45. Snow, “Alcoholism in the Russian Military,” 424–25. For more on “Was he drunk?” see Frederick McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2 vols. (New York: Outing Publishing Co., 1907), 2:281.
46. Frederic William Unger, Russia and Japan, and a Complete History of the War in the Far East (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1905), 231–40.
47. Vinkentii V. Veresaev, In the War: Memoirs of V. Veresaev, trans. Leo Winter (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), 7–8; on suicides, 19–21.
48. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 13; Veresaev, In the War, 23.
49. Veresaev, In the War, 25.
50. On McCormick’s first impressions see Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 1:27. See also ibid., 2:278–82; Ernest Barron Gordon, Russian Prohibition (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue, 1916), 8.
51. Eugene S. Politovsky, From Libau to Tsushima: A Narrative of the Voyage of Admiral Rojdestvensky’s Fleet to Eastern Seas, Including a Detailed Account of the Dogger Bank Incident, trans. F. R. Godfrey (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1908), 11.
52. McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 1:143. On the high levels of drunkenness among the officer class see V. E. Bagdasaryan, “Vinnaya monopoliya i politicheskaya istoriya,” in Veselie Rusi, XX vek: Gradus noveishei rossiiskoi istorii ot “p’yanogo byudzheta” do “sukhogo zakona,” ed. Vladislav B. Aksenov (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2007), 101–3.
53. McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 1:180–81.
54. Ibid., 2:279.
55. Ibid., 2:281.
56. Richard Linthicum, War between Japan and Russia (Chicago: W. R. Vansant, 1904), 213.
57. Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III, trans. David R. Jones (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International, 1976), 22.
58. Kevin Lee, “Dogger Bank: Voyage of the Damned,” Hullwebs History of Hull (Kingston upon Hull city history website) (2004), http://www.hullwebs.co.uk/content/l-20c/disaster/dogger-bank/voyage-of-dammed.htm# (accessed March 21, 2009); Sydney Tyler, The Japan-Russia War (Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler Co., 1905), 357.
59. Lee, “Dogger Bank: Voyage of the Damned.”
60. Richard Michael Connaughton, The War of the Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: A Military History of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 246.
61. Norman E. Saul, Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 64–66.
62. Connaughton, War of Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear, 246; Lee, “Dogger Bank: Voyage of the Damned”; Constantine Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 98.
63. Pleshakov, Tsar’s Last Armada, 98–99; Tyler, Japan-Russia War, 364.
64. Gordon, Russian Prohibition, 9; Michael Graham Fry, Erik Goldstein, and Richard Langhorne, Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy (London: Continuum, 2002), 162.
65. J. Martin Miller, Thrilling Stories of the Russian-Japanese War (n.p., 1904), 449.
66. Veresaev, In the War, 259–60.
67. Ibid., 275.
68. Ibid., 259–60.
69. Reported in the Vil’no voenno-listok; cited in Snow, “Alcoholism in the Russian Military,” 427.
70. McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2:280.
71. Pleshakov, Tsar’s Last Armada, 192–93.
72. Ibid., 283, 86.
73. McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2:280. See also Pleshakov, Tsar’s Last Armada, 324–25.
74. McCormick, Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2:281.
75. W. Bruce Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York: Dial, 1983), 243, 59.
76. Quoted in Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 52; see also Ernest Poole, “Two Russian Soldiers,” The Outlook, Sept. 2 1905, 21–22.
Chapter 12
1. Viktor P. Obninskii, Poslednii samoderzhets, ocherk zhizni i tsarstvovaniia imperatora Rossii Nikolaia II-go (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), 21–22.
2. Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 5.
3. Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 19–20.
4. See Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Viking, 1996), 16; Valentina G. Chernukha, “Emperor Alexander III, 1881–1894,” in The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Rediscovering the Romanovs, ed. Donald J. Raleigh and Akhmed A. Iskenderov (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 359; Charles Lowe, Alexander III of Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 277–89; Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Russia under Alexander III. And in the Preceding Period, ed. Felix Volkhovsky, trans. J. Morrison (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1893), xxi–xxii.
5. Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiya (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 47–48.
6. James P. Duffy and Vincent L. Ricci, Czars: Russia’s Rulers for over One Thousand Years (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1995), 331–32; Catherine Radziwill, Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), 100.
7. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 51–52.
8. Mohammed Essad-Bey [Lev Nussimbaum], Nicholas II: Prisoner of the Purple, trans. Paul Maerker-Branden and Elsa Branden (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1936), 153. See also George Alexander Lensen, Russia’s Eastward Expansion (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 95; David Chavchavadze, The Grand Dukes (New York: Atlantic International, 1990), 224.
9. Mark D. Steinberg, “Russia’s Fin De Siècle, 1900–1914,” in Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Ronald G. Suny (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 72. This wasn’t the first time that a festin du peuple went horribly awry. Following Alexander II’s coronation forty years earlier, a free dinner for a quarter-million guests was spoiled by rain and ravaged by crows. Moreover, the festivities were accidentally begun even before the new tsar arrived. Once the guests laid into the 1,252 vedros of wine, 3,120 vedros of beer, and untold quantities of vodka, they could not be stopped. Henry Tyrrell, The History of the War with Russia: Giving Full Details of the Operations of the Allied Armies, 2 vols. (London: London Printing & Publishing Co., 1855), 2:334–35.
10. Duffy and Ricci, Czars, 331; Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 58–59; W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (New York: Dial, 1981), 627. On the couple’s charitable work see Christopher Warwick, Ella: Princess, Saint and Martyr (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 167.
11. Alexander Mikhailovich Romanov, Once a Grand Duke (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932), 139; Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 52, 136–37; Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24–28, 209n1.
12. Constantine Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 21–22. See also Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 51.
13. Mike Martin, From Crockett to Custer (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2004), 172–73.
14. Dee Brown, Wondrous Times on the Frontier (Little Rock, Ark.: August House, 1991), 46–52.
15. Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: Last of the Tsars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49; Julia P. Gelardi, From Splendor to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847–1928 (New York: Macmillan, 2011), n.p.
16. Pleshakov, Tsar’s Last Armada, 21, 58, 98, 152.
17. The grand duchess subsequently retired to a convent and devoted herself to alleviating poverty and intemperance. Edith Martha Almedingen, An Unbroken Unity: A Memoir of Grand-Duchess Serge of Russia, 1864–1918 (London: Bodley Head, 1964), 52; Lincoln, Russia, 651.
18. On his alcoholism see Obninskii, Poslednii samoderzhets, 21. As a scapegoat, see Ferro, Nicholas II, 47.
19. Alexander Polunov,
Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform and Social Change, 1814–1914, trans. Marshall Shatz (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 219–21. On the vodka-fueled riots and pogroms see Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 36; V. E. Bagdasaryan, “Vinnaya monopoliya i politicheskaya istoriya,” in Veselie Rusi, XX vek: Gradus noveishei rossiiskoi istorii ot “p’yanogo byudzheta” do “sukhogo zakona,” ed. Vladislav B. Aksenov (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2007), 108–11.
20. V. Blagoveshchenskii, “Vred p’yanstva dlya obshchestva i gosudarstva,” in Pit’ do dna—ne vidat’ dobra. Sbornik statei protiv p’yanstva (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya Aleksandro-Nevskago obshchestva trezvosti, 1911); N. N. Shipov, Alkogolizm i revolyutsiya (Alcohol and Revolution) (St. Petersburg: Grad., 1908), 35–42; W. Arthur McKee, “Sobering up the Soul of the People: The Politics of Popular Temperance in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999): 214; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 61–62, 66–68. On the vodka boycotts see Transchel, Under the Influence, 36.
21. Marr Murray, Drink and the War from the Patriotic Point of View (London: Chapman & Hall, 1915), epigraph; Vladimir P. Nuzhnyi, Vino v zhinzni i zhizn‘ v vine (Moscow: Sinteg, 2001), 234; A. W. Harris, “A Compensation of the War,” Union Signal, June 8, 1916, 5.
22. Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 141, 73–74. On the Kaiser’s proclamation see “Kaiser Wilhelm Seeks to Curb Drink Evil,” Union Signal, Sept. 25, 1913; James S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance, and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 68–69.
23. Aleskandr M. Korovin, “Vysochaishii manifest 17 oktabrya i bor’ba s p’yanstvom,” Vestnik trezvosti, no. 130 (1905) cited and translated in Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 129. Indeed, America’s pioneering expert on Russia, George Kennan, explained to temperance advocate Frances Willard that “drunkenness among the peasants is a result of the latter’s poverty and wretchedness—that it is an attempt to escape for a time from the consciousness of hopeless misery caused by oppression and bad government.” George Kennan to Frances Willard, Aug. 29, 1888, p. 2, folder 47—Correspondence, 1888: July–September (reel 15), Women’s Christian Temperance Union Series, Temperance and Prohibition Papers, Evanston, Ill.
24. Quoted in Transchel, Under the Influence, 31. See also Irina R. Takala, Veselie Rusi: Istoriia alkogol’noi problemy v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2002), 100–103. Evgenii V. Pashkov, “Kazennaya vinnaya monopoliya v Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XX v.” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy vtoroi mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 28–29 oktyabrya 2011), ed. Nikolai V. Dem’yanenko (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU v g. Ivanovo, 2011), 72–9.
25. Sergei Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1921), 54–57; Mikhail Fridman, Vinnaya monopoliya, tom 2: Vinnaya monopoliya v Rossii (Petrograd: Pravda, 1916), 120–31; Nikolai Osipov, Vinnaya monopoliya: Ee osnovniya nachala, organizatsiya, i nekotoriya posledstviya (St. Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1899), 9, 14 Alexis Raffalovich, “The State Monopoly of Spirits in Russia, and Its Influence on the Prosperity of the Population,” Journal of the Royal Statistics Society 64, no. 1 (1901). Robert Hercod, La prohibition de l’alcool en Russie (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue, 1919), 4; Vladimir I. Lenin, “Casual Notes,” in Collected Works, vol. 4: 1898–April 1901 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 407–8. Also see Vladimir I. Lenin, “Spare Cash,” in Collected Works, vol. 18: April 1912–March 1913 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 601–2.
26. D. G. Bulgakovskii, Ocherk deyatel’nosti popechitel’stv o narodnoi trezvosti za vse vremya ikh sushchestvovaniya, 1895–1909 G., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Otechestvennaya tipografiya, 1910); V. A. Hagen, Bor’ba s narodnym p’yanstvom: Popechitel’stva o narodnoi trezvosti, ikh sovremennoe polozhenie i nedostatki (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaya Tipgrafiya, 1907); David Lewin, “Das Branntweinmonopol in Russland,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 25 (1908).
27. See, for instance, I. Mordvinov, Obshchestvo trezvosti, zhizn’ i rabota v nem (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya Aleksandro-Nevskago obshchestva trezvosti, 1911); John F. Hutchinson, “Medicine, Morality, and Social Policy in Imperial Russia: The Early Years of the Alcohol Commission,” Histoire sociale/Social History 7 (1974): 204; George Kennan, “Results of the Russian Liquor Reform,” The Outlook, Jan. 11, 1902; original manuscript is housed in the New York Public Library.
28. Quoted in Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 15.
29. Vladimir I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II, trans. Laura Matveev (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1939), 530; Marc Lee Schulkin, “The Politics of Temperance: Nicholas II’s Campaign against Alcohol Abuse” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), 151–95. See also f. 115 (Soyuz 17-ogo Oktyabrya), op. 1, d. 111, l.3; f. 115, op. 1, d. 19, l.1–317; f. 115, op. 2, d. 16, 16; f. 115, op. 2, d. 18, l.1–63; f. 1779 (Kantselyariya vremennogo pravitel’stva, 1917), op. 1, d. 709, 1.1 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF) (State archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow. On the evolution of temperance and the legislature, see Aleksandr L. Afanas’ev, “Trezvennoe dvizhenie 1907–1914 godov v Rossii: Etapy, kharakter, znachenie,” 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), 114–19.
30. GARF, f. 102 (Departament Politsii (4-oe deloproizvodstvo)), op. 1909, d. 194 (Vserossiiskii s”ezd’ po bor’be s p’yanstvom), l.3–64; N. A. Lyubimov, Dnevnik uchastnika pervago vserossiiskago s’ezda po bor’be s narodnym p’yanstvom. Sankt Peterburg, 28 dekabrya 1909 g.–6 yanvarya 1910 g. (Moscow: Pechatnya A. I. Snegirevoi, 1911); Laura Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 12–17; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 130–32; Transchel, Under the Influence, 55–65. On political opposition parties and temperance see Mikhail V. Teplyanskii, “Politicheskii aspekt trezvennogo dvizheniya v dorevolyutsionnoi Rossii,” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy tret’ei mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 26–27 oktyabrya 2012), ed. Mikhail V. Teplyanskii (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU vg. Ivanovo, 2012), 181.
31. Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 102–10; Sir John Maynard, Russia in Flux (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 171.
32. Cited in Vladimir N. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, trans. Laura Matveev (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1935), 444. See also Vladislav B. Aksenov, Veselie Rusi, XX vek: Gradus noveishei rossiiskoi istorii ot “p’yanogo byudzheta” do “sukhogo zakona” (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2007), 152–54.
33. Alexander M. Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” in Russian Public Finance during the War, ed. Alexander M. Michelson, Paul Apostol, and Michael Bernatzky (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1928), 82. On alcohol consumption and temperance conversion see Boris V. Ananich and Rafail S. Ganelin, “Emperor Nicholas II, 1894–1917,” ed. Donald J. Raleigh and Akhmed A. Iskenderov (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 390; W. Arthur McKee, “Taming the Green Serpent: Alcoholism, Autocracy, and Russian Society, 1881–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 522.
34. William Johnson, The Liquor Problem in Russia (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue, 1915), 191; Peter L. Bark, “Memoirs,” Sir Peter Bark Papers, Leeds Russian Archive, Special Collections, Leeds University Library, n/d. See also Bernard Pares, “Sir Peter Bark,” Slavonic and East European Review 16, no. 46 (1937): 191; Takala, Veselie Rusi, 167.
35. The minister of war, General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, likewise encouraged the prohibition measure. George Snow, “Alcoholism in the Russian
Military: The Public Sphere and the Temperance Discourse, 1883–1917,” Jahrbiücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 45, no. 3 (1997): 428–29; Arthur Toombes, Russia and Its Liquor Reforms: National Experiments in License, State Monopoly and Prohibition (Brisbane: Queensland Prohibition League, 1920), 2.
Vodka Politics_Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 65