shouted, “are you asleep? Get up! the hour has come. Down with taxation; down with the proprietors!”59

  Ironically, the peasants initially mistook Nezhdanov’s ravings for drunkenness. Yet as his words gained traction, he was welcomed by a burly, approving peasant into the tavern, where—unsurprisingly—things went awry for the young intellectual. To prove his allegiance with his peasant comrades, the firebrand lightweight accepted round after round of their vodka-laced hospitality.

  Ugh! He swallowed it with the resolution of despair, as he would have marched up to a battery or to a line of bayonets. But, heavens, what has happened? Something struck him down his back and legs, burned his throat, and chest, and stomach, and brought tears to his eyes—a qualm of nausea, which he could hardly conquer, ran over his whole body. He shouted as loud as he could the first thing that came into his head, to dull that terrible feeling….

  A voice shouted again, “Drink!” and Nezhdanov swallowed another draught of the vile poison. It was as if iron hooks were tearing him inside, his head began to spin, green circles were turning before his eyes. There was a ringing in his ear—a roar. Horror—a third glass! Is it possible that he swallowed it? Red noses flew toward him; dusty heads of hair, sunburned necks, furrowed, scarred throats. Hairy hands took hold of him. “Come, finish your speech!” shouted wild voices. “Come, speak! Day before yesterday a stranger, like you, told us lots of things. Go on! You four-legged son of a sea cook!”

  The earth waved beneath Nezhdanov’s feet. His voice sounded strange to him, as if some one else was speaking. Could he be dead?60

  He wasn’t dead, of course, but he well could have been had the naive narodnik not been carried away from the frenzied crowd by his more level-headed comrade, Paul. As the peasants pressed for his views as Paul hauled away the drunken revolutionary we get perhaps the best taste of Tugenev’s disdain for the narodniki: “It would be perfect, if there were no masters and if the whole world belonged to us, of course,” he replied. “But, up to the present time, there has been no ukase [government decree] ordering that.”61

  Like the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil spurned Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary ideology, all the while sharing the same language of all of Russia’s great writers—the language of vodka.

  The Brothers Ulyanov

  Historian Orlando Figes argues that letting Chernyshevsky’s brilliantly awful novel slip through their fingers was one of the tsarist state’s greatest mistakes, “for it converted more people to the cause of the revolution than all of the Marx and Engels put together.”62 And that gets it just about right, as the educated Russian youth of the 1870s and 1880s became increasingly restive and the universities churned out revolutionaries who made the “populist” narodniki look amateurish by comparison.

  The most infamous group inspired by Chernyshevsky came to be known as Narodnaya volya or the People’s Will. This faction of perhaps five hundred revolutionary radicals sought to replace the “propaganda of ideas” condemning the autocratic system with the “propaganda by deed”—in the process becoming the first modern terrorist organization. For them, Alexander II’s emancipatory reforms did not go far enough: the people could never be truly free until the tsarist system was destroyed, which could best be achieved
by assassinating key government officials, members of the royal family, and the tsar himself.63

  On a cold Sunday in St. Petersburg in March of 1881, the tsar-liberator Alexander II fell victim to the People’s Will. That Sunday, as on every Sunday, the tsar’s motorcade was riding along the Griboedov (literally, mushroom-eater) Canal when a revolutionary chucked a bomb at the bulletproof horse-drawn carriage of the tsar, killing one of the tsar’s Cossack guards and injuring nearby civilians. Stepping out to survey the damage, Alexander was easy prey for a second revolutionary, whose bomb killed both tsar and assassin. The magnificent Church of the Savior on the Spilt Blood was erected in the middle of the street to commemorate the very spot where the tsar met his gruesome end.

  The assassination prompted a police clampdown, domestic espionage, and the infiltration of radical student groups. Since explicit meetings of revolutionary groups could land them in jail or Siberia, radical students held innocent-looking parties—replete with music, dancing, and gratuitous amounts of vodka—as a front for serious back-room plotting. And in a now-familiar pattern, the revelers served their guests “enough strong drink to soften their vigilance”: and occasionally potential collaborators revealed themselves as stool pigeons for the police.64

  One extreme, Chernyshevsky-inspired group was the Terrorists’ Faction of the People’s Will. Its leader was a young biology student at the University of St. Petersburg named Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known later by his nom de guerre, Lenin. Inspired to revolution, Aleksandr set aside his study of sea spiders to learn bomb making. On the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, the elder Ulyanov was arrested with a larger circle of comrades-in-arms as they planned to hurl bombs at the new tsar, Alexander III, as he rode down the Nevsky Prospekt after paying tribute to his slain father at the Church on the Spilt Blood. Despite the radicals’ best efforts, the secret police had infiltrated the organization and found sufficient reason to arrest everyone.