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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  Populist rhetoric aide, time after time the traditional vodka monopoly has always put the financial interests of the state ahead of the welfare of its people. Always. When Ivan the Terrible instituted Russia’s first retail monopoly through his kabaks in the sixteenth century, it was in the interest of state revenue. When Sergei Witte rebuilt the imperial monopoly in 1894, it was done in the name of reducing out-of-control vodka consumption. Yet once the treasury was hooked up to a stronger dose of vodka revenues, it encouraged alcohol consumption to skyrocket from eight liters per capita to fourteen on the eve of the Great War. Following the disastrous prohibition of Nicholas II—continued by Aleksandr Kerensky and Vladimir Lenin—Joseph Stalin again resurrected the vodka monopoly in 1924, ostensibly to protect the peoples’ health from dangerous bootleg vodka. The result? An even more pervasive alcoholization of Soviet society, with consumption rising virtually unimpeded for some sixty years and with vodka again contributing one-quarter to one-third of all state revenues.24 Now, there are worrying signs that even Russia’s present anti-alcohol initiative may be falling victim to this same pattern (chapter 23).

  So even paying lip service to the greater good, why would we expect that resurrecting the traditional vodka monopoly today would have any different outcome today than the iron-clad dynamics of vodka politics past? It wouldn’t. If there is an answer to the so-called alcohol question beyond incremental retail restrictions and other band-aid measures, it is to be found not in monopolization, but in municipalization akin to the Swedish experience—an idea that is beginning to gain greater traction within Russia’s public health community.25

  A Russian Gothenburg System of disinterested management would be a boon to communities throughout Russia by promoting local activism. Temperance-minded individuals would be empowered to oversee the local alcohol restrictions. Local governments would be empowered to adopt restrictions as deemed appropriate by the community instead of waiting for Kremlin dictates that never seem to come.26 What’s more, the windfall vodka revenues could help empower local civic organizations, such as those interested in promoting a clean environment, healthy lifestyles, agriculture, education, and beyond as well as care for the elderly, the disabled and orphans. Money could also be funneled into the chronically cash-strapped healthcare infrastructure, rehabilitation centers, and orphanage systems. Ironically, when former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin suggested that heavy drinkers do more to support the government’s provision of social services, his opponents lampooned his disingenuousness, since vodka revenues and social spending were in no way linked. In a system of disinterested management they actually would be linked, empowering local representatives to address their community’s greatest needs. Such local autonomy would help make the Russian Federation into an actual federation, where policy decisions are divided among the national, regional, and local authorities and the Kremlin is freed from its micro-managing tendencies.

  Of course there will be objections. I can already hear them: this system may work for the Swedes or Canadians, but it would never work in Russia. Russia just isn’t ready: there isn’t enough grass-roots activism. The cultures are just too different. It is too impractical. And with Russia’s systemic corruption, it would be impossible to find honest administrators who could resist the temptation for personal enrichment.

  As it turns out, the Russian government already poo-pooed the idea in exactly those terms. After extensive research into the Gothenburg System and prolonged debate within the quasi-official “Commission on the Question of Alcoholism” comprising bureaucrats, physicians, economists, and policy experts, the ministry of finance openly admitted that, while “the system is theoretically better than ours,” similar results could not be expected in Russia because of the “insufficiently cultured society” and the inability to find honest administrators.27 The author was Ivan Mintslov—the Russian finance ministry’s resident specialist on the vodka economy. The year was 1898. In the decades before the outbreak of the Great War and Tsar Nicholas’s disastrous prohibition decree in 1914, Russia’s alcohol experts were unified in acknowledging that the municipal system was “the best legislative weapon in the fight against alcoholism” but that the Russian people were unfit culturally, educationally, and administratively.28 Russian society simply could not be trusted to put its own welfare first. As the long history of vodka politics has demonstrated, Russia’s autocratic leaders were even less trustworthy with such a charge.

  In the intervening hundred-plus years since the tsarist Commission on the Question of Alcoholism panned the disinterested municipal dispensary in favor of the traditional autocratic monopoly, that “question of alcoholism” has effectively been put to bed as an issue of high politics in every other industrialized country. Meanwhile in Russia, the imperial and Soviet autocratic monopolies not only did not solve Russia’s alco-woes; it made them far worse. But since monopolization remains the only alternative that Russia has ever known, both policy makers and critics naively look to it as the solution rather than the problem.

  Monopolization relies on the autocratic assumption that the people don’t know what is in their own best interest. While that may have been true for the illiterate peasantry of the nineteenth century, Russia today boasts one of the most highly educated populations on earth. Moreover, the growth and stability of the Putin and Medvedev years produced a middle class that is increasingly affluent, increasingly connected, and—as the protests of 2011–12 demonstrated—increasingly impatient with systemic corruption and their inability to influence governance. Anachronistic arguments about reverting to monopoly control are not only wrongheaded; they are an insult to the Russian people themselves.

  Russians know alcohol is a problem, thank you very much. For years opinion polls have ranked alcohol abuse as Russia’s top political challenge, even ahead of terrorism, economic crisis, and human rights issues.29 And yet, the entrenched financial interests of the state and politically influential businessmen; the systemic corruption; an autocratic system that impedes grass-roots activism and local governance; and the national culture of inebriation that these factors all helped create conspire to prevent the Russian people from tackling their most enduring political challenge.

  The Kremlin today has a unique window of opportunity to finally move beyond band-aid solutions and directly address Russia’s autocratic vodka politics and the subordination of public welfare to the financial interests of the state.

  First, while vodka revenues are still significant, in percentage terms they aren’t nearly as vital today as they once were. One upside of the government’s increased reliance on oil, gas, and mineral exports—as well as a series of effective tax reforms under Putin—is that vodka’s relative contribution to the federal budget has diminished to some two to four percent of revenues rather than the twenty to forty percent under the tsars and Soviets. Swearing off vodka revenues today would be tough, but it would not be fatal as in the past. This alone suggests that the time is ripe for the Kremlin to go cold turkey and finally divorce itself from the toxic legacies of vodka politics.

  Second, it is not as though foregone revenues would simply disappear—instead they would fund the cash-strapped social and medical organizations the state has chronically neglected. Instead of the occasional (and much-ballyhooed) infusions of a few billion rubles here and there, a system of disinterested management would provide localities with a steady and reliable revenue stream that would finally allow healthcare and other services to thrive.30 And if revenues diminished over time, it would be due primarily to reduced alcohol consumption, which would mean better health and less stress on the healthcare system itself.

  Third, Russia is already waging another anti-alcohol campaign, nominally in the interest of the welfare of its people. What clearer signal could there be that the Kremlin is sincere about finally putting the people before both the government and its cronies than swearing off Russia’s autocratic vodka politics once and for all? Bringing Russia’s astronomical alcohol-related mortalit
y in line with that in other European countries would help Russia avoid the worst-case demographic forecasts and build a healthier, stronger, and more prosperous country.

  Finally, the Gothenburg option may promote genuine democratization in Russia by empowering local civic organization and activism. Beyond the widespread public concern over societal alcoholism, networks of grass-roots organizations and concerned individuals ready to act on the alcohol issue have been denied an opportunity to do so.31 “If society’s problems are to be solved, it is essential that social responsibilities be shared by the state and local governments,” declares Lilia Shevtsova. “The latter must be given the authority to provide the basic services needed by individuals and their families: schooling, medical care, public services, and cultural activities. For this to be possible the Kremlin will need to abandon its efforts to embed local government in the state structure; it must develop local self-government and allow local authorities to raise their own revenues.”32 In his first State of the Nation address upon returning to the presidency in 2012, Vladimir Putin encouraged Russia’s regions to draw up and implement their own health and demographic policies to supplement federal initiatives.33 Here, too, the Gothenburg option is well suited to answer the president’s call.

  Moreover, a Gothenburg System could also build on the pervasive anti-corruption sentiment that rose to the surface during the protests of 2011–12. What better place to begin a concerted grass-roots fight against systemic corruption than with vodka, which bred such widespread corruption in the first place?34

  At the end of a recent conference of Russian and international health specialists, noted expert Andrei Demin concluded that “in the present conditions, the possibility of securing the interests of public health, overcoming the shadow market and other endemic problems can only develop through the systematic control over the alcohol market under the control of civil society.”35 In other words: Russia can put the vodka question to bed only in the same way it was laid to rest in almost every other industrialized country: a Gothenburg-type system of disinterested civic management. Would the Kremlin ever attempt such a bold move? Fundamentally, it should be a clear choice of promoting the interests of society over those of the state, health over misery, moderation over drunkenness, honesty over corruption, and empowerment over autocracy. The very future of Russia itself largely hangs in the balance.

  Parting Thoughts…

  At the height of American prohibition in the 1920s, Hollywood actor, vaudeville performer, humorist, and “cowboy philosopher” Will Rogers went on a worldwide speaking tour as unofficial goodwill ambassador from the United States. Denied entry to Russia by the new Bolshevik regime, Rogers instead went to Paris, where he was welcomed by affluent Russian émigrés who had fled the revolution. It was in one of their well-to-do restaurants that America’s most famous celebrity first encountered this exotic drink known as vodka.

  “It was the most innocent-looking thing I ever saw,” Rogers later explained (in his folksy style) to an American audience that had never heard of it. “They all said just drink it all down at one swig; nobody can sip Vodka. Well, I had no idea what the stuff was, and for a second I thought that somebody had loaded me up with molten lead, and I hollered for water.” Thinking that the clear liquid in the tabletop carafe must have been water, Rogers gulped it down quick, only to find that it too was vodka!

  The cowboy from Oklahoma slowly regained his composure after a few panicked moments that surely amused his Russian hosts. “How they can concentrate so much insensibility into one prescription is almost a chemical wonder,” Rogers recounted. “One tiny sip of this Vodka poison and it will do the same amount of material damage to mind and body that an American strives for for hours.”36

  Since then, Americans have become well-acquainted with the concentrated insensibility of Russia’s foremost cultural export, which has become the world’s top-selling liquor. And while a small segment of discriminating connoisseurs claim to appreciate the subtle distinctions between this or that top-shelf brand, the vast majority of drinkers are more interested in vodka’s mind-blasting effects. Yet even as drinkers of the world raise a toast to vodka, we should all be reminded of its dark past: the generations of Russians who found not only consolation at the bottom of the bottle but also grief, illness, and death. We must remember that such incredible human costs were—and still are—attributable not just to the lowly drunkard, but to the autocratic political system that reaped unimaginable profits from the people’s misery, generation after generation.

  With history in mind, the cowboy philosopher’s alcoholic musings sound even more fitting: “Now that is the whole story to Vodka,” Rogers surmised. “Nobody in the world knows what it is made out of, and the reason I tell you this is that the story of Vodka is the story of Russia. Nobody knows what Russia is made out of, or what it is liable to cause its inhabitants to do next.”37

  The story of vodka truly is the story of Russia: not just its culture and society, but its history and statecraft as well. Whether it can ever break free of the shackles of vodka politics—and the autocratic system that nurtures it and is nurtured by it—may well be the most fundamental political question facing the future of Russia.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Chto-to pro medvedei i balalaiki zabyli. “‘N’yu Iork Taims’ ne unimaetsya,” http://politics.d3.ru/comments/469696 (accessed Aug. 28, 2013). This in response to my op-ed on the LGBT Russian vodka boycotts: Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Boycotting Vodka Won’t Help Russia’s Gays,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 2013, A19.

  2. Valerii Melekhin, “Nuzhno vybirat’ trezvost’,” Soratnik, January 2010, 2, http://video.sbnt.ru/vl/Newspapers/Soratnik/Soratnik_167.pdf; “Obshchestvennoe mnenie,” Radio svoboda, Nov. 17, 2002, http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/vp/2002/vp.111702.asp (both accessed Jan. 8, 2011).; Aleksandr Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii: Noveishii period (Moscow: URSS, 2009), 6. On the image of Russian alcoholism more generally, see Irina R. Takala, “Russkoe p’yanstvo kak fenomen kul’tury,” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy pervoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 29–30 oktyabrya 2010), ed. Mikhail V. Teplyanskii (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU v g. Ivanovo, 2010), 12–21.

  3. This is not to claim that economic fears are unimportant: “inflation,” “living standards” and “employment” all consistently place in the 40–50 percent range. Respondents can choose up to seven of the twenty-six issues listed. VTsIOM, “What Russians Are Afraid Of: Press Release No. 1299,” Russian Public Opinion Research Center 1299 (2010), and “August Problem Background: Press Release No. 1383,” Russian Public Opinion Research Center 1383 (2011), http://wciom.com/index.php?id=61&uid=411 (accessed Feb. 2, 2012).

  4. AFP, “Kremlin-Bound Putin Tells Russians to Have More Children,” AhramOnline, April 11, 2012, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/9/39030/World/International/Kremlinbound-Putin-tells-Russians-to-have-more-chi.aspx (accessed April 12, 2012). See also Vladimir Putin, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly,” May 10, 2006, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2006/05/10/1823_type70029type82912_105566.shtml (accessed Nov. 1, 2010).

  5. Nicholas Eberstadt, Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, Implications (Seattle, Wash.: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010), 89; 2009 Life Tables at World Health Organization (WHO), “Life Tables for WHO Member States,” http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/mortality_life_tables/en/ (accessed Jan. 22, 2013).

  6. Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Moscow’s Drinking Problem,” New York Times, April 17, 2011, and “A Lesson in Drinking,” Moscow Times, March 4, 2011.

  7. Charles van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic,” History Workshop 1, no. 2 (1976): 84; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave [1845] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011
), 74–76. Many thanks to Emmanuel Akyeampong for this reference. On Russia see David Christian, “Traditional and Modern Drinking Cultures in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 1, no. 1 (1987): 61–84.

  8. Examples include Nicholas Ermochkine and Peter Iglikowski, 40 Degrees East: An Anatomy of Vodka (Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova, 2003); Patricia Herlihy, Vodka: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); Vladimir Nikolaev, Vodka v sud’be Rossii (Moscow: Parad, 2004); Gennadii M. Karagodin, Kniga o vodke i vinodelii (Chelyabinsk: Ural, 2000).

  9. David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Vladimir G. Treml, Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study, Duke Press Policy Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982); Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Aleksandr Nemtsov, A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia, trans. Howard M. Goldfinger and Andrew Stickley (Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2011). The works of Boris Segal and Irina Takala also are worthy of mention in this vein. Boris Segal, Russian Drinking: Use and Abuse of Alcohol in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1987) and The Drunken Society: Alcohol Use and Abuse in the Soviet Union (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990); Irina R. Takala, Veselie Rusi: Istoriia alkogol’noi problemy v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2002).