Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State
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One exonerated former prisoner was an aspiring writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A twice-decorated military commander, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 during the Red Army’s German offensive for making derogatory comments about comrade Stalin. After being beaten and interrogated by the NKVD at the Lubyanka Prison, he was convicted for counterrevolutionary activity under the infamous Article 58 of the penal code and sentenced to eight years hard labor—the brutality and senselessness of which he would describe in a string of scathing, historically based novels. His first—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—was published in 1962 with the personal blessing of Khrushchev, who defended it before the Politburo as social catharsis: “There is a Stalinist in each of you,” Khrushchev railed, “there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”2
Ivan Denisovich was a hit—not only in the West, where it highlighted the severity of Soviet human rights violations, but in the Soviet Union, too. Just as during Russia’s literary golden age of the nineteenth century, government censorship still prevented direct criticism of the state and its leaders, but literature still provided a veil for political discussions. And just as under the tsars, critics seized upon vodka politics as a way to confront the Soviet autocracy.
If the 1960s were the new 1870s, then certainly Solzhenitsyn was the new Tolstoy: beyond their similar physical stature, both were war heroes-turned-historical dramatists, both were prolific writers, both wrote biting condemnations of the ruling autocracy that made them influential moral authorities, and—notably—both were teetotalers whose rejection of alcohol fundamentally conflicted with the autocratic political system. Even battling Nazis in the trenches, where “vodka consumption was second only to battlefield courage as a mark of valor,” Solzhenitsyn still refused to drink.3
Like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn’s social criticisms are drenched in vodka. One of his earliest novellas, Matryona’s House, describes Soviet rural life in the 1950s but is strikingly reminiscent of imperial days. The hero, Matryona, reluctantly consents to give up part of her tiny hut to her relatives, who want to use the wood for their house in a village twenty miles away. While the men tear down part of the house, the women distill samogon—as women traditionally did—as payment for the ten men hauling the wood on a borrowed tractor. After a boisterous evening of drinking, even Matryona joined the men on their ill-fated, drunken escapade. In the middle of the night, the narrator staying in Matryona’s humble cottage is visited by police, demanding to know whether the group had been drinking. Knowing “Matryona could get a heavy sentence for dispensing illicitly distilled vodka,” the narrator lies to the officers at the door, even while the foul stench of half-drunken bottles of moonshine wafted in from the kitchen. As the police leave, they let it out that Matryona and the drunken men were killed by a train as the tractor got stuck on a railroad crossing.4
Beyond the usual array of drunken characters and drinking parties, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968) also highlights the use of poisonous alcoholic surrogates—as intoxicant or folk medication—for inmates facing terminal cancer.5 He also uses vodka to take jabs at the systemic corruption. While lamenting that officials always expected bribes simply to perform their assigned duties, one worker worried that if they did not “‘come across’ with a bottle of vodka,” the bureaucrats “were sure to get even, to do something wrong, to make her regret it afterwards.”6 (Solzhenitsyn wasn’t alone in linking vodka and Soviet corruption: when referring to khrushchoby—the shoddy four- or five-story tenements hastily built during the Khrushchev years—the popular joke was that some only have four stories because the fifth was stolen and sold for vodka.)7 All the same, like those of Tolstoy, virtually all of Solzhenitsyn’s works use drunken tragedy to both expose the autocracy and share the author’s disdain for drinking.
DON’T DRINK METHYL ALCOHOL! (1946). “Methyl alcohol (wood spirits) is a dangerous poison.”
Unfortunately the cultural, political, and social openness of the Khrushchev era was doomed by the bombastic premier’s domestic gaffes and foreign policy fiascoes. To Mao Zedong in China, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” was a sell out, and his de-Stalinization was misguided, and this disagreement drove a wedge between the two communist giants. Détente with the Americans was sidetracked by one crisis after another: the downing of an American U-2 spy plane in 1960, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and finally the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which pushed the world to the brink of thermonuclear war. Meanwhile, Khrushchev’s domestic reforms went nowhere. His vaunted campaign to transform the arid Kazakh steppe into rich farmland turned to dust. All this, when added to his brash and erratic behavior, such as his embarrassing shoe-banging incident at the UN, culminated in Khrushchev’s forced retirement in October 1964. His replacement, Leonid Brezhnev, put a quick end to the “thaw”—clamping down on expression and opposition. The eighteen years of Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 until his death in 1982, was an era of zastoi, or stagnation, in the economy, arts, and society.
Brezhnev embodied the corruption, decay, and drunkenness that mushroomed in Soviet society under his tutelage. Dour and stodgy, he had none of the in-your-face exuberance of Khrushchev. Some of his closest associates depict Brezhnev as an unstable and increasingly senile alcoholic who, in failing health, stumbled into such disastrous decisions as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Anatoly Dobrynin—the Soviet ambassador to the United States—seemed particularly irked by Brezhnev’s incessant drinking, especially since he was usually on the receiving end of the general secretary’s drunken, late-night, prank calls on the Kremlin’s hotline to the Soviet embassy in Washington. After Brezhnev’s death, his longtime foreign minister Andrei Gromyko was asked whether Brezhnev had a serious drinking problem. “The answer,” he replied after a reflective pause, “is Yes, Yes, Yes.” Gromyko admitted “It was perfectly obvious that the last person willing to look at this problem was the general secretary himself.”8
Brezhnev’s alcoholism was a product of his rise through the military under Stalin. The morning after Brezhnev’s extremely well-lubricated seventieth birthday celebration in 1976, advisor Anatoly Chernyaev remembered how—still visibly intoxicated—Brezhnev waxed nostalgic for getting drunk during the Stalin years. Brezhnev reminisced how, as a Red Army hero, he got so hammered at Stalin’s World War II victory banquet that he stopped in the Kremlin courtyard and carried on a meaningful conversation with the tsar-kolokol—the world’s largest brass bell, which was cast in the eighteenth century but dropped and broken before it could ever be rung.9
For dissident writers like Solzhenitsyn, tightening censorship under Brezhnev not only forced their writings underground; it also sharpened their criticisms. The KGB kept him under close surveillance and routinely seized his manuscripts, and the world-famous writer could no longer find a willing publisher. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. The following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he could not accept for fear of not being allowed to return home to the USSR. Sheltered by a secretive circle of underground friends, Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on his magnum opus, the three-volume Gulag Archipelago. Completed in 1968, Gulag was a bombshell—chronicling not only the unimaginable hardships in the camps but also the entire system of political repression from arrest, detention, and interrogation to transportation and incarceration. Smuggled out of the country to be published abroad (tamizdat—literally “publishing over there”) in late 1973, it was hailed by America’s foremost Kremlinologist-diplomat George F. Kennan as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime in modern times.”10
On September 5, 1973, Solzhenitsyn candidly wrote to Brezhnev, articulating what he saw as the most pressing challenges for the Soviet leadership both at home and abroad. With surprising audacity, Solzhenitsyn described the malaise in the economy, dilapidated collective agriculture, outdated military conscription, the exploitation of women, the lack of societal morality, and a destruc
tive corruption that pervaded the entire Soviet system. “But even more destructive is vodka,” continued Solzhenitsyn’s Tolstoyan indictment of the state’s complicity in the alcohol trade.
So long as vodka is an important item of state revenue nothing will change, and we shall simply go on ravaging people’s vitals (when I was in exile, I worked in a consumers’ cooperative and I distinctly remember that vodka amounted to 60 to 70 percent of our turnover). Bearing in mind the state of people’s morals, their spiritual condition and their relations with one another and with society, all the material achievements we trumpet so proudly are petty and worthless.11
Solzhenitsyn was a nationalist and Slavophile who viewed the alien, European ideology of Marxism–Leninism as the root cause of all of Russia’s ills—corrupting the spirituality and the morals of the people through “that same old vodka.”12
Brezhnev never wrote back, but the Kremlin responded in other ways. In February 1974—five months after penning his letter—Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported. He ultimately settled in the secluded hills of Cavendish, Vermont. Though Solzhenitsyn was persona non grata in the Soviet Union, his works were published to greater acclaim abroad and were often smuggled back in to the Soviet Union where his—and other dissidents’—banned works were circulated and reproduced by hand through underground networks in a process known as samizdat—or self-publishing.
With Solzhenitsyn in exile, the main dissident voice in the USSR belonged to Andrei Sakharov—nuclear physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Sakharov’s early warnings of the dangers of nuclear holocaust gave way to a broader criticism of the oppressive Soviet system itself. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was denounced as a traitor by his government. Like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov wrote brazen letters to the Kremlin leadership—and also like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov took particular issue with Soviet vodka politics. “Our society is infected by apathy, hypocrisy, petit bourgeois egoism, and hidden cruelty,” Sakharov wrote in a second letter to Brezhnev in 1972. “Drunkenness has assumed the dimensions of a national calamity. It is one of the symptoms of the moral degradation of a society that is sinking ever deeper into a state of chronic alcohol poisoning.”13
Increasingly famous for advocating democracy and human rights, Sakharov understood alcohol’s centrality to the system of repression: trapped in fear, unable to emigrate, and deprived of a voice in politics, the dissatisfied Soviet people turned to “internal protest” that takes on “asocial forms”: drunkenness and crime. “The most important and decisive role in maintaining this atmosphere of internal and external submission is played by the powers of the state, which manipulates all economic and social control levers. This, more than anything else, keeps the body and soul of the majority of people in a state of dependence.”14 That the state itself profits from this dependence, while the people grapple with the social, health, and criminal consequences only compounds the tragedy. Accordingly, in his letters and statements, Sakharov railed not only against the death penalty and torture but also for education and healthcare reform and remedying the alcohol problem.
Sakharov was long aware of the pervasive liquor problem. His Memoirs describe working at a munitions factory during World War II, recalling “with horror the day a roommate of mine came back from his shift after drinking a cupful of the methyl alcohol used in the plant. He became delirious and went berserk. Half an hour later, he was taken away in an ambulance, and we never saw him again.”15
In addition to the more-or-less conventional stories about rewarding workmen with drink or drunken hotel brawls, he also explained how the prodigious academics involved in the Soviet atomic bomb project gave the straight-laced Sakharov lessons in drinking pure 100 percent alcohol. He described how in the 1960s government procurement officers flew in helicopter loads of vodka to swindle Siberian trappers hunting in the rugged north. “After a few days the trappers and their parents, wives, and children would all be drunk, and the helicopter would fly off with furs for export.”16
Following the 1982 death of Leonid Brezhnev, Sakharov straightforwardly condemned Soviet vodka politics.
Drunkenness is our great national tragedy; it makes family life a hell, turns skilled workers into goldbricks, and is at the root of a multitude of crimes. The rise in drunkenness is a reflection of social crisis and evidence of our government’s unwillingness and inability to take on the problem of alcoholism. More recently, cheap fortified wines have become the favored means of turning people into drunkards and siphoning off surplus rubles.17
It is worth stepping back for a moment to appreciate the bigger picture here. Despite deep philosophical differences between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, these two greatest dissidents of the age were both teetotalers.18 Neither feared confrontation with General Secretary Brezhnev, who—like all the heirs of Stalin—was a drop-dead alcoholic. In a country where few abstained from drink, both understood and condemned Russia’s vodka addiction as central to an autocratic system that denied individuals their basic human rights and hindered their personal fulfillment.
A Surreal Ride
While Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were the reluctant celebrities of the Soviet dissident movement, many poignant social criticisms were written under assumed names and disseminated through the samizdat underground. My all-time favorite is a short 1968 novel by Venedikt Erofeyev called Moskva-Petushki, sometimes translated as Moscow to the End of the Line. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, called it “the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era” and picked it as his favorite obscure book.19 It is easy to see why.
Moscow to the End of the Line may well be the first work of gonzo journalism. A satirical firsthand account steeped in humor, sarcasm, and copious profanity, it is a Soviet Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written three years before Hunter S. Thompson’s descent into drug-addled hallucinations while searching for the American dream in the desert southwest. In Erofeyev’s counterpart we follow the vodka-, sherry-, wine-, vermouth-, and eau-de-cologne-swilling alcoholic Venya, who has just spent his last kopecks on a suitcase full of liquor “and a couple of sandwiches so as not to puke” for the train ride from Moscow to his much-embellished childhood home of Petushki some eighty miles distant.20 Did Venya ever find what he was seeking? We may never know. As reality melts into drunken hallucination, only his blackouts seem definite.
Even before the alcoholic haze sets in, Venya describes getting canned as foreman of a cable-laying crew for playfully charting his comrades’ alcohol consumption. “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us,” was the unofficial motto of the zastoi era, which Venya took to the extreme.
In the morning we’d sit down and play blackjack for money. Then we’d get up and unwind a drum of cable and put the cable underground. And then we’d sit down and everyone would take his leisure in his own way. Everyone, after all, has his own dream and temperament. One of us drank vermouth, somebody else—a simpler soul—some Freshen-Up eau de cologne, and somebody else more pretentious would drink cognac.… Then we’d go to sleep.
First thing next morning, we’d sit around drinking vermouth. Then we’d get up and pull yesterday’s cable out of the ground and throw it away, since, naturally, it had gotten all wet. And then what? Then we’d sit down to blackjack for money. And we’d go to sleep without finishing the game.
In the morning, we’d wake each other up early. “Lekha, get up. Time to play blackjack.” “Stasik, get up and let’s finish the game.” We’d get up and finish the game. And then, before light, before sunrise, before drinking Freshen-Up or vermouth, we’d grab a drum of cable and start to reel it out, so that by the next day it would get wet and become useless. And, so, then, each to each his own, for each has his own ideals. And so everything would start over again.
Erofeyev’s satire wasn’t much of an exaggeration. In a fitting epitaph to the entire era of Brezhnevite stagnation, a loaded Venya utters his sodden tribute: “Oh, freedom and equality! Oh, brotherhood, oh, life on the dole! Oh, the sweetn
ess of unaccountability, Oh, that most blessed of times in the life of my people, the time from the opening until the closing of the liquor stores.”21
The samizdat underground didn’t just disseminate trenchant works of fiction—much nonconformist literature was academic: historical, economic, social, and political critiques of the autocratic system in which alcohol played a major role.
Lies, Damned Lies, And Soviet Statistics
The official position of the Communist Party on any question of significance was articulated in the Big Soviet Encyclopedia. When it came to its drinking problem, the official line was that the Soviet Union was a largely temperate nation, steadily working to eliminate the alcoholism that was a remnant of the capitalist past: “In Soviet society alcoholism is considered an evil, and the fight against it is carried on by the state, Party, Trade-Union, and Komsomol (Communist Youth League) organizations and health agencies. Great importance is attached to measures of social influence, to raising the cultural level of the population, and to overcoming the the so-called alcoholic traditions which exert an influence on the youth.” Apparently they were making great strides: the official Stalin-era consumption figure of 1.85 liters of pure alcohol per person annually was far below the 5.1 liters in the United States or the 21.5 liters in France.22