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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Stumbling Toward The Exits

  By 1991 the Soviet Union was in its death throes. The massive hole in the budget, of which lost vodka revenues was a significant cause, was papered over with reams of new rubles, stoking inflation. With money losing its value as they held it in their hands, citizens scrambled to buy essentials and even food, most already gone from store shelves. Fistfights and skirmishes in the lengthening queues highlighted that the half-measures of perestroika weren’t wreaking just economic chaos, but social instability as well.

  Meanwhile, the openness of glasnost and the self-liberation of the Eastern European satellite states emboldened nationalists in the Soviet Baltic Republics, Georgia, and even the Russian Republic itself. The fissures of nationalism threatened to shatter the Soviet Union as one republic after another pressed for autonomy, then independence. Hoping to peaceably accommodate pressures for self-determination, Gorbachev proposed a new treaty that would reorganize the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into the Union of Sovereign States—a confederation of independent countries that would maintain a common executive as well as a shared military and foreign policy.

  This was a bitter pill for many Soviet patriots to swallow—especially for a group of high-level conspirators in Gorbachev’s own cabinet who decided that they could no longer sit idly by and watch the dismemberment of the only motherland they had ever known. On August 19, 1991—one day before the signing of the new union treaty—they acted. At dawn, citizens awoke to news that Gorbachev—then vacationing at the presidential retreat in Crimea—had suddenly fallen ill and was unable to perform his duties. Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev, assumed the role of acting president and head of the so-called State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), which vowed to solve the crippling shortages and restore the “honor and dignity” of the Soviet people. Following the announcement, the media came under emergency control. All meetings and street demonstrations were strictly outlawed. Martial law was imposed, and tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow.

  This was a coup d’etat. And like every coup in Russia’s imperial past, this too was drenched in vodka.

  According to witnesses, on the afternoon of Sunday August 18, both Vice President Yanayev and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov had been out drinking with friends when they were summoned to the Kremlin by KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who set the plan in motion. “Yanayev wavered and reached out for the bottle,” Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs. Along with the other conspirators, it is doubtful that Yanayev was sober at any time during the bungled three-day coup.2

  Co-conspirator Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov later confirmed that not only was Yanayev “quite drunk,” but so too were other plotters: KGB head Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and even Marshal Yazov himself. According to Yazov’s trial testimony, Pavlov was incapacitated by headaches and unspecified illnesses from the very beginning. After chasing his blood pressure medications with alcohol, Pavlov had to be pulled unconscious from the bathroom. After that, “I saw him two or three times, and each time he was dead drunk,” Yazov testified. “I think he was doing this purposefully, to get out of the game.”3

  Whether or not the failure can be chalked up to the liquor, the conspirators forgot rule number one of any takeover: neutralize your rivals. Their main opponent was Boris Yeltsin, who just the year before had been popularly elected president of the Russian Republic—the largest and most important of the fifteen republics that constituted the USSR. Yeltsin was a champion of liberalization, democratization, and devolution of power from the Kremlin to the republics. Yet while the plotters in the Kremlin dispatched KGB troops to his dacha, somehow they never ordered his arrest.

  On Sunday, August 18, Yeltsin was in Almaty, concluding a weekend trip to shore up relations with the Kazakh republic and its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. After a long Saturday of forging friendship treaties, Sunday began with vodka. “Yeltsin was well and truly drunk,” Nazarbayev remembered, as the tipsy Russian president tried to ride the magnificent black stallion Nazarbayev had just given him. “He kept rolling out of the saddle first one way, then the other, while his security men did their best to keep him from falling as the stallion kicked out and reared up. It was quite dangerous.” Escaping unharmed, the delegates relocated to the scenic mountain rivers of the Talgar Gorge above Almaty, where to the horror of his handlers the sauced Yeltsin tried to dive into in the frigid, fast-moving waters that masked jagged rocks. Reluctantly diverted to a calmer backwater, Yeltsin then called for shots to warm up. And then more vodka at the farewell lunch. Knowing his guest’s propensity for drink, Nazarbayev ordered the erecting of a yurt—the traditional tent of steppe nomads—for a post-celebration nap. When the bearish Yeltsin emerged, he called for even more toasts, further postponing his flight home. “I had to order the police to keep everyone away from the airport so that nobody could see the President of Russia in such a condition. We had to push him up the aircraft steps to get him on his plane,” recalled Nazarbayev—unaware of the momentous events awaiting Yeltsin back in Moscow.4

  At his dacha outside Moscow, Yeltsin was rudely awoken not only by a splitting headache, but also by news of the State Committee on the State of Emergency’s takeover. Top aides and panicked opposition figures soon arrived, including Yeltsin’s confidant and bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov, speaker of the Russian legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov, the popular deputy mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov, and even Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of the recently rechristened St. Petersburg.

  Amazed to find his fax and phone lines still working, the hungover Yeltsin started making phone calls: first to Nazarbayev, his Kazakh host from the evening before.

  “What is happening there, Boris Nikolayevich?”

  “I don’t know,” slurred Yeltsin, “But I think this is a real coup and we must prepare ourselves for the worst.”5 The president planned to denounce the takeover, call for nonviolent opposition, and stage a protest in downtown Moscow. During the Soviet era Moscow was not only capital of the Soviet Union—whose government ruled from the Kremlin—but also of the Russian Republic of the USSR, whose government was located at the “White House,” the towering parliament building on the Moscow River some three kilometers due west of the Kremlin. The White House was the symbol of Russian self-determination against Soviet power—he would go there.

  To arrange safe passage, Yeltsin phoned paratrooper commander Pavel Grachev, whom Yeltsin had befriended months earlier over a vodka-fueled banquet. Describing their encounter, airborne commander Aleksandr Lebed (who also rose to prominence for supporting Yeltsin) simply invoked the famed words of Vladimir of Kiev a thousand years earlier: “‘drinking is the joy of the Russes’—and that centuries old tradition was not broken, as the entire cavalcade set upon the open bar [brazhnyi stol].”6

  Supported by Grachev and Lebed, Yeltsin’s entourage made their way with surprising ease to the White House, where scores of protesters were already erecting protective barricades. Nonviolent protestors convinced the tank troops dispatched to the White House to defect and instead defend Yeltsin and the leadership of the Russian Republic. In an iconic moment captured by the global news media, Yeltsin—defying threats of sniper fire—courageously climbed atop a tank turret to address the crowd, denouncing the coup and calling for a general strike. Assuming command of the resistance, witnesses recalled how Yeltsin sternly declined offers of vodka at the White House, claiming “there was no time for a drink” at this moment of supreme crisis.7

  The exuberance and tension—serious and sober—at Yeltsin’s White House stood in stark contrast to the coup plotters just blocks away. That evening, the gray-clad Yanayev and the hard-liners of the State Committee on the State of Emergency held a press conference that was televised internationally as well as nationally. With the legitimacy of the coup unexpectedly challenged by stubbornly noncompliant reporters, the country and the world focused on the trembling hands of the befuddled Gennady Yanayev as evidence of the bankruptcy and irresolution of
the plotters. This “stunning spectacle exposed these mediocrites to public scrutiny,” recalled Russian history professor Donald J. Raleigh. “A sniffling Gennady Yanayev, his face swollen by fatigue and alcohol, had a tough time fielding the combative questions. His trembling hands and quivering voice conveyed an image of impotence, mediocrity, and falsehood; he appeared a caricature of the quintessential, boozed-up Party functionary from the Brezhnev era.”8 That’s precisely who he was.

  In the face of growing opposition and a military unwilling to follow orders, the coup collapsed on August 21. The police were dispatched to arrest the plotters. With the authorities banging down his apartment door, Interior Minister Pugo chose to shoot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Others sought refuge in the bottle: Pavlov was drunk when the authorities came to arrest him, “but this was no simple intoxication,” said Kremlin physician Dmitry Sakharov, “He was at the point of hysteria.” When the incoherent Vice President Yanayev was carried out of his Kremlin office—its floor strewn with empty bottles—he was too drunk to even recognize his one-time comrades who had come to arrest him.9

  In his subsequent interrogation, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov was asked how he lost command of his own military. He faulted the battalion commanded by “Yeltsin’s personal friend,” an allusion to Grachev. “And when the second day began, I saw a whole busload of vodka being brought to them,” Yazov claimed. “That’s how they tried to encourage the soldiers to betray their duty. Just imagine drunks in the armored personnel carriers! That’s a whole different sort of danger.”10 Although Yazov’s audacious claims bear a shocking similarity to the way that Empress Elizabeth won over the imperial regiments who placed her on the throne in 1741 (and again with the ascension of Catherine the Great in 1762), there is little evidence to substantiate them.

  While Yazov was being interrogated on August 22, a relieved Mikhail Gorbachev landed safely back at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport alongside his visibly shaken family. Moscow looked the same as before, but in his brief absence the country had been transformed: while he nominally held on to authority, Yeltsin’s sober defiance bolstered his political legitimacy, especially when juxtaposed against those drunken members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency whom Gorbachev himself had appointed.

  In the following months the Communist Party was outlawed. Gorbachev and his outmoded USSR were further marginalized as one union republic after another declared its independence. As devastating as it was, the coup was not the end of the Soviet Union. That began in December 1991, when representatives of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republics—the three republics responsible for creating the original USSR—met at a Belarussian hunting lodge and signed the Belovezh Accords, legally undoing that union and leaving Mikhail Gorbachev as a president without a country.

  A jubilant Russian president Boris Yeltsin was joined by Ukrainian Republic president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarussian chairman Stanislau Shushkevich to negotiate the final dissolution. Yet unlike his sober resolve atop the tank, Yeltsin’s final political triumph over his rival Gorbachev was “lubricated in traditional fashion.” Indeed, witnesses recalled how Yeltsin got so drunk that he fell out of his chair just as the doors were opened for the ceremony. According to one witness:

  Everyone began to come into the room and found this spectacular scene of Shushkevich and Kravchuk dragging this enormous body to the couch. The Russian delegation took it all very calmly. They took him to the next room to let him sleep. Yeltsin’s chair stayed empty. Finally, Kravchuk took his chair and assumed the responsibility of chairman. When Kravchuk finished his short speech to everyone about what had been decided, he said, “There is one problem that we have to decide right away because the very existence of the commonwealth depends on it: don’t pour him too much.” Everyone nodded. They understood Kravchuk perfectly.11

  The Soviet Union was finished two weeks later, on December 21, 1991, back in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the leaders of eleven soon-to-be post-Soviet republics (not including the Baltics or Georgia, which had already left the Union) signed into existence the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a confederal alternative to Gorbachev’s USSR. As the assembled presidents discussed a retirement package for Gorbachev, Yeltsin was drunk again—only occasionally raising his head to mutter a slurred “What you say is right,” before passing out. Yeltsin again had to be carried from the room.

  “This is terrible! Who’s ruling Russia?” growled a scornful Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrossian to one of Yeltsin’s aides. “How are you Russians going to live? We don’t envy you.”12

  And so independent Russia was born.

  Role Reversal

  The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union were largely peaceful, yet the political chaos, economic collapse, and demographic crisis that Russia suffered thereafter were similar to what happens in countries vanquished in war. Amid the disorder, Boris Yeltsin confronted the virtually insurmountable tasks of simultaneously transitioning not only from dictatorship to democracy, and from a command economy to the market, but also from an antiquated empire to a modern nation-state, complete with new borders and fourteen brand new international neighbors. Yet perhaps the greatest Soviet legacy that Yeltsin had to confront was vodka politics.

  Democratic theatrics aside, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin was a product of the Soviet autocratic system, and it showed through his temperament. Raised in the austere Urals countryside, young Boris was an adventurer—he lost his left thumb and index finger cracking open a hand grenade stolen from a local army depot. Still, his adventurism was tempered by parents and teachers who sternly condemned alcohol. Even as a teen, Yeltsin had no patience for drunkards: he was known to snatch vodka from the hands of classmates and dump it on the ground.13

  Yeltsin’s steadfast temperance weakened as he rose through the Communist Party, where no banquet, celebration, or transaction was complete without liquor. By 1976 he had been promoted to first secretary of the Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) district—effectively the governor of one of the country’s most important regions. The following year the Kremlin entrusted Yeltsin with the midnight demolition of a persistent symbol of anti-Soviet activism: the Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family met their gruesome ends at the hands of a Bolshevik firing squad back in 1918.14 Within the party Yeltsin became an acclaimed toastmaster. He would take guests and subordinates on vodka-fueled hunting trips in the Siberian wilderness. A small-scale carbon copy of the courtly dynamics of Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, or (Yeltsin’s professed hero) Peter the Great, these drunken escapades had the usual ulterior benefits. “Keeping everyone under control at work, during vacation, and even during their spare time allowed Boris Nikolaevich to know even the most intimate things about all his colleagues,” recalled one of those colleagues, Viktor Manyukhin. “Most importantly, it allowed him to see with his own eyes that there were no groupings against him. On the contrary—everyone was giving him their full support on everything.”15

  Yeltsin’s drinking rarely interfered with his work, and he had little patience for those who let vodka inhibit theirs—even firing factory directors for drunkenness.16 His energetic party work was noticed by Yegor Ligachev, the teetotaler from nearby Tomsk, who became Yeltsin’s political patron. Ligachev visited Sverdlovsk in 1984 and later noted that Yeltsin did not touch a drop of liquor. If he had, it is questionable whether the notoriously dry Ligachev and Gorbachev would have brought Yeltsin to Moscow, entrusted him as first secretary (de facto mayor) of Moscow, or promoted him as candidate member of the Politburo.17

  It wasn’t long before the outspoken Yeltsin ran afoul of Gorbachev. At a 1987 party plenum Yeltsin scathingly criticized the slow pace of perestroika reforms, warning that a destructive cult of personality was forming around Gorbachev, before requesting that he be able to resign his Politburo post. This was sensational: no one had voluntarily stepped down from the Politburo—ever. Such audacity galvanized Yeltsin’s populari
ty as a hero among Russian liberals, who attributed his stand to his unwavering principles. “Unwavering” was just the opposite adjective used by those Communist Party leaders who were present in the hall that day. They described Yeltsin as “not in total control of his thoughts”; his speech, “incoherent.” One Yeltsin supporter claimed “I could smell the alcohol on his breath. He was probably drinking all night.”18

  Yeltsin was ritually denounced by Gorbachev and the communist leadership. The barrage of beratements sent Yeltsin—complaining of chest pains—to the hospital, where later it was revealed that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Physical and psychological withdrawal would become a defining pattern of Yeltsin’s political career.19

  The general secretary had effectively ended Yeltsin’s career, just as Gorbachev’s democratization reforms began to offer the possibility of political redemption. In 1989, competitive, multi-candidate elections were held for a new nationwide parliament: the Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD). Yeltsin was elected as a representative from Moscow with a decisive ninety-two percent of the vote, and soon assumed a leadership role. In March 1990 Yeltsin was again elected, this time to the parliament of the Russian Republic, which quickly appointed him to its highest post: chairman of the Presidium. In June 1991—two months before the August coup—Yeltsin won another landslide election to become the first democratically elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the USSR. With fifty-seven percent of the vote, he defeated the Gorbachev-backed Nikolai Ryzhkov, who garnered only sixteen percent. Yeltsin’s dramatic political rise, then fall, then rise again were accompanied by moderation in alcohol. The accounts of foreign dignitaries, close associates, and even fierce political opponents affirm that during these years he rarely drank to excess like he did in later years.20 Yeltsin’s steady hand in the roisterous August putsch can be seen as part of that.