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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  This pause allowed the Soviets to consolidate their gains before later resuming a less chaotic collectivization offensive. The entire peasantry was collectivized in four years, with private agriculture completely abolished by 1937. Even after being transformed into state farms akin to massive rural factories, collectivized agriculture suffered the same labor discipline problems of drunkenness, absenteeism, and “wrecking” that bedeviled the urban factories.

  The Soviet Union paid a tremendous toll for Stalin’s twin campaigns of industrialization and collectivization. Between the terror, purges, collectivization, and a devastating terror-famine in the agricultural heartland stretching from Ukraine to northern Kazakhstan (which Stalin naturally blamed on kulaks hoarding and distilling grain), the long-suffering Soviet people endured an unrivaled demographic nightmare. With the power of the peasantry broken and collectivization completed, in 1937 the state conducted a nationwide census. Surprisingly, there were roughly fifteen million fewer people in the country than the government originally estimated. Stalin reacted as only a totalitarian despot can: the secret police suppressed the figures and had the census statisticians arrested as “Trotskyist-Bukharinist spies” and shot.49

  The Great Patriotic War

  It is impossible, within the space of a few of pages, to do justice to the unfathomable hardships endured by the Soviet people during the Second World War. In the United States, famed television journalist Tom Brokaw praised American wartime sacrifices by dubbing those who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”50 Not to disparage their hardships and tribulations—much less the loss of four hundred thousand Americans and another four hundred thousand British soldiers (comprising less than one percent of the population) who did not return from the global battles against fascism—these sacrifices pale in comparison to the horrors on the Eastern Front, where Adolf Hitler was ultimately defeated. More than twenty-four million Soviets—or fourteen percent of the entire population—were sacrificed there. In other words, for every American or British wartime death, more than fifty Soviets paid the ultimate price. Having built a world superpower from scratch while sacrificing millions more to Stalin’s totalitarian terror, crash industrialization, gunpoint collectivization, famine, civil war, and revolution, the Soviet people have a legitimate claim to being an even greater generation. Such heroic sacrifice and endurance makes a discussion about alcohol seem almost trivial.51

  Yet even in a time of unimaginable sorrow and loss, there was vodka.

  We have already heard the tale of the liquor-soaked 1939 Kremlin meetings with the Nazis that produced the Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, which secretly divided most of Central and Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian titans (chapter 1). As international tensions increased, so too did alcohol consumption in the Kremlin. While observing an uneasy peace with the German fascists to the west, Stalin mended fences with the fascist Japanese foe to the east as well. When Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited Moscow in April 1941 to meet with Stalin, according to contemporary accounts, “They both got most gloriously drunk and a Pact of Non-Aggression and Neutrality was signed between them.”52

  Indeed. The weekly Trans-Siberian Express that would carry the Japanese delegation home had to wait for an hour and a half at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station before the foreign minister stammered in with an inebriated entourage… including Stalin himself. Stalin was rarely seen in public, and certainly never drunk. Yet according to one journalist, “Stalin went up to the aged and diminutive Japanese Ambassador-General, punched him on the shoulder rather hard, with a grin and an ‘ah… ah’, so that the General, who has a bald and freckled pate, and is not more than four feet ten in height, staggered back three or four steps, which caused Matsuoka to laugh in glee.”53

  According to the astonished Bulgarian ambassador, the “least drunk” of the participants at the send-off was Molotov—stammering a few feet behind Stalin, “saluting all the time, shouting: I am a pioneer, I am ready!” in the manner of the Soviet youth league.54

  Yet the Soviet leadership was anything but ready when two months later, on June 22, 1941, Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa—the largest and most deadly military operation in human history. As part of the Nazi blitzkrieg, over three million Axis troops spilled into Soviet-held territories from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Decimated by endless purges, the Soviet high command was in disarray and incapable of mounting a meaningful defense. On the first day of the invasion twelve hundred Soviet planes—most of the Soviet air force—were destroyed; most were still on the tarmac, having never engaged in combat.55

  For eleven days Stalin—who had received ample and reliable intelligence about the imminent Nazi attack—was nowhere to be seen. The great leader’s conspicuous absence prompted widespread rumors that he was in shock, demoralized, and drunk. Why else would it be left to the uninspiring Molotov to rally the people to war?56

  Even after Stalin’s return, mayhem reigned at the front. Panicked Soviet troops fled east before the German advance. Cities like Kiev witnessed scenes of wild drunkenness, as mobs set upon state liquor stores and looted the houses of evacuees.57 Within weeks Nazi forces occupied all of present-day Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states and were rapidly advancing across the vast Russian heartland: encircling Leningrad in the north, encroaching toward Moscow, and pushing toward an epic confrontation at Stalingrad on the Volga. Stalin dealt with insubordination in the army with characteristic brutality—dispatching NKVD forces to shoot any soldier who fell back from the line and executing any commander who ordered retreat.

  Today, as then, the epic battle to defeat Hitler is not known in Russia as World War II but, rather, as the Great Patriotic War: a surprising title since the communist tenets of Marx and Lenin were antithetical to nationalism. Appeals to patriotism were only one reversion to the traditions of Russia’s imperial past. Soviet wartime propaganda valorized epic heroes from Russian history, including Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic depictions of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. Moreover, within the Red Army the traditional daily vodka ration—gone since Nicholas’s ill-fated prohibition in the previous world war—was reintroduced. “At Stalin’s personal order,” wrote historian Constantine Pleshakov, “28 million men were given a glass of vodka a day for four years, thus ensuring that the next generation would be fully trained to function in an inebriated nation.”58 One hundred grams of vodka per day equated to roughly fifteen liters of pure alcohol per year for every soldier. To provide upwards of a billion liters of vodka annually, Soviet vodka factories ran full tilt day and night, much like the armaments factories—both producing badly needed war materiel.59

  “When a person gets drunk, he feels more determined, more courageous,” claimed World War II historian Fyodor Sverdlov. “He doesn’t think about being killed in a minute. He marches on, trying to kill the enemy. Being quite frank, I have to say that in the course of the whole war both Germans and Russians were always drunk at decisive moments because a human mind cannot otherwise bear the horrors of modern war.”60 Now certainly, as members of modern, well-regimented armies, the belligerents weren’t always drunk in battle. Still, such accounts are a useful counterweight to the popular image of the rational, resolved, and clear-headed war hero.

  By August 1941 the overextended Nazi advance stalled, as Soviet defenses and resolve hardened, due to both the harsh discipline and vodka. Soviet soldiers—often loaded up with more alcohol than munitions—displayed reckless bravery: desperately charging German lines, inflicting massive casualties on both sides.61

  Justified or not, the obvious consequence was an upsurge of drunkenness in the trenches. According to Russian vodka historian Boris Segal:

  Soldiers in the Soviet army would offer their last piece of bread to their comrades in order to get vodka, but it was impossible to find men who were willing to give up their own daily vodka ration. When Russian servicemen captur
ed German medical supplies, they drank everything, just as during the Civil War: aftershave lotion, medicines, and even liquids containing poisons.62

  While the troops drank their courage in the trenches, Stalin’s drunken Kremlin debauches continued unabated. But rather than regale German and Japanese delegations, the new guests were British, French, and American. Western missions to the Kremlin hoped to size up their newfound Soviet allies, to whom they were providing military, economic, and humanitarian support instead of opening a western front against Hitler. As the Nazi bombardment encroached ever closer to the Russian capital in December 1941, Life magazine told of the Kremlin banquet for visiting American and British military delegates, with “Uncle Joe” Stalin as toastmaster. The reporter’s scoop was that the atheist dictator of a godless Soviet juggernaut actually raised his glass in praise of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the words “May God help him in his task.” Only in passing did the reporter mention that somewhere between thirty and thirty-six other rounds were drunk before Stalin brusquely concluded the festivities by announcing to his foreign guests: “The lavatory is on the left.” Then, in English, “Good night.”63

  When Winston Churchill’s representative Anthony Eden conducted high-level negotiations with Stalin in December 1941 that helped pave the way for Churchill’s visit to the Kremlin the following year (chapter 1), he was surprised by the Kremlin’s lavish spread. While the people suffered and battled the German onslaught outside the delegates drank round after round of vodka, wine, and champagne toasts—including Eden’s toast to Stalin’s health on his sixty-second birthday. According to his accounts, longtime defense minister Kliment Voroshilov “got so drunk that he fell across Stalin’s knees,” while Marshall Semyon Timoshenko—the man in charge of defense of the central front—had been drunk for much of the day. “Stalin seemed rather embarrassed at the signs of this,” Eden noted, “and said quietly to me: ‘Do your generals ever get drunk?’ to which I replied, I hope diplomatically, ‘They don’t often get the chance.’”64

  Fourteen hundred miles overland from Berlin, Hitler’s eastward advance was finally stopped at Stalingrad in 1942. Beyond the city’s obvious symbolic significance, situated on the Volga, Stalingrad was the last major barrier to the vast oil wealth of the Caspian. Stalin declared that it must be defended at all costs. On July 28, 1942, he issued Order 227 declaring Ni shagu nazad!—not one step back. “It is necessary to defend to the last drop of blood every position, every meter of Soviet territory, to cling on to every shred of Soviet earth and to defend it to the utmost.”65 By the bitter-cold February of 1943, some two million combined Soviets and Nazis lay dead, as Hitler’s war machine was dealt a decisive blow from which it would never recover.

  Ni shagu nazad! became the rallying slogan of ultimate patriotic sacrifice—putting the interests of state and motherland above all else. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, it was also used as the name of one of the best-selling Soviet vodkas.

  After Stalingrad, Soviet forces gradually reconquered Nazi-occupied territories, where the Germans had ruthlessly executed Jews, communists, partisans, and other undesirables. The Nazis had little patience for drunkenness, so occupied cities were mostly dry—in stark contrast with the rural areas, which continued the tried-and-true practice of distilling grain into samogon instead of handing it over to the authorities. The fields and forests provided protection for “partisans”—remnants of destroyed Red Army units, communist activists, underground resistance movements, and even regular army detachments sent behind enemy lines—all engaging in guerrilla warfare to disrupt Nazi communication, transportation, and occupation. Even amid the Nazi brutality and wintertime food shortages, alcohol was everywhere. “It was amazing how [the partisans] could get samogon from their relatives and friends in the villages,” recalled A. Lewenberg. “With each trip they took a chance of being arrested, tortured, and killed; but they did it regularly; and each time we had a great celebration, everybody, including me, an 11-year-old Jewish boy, had to drink this terrible liquid.”66

  Even once these Soviet saboteurs were reined in by the Kremlin their drunkenness remained a pressing security issue. On January 23, 1943, NKVD kingpin Lavrenty Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov with reports that the partisan brigade in Volhynia (northwestern Ukraine) was “on the rampage; they get drunk, terrorize and rob friendly civilians, among them those whose families are our fighters. After I intervened, the battalion commander and commissar promised me these anti-Soviet activities would stop, but they take only hesitant action and try to shield those acting like thugs.”67

  By 1944-45, the Red Army liberated Eastern Europe on their way to toppling Hitler himself. Once in Germany, Soviet officers and soldiers looted houses and liquor stores; avenging German atrocities in Russia with arson, rape, and murder. The Soviet occupiers were confused as to why the German population did not join them in the drinking and looting. Initially, the high command looked the other way when confronted with complaints of Soviet revelry before gradually tightening discipline.68

  On April 30, 1945, the Soviet flag was unfurled over the German Reichstag—the same day Hitler shot himself in a Berlin bunker—effectively concluding the war in Europe. This was the Soviet peoples’ crowning achievement. Over the space of twenty years the Soviet Union had been transformed from a famine-ravaged failed state to a global superpower. But for this, the people endured incalculable human suffering. In addition to the twenty-four million souls lost to the Great Patriotic War, nine million were executed or died in Siberian gulags, and another six million died from collectivization, dekulakization, and famine.69

  At a well-lubricated, postwar banquet for his Red Army commanders, Stalin drank the last of many toasts… to the health of the Russian people. Close to an apology for his incapacity at the outbreak of the war, Stalin admitted that his regime had made tremendous mistakes. “Any other people would have told their government ‘you have failed to live-up to our expectations. So go away and we will install another’,” he said. The “confidence of the Russian people in the Soviet government was decisive in securing the historic victory over that enemy of humanity—fascism.” And with that, Stalin—both penitent and grateful to his people—sealed his dedication with vodka.70

  Early on, Stalin recognized the necessity of building Soviet power upon the traditional foundation of autocratic statecraft in Russia: vodka. This was a central tenet not only of his power struggle with political rivals like Trotsky but also of his dramatic economic reforms. Resurrecting the vodka monopoly both smashed the power of the peasantry and facilitated their forcible collectivization; it also provided the revenue necessary for the massive industrialization campaign. Alongside fear, vodka was a useful instrument of totalitarian terror: just as Stalin used fear mixed with alcohol to keep potential opponents in his inner circle inebriated, suspicious, divided, and unable to mount a challenge to his authority, he likewise kept the Soviet people scared and drunk, creating the docile and prostrate civil society characteristic of a totalitarian system. In all of these ways vodka politics contributed not only to the Soviet Union’s greatest triumphs but also its most unspeakable tragedies.

  Perhaps at no other time in Russian history did these diverse dynamics associated with vodka politics intersect so readily as they did under Stalin; yet Soviet alcoholization is rarely mentioned alongside its better known counterparts—industrialization and collectivization—even though arguably its economic, political, social, and demographic legacies are just as enduring.

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  Vodka and Dissent in the Soviet Union

  After World War II, Soviet power effectively stretched from the Elbe River in Germany to the Pacific Ocean. With Mao Zedong’s victory over the Chinese nationalists, communism was on the march globally. In 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon to join only the United States in the elite club of nuclear powers, as the rift between the capitalist West and socialist East solidified into Cold War standoff.

  Behind the scenes o
f Stalin’s seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, the Soviet economic system was in tatters. The people were exhausted from years of total war, terror, collectivization, and famine. Some twenty-five million souls were lost to the war against fascism; another twenty-five million were left homeless. Grain production was only half what it was before the Nazi invasion, and a series of postwar droughts produced yet another famine. Unlike the United States—where the 1940s and 1950s ushered in a golden era of prosperity and a “baby boom” fathered by victorious G.I.s returning from foreign battlefields, the Soviet Union experienced just the opposite: a “baby bust.” Of the millions lost to war, famines, and purges, most were men of working age. Women could not find husbands. Children were raised without fathers. An entire generation virtually vanished.1

  In the postwar Soviet Union image rarely corresponded to reality: military might was built atop ruined socioeconomic foundations; the public’s adulation of Stalin masked the all-pervasive private fear of his totalitarian regime; high-profile technological accomplishments overshadowed an economic system that could not meet basic social needs. Here again, the lens of vodka politics helps distinguish fact from fiction in the communist colossus. From the 1940s through the 1980s, not only was alcohol just as essential to autocratic statecraft as it had been under the tsars, but so too did pointing out the pervasiveness of vodka become a central tactic for dissidents and critics of Soviet autocracy.

  Liquor And The Thaw

  In February 1956—three years after the death of Stalin—his successor Nikita Khrushchev took the first step in confronting Stalin’s totalitarian legacies by delivering the so-called “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Before a closed session of party elites, for four hours past midnight, a sullen and tempered Khrushchev criticized Stalin’s personality cult, the wholesale deportation of national minorities, and his ruthless purges of the party and military. The speech began a decade-long thaw in Soviet society, culture, and even foreign policy. Censorship was eased, consumer-based economic reforms were enacted, and millions of political prisoners returned from Siberian gulags.