By the end of 1927, it was already paying dividends: “The fact is, immediately abandoning the vodka monopoly would deprive our industry of over 500 million rubles, which could not be replaced from any other source,” Stalin then claimed. That translated to ten percent of all state revenues. To hear him explain it, the monopoly was only a temporary improvisation, and “it must be abolished as soon as we find new sources of revenue in our national economy for the further development of industry.”20
Apparently Stalin never found those new sources of revenue. As vodka production rapidly increased, so too did alcohol’s contributions to the state budget: rising from a mere 2 percent of Union revenues in 1923–24 to 8.4 percent in 1925–26 and fully 12 percent of all income by 1927–28.21 These increases resulted in quite a problem of national drunkenness. In a letter to the liquor monopoly Gosspirt, the finance ministry admitted that vodka revenues could barely cover the harm it was causing the country. From 675 million rubles in 1927–28, by 1928–29, the letter projected, “we should net 913.7 million rubles and 1,070 million by 1929/30. Yet the demands of common sobriety require minimum budgetary revenues from vodka. Herein lies our present trouble and future problems.”22 Herein, again, lies vodka politics.
The finance ministry was right to focus on sobriety. Drunkenness bedeviled efforts to build the disciplined, urban workforce needed to man the new assembly lines, iron works, railways, and hydroelectric stations—all built on a gigantic scale. Certainly forced labor provided one answer, as the greatest engineering accomplishments of the Stalin era—from the White Sea Canal to the towering spires of Moscow State University—were largely built by the slave labor of those condemned to the gulags. But the incredible growth of the urban working population—from 26 million in 1926 to 38.7 million in 1932—primarily reflected the forced migration of peasants from the countryside: the same conservative peasantry the communists long suspected of potential counterrevolution; the same rural peasantry that long persisted in distilling their grain into samogon rather than giving it to the state; the same illiterate and unskilled peasantry that had a long tradition of insobriety.23
By the late 1920s—with Stalin becoming the unscrupulous tavern keeper for all of Soviet society—the People’s Commissariat of Labor, or Narkomtrud, suffered the biggest hangover. With the flood of uneducated and intoxicated peasants into the workforce Narkomtrud charted a staggering drop in workplace discipline. Few workers showed up on time, and when (or if) they did, they were often hungover. They could not work the machinery and did not care to learn, a situation leading to waste, broken equipment, and shoddy products. Narkomtrud was inundated with reports of absences, drinking on the job, drunken fistfights, and assaults on factory managers and party representatives.24 Rank-and-file communists hardly set the example of the honest, sober new “Soviet man” the ideologues had envisioned. As the recruitments of the 1920s transformed the Communist Party from a small vanguard of intellectuals and activists to a mass party of millions, rampant alcoholism became a major problem for the party itself. Since drunkenness was considered a petit bourgeois remnant of the past, the party regularly purged itself of “drunks, hooligans, and other class enemies” in the interest of party discipline.25
To promote workplace discipline, the Soviets turned to propaganda. In 1928, Gosplan co-founder Yury Larin and famed theorist Nikolai Bukharin spearheaded a diverse group of politicians, war heroes, writers, poets, and academics in creating the Soviet Union’s first temperance organization, the Society for the Struggle against Alcoholism (OBSA).26 The OBSA focused on improving the dismal conditions in the sprawling urban slums, which were eerily reminiscent of the grinding poverty and desperation of capitalist Europe’s industrial working classes that Marx and Engels decried a century earlier. Temperance admonishments peppered the pages of Pravda, Izvestiya, and a new monthly journal, Trezvost i kultura (Sobriety and Culture).27
Yet temperance was never an end in itself—it was only a means to greater discipline necessary for industrialization. Such well-meaning temperance activism was tolerated only so long as it did not interfere with Stalin’s greater aspirations. In this respect, Soviet temperance was doubly doomed.
DOWN WITH DRUNKARDS! (1930). “Down with drunkards we say loudly: from drunkards come only hooliganism and breakage.” I. Yang and A. Cernomordik.
Kate Transchel—the leading historian of the OBSA—noted “it is significant that Bukharin, who is generally accepted as the party’s leading theorist after Lenin’s death, chose the anti-alcohol movement through which to attack the problems of Soviet society.”28 It is also significant that within a few months of founding the OBSA, Bukharin (who was Stalin’s last rival within the Politburo) was disgraced as part of the “Right Opposition.” A decade later—suffering the same fate as Kamenev and Zinoviev’s “Left Opposition”—Bukharin was put on show trial on trumped-up sedition charges, tortured into confession, and executed.
With Bukharin gone, the OBSA stood little chance against Stalin’s unquenchable need for more vodka revenues. In 1930, the society was scuttled, and the problem of alcoholism in the Soviet Union quietly disappeared from official discourse. Trezvost i kultura abruptly explained to its readers that there was no longer a need to combat alcoholism since “the socialist way of life would destroy drunkenness.” Beginning with the very next issue, the magazine would be known as Kultura i byt—Culture and Lifestyle—which vocally denounced OBSA founders Larin and Bukharin as antigovernment demagogues.29
Just like Stalin brushed aside Bukharin as an impediment to his single-minded quest for absolute power, he also brushed aside the OBSA as an impediment to his all-out expansion of the industrial and military might of the Soviet state. In complete opposition to his publicly professed desire to “completely abolish the vodka monopoly,” on September 1, 1930, Stalin wrote in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, then the loyal first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, that
I think vodka production should be expanded (to the extent possible). We need to get rid of a false sense of shame and directly and openly promote the greatest expansion of vodka production possible for the sake of a real and serious defense of our country. Consequently, this matter has to be taken into account immediately. The relevant raw material for vodka production should be formally included in the national budget for 1930-1931. Keep in mind that a serious upgrade of civil aviation will also require a lot of money, and for that purpose we’ll have to resort again to vodka.30
Two weeks later, the question of maximizing the liquor output was taken up by the Politburo. Strangely, archival records of the Politburo’s discussions and decisions of that day were submitted to the so-called special file—reserved for the most secret documents in the Soviet Union. Now housed in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, these documents remain highly classified and strictly off limits to historical researchers.31
Vodka And Collectivization
If industrialization was the foremost ideological challenge of the late 1920s, the primary practical challenge was the peasantry. Here too the issue turned on vodka. During the reconstruction from war and famine, agricultural productivity rebounded more quickly than industrial productivity. This makes sense, since you don’t have to rebuild a field like you do a factory: simply plant the seeds, till the soil, and come fall you’ve got crops. In the past, there was an urban-rural trade cycle: the peasants sold their grains to buy goods manufactured in the cities. Only now there was nothing to buy because the factories were still in ruins. By 1923, the Soviet Union was in the middle of what Trotsky dubbed the “scissors crisis”: the prices of scarce industrial goods were rising while the cost of the now-plentiful agricultural goods was plummeting—when plotted on a graph, the diverging prices looked like the two blades of an open pair of scissors.
According to most historians, rather than get next to nothing for their crops, the peasants simply hoarded them. That is a half-truth. Since piles of grain easily rot and are difficult to conceal from the authoritie
s, most peasants didn’t just hoard their grain; they distilled it. Bottles of samogon did not spoil, they were more easily concealed, and they could be consumed or used to bribe local authorities. Plus, since home-brewed vodka could be sold at a black market price that was far higher than the abysmally low price of grain, the terms of trade became more even. Consequently, every time agricultural and industrial prices diverged, the Russian countryside was flooded with illegal alcohol, even as foodstuffs disappeared from store shelves in the cities.32
In the early 1920s, the government first tried to crack down on bootleggers throughout the countryside. When it became apparent that the crackdown did not work, they threw up their hands and reimplemented the vodka monopoly, which also generated the resources needed for industrialization. As Chamberlain described it:
The official justification for the legal return of vodka is that all efforts to prohibit it broke down as a result of the widespread drinking of samogon, or home-brewed vodka, which sometimes attained an alcoholic strength of 70 per cent and was considered more harmful than vodka, both in its physical effects and in its waste of grain. The euphemistic explanation for the return of vodka is that it is a “means of fighting samogon.” While this consideration doubtless carried weight, the action of the government was also influenced by the fact that the Russian peasant is reluctant to part with his grain until he sees something which he may buy with the money which is paid him. It is expected that vodka will help to full up the void which is created by the shortage of manufactured goods.33
Even with a functioning—and lucrative—vodka monopoly, the artificially low price of grain produced another so-called scissors crisis in 1927. Although grain production had almost recovered to prewar levels, less than half was being brought to market, leading to food shortages in the cities and samogon surpluses in the countryside. A 1927 official study estimated that the rural Russian population annually consumed an average of 7.5 liters of samogon per capita—four times their consumption of legal state vodka.34 This was the dilemma that American satirist Will Rogers described as driving the Soviet government cuckoo. “If you got that Vodka for a companion you got a mighty ally on your side when it comes to forgetting your troubles,” Rodgers said of the Russian peasantry. “They can live on what the raise, and drink the surplus and enjoy it.”35 By the Soviet government’s own account, illegal distillation was consuming no less than thirty million pud (491 million kilograms) of grain every year.36 Something had to be done.
The response to this scissors crisis would be different from the last—much different. Rather than concede to the peasantry, as Lenin did with NEP, Stalin used this crisis as a pretext for all-out class warfare against the peasantry through a brutal collectivization campaign which—by the estimates that Stalin later confided to Winston Churchill at Potsdam—cost over ten million lives. For Stalin, forcing peasants into modern agricultural communes—oversized, mechanized, and rationalized—was the only way to forever smash the power of the conservative peasantry, eliminate the threat they posed to the food supply by moonshining, and drive out the ideological threat of agricultural capitalism in the countryside.37
“The struggle for bread is the struggle for socialism,” Stalin declared. The opponent in this struggle was the kulak—the class of “rich” peasants that Stalin slated for complete and ruthless liquidation. The line between a (bad) kulak and a (good) poor peasant was blurry, leaving the regime tremendous leeway in eliminating suspected opponents. Meanwhile, locals settled private scores by ratting out neighbors as an alleged kulak and, thus, an enemy of the people.38
Viewed through the lens of vodka politics, strangely, this blurry distinction actually comes into crisper view. Being a kulak was not just about having marginally more land, livestock, or “surpluses” than other peasants—it was also about debauching poorer peasants with samogon. Indeed, going back to the earliest days of the revolution, kulak was virtually synonymous with bootlegger, since bootlegging was the primary means of peasant enrichment. Even in May 1918, when the Russian Republic’s government passed its decree on the “Granting of Emergency Power to the People’s Commissar of Produce for the Struggle against the Rural Bourgeoisie, Which Conceals Grain Supplies and Speculates with Them,” moonshiners and kulaks were indistinguishable as counterrevolutionary enemies of the people.39
“In many places,” explained Committee Chairman Yakov Sverdlov, “the kulak elements lure the poorest peasants to their side by inviting them to share in the profits from moonshine. The entire countryside, entire villages, entire rural districts are captured by the spirit of drunkenness; so in order to destroy the corrosive influence of the kulak elements by any means, we are sending punishment expeditions and death squads from the cities to these districts to destroy the bootleggers by force.”40
This association of kulak with profiteer and bootlegger continued under NEP, as the path to wealth in the countryside was paved with vodka bottles. The most prosperous kulaks did not hoard grain but distilled it into more profitable samogon. This association was even apparent in Soviet propaganda movies of the 1920s, in which “the kulak and the priest are never portrayed without a bottle of vodka in their hands.” (Even according to the cinematic journal of the day, Sovetsky ekran, this portrayal was ineffective even as propaganda “because the peasant knows that it is not only the kulak who drinks home brew.”41)
The food shortage of 1927 prompted a return to forcible grain requisitions a la War Communism—only more brutal. When the grain deliveries to the state fell short by two million tons in 1928, Stalin was incensed that the harvests were being “hoarded” by kulaks. The demands for 1929 would be even greater.
Local Communists Party delegates—aided by the Red Army, NKVD secret police, and self-appointed committees of resentful, poorer peasants—infiltrated the countryside, arresting kulak hoarders and looting their wares. Many alleged kulaks were deported to Siberia; others were summarily executed. The enforcers were hardly the principled communist idealists state propaganda made them out to be: they were terrorist bands of cynical opportunists, addicts, and drunks—not unlike the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible. At mass execution sites, including the infamous KGB firing range at Butovo (on the road to Podolsk just south of Moscow)—where today more than twenty thousand victims of the terror of the 1930s are thought to lie in mass graves—barrels of free vodka numbed the senses of the secret police. Execution brigades drank as much as they pleased. Others sought vodka from the victims themselves—either through appropriation or extortion. Untold millions of kulaks were imprisoned or executed as part of what Stalin heralded as a “great break” with the imperial past.42
For the marauding hordes, “for a glass of vodka or a bottle of samogon, a kulak could be transformed into a poor peasant or, in the absence of a glass of vodka or a bottle of samogon, a poor peasant could be transformed into a kulak,” so subjective was the distinction, and so pervasive the corruption amid the murderous chaos.43
According to economic historian Alec Nove (born Alexander Novakovsky),
Those engaged in the process of dekulakization were known to requisition and drink any vodka found in the kulak house. Orders were issued to stop such behaviour. But what could the government expect? There were few reliable party members in the villages and they had to utilize and encourage any ragged ruffians who could be prevailed upon to expropriate and chase out their better-off neighbours (in the name of the class struggle, of course).44
In some cases, having collected whatever kulak crops could be found in a particular district, some requisition brigades themselves distilled the grain into samogon instead of turning it over to the state.45
WHAT MOONSHINE CONSUMES IN ONE YEAR (1930). Train transporting annual quantities of grain, potatoes, and flour either to the grain factory or a moonshine distillery. Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.
By way of resistance many kulaks reverted to a scorched-earth policy, destroying everything they owned rather than hand it over to the state:
in 1928 there were 70.5 million head of cattle in the Soviet Union; by 1933 there were only 38.4 million. The number of pigs dropped from 26 million to only 12 million. “Farmsteads were burned down, machinery wrecked in Luddite fashion, rail and truck transports taking peasant grain away were sabotaged, home brewed vodka was consumed to the point of stupor, and livestock was slaughtered en masse.”46 Soviet agriculture would not fully recover until the 1950s—to say nothing of the incalculable human toll. Forewarned, some kulaks opted instead for suicide, entire families at a time.47
By 1930, collectivization had taken on a life all its own. With unimaginable speed, over sixty percent of peasant households had been forcibly uprooted and swept into the massive collective farms. Afraid the rampage of terror in the heartland might threaten the spring planting—possibly producing another famine—on March 2 Stalin called for a temporary halt, blaming local authorities for the bloody excesses of collectivization: “Some of our comrades have become dizzy with success,” Stalin famously wrote, “and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision.”48
Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 33