Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State
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In Sterlitamak, over 10,000 reservists began a disturbance that is threatening devastation of the entire city. The havoc began at the liquor warehouse that was ransacked. The assistant superintendent has been wounded when the police guards opened fire. The stores and shops are all closed on account of the devastation of the property of the residents.… We never had this sort of disturbance during the war with Japan.11
Why were the tsar and his military leaders so blissfully unaware of this epidemic of drunken riots? Perhaps they simply chose not to acknowledge the severity of the problem. More likely, the leadership simply never found out.
“In Russia, ministers have no right to say what they really think,” Russia’s foreign minister candidly acknowledged to an audience of foreign dignitaries at the outbreak of the war. Since all of Russian officialdom owed their offices, entitlements, and salaries to the benevolence of the tsar, there was little incentive to deliver bad news or otherwise rock the boat.12
Perhaps this explains why, despite reams of evidence to the contrary in the archives of each respective ministry, Tsar Nicholas received nothing but glowing reports of prohibition’s benefits from the minister of war, Gen. Vladimir Sukhomlinov, Assistant Interior Minister Vasily Gurko, and Finance Minister Bark, among others.13 Widespread reports claimed that the tsar’s prohibition was “universally approved by all his official representatives and Russia’s best people.”14 Such glowing statements accompanied a mass of letters and petitions to the tsar from his grateful subjects imploring that he make the temporary measures into a permanent prohibition decree.15
Despite his growing temperance inclinations, Nicholas could not simply order an eternal prohibition, since almost one-third of the revenues of the entire Russian government came from the vodka monopoly. So in August 1914 Nicholas commissioned his most trusted and experienced ministers to study the feasibility of prohibition by identifying replacements for the lost vodka revenues—a truly herculean task given the wartime circumstances. The commission was chaired by State Comptroller Pyotr Kharitonov and included Finance Minister Bark, trusted former Prime Minister Sergei Witte, and the ministers of agriculture, transportation, and commerce as well as prominent professors and experts on state finance, who together quickly drafted a plan to patch the gaping hole in the budget with a hodgepodge mix of taxes on income, transport, tobacco, textiles, and government bonds and foreign loans.16
Read in hindsight, the report is equal parts comedy, tragedy, and horror. The top civilian and royal leaders of the Romanov empire gambled on the blind faith that prohibition would somehow unleash the long-dormant economic capacity of Russian society, just as millions of its most productive members put down their scythes and marched off to the front. Finance Minister Bark wagered the stability of the empire itself on a miracle—one that never came. In late August 1914, Bark personally delivered to an approving tsar the report confirming exactly what Nicholas wanted to hear: vodka’s budgetary contributions were apparently quite minor, and their loss through a permanent prohibition could be easily overcome with a few painless reforms.17
With the revenue matter supposedly resolved by his most trusted ministers and the mobilization benefits of prohibition being hailed throughout the empire and by temperance advocates abroad, there was little stopping the tsar from enacting his most benevolent decree—forever banishing the liquor evil that had long tormented his dearest subjects. The tragic death of Prince Oleg provided the opportunity to attach greater symbolic meaning to prohibition, but it was still a decision based on bad information and even worse calculations.18
From Prohibition To Revolution
Ultimately the strains of total war were too great for the tsarist regime: the mobilization of fifteen million men disrupted industrial and agricultural production just when both were needed more than ever. Russia’s fragile railway infrastructure collapsed from the strain of war, hampering the delivery of food and fuel to beleaguered cities like Moscow and Petrograd. A string of demoralizing military defeats at the front unleashed a wave of deserters, who only added to the widespread hostility with the incompetent tsar and his regime. Nicholas’s actions did not help: his inept handling of the war effort at the front and the rapid turnover of key ministerial positions made governance uncertain, unstable, and ineffective.
Frustrations boiled over in February 1917, as striking factory workers and hungry citizens staged mass demonstrations in the capital, Petrograd. The military garrison called on to suppress the rioters refused to fire on their own people and defected to the demonstrators. Boldly defying the tsar, liberal Duma deputies held session to hastily form a so-called Provisional Government. Drawing on the experiences of the 1905 Revolution, workers in the capital created a separate representative body—the Petrograd Soviet, or Council—representing the city’s disgruntled workers and soldiers. The train on which Nicholas was returning from the front to reclaim his lost capital was blockaded by striking railroad workers and mutinous soldiers. Informed that he no longer had the support of his military commanders, the tsar sheepishly abdicated his throne (ironically, from the train’s saloon car), ending three centuries of imperial Romanov rule.19
Beyond simply mapping the empire’s road to ruin, historians and social scientists have long tried to explain what causes social revolutions in general and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular.20 Explanations for the demise of the imperial Russian regime usually come from one of two camps—one focusing on proximate causes associated with the strains of Great War, the other faulting long-term structural weaknesses and contradictions of Russia’s autocratic statecraft that made systemic collapse virtually unavoidable.21
Remarkably, vodka politics contributes to arguments on both sides. Much of this book has highlighted the fundamental dilemma of utilizing vodka as a tool of autocratic statecraft, yet no historical study has explicitly considered the role of vodka politics in felling the once mighty Romanov empire. This consistent omission is even more baffling when one realizes how thoroughly vodka politics permeated even the most often cited proximate causes for the collapse of the empire: widespread and systemic discontent with the tsarist system, the collapse of the economy amid wartime hyperinflation, and the breakdown of Russia’s infrastructure under the burdens of total war.
Distillation And Its Discontents
Accurately measuring a leader’s popularity is difficult even in modern dictatorships and becomes ever tougher looking back in time. Without modern opinion polls, figuring out whether prohibition enamored or alienated Russia’s citizenry is a daunting task. Ever since his coronation disaster on the Khodynka Fields, Nicholas II was long viewed as indifferent to the plight of his people; one would assume that commanding his subjects to go cold turkey would not be popular. “There is no evidence to suggest that prohibition, tsarist or early Soviet, received popular support from working-class Russians, for whom alcohol remained central to their social, cultural, and economic lives,” suggested historian Kate Transchel: “the strength of custom and tradition ensured that the narod would find ways to evade prohibition.”22
While ministers touted open letters and women’s petitions to continue prohibition, citing fantastic improvements in the health and disposition of their chronically drunken husbands, fathers, and sons,23 the actual record is… hazy. Contemporaries noted that “the population could not stand forced abstinence,” which not only promoted discontent with the imperial leadership but also led to the drinking of dangerous homebrews and liquor surrogates, such as eau-de-cologne, shoe polish, industrial lacquers and varnishes. Within months of prohibition, “dry” Russia was inundated by a nationwide wave of alcohol poisonings.24
While the tsar’s wartime patriotic support was eroding thanks to debilitating and humiliating losses on the front, prohibition did not help bolster his legitimacy. Foreign observers lamented that the tsar’s prohibition policy “did not enhance his popularity.”25 Many Russians approached the question with a dark sense of foreboding. “Our sobriety was forced upon us, an
d at a time when every good person, even without prohibition, cannot enjoy life,” explained one Russian survey respondent in late 1914. “Therefore such a change in the life of the people is due not only to temperance but to the expectation of something terrible and indefinite that is going to happen.”26
The sobering reality of war bred widespread distrust of the tsar, as many viewed any government restriction—however “benevolent” its intentions—as a fiendish attempt to increase the autocrat’s control over his peasant subjects while the moneyed elites were given free license to indulge as they pleased. The fact that first-class restaurants were allowed to continue serving alcohol during the first months of prohibition while the taverns and liquor stores frequented by the lower classes were locked down only entrenched the cynicism. Just as in the war itself, it was clear that the masses, rather than the elites, would sacrifice the most for the tsar’s poor decisions. Such widely held sentiments have led historians to argue explicitly that “prohibition led to the decline of the czar’s popularity and, increasingly, political radicalization.”27
Vodka In The Trenches
While long-simmering discontent with the tsar and his regime provided the backdrop for the revolution, academics point to the constant series of demoralizing losses at the front as a more proximate cause. Here, too, vodka played a dubious role: knowing full well their enemy’s traditional “weakness” for alcohol, both the Germans and Austrians allegedly enlisted alcohol as a valuable, anti-Russian weapon. In an effort to incapacitate the army and stymie Russian advances, they deliberately left bottles of vodka in the trenches and stocked houses near the battlefields with liquor to encourage drunkenness and insubordination in the ranks of the enemy.28
Surviving accounts of life in the Russian trenches are drenched in alcohol. Soldiers looked to the bottle not only to build camaraderie but also to cope with the inhuman misery of modern trench warfare. In his Notes of a Soldier, Dmitry Oskin wrote how Russian soldiers focused their attacks on Austrian troops who carried flasks of rum. Oskin even admitted that he was seriously wounded after stumbling drunk out of the trenches to find more rum.29
Holidays and occasional breaks in the hostilities allowed for battlefield “fraternizations”—the relaxed mingling of opposing troops who had been fighting tooth and nail for months. During such temporary ceasefires, alcohol was openly distributed to the Russian troops by their enemies. The quantity of liquor was on such a scale that front-line Russian regiments could occasionally create their own regimental liquor stocks.30 Military discipline eroded in step with morale as the Russian army suffered one crushing defeat after another.
With declining morale, Russian soldiers deserted en masse. The Germans crept further into the motherland as the clock ticked closer to the fateful year of 1917. In a futile effort to maintain discipline, army officers up and down the line smashed any liquor warehouse near the front, but all for naught.31 By the time of the February Revolution, officers no longer controlled the enlisted men, many of whom actively pillaged and looted liquor stores, wine cellars, and wealthy estates. Sociologist Dmitry Shlapentokh has written of the Russian Fifth Platoon stationed near Oryol, where twenty thousand soldiers looted the wine cellars of a local nobleman, in the process destroying various Italian masterpieces, antiques, pianos, and an extensive library. When the wine ran out, the horde besieged the local distillery, which they quickly drained of alcohol and burned to the ground. A detachment sent to quell the riot disobeyed orders and instead joined in the revelry.32
In Moscow, the police battled to surpress drunken rioters who torched every German-named business while also looting the idle liquor stores. As one Englishman’s diary notes: “Whilst the wine-shops were being looted the police came along and had them closed and sealed up, leaving in many cases a large number of the rioters dead drunk inside, who at the end of the war will be found like brandy-cherries!”33
To add insult to injury, the tsar’s prohibition threatened to undermine Russia’s wartime industry. Beyond its use as a beverage, alcohol is crucial to the manufacture of gunpowder and other war materiel. At the outset of hostilities the state had plenty of alcohol for industrial purposes, but by 1916 the closing of distilleries further disrupted Russia’s already strained defense industry.34
Certainly many factors contributed to the utter collapse and dissolution of the Russian army in World War I. Yet vodka’s role can no longer be ignored, as it facilitated the disorganization long credited with dooming the Romanov dynasty.35
Farewell, Drunken Budget
“From time immemorial countries waging war have been in want of funds,” wrote Andrei Shingarev, official rapporteur of the imperial Duma’s budget and finance committees, in a 1915 report on the financial effects of the tsar’s prohibition, “but never since the dawn of human history has a single country, in a time of war, renounced the principal source of its revenue.”36
Indeed, the tsar’s vodka monopoly brought in an average of four hundred million rubles a year, or between a quarter to a third of all revenues, to the imperial treasury. This vital stream of funding dried up almost immediately following Nicholas’s fateful prohibition telegram to his dear uncle Kostya. Even with the supplementary taxes, bonds, and loans cobbled together by Finance Minister Bark, state revenues decreased by over five hundred million rubles in the second half of 1914 alone and by nine hundred million rubles per year thereafter—just as Russia stumbled into the greatest military conflagration in world history.37
There are good reasons why countries typically do not renounce their principal revenue source in wartime. Wars are expensive, and countries that can’t pay for them usually meet with an unfortunate end. Despite frantic warnings from outside of government, Russia would not avoid this fate. “Government indebtedness exacerbated wartime inflation,” as prominent historians have pointed out, “which aggravated the social and economic crises that eventually toppled the tsarist government.”38
So it seems all the more ironic that, instead of sounding the alarm about the obvious financial disaster awaiting the country, rapporteur Shingarev’s claim that Russia would be the first country to renounce its principal source of revenue was, if anything, boastful. In fact his report claims that “the government’s repudiation of the fiscal taxation of spiritous liquors and the discontinuation of their sale will provide the greatest economic, social and moral benefaction for the population.”39 While difficult to comprehend in hindsight, Shingarev was not alone in disastrously misreading the state’s finances. Similar unbridled optimism was shared by temperance advocates in Russia, Europe, and North America who believed that the people’s natural industriousness would be miraculously unleashed once liberated from the yoke of alcohol. According to this logic, any lost vodka revenues would be more than made up for by the overall growth of economic activity.40 Unfortunately for prohibitionists the world over—and for the fate of Russia in particular—prohibition’s much-anticipated productivity boost never happened. Compounded by the astronomical costs of war, the hole in the budget grew ever larger.
Trying to patch the hole, the imperial government simply printed more rubles, without regard for the hyperinflationary consequences. “What if we do lose eight hundred million rubles in revenue?” asked the dismissive Premier Ivan Goremykin. “We shall print that much paper money; it’s all the same to the people.”41 Even embattled Finance Minister Bark seemed oblivious to the consequences of uncontrolled inflation: in submitting his 1917 budget estimates to Tsar Nicholas II (against the backdrop of escalating war costs, growing social resentment, and the worthlessness of paper rubles), Bark forecast an astounding increase in government revenue that “enables us also to increase our expenditure on the Church, Education, Public Health, Agriculture, Trade and Industry, Postal and Telegraphic Service, and the construction of railway lines, thus providing for the spiritual and practical needs of the nation.”42 With the economy and state crumbling around him, it seemed as though Russia’s finance minister was living on some distant
planet.
Russia’s hyperinflationary spiral has always been considered a primary cause of dethroning both the tsar (in the revolution of February 1917) and his successor—the Provisional Government—in the Bolshevik Revolution that October.43 Yet the destruction that prohibition wrought on imperial finances was not simply the result of the sudden lack of alcohol sales. The old vodka monopoly was a retail and distribution monopoly—a compromise arrangement that not only allowed the treasury to reap tremendous revenues from the sale of alcohol (and manipulate the retail price of alcohol as it saw fit) but also left the lucrative production of alcoholic beverages in the hands of gentry distillers and brewers who had long enjoyed the exclusive right to production.44 Prohibition not only left the imperial government with huge stores of unsold alcohol; it also left politically influential gentry distillers with massive liquor stockpiles they could not legally sell, depriving many of their primary source of wealth—and they were not happy. As part of existing long-term contracts, many distillers had already paid taxes on future alcohol deliveries. If that alcohol was not to be delivered, the producers wanted their money back, draining even more rubles from the treasury.45
For every distiller who effectively served as a creditor to the ministry of finance by paying their taxes in advance there were debtors, like Pyotr Pavlovich Bukhov mentioned earlier, who owed back taxes to the treasury. Thanks to prohibition, Bukhov and many like him had built tremendous debts to the treasury only to suddenly find themselves without a stream of income with which to repay them. While the finance ministry later allowed debtors to renegotiate contracts, in the short term the treasury was starved of badly needed funds, causing the financial hole to grow ever deeper.46