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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  “There was no point in trying to bargain further,” thought Kozyrev, after being repeatedly rebuffed: “all I could do was descend the ramp under the lights and flashing of journalists’ cameras, in anticipation of Boris Yeltsin’s appearance, and explain the whole situation to the Irish premier. What is more, I had to think up words of apology as I went along (naturally Korzhakov did not supply anything on this account), as well as the version that the president was not feeling well due to supposedly high blood pressure.”

  Kozyrev exchanged meaningful glances with the disappointed Irish Taoiseach. “Well now, if he is sick, there is nothing we can do about it,” concluded the visibly disappointed Reynolds, “but Mr. Yeltsin, my guest, is on Irish soil, and I cannot miss this opportunity to go on board the airplane for five minutes, shake the president’s hand and wish him a speedy recovery.” Yet that too was impossible. No one could see the Russian president.

  And so the Irish summit failed before it began, producing enmity and indignation rather than trust and cooperation. “We Irish, like you Russians, also like to drink, and all kinds of things happen here,” a high-ranking Irish official later confided. “So if your president had come out to see us, we wouldn’t have paid any attention to his state and would have forgiven him, but his refusal to come out of the airplane insulted us to the depth of our souls and showed us that a small country like Ireland wasn’t worth reckoning with.”43

  When Yeltsin finally did emerge—at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport—he was peppered with questions. His reply was artless at best: “Well, you see I was sleeping and no one woke me up. But they’re not going to get away with it. And I am well, who said I was sick?” Yeltsin later apologized personally to Reynolds, again claiming that he had overslept.

  The truth about what really happened at Shannon remains a mystery. The Aeroflot representative recalled seeing Yeltsin emerge from his compartment in suit and tie eager to go to the talks and was agitated that his handlers, “fearing for the state he was in,” would not allow it. Korzhakov’s muckraking biography claimed that Yeltsin was having chest pains. Yeltsin’s daughter and advisor, Tatyana Yumasheva, later revealed it was a mild heart attack. Still, these conflicting accounts at least agree that the party Yeltsin began in Washington continued on the transatlantic flight.44

  Whether he was drunk, sleeping, or ill, the Shannon snub provided even more ammunition for Yeltsin’s opponents to depict him as unfit for leadership. The press had a field day, with one headline more scathing than the next. One front-page political cartoon depicted the waiting Irish delegation watching as an empty vodka bottle tumbled down the plane’s staircase with the inscription “Hello from Yeltsin.” Back in Russia, former vice president turned critic Aleksandr Rutskoi joked that Yeltsin was in a “permanent state of visiting Ireland.”45

  While such high-profile diplomatic gaffes tarnished Yeltsin’s once-heroic image, other alcoholic episodes would have much more tangible—and tragic—results.

  Chechnya

  At the time of the failed August 1991 coup Boris Yeltsin encouraged the various republics across the Soviet Union to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow” to weaken the authority of Mikhail Gorbachev. Former Soviet air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev—the recently elected president of the tiny republic of Chechnya in Russia’s rugged northern Caucasus mountains—did just that. On November 1, 1991, Dudayev expelled Kremlin operatives from the predominantly Muslim Chechnya and declared its independence from both from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s Russian Republic, to which it was nominally subordinate. The tiny, breakaway republic maintained de facto sovereignty even after the Russian Federation’s independence, until the unsteady Yeltsin took decisive action to reassert Kremlin control after a series of bus hijackings in November 1994.46

  Emotions ran high at a November meeting at Yeltsin’s dacha attended by more drinking buddies than government ministers (including those like Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who conveniently filled both roles). Yeltsin suddenly gave the order: “Reestablish control of Chechnya!” Unsurprisingly, according to those present, Yeltsin was “drunk” and “out of control.” Russia’s dilapidated military had neither the plans nor the troops in place to carry out such a brash order. Nevertheless, within days, a ragtag collection of ill-equipped units pressed into Chechnya, where they were quickly pinned down by rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire.47

  The focus of the Russian advance was the Chechen capital, Grozny. With a population of four hundred forty thousand, it was a vibrant, multi-ethnic city larger than Omaha, Nebraska. The decision to besiege the city—the first indiscriminate aerial bombardment of a European city since World War II—was ordered in such haste that it was not even assigned an official code name. The newspaper Izvestiya reported that the decision to attack on New Year’s Eve—which caught tens of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting ethnic-Russian and Chechen civilians in the crosshairs—was made by Defense Minister Grachev and other high-ranking officials in the middle of a vodka binge. “The front-line units then received the command—whoever took the [Chechen] presidential palace would receive three Hero of Russia awards.”48

  It would be easy to simply portray the first war in Chechnya as a series of awful tactical decisions that were implemented disastrously, but that would trivialize the tragedy of some thirty thousand killed in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996 and perhaps another seventy thousand killed following the resumption of hostilities in 1999—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians, a litany of torture, forcible disappearances, terrorist attacks, and human rights atrocities committed by belligerents on all sides.49 And as with the more epic military engagements of Russia’s storied past (chapter 11), this war was also drenched in alcohol. Interior ministry generals and Cossack volunteers were notorious for their brutality and open drunkenness. Chechen civilians also feared the underpaid Russian foot soldiers, who “were extremely savage—hysterical, terrified, drunken—they would kill for no reason at all.”50 Eyewitnesses told of rogue Russian troops menacing civilians for food, cash, and vodka or bartering their weapons to obtain them.

  “We were all going absolutely nuts, what with the racket and the corpses and the blood and the lice,” explained a Russian unit commander.

  Street fighting is hell. We were all drunk and high. Otherwise we couldn’t have stood it. There was no other way. But I smile sometimes when I speak, because it seemed funny to us at the time. It was so much fun when a house filled with civilians was hit with depth charges, the kind you use against submarines. What it does is, it smashes through nine stories and after a while it explodes. When the dust all settles, there’s nothing left but the outside framework, the four walls.51

  Yet it wasn’t just the Russian side that was drunk: one of the most frequently reported ironies of the Chechen separatists were tales of “true Muslim” fighters preparing to take on the Russian enemy after quaffing bottles of Russian vodka.52

  Chechnya is one of the great humanitarian tragedies in post-Soviet Eurasia as well as an enormous political challenge for the Kremlin. For some, laying at least partial blame with vodka could be construed as absolving politicians, commanders, and troops of responsibility. That is not my intent. Instead Chechnya underscores the persistence of the autocratic traditions of Russian vodka politics. For all the rhetoric of liberty and democracy in the immediate post-Soviet years—when Russia was arguably its most democratic—under Yeltsin, political decision making was still insular and autocratic. In well-functioning, responsive governments, big decisions about issues like war and peace are rarely entered into lightly: usually after extensive coordination within the government and in dialogue with the public rather than on a whim over rounds of drinks. Indeed, one need not focus on Yeltsin’s drinking to see the continuities with the Soviet autocracy from which he emerged; you need only consider Chechnya and the drunken callousness with which Yeltsin and his inner circle unnecessarily imperiled hundreds o
f thousands of their own, voting citizens.

  Political Death, Political Resurrection

  To say that Yeltsin was in trouble with Russian voters was an understatement. Chechnya was just another failure laid at his feet, alongside the implosion of the Russian economy and his high-profile drunken gaffes. Even worse, between July and December 1995 Yeltsin’s heavy drinking culminated in three separate life-threatening heart attacks. His sudden disappearance in the run-up to the 1995 legislative elections to the Duma entrenched perceptions that Yeltsin was unfit to lead. His most vocal opponents made significant gains through populist, anti-Yeltsin positions. Ironically, the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky—subsequently better known for his bombastic rhetoric and for starting fistfights on the floor of the Duma—scored points with the everyday Ivan-in-the-street by demanding even lower vodka prices. Many snickered when he launched his own brand of vodka with his face on the label. But when Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, along with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, became the two largest factions in the legislature, nobody was laughing.53 Indeed, Richard Nixon’s warnings sounded ever more prophetic.

  The real prize was the presidency, which was due to be contested in the summer of 1996. While the communists and the nationalists surged ahead, Yeltsin’s approval numbers were in the single digits—in some cases even less than the poll’s margin of error. Many whispered that it might be necessary to cancel the elections in order to save “democracy” from itself. The economic stability of the Soviet past promised by Yeltsin’s principal rival, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, sounded increasingly alluring amid the hardships of transition. With a seemingly insurmountable lead, Zyuganov accentuated Yeltsin’s personal and political shortcomings. “I’m not against a good glass of wine or a little shot of vodka,” Zyuganov reminded voters. “But I drink quite modestly. I can’t handle more than three vodkas. Someone has to be sober among today’s politicians.”54

  At his hospital bed, Yeltsin received a blunt ultimatum from his Kremlin doctors: either stop drinking or die—plain and simple. From that point on, Yeltsin vowed to shape up and compete. Facing his own mortality, however, may have been easier than facing the hostile electorate. When pollsters asked what adjectives best described Yeltsin, “drunk,” “ill,” and “out of touch with the common person” made the top five. A rededicated Yeltsin tried to resurrect the image of a dynamic leader. Traveling the country, famously dancing onstage at concert rallies, a reinvigorated Yeltsin lost twenty pounds and stopped drinking. Days before the first round of voting he even fired his longtime enabler/gatekeeper Alexander Korzhakov. On the campaign trail, when he was bluntly asked whether he was an alcoholic, he answered,

  To say yes would be untrue. To say no would not be convincing. Here people will not believe it unless they check it themselves. They would even say: “What kind of Russian man are you if you can’t drink?” So I will only say that I can drink, but that I don’t abuse alcohol!55

  While many remained skeptical that he had turned over a new leaf, kicking the bottle was just part of the formula that brought Yeltsin back from near death—both politically and physiologically—to achieve ultimate victory over the communist Zyuganov with fifty-four percent of the vote in a runoff election. He ended the disastrous war in Chechnya. His campaign re-framed the election as a referendum on the communist past represented by Zyuganov. Against the memory of Soviet rule, Yeltsin’s alcoholism did not seem nearly as bad.56 Yet his message could not resonate if no one heard it. To bankroll his campaign, Yeltsin turned to a group of “oligarchs,” the super-rich winners of Russia’s new capitalist game, who had everything to lose should the communists return. In the ensuing “loans-for-shares scandal,” these oligarchs not only bankrolled Yeltsin’s campaign, but they also had their media holdings shower Yeltsin with positive coverage—in exchange for some of the remaining yet-to-be-privatized jewels of the old Soviet economy. When, as expected, the government failed to repay the loans, the oligarchs walked away with the commanding heights of the Russian economy, having paid only kopecks on the ruble for them.

  From day one of his second term Yeltsin was seen as a lame duck president. His newfound sobriety could have been a bigger story, had Yeltsin not again disappeared shortly after his victory—this time for a quintuple heart bypass that landed him in the hospital for months—again inviting comparisons with the infirm Brezhnevite gerontocracy. Upon his return, Yeltsin seemed politically beholden to the oligarchs as the Russian economy lurched from one crisis to another, culminating in the government’s default and economic collapse amid the 1998 financial crisis.

  On December 31, 1999—while the rest of the world waited anxiously to see whether the Y2K bug would crash the global computer grid—Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV to give his annual new year’s address. He tearfully pleaded for forgiveness for promises unfulfilled before announcing his immediate resignation. The recently appointed prime minister, Vladimir Putin, would serve as interim president until new elections could be held.

  When Yeltsin left office, his approval rating was around three percent in polls with a margin of error of plus or minus four percent. He had very few friends left—save perhaps for Bill Clinton, who had suffered his own political disgraces. Though Yeltsin withdrew from public view, those who met him in private said that his continued sobriety had done wonders for his health. Friends claimed he looked ten years younger and was at peace, enjoying family, reading, and following tennis. Nevertheless, Boris Yeltsin finally succumbed to congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007.57

  Three years later, Yeltsin’s normally reclusive daughter and former advisor Tatyana Yumasheva tried to dispel the misperceptions. “Many in the West have a caricatured image of Yeltsin, a larger-than-life character for whom drinking was a way of life,” she said. “That’s absolutely untrue.” While she admitted that he often drank to excess, it was only to cope with the monumental political challenges he faced. In his exhaustive and engaging biography of Yeltsin, Harvard political scientist Timothy Colton argued that Boris Yeltsin became the butt of so many jokes not because he drank more than his Soviet predecessors, but rather because his torments played out in public, thanks to a media that was freer and livelier than in any other period in Russian history. Yumasheva would concur: “They do so because it’s a cliché which sells.”58 This is most certainly true. Yeltsin was hardly the most drunk leader in Russian history. He wasn’t even among the most drunk leaders of the previous fifty years—arguably consuming less than Brezhnev, Chernenko, and perhaps even Stalin—all of whom drank far from the peering eyes of the public.

  Nevertheless, to the extent that alcoholism was part of the Yeltsin story, the legacy of his heavy drinking is intimately connected to the fate of modern Russia itself. Ironically, Russia’s first post-independence president was perhaps the purest product of Soviet vodka politics, which nurtured both his debilitating alcoholism and his closed system of autocratic decision making under the veneer of democracy. His public temperament set an awful example for Russian citizens to follow and fostered ever-greater cynicism toward Yeltsin the man as well as his economic and social reforms that culminated in a decade of misery and despair.

  20

  Alcohol and the Demodernization of Russia

  From the outset, Russia’s reformers were in uncharted waters and sinking fast. The received wisdom going back to Karl Marx was that the great challenge of history would be the transition from capitalism to communism, not the other way around. Right up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, few people thought a reversion to capitalism was even possible. Even fewer thought about how to do it. Reformers in the communist satellites of Eastern Europe and the Soviet homeland thought they knew what hardships it would entail—unemployment, dislocation, and economic contraction—but they could only guess how deep the pain would be or how long it would last.

  To right the ship, Boris Yeltsin—fresh from victory over the August 1991 hardline coup—pushed for radical ref
orms. “The time has come to act decisively, firmly, without hesitation,” he declared. Top experts drafted a “500 Days” program that denationalized land and housing, freed fixed prices, abolished subsidies for inefficient firms, and implemented austere fiscal and monetary reforms. “The period of movement with small steps is over.”1 Yet he too was uncertain about the suffering it would entail.

  “I have to tell you frankly: today in the severest crisis we cannot carry out reform painlessly. The first step will be most difficult. A certain decline in the standard of living will take place,” Yeltsin said. In preparing the country for the shock therapy of rapid liberalization he claimed, “It will be worse for everybody for about half a year. Then, the prices will fall and the consumer market will be filled with goods. And toward the fall of 1992… the economy will stabilize and lives will gradually improve.”2

  But things did not improve. Into 1993 Russia was still stuck in a hyperinflationary spiral, which wiped out most Russians’ entire life savings. With consumer prices rising over two thousand percent per year, the ruble became worthless, eroding the real wages of those who still had jobs and plunging millions into abject poverty. The average Russian schoolteacher’s monthly salary during the 1990s was just $34, well below their counterparts in Thailand, and often below the government’s official “minimum subsistence” (i.e., poverty) level. Even after the economy stabilized at the end of the millennium, one study concluded that the minimum monthly income in Novgorod region was barely enough to feed five live cats.3