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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Figure 16.2 VLADIMIR TREML’S PER-CAPITA ESTIMATES OF LEGAL VODKA AND SAMOGON CONSUMPTION IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1955–79. Source: Vladimir Treml, Alcohol in the U.S.S.R.: A Statistical Study. Duke Press Policy Studies. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982, 68.

  These findings were even more damning than the brouhaha over Davis and Feshbach’s report. Based on the greater harmfulness of the potent, low-quality samogon and the culture of drinking to stupefaction, Treml boldly announced to the Soviet academy that the upsurge of alcohol consumption was accompanied by a spike of alcohol poisonings to the tune of fifty thousand fatalities per year or over one hundred times higher than the rate in the United States.49

  These revelations were damning… or they would have been had they been acknowledged. Instead, foreign studies of Russian drinking were held in only a few Soviet libraries—and even in those, books like Treml’s Alcohol in the U.S.S.R. were kept under lock and key in spetskhran—the secure section—officially off limits to all but the most well-connected researchers.50

  Why was the government going to such lengths to cover up this epidemic? Having met privately with Soviet academics, Treml later recalled their callous explanation: “the authorities are aware of the problem, but they want these alcoholics to die” in order to relieve the state’s burden in caring for those beyond rehabilitation.51

  Outlandish? Perhaps. Yet with vodka contributing nearly one-quarter of all government revenue—or enough to cover the entire defense budget of the Soviet superpower—the state’s budget needs were always paramount. So much so, Treml claimed, that “no anti-alcohol measure can be contemplated without considering its impact on tax earnings.”52

  “This is what Vlad Treml has called the ‘fiscal dilemma’,” Feshbach replied to a question on Soviet alcoholism during a 1985 C-Span call-in television show. “The average per capita consumption of alcohol between 1952 and about 1980 has increased by about six times in the Soviet Union, and again, most of it being hard liquor.” Murray was on a roll—a seemingly endless twelve-minute ramble of facts, figures, and anecdotes without pause or punctuation. “The dilemma is do you supply alcohol or vodka or whatever, or do you stop that and then make people complain about other things—and they might complain even more than they are. And here it seems to be that it just is increasing dramatically.”53

  Despite the official line of a sober and prosperous socialist future, nobody was buying it—at home or abroad.

  Is Anybody Listening?

  From the victory over Hitler in 1945 through the stagnation of the early 1980s, Soviet alcohol sales increased eightfold. Social, health, economic, and criminal statistics deteriorated accordingly—to say nothing of the unquantifiable misery of broken lives and families left in vodka’s wake. Today, Russia’s foremost alcohol researcher Dr. Aleksandr Nemtsov argues that “the very high level of drinking, the predominance of strong drinks, the significant quantity of illegal alcohol, the low quality of liquor, its use in socially unacceptable circumstances—is all a product of the post-war Soviet epoch, not having been previously seen at such levels before in Russia.”54

  No amount of propaganda could comb over such blemishes: they were just as apparent to researchers in far-off America as to dissidents and common citizens across the Soviet Union. Were the Soviet leaders just so out of touch that they did not realize the incredible toll their vodka politics was taking on their people? Didn’t they care? Or had they become stupefied victims of vodka themselves?

  Back in 1958, Nikita Khrushchev characteristically responded in autocratic fashion: ramping up anti-alcohol propaganda and education, curtailing hours of alcohol sales, and immediately hiking retail prices by twenty-one percent. The measures failed: state production dipped slightly (figure 16.1), but drinkers simply turned to black market samogon. In those scratchy tapes recorded after his ouster, Khrushchev admitted as much: “I, too, thought that by raising the price of vodka we could bring the level of consumption down. But it did not work. The only result was that family budgets were hit harder than before, and people had even less money to spend on necessary goods. Besides, it makes people angry when the government arbitrarily raises prices.”55

  At the very least, the leadership was aware of the problem and the yawning distance between the official image and alcoholic reality. “I shall not conceal the fact that we receive letters in which workers, collective farmers and engineers propose an intensified struggle against loafers, drunkards, and dodgers,” declared Brezhnev before the workers at the Kharkov Tractor Factory in 1970, responding to complaints about about the type of workplace alcoholism satirized by Erofeyev. “I believe this is a very proper demand.”56 Yet when the Central Committee finally instituted reforms two years later they too contained little beyond the usual calls to “eradicate drunkenness” through education and propaganda campaigns and by increasing expenditures on cultural and sports alternatives. As Treml’s statistics suggest (figure 16.2), even Brezhnev’s 1972 command to reduce vodka production in favor of safer, lower-alcohol beers and wines only survived one year before getting ramped up once again.57

  “One cannot affirm the norms and principles of communist morality,” proclaimed an aging Brezhnev in 1978 to the Komsomol, Communist Youth League, “without waging a continuous hard struggle against anti-social behavior and spiritual poverty, and its inevitable concomitants—drunkenness, hooliganism and breaches of labor discipline.” Yet such pronouncements rang hollow, as the hard-drinking general secretary (and his equally inebriate Politburo) had as little interest in confronting society’s debilitating alcoholism as in confronting his own.58

  For the twenty-eight years from 1957 to 1985, Andrei Gromyko served as the Soviet Union’s stalwart foreign minister. Late one night in the 1970s he found himself driving back to Moscow from the country residence at Zavidovo with General Secretary Brezhnev himself. Gromyko seized this rare opportunity—alone with the powerful Soviet leader—to broach a subject that had been troubling him for some time.

  “Leonid Ilich,” he said, “something has to be done about vodka. The people are becoming alcoholics. Why is the Politburo silent on this?”

  Gazing at the road in front of them, Brezhnev was silent. For five minutes, the two drove on in awkward silence, while Gromyko increasingly regretted having said anything.

  “Andrei,” Brezhnev finally replied, “the Russian people have always enjoyed drinking. They can’t get by without it.”

  “He wouldn’t agree to any further discussion,” Gromyko later recalled. “He particularly emphasized the words: ‘They can’t get by without it.”59

  If these words sound familiar—they should. This was the legendary utterance of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in the year 986 in justifying his choice of Orthodox Christianity for his people.60 And while Brezhnev’s proclamation was not nearly as bold, it did make clear that there would be no dethroning of king vodka so long as he was in power.

  17

  Gorbachev and the (Vodka) Politics of Reform

  With the aid of hindsight, most histories of the Soviet Union refer to the three years from 1982 through 1985 as an interregnum—a relatively unimportant discontinuity between the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet doing so misses a number of important tensions and developments, especially as they relate to vodka politics. If the post-Stalin era highlighted the key division between “dry” dissenters against the “wet” Soviet leadership and their alcohol policies, the transition from Brezhnev to Gorbachev shows how the wet/dry distinction—both in policy and personal temperament—became among the most important political cleavages within the Soviet leadership itself.

  By the beginning of the 1980s both the aspirations and ills of the Soviet system were incarnate in its leader, Leonid Brezhnev—his suit jackets overflowing with medals proclaiming the heroism of past glories, all pinned to an aging and decrepit chest. Like its political leadership, Soviet society was increasingly corrupt, drunk, and in deteriorating health. Brezhnev valued orde
r and predictability through the so-called stability of cadres: once ensconced in powerful positions, Communist Party leaders were difficult to remove. The result was gerontocracy—rule by the elderly. In the early 1980s the combined age of Brezhnev’s thirteen-member Politburo was 909, for an average age of 70.1 No new faces or ideas meant greater stagnation, corruption, and political decay. As the temperate Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko learned, Brezhnev met serious confrontations about drunkenness, stagnation, and corruption with resigned indifference: “You don’t know life,” Brezhnev said when discussing the scale of the shadow economy, “Nobody lives just on his wages.”2

  Since keeping your position and perks depended on not rocking the boat, most in Brezhnev’s graying cadre shared his dismissiveness. One exception was KGB head Yury Andropov—a man with a great deal of blood on his hands. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary, he helped crush the 1956 liberalization movement there. After his promotion to head of state security, Andropov believed only military force could safeguard faltering communist regimes: accordingly, he rolled in the tanks to squash the Prague Spring in 1968, invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and supported martial law in Poland in 1981. The KGB chief’s “Hungarian complex” also meant squashing opposition at home, including oppression of dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.3

  So it is ironic that the ruthless head of the KGB actually shared these dissenters’ understanding of the threat posed by alcoholism, shysterism, and corruption. A relatively dry ascetic who preferred sipping Johnnie Walker scotch to quaffing bottles of vodka, Andropov was appalled at the privilege, drunkenness, and corruption among the party elite.4 He dedicated himself to streamlining the KGB into a regimented, efficient, anti-corruption force.

  As Brezhnev disappeared from view due to his failing health, in 1982 Andropov’s KGB investigated a high-profile ring of embezzlement, money laundering, and international diamond smuggling that included the suspiciously affluent, notoriously depraved, and rabid drunk Galina Brezhneva—daughter of the ailing general secretary himself. This was an unmistakable signal to the party elite that when Brezhnev finally passed it would be anything but politics as usual.

  Brezhnev died peacefully at his state dacha outside Moscow in November 1982. Gathering at his bedside, Brezhnev’s elderly Politburo comrades agreed that Andropov would be his successor. At the nationally televised funeral, few Soviets missed how Andropov solemnly embraced Brezhnev’s grieving widow but turned his back on Brezhnev’s daughter, who was conspicuously flanked by two burly guards. KGB investigations concluded that the hedonistic Galina and her many lovers and ex-husbands were smuggling diamonds on such a scale that they threatened to undermine the DeBeers cartel. Under Andropov, the alcoholic Brezhneva quietly disappeared before being committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1998.5

  Andropov used his very first policy address to launch a wide-ranging labor-discipline campaign patterned on his KGB reforms—including a sweeping anti-vodka initiative—which was carried out with all the subtlety one might expect from a former KGB chief. In a move completely unthinkable during Brezhnev’s two decades in power, the new secretary general checked in on workplace drunkenness through widely publicized surprise visits to factories. He launched “Operation Trawl,” a nationwide dragnet of restaurants, movie theaters, saunas, metro stations, and parks for anyone getting drunk and playing hooky from work.6

  Andropov was serious. The Presidium also made drunkenness on the job grounds for immediate termination—a dramatic move in the land of full employment. Even if the terminated worker found another job, the stigma of alcoholism followed him, as a disciplined drunkard could receive only half the usual bonuses. Drunks were now liable for damage—including defective output—caused in an intoxicated state. Managers who did not root out shop floor drunkenness lost their coveted bonuses.7

  Since it only addressed the symptom of labor indiscipline, rather than the disease of vodka politics, Andropov’s approach was doomed to fail. Indeed, stiff penalties for drunkenness remained the same as in the past—as did their lax enforcement. There were no attempts to improve education, living standards, or healthcare or to limit state vodka sales.

  In fact, Andropov’s other break from traditional practices—reducing rather than raising the price of vodka—seriously hampered his labor-discipline campaign. Cheap bottles of “Andropovka” (as drinkers affectionately dubbed them) were meant to draw customers away from dangerous samogon. Still, despite the stepped-up penalties, home brewing endured, especially in rural areas.8

  Historians are left to debate whether Andropov’s reforms would have succeeded had he not succumbed to his failing kidneys. At least he shook up the drunken, aging “cadres” of the Brezhnev era by promoting young, like-minded, and mostly “dry” reformers like Yegor Ligachev and Mikhail Gorbachev. By the summer of 1983 Andropov was conspicuously absent from official meetings, leaving the day-to-day operations to the elderly second secretary, Konstantin Chernenko. From his bed Andropov wrote that since he was unable to chair Committee meetings, “I would therefore request members of the Central Committee to examine the question of entrusting the leadership of the Politburo and Secretariat to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” as his anointed successor rather than the corrupt and stodgy old Chernenko. Yet when the Brezhnevite old guard disseminated his letter to the Politburo, this final paragraph was conveniently redacted.9

  On February 9, 1984, Yury Andropov died of kidney failure. At his state funeral on Red Square a virtually unintelligible eulogy was delivered by his successor—Konstantin Chernenko—who was already dying from chronic lung, heart, and liver diseases. The 72-year-old “new” secretary general was perhaps the most ineffectual leader of any state at any time. Despite expressing “serious concern” about pervasive alcohol abuse that “destroys people’s health and brings misfortune to the home” and preaching a desire to “free society from this great evil,” Chernenko’s words were not matched with deeds.10 His inability to continue the labor-discipline campaign can be chalked up to his failing health while his unwillingness to do so was rooted in his loyalties to his former drinking buddy, Brezhnev. Indeed, if there was anything at all remarkable about Chernenko it may have been that he could drink even Brezhnev under the table. Ever boastful of his “amazing capacity to consume alcohol”—a trait he ascribed to his upbringing in the harsh Siberian climate—“Chernenko never got drunk, no matter how much he consumed.”11

  His prodigious alcoholism no doubt compounded the liver cirrhosis and lung and heart aliments that killed him on March 10, 1985. “Whatever the cause of Mr. Chernenko’s cirrhosis,” diplomatically concluded the official Kremlin autopsy, “the disease reduced his liver function and disrupted the complicated biochemical reactions necessary to sustain life.”12

  The Soviet superpower was now poised to get its fourth leader in as many years—a political embarrassment both at home and abroad. “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?” recalled a frustrated American President Ronald Reagan in his memoirs.13

  The Choice Of A Dry Generation

  Reagan wasn’t the only one fed up with the gerontocracy. As the usual story goes: with the demise of Chernenko the Soviet elders reluctantly agreed that a new generation must lead. And so the Politburo chose its youngest, most promising member—the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev—as his successor. Yet this conventional wisdom is overdetermined.

  The choice was not simply whether the next general secretary would be old or young but also whether he would be drunk or sober. This was no trivial matter, since the leader’s personal relationship with the bottle seemed to be a reliable bellwether for reform. As we have seen, aside from Lenin most Soviet leaders were heavy drinkers with little interest in weaning society (or themselves) off the bottle. The relatively more sober leaders, including Khrushchev and Andropov, weren’t content with the drunken stagnation and initiated reform. It is worth bearing this distinction in mind when considering the two top contenders for secretar
y general in 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev and Grigory Romanov.

  Born in the southern region of Stavropol in 1931, Gorbachev—like Andropov—was not a complete abstainer but leaned toward the “dry” side. In his Memoirs, he traced his distaste for distilled spirits to a rite of passage in 1946, when he was fifteen years old. After a hard day working in the fields alongside his father, the harvesting team leader declared, “It’s time you became a real man” and forced the boy to down a full mug of what he thought was vodka. It turned out to be one hundred percent pure medical alcohol. “After that experience I have never felt any pleasure in drinking vodka or spirits.”14

  Gorbachev left Stavropol to attend the prestigious Moscow State University, where he met his future wife, Raisa. The two wed in 1953. Following graduation, they returned to Stavropol, where Mikhail rose through the ranks as an able reformer of the notoriously inefficient collective farms. When in 1978 his mentor and patron—Politburo member Fyodor Kulakov—died of a sudden heart attack after a night of heavy drinking, Gorbachev succeeded him as secretary of agriculture, where he enjoyed the support of his like-minded, fellow Stavropol-native Yury Andropov. As a regional party secretary in the 1970s, Gorbachev pioneered the fight against indiscipline, corruption, and drunkenness in agriculture, which Andropov drew from once in power.15