Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State
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Ultimately, when it came to launching Gorbachev’s historic reforms with an all-out war against vodka politics—the very foundations of the Russian autocracy itself—there is plenty of blame (or credit) to go around. As Ligachev and Gorbachev both acknowledged, the decision was made collectively—which is not to say that it was unanimous. What’s more, the personal rivalries that emerged from the heated debates over the anti-alcohol campaign shaped the course of future reforms, while the mismanagement of the campaign itself hastened the unraveling of the entire Soviet autocracy.
18
Did Alcohol Make the Soviets Collapse?
Q: What is a Soviet historian?
A: Someone who can accurately predict the past.1
Even in Soviet dissident circles the above was perhaps not the funniest political joke. Still, that did not stop American president Ronald Reagan from delivering it—and others like it—to great political effect with domestic audiences. As a former actor, Reagan understood the power of wit, and he had aides collect wisecracks told in the Soviet Union that captured the Russians’ wry sense of humor. Dropped into the middle of a speech, a well-delivered Soviet pun could not only win over a crowd but also convey that beyond the bombastic rhetoric of “evil empire” there were human beings on the other side of the Iron Curtain: regular, cynical people who well understood the substance of their system’s shortcomings. Plus, Reagan loved to tell audiences jokes they had never heard.
Two fellas are walking down the street in the Soviet Union, and one of them says “Have we really achieved full communism? Is this it?” Then the other one says, “Oh hell no—things are going to get a lot worse.”2
Beyond just his comedy stylings, Russians might be shocked to hear just how many present-day Americans believe that it was actually Reagan’s oratorical skill that singlehandedly ended the Cold War and fell the mighty Soviet Union. Consider this: according to historian Garry Wills, Reagan said “‘Tear down this wall,’ and it was done.” And today “we see no Soviet Union. He called it an Evil Empire, and it evaporated overnight.”3
That guy won a Pulitzer Prize.
Overstated? Certainly—but such arguments are increasingly common in an ever-growing Reaganology literature dedicated to valorizing “the Gipper.” As the standard line goes: Reagan’s steadfast moral resolve against a “godless” enemy and the dramatic increase in American defense spending overextended the Soviet Union and exposed the bankruptcy of communism, leading to Soviet capitulation, democratization of Eastern Europe, and liberalization throughout the socialist world. That is how Reagan alone “freed a billion slaves from their Communist masters.”4 And no, that wasn’t meant to get a laugh.
There are (at least) two fatal flaws that plague this literature. The first is that most Reaganology writers lack even the slightest familiarity with Soviet politics or history, focusing instead on the bountiful charisma of the American president. The other is sloppy reasoning. Pundits who credited Barack Obama for the Arab Spring beginning in late 2010 made the same error: there is little causal connection between a foreign leader’s rhetoric on one side of the globe and domestic political developments on the other.5
Reagan’s oratory was far less important to the future of the Soviet Union than the actual ills of the autocratic system itself. Many of those problems—from public dissatisfaction with the leadership, rising inflation amid a shortage economy, and even the exacerbation of nationalist tensions—were linked to vodka politics. Upon coming to power, Gorbachev was particularly horrified by the appalling social statistics, which showed that by the late 1970s the Soviet Union had begun a process of “demodernization.” Rather than expanding, economic productivity was on the decline; instead of blossoming, Soviet society was becoming more corrupt and stagnant. Instead of living longer, healthier lives, Soviets were becoming more sickly and dying earlier. The raw health statistics, shown for the first time under Gorbachev, confirmed that not only was infant mortality on the rise—as Western demographers like Murray Feshbach had suggested—but also that “life expectancies began to fall, a development without precedent in the industrial world in peacetime.”6
Indeed, the statistics that were made available thanks to Gorbachev’s alco-glasnost were horrific. The following is just a taste:
In 1985, Russians consumed on average of 14.9 liters of pure alcohol per person per year: according to the World Health Organization, anything over 8 liters is damaging to the overall health of the population. In other words, the average Russian man consumed 130 of the conventional half-liter bottles of vodka per year—or a bottle of vodka every three days for every man in the Soviet Union.7
While life expectancy for Soviet women was 72.6 years at the end of the 1970s, for men it had dropped to 62.5 years—lower than in any other European country. Not only did alcohol poisoning claim twenty thousand lives annually, but vodka also killed working-age Soviets through accidents, traumas, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Together, it was estimated that between 1960 and 1987 thirty to thirty-five million Soviets had been sacrificed to vodka—ten million more than were lost to Adolph Hitler in World War II.8
Once a mostly male activity, by the early 1980s more than ninety percent of Soviet women drank regularly. Even without including Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, drinking mothers were prone to dramatically higher rates of infant mortality, underweight and premature deliveries, and children born with physical and mental disabilities. Drinking often led to unwanted sex and unwanted pregnancies. The dramatic upsurge in abortions rendered more women barren at a younger age. Vodka invaded Russian universities, high schools, and even elementary schools: 84 percent of Soviet kids began drinking before the age of sixteen. According to a controversial report by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk—headed by Gorbachev’s future chief economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan—of those receiving anti-alcoholism treatments for the first time, ninety percent were under the age of fifteen, and a third were under the age of ten.9 This was devastating.
Vodka also tore apart Soviet families. Alcoholism was a major factor in up to eighty percent of divorces and eighty percent of traffic deaths. Alcohol was the single largest cause of suicides, drownings, and new cases of syphilis and gonorrhea. Statistics on crime were even more stark: in the Russian Republic, seventy-four percent of all murders were committed in a state of intoxication and sixty percent of all thefts, two-third of all fires, seventy-four percent of rapes, eighty-four percent of robberies, and ninety percent of all cases of hooliganism were attributable to alcohol. As one Soviet study concluded, “if there was no drunkenness and alcoholism, there would be no more of the crimes that make up most of the elements of the criminal statistics, above all violent, domestic and mercenary crime.”10
The costs to the Soviet economy were equally astonishing. The economic costs of illness and early death, workplace accidents, absenteeism, and the lack of labor discipline—so vividly described in Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moscow to the End of the Line—leeched billions of rubles from the economy every year. According to exhaustive studies, alcohol abuse cost the Soviet economy more than a third (36.9%) of national income—or more than five times what the state was reaping in vodka profits. Aganbegyan’s Academy of Sciences claimed that drunkenness contributed more than any other factor to the failure of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (1981–85) before concluding that alcoholism constituted the “most appalling tragedy in Russia’s thousand-year history.”11
If you were the new leader confronted with unending statistics like these, what would you do? It is clear why Gorbachev began his reforms with an anti-alcohol campaign aimed at improving the health, morality, and economic productivity of the Soviet people.12 Although we tend to focus on the campaign’s failures, it did have some demonstrable early successes: in its first year vodka production and sales dropped by a third; within two-and-a-half years it was down by two-thirds.13 By 1989 per capita alcohol consumption dropped from 14.9 to 12.5 liters. In the first year alone, overall crime dropped by a quarter. T
here were far fewer divorces, automobile accidents were down twenty percent, and absenteeism fell by a third.14 Early on, the draconian restrictions on sales and availability seemed to deliver results.
Twenty- to thirty-year-olds saw an instant twenty percent drop in mortality. In the Russian Republic, alcohol-related mortality plummeted from 26.4 per 100,000 in 1980 to 9.1 in 1987. Deaths from accidents at work dropped by a third; deaths from alcohol poisoning were cut in half. Happily, just as the death rate was dropping, the number of births was rising, and the babies were statistically far healthier than in the past. Perhaps most astonishing was the dramatic rise in life expectancy. From 1984 to 1987 average female life expectancy increased by a full year while Soviet men could expect to live fully three years longer.15 Indeed, before the policy was quietly withdrawn in 1988, the campaign was credited with saving up to a million Soviet lives.16
“It would be wrong to say that the anti-alcohol measures were absolutely useless,” Gorbachev later claimed in defense of the policy. “There were decreases in accidents, fatalities, lost working time, hooliganism and divorces due to drunkenness and alcoholism.… For the first time information was available on the manufacture and use of alcoholic beverages, along with statistical data that had previously been kept secret. However, the negative consequences of the anti-alcohol campaign greatly exceeded its positive aspects.”17
Gorbachev certainly had a good appreciation for the benefits of the campaign, but he also kept his sense of humor about the frustration his policies caused the average Soviet drinker. Even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, a jolly, self-effacing Gorbachev himself told foreign audiences this well-known joke:
Fed-up at a mile-long line for vodka at the liquor store, one guy finally snaps:
“That’s it. I’m going to the Kremlin to kill Gorbachev!”
An hour later, he came back to the same line.
“Well?” Everyone asked. “Did you kill him?”
“Kill him?” the man replied. “That line’s even longer than this one!”18
So, what went wrong? Despite the social and demographic achievements, the campaign’s political and economic losses were too great to ignore, beginning with the growing dissatisfaction with the Kremlin and a cynicism toward perestroika that proved difficult to overcome.
“The state, in effect, created two hundred million criminals,” explained Russian journalist Leonid Ionin, by forcing thirsty customers turn to illegal samogon. “The perestroika rhetoric was discredited. The authorities showed their stupidity and powerlessness. The people’s belief that the new leaders knew what they were doing, and could do it, was undermined.”19
The unpopular policies caused prime minister of the Russian Republic Vitaly Vorotnikov some uncomfortable public encounters. “The people were outraged,” he told the Politburo. “You couldn’t visit a factory without being shoved into a corner and shouted at, ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this to us!’” Fellow opponent of the anti-alcohol measures, candidate Politburo member Vladimir Dolgikh explained to his colleagues not only how the ubiquitous liquor store lines were caused by an undiversified economy that failed to deliver anything else to spend their rubles on but also how he was personally shouted down every time he passed one in his black Zil limousine.20
It wasn’t just irredeemable drunks who were inconvenienced—even casual drinkers waited in long lines to get drinks for family celebrations and holidays. At the height of the campaign, the average Muscovite spent over ninety hours—or almost four full days—in line waiting for alcohol. Simply to maintain order in the capital’s vodka queues required four hundred police officers and dozens of additional patrol cars every day.21
Even the well-meaning propaganda about the harms of alcohol was met with cynicism and scorn. Beyond the constant temperance entreaties in magazines and newspapers, drinking and party scenes were expunged from theaters, cinema, radio, and television programs. And still, when friends gathered to drink the very first toast often was raised “to the struggle against drunkenness.”22
“People became more and more frustrated by hours of queuing and the impossibility of buying a bottle of vodka or wine for some special occasion,” Gorbachev recognized in his Memoirs. “They cursed the leadership, most of all the General Secretary, who was traditionally held responsible for everything. It was then that I got the nickname ‘Mineral Water Secretary’,” or mineralny sekretar as a snide take on the title of generalny sekretar, or General Secretary.23
Yet while Soviets naturally vented their angst toward Gorbachev the man, the real source of frustration lay with the autocratic system itself. From their perch atop a closed, autocratic hierarchy, the insulated leadership often bolstered their legitimacy with bold proclamations. But policy implementation was always complicated by Russia’s traditionally obsequious bureaucracy. As it was before communism, and just as it is today, bootlick bureaucrats dutifully advance even the most misguided policies so long as it keeps them in good standing with their immediate superiors. Consequently, even the most unrealistic directives are amplified to the point of absurdity. As with Stalin’s collectivization campaign, it seemed as though the Soviet bureaucracy was again “dizzy with success” in persecuting alcohol. The overfulfillment mentality led local officials to exaggerate their successes and downplay their failures. Gorbachev admitted as much: “As is often the case [in the traditional Russian autocracy at least], the idea and its implementation were miles apart. I would say that we were both realistic and responsible during the discussion and decision-making, but when the time came to carry out our decisions we began to do things helter-skelter and to allow excesses, and thus we ruined a useful and good initiative.”24
In the name of socialist competition village leaders went far beyond the original decree, forcing “dry months” upon their jurisdictions. Local and regional bureaucrats across the USSR proclaimed their results were so encouraging that there was a real prospect of eliminating all alcohol consumption within five years or at least by the year 2000. “The leadership, for its part, left no room for doubt about what it wanted to hear,” claimed historian Stephen White, “calling (as Ligachev did in late 1985) for sobriety zones to be established and ‘the sooner, the better,’ or even for total prohibition.”25
If Solomentsev was the program’s architect, and Gorbachev its enabler, it was Yegor Ligachev who kicked the policy into hyperdrive. Ligachev encouraged regional leaders to overfulfill the plan: close down even more retail outlets and encourage greater competition between vodka producers to see who could slash output the most. Those who hesitated were given a public dressing down or booted straight out of the Party. Before he retired in 1988, Mikhail Solomentsev did the same. They “punished so many people,” recalled Vorotnikov, “ruined so many people with terror if they dared to decline to carry out the decisions.”26
“Ligachev and Solomentsev… began with irrepressible zeal, but eventually they took everything to the point of absurdity,” Gorbachev later recalled. “Well, I must admit that I bear a great share of the responsibility for this failure. I should not have entrusted the implementation of the policy entirely to others.”27
The rift between Gorbachev and the conservative Ligachev over the botched anti-alcohol campaign widened when Ligachev openly derided Gorbachev and his reforms as going to far. His hard-line economic criticisms first won Ligachev a demotion to agriculture secretary in 1988 and then dismissal from Gorbachev’s Politburo in 1990. “I am not dodging responsibility for the fact that these measures initially turned out to be excessively harsh and bureaucratic,” Ligachev responded to those blaming him for the anti-alcohol mess. “As a nondrinker, I was psychologically unprepared to accept the fact that someone would not be able to ‘kick’ drinking if the possibility of obtaining alcohol were sharply curtailed. This was undoubtedly a mistake on my part, [but it] seemed to be that if you went at it with a will, drunkenness could be eliminated quickly.”28 Only later did he realize that undoing the alcoholization of an entire
society would be a gradual, long-term undertaking, not something that could be solved with shock tactics.
Q: What is Soviet business?
A: Soviet business is when you steal a wagonload of vodka, sell it, and spend the money on vodka.29
As we learned in chapter 13 about prohibition’s role in the demise of the Romanov dynasty, it takes more than just discontent to topple an autocracy. There is usually a precipitating crisis: a disastrous war or economic collapse that weighs heavily on the people. In the case of Nicholas II those crises were only exacerbated by the tsar’s ill-fated prohibition, which blew a massive hole in the treasury at the worst possible time. Patching the hole with paper rubles accelerated the hyperinflation that pushed the empire toward revolution. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, his reform followed the exact same script, leading to the demise of the Soviet superpower itself.
Let’s begin with another unfortunate parallel with the ill-fated imperial prohibition: unrealistic expectations. Dusting-off imperial Finance Minister Peter Bark’s script from some seventy years earlier, defenders of the Soviet anti-alcohol campaign declared that any loss of revenue from decreased vodka sales would be more than compensated by a miraculous economic growth from casting off the yoke of vodka that had long stifled the peoples’ productive capacity.30 The treasury’s prayers would again go unanswered.
Gorbachev inherited an absolute mess of Soviet state finances. While, on paper, state income neatly covered expenditures, the two largest contributors were the domestic vodka sales and international oil and natural gas exports. Just as Finance Minister Garbuzov continuously ratcheted up vodka production, the Soviet Union also increased its petrochemical production eightfold from 1971 to 1980.31 So long as international oil prices hovered between thirty to forty dollars per barrel, the Soviet treasury was assured a constant stream of hard-currency revenues. But just as Gorbachev assumed power, the global price of oil collapsed to less than ten dollars a barrel. The Kremlin suddenly lost the foreign-currency reserves that funded the Brezhnev-era illusion of growth. By slashing supply in a futile attempt to drive global prices higher, they lost even more.32