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

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

  54. Remnick, Resurrection, 305–6; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 194; Colton, Yeltsin, 315.

  55. Michael McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1997), 23–24. Remnick, Resurrection, 102, 334.

  56. McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election, 23.

  57. Colton, Yeltsin, 438–39; Michael McFaul, “Evaluating Yeltsin and His Revolution,” in Russia after the Fall, ed. Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 22.

  58. Colton, Yeltsin, 316; Franchetti, “The Sober Truth behind Boris Yeltsin’s Drinking Problem.”

  Chapter 20

  1. Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 64; Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001), 270–73.

  2. Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, 69.

  3. Harley Balzer, “Human Capital and Russian Security in the Twenty First Century,” in Russia after the Fall, ed. Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 175; Judyth Twigg, “What Has Happened to Russian Society?” in Russia after the Fall, ed. Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 149.

  4. Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 249–51.

  5. Steven Rosefielde, “Premature Deaths: Russia’s Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 53, no. 8 (2001): 1162; Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, Martin McKee, and David A. Leon, “Changes in Life Expectancy in Russia in the Mid-1990s,” The Lancet 357 (2001); Anatoly Karlin, “Demography II—Out of the Death Spiral,” Da Russophile (blog), April 14, 2008, http://darussophile.com/2008/04/14/out-of-the-death-spiral (accessed May 5, 2012).

  6. Richard C. Paddock, “Patient Deaths Point to Depth of Russian Crisis,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/mar/13/news/mn-16823 (accessed Nov. 14, 2011).

  7. Colin McMahon, “Shortages Leave Russia’s East out in the Cold,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 19, 1998. See also Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, updated ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 47; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007), 301.

  8. Cohen, Failed Crusade, 169; Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 288.

  9. Cohen, Failed Crusade, 169 (emphasis added).

  10. Michael Specter, “The Devastation,” New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2004, 59. This is not to say that “demodernization” has never been used. In terms of alcoholization see Andrei V. Podlazov, “Demograficheskaya demodernizatsiya i alkogolizatsiya Rossii,” in Alkogol’naya katastrofa i vozmozhnosti gosudarstvennoi politiki v preodolenii alkogol’noi sverkosmertnosti v Rossii, ed. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev (Moscow: Lenand, 2010), 133. On grassroots connotations see Oleg Yanitsky, Russian Greens in a Risk Society: A Structural Analysis (Helsinki: Kikimora, 2000), 3, 267. On the rural-resource connotation see Stephen K. Wegren, Land Reform in Russia: Institutional Design and Behavioral Responses (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 162. Regarding capacity for civic organization see Valerii Aleksandrovich Tishkov, Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 14. Still, none of these have the same connotation as the retrograde economic, social, and political development I propose here.

  11. See, for instance, Hans Rosling’s “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes” presentation on gapminder.org, http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world-bbc (accessed Nov. 25, 2011).

  12. Irina Rozenberg, “Proizvoditeli podpol’noi vodki mogut pereiti na legal’noe polozhenie,” Segodnya, Nov. 6, 1996, 6.

  13. Alexander Elder, Rubles to Dollars: Making Money on Russia’s Exploding Financial Frontier (New York: New York Institute of Finance, 1999), 40; Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168. Kosmarskaya calculates that all excise taxes contributed only 8.3 percent of state revenue in 1997. T. Kosmarskaya, “Problemy gosudarstvennogo regulirovaniya rynka alkogol’noi produktsii,” Voprosi ekonomiki (1998): 140; Irina R. Takala, Veselie Rusi: Istoriia alkogol’noi problemy v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2002), 272–74.

  14. A. Krasikov, “Commodity Number One (Part 2),” in The Samizdat Register, ed. Roy A. Medvedev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 164.

  15. Victor Erofeyev, “The Russian God,” New Yorker, Dec. 16, 2002).

  16. Daniel Treisman, “Death and Prices: The Political Economy of Russia’s Alcohol Crisis,” Economics of Transition 18, no. 2 (2010): 281–82. In 1990, the average Soviet monthly wage was equal to sixteen liters of vodka. By 1993 it could buy thirty-three liters. Relative to foodstuffs, the price of vodka fell over 70 percent from 1990 to 1994. Aleksandr Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii: Noveishii period (Moscow: URSS, 2009), 99.

  17. N. V. Molina, “Vino tochit’—chto zolotuyu monetu chekanit’,” EKO, no. 298 (1999): 178; Sonni Efron, “Grim Prognosis,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 1995, 1; Jay Bhattacharya, Christina Gathmann, and Grant Miller, The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis, NBER Working Paper No. 18589 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012).

  18. On the roles of money see William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1901), 14–38. Vodka in Russia has fulfilled most of these roles (not a widely recognized standard of value), making it, at best, a “preferred medium of barter” in the terms described by Paul Einzig in Primitive Money: In Its Ethnological, Historical and Economic Aspects (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949), 328.

  19. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 175. Similarly see Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 58.

  20. Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 77; Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society; The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 130, 256. On bartering for Pepsi see Charles Levinson, Vodka Cola (London: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978). See also Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.

  21. “Of Aeroflot, Volgas and the Flu: Some Joys and Sorrows of the Soviet Way,” Time, June 23, 1980, 88. See also Nicholas Daniloff, “Kremlin’s New Battle against Drunks and Slackers,” U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 31, 1983, 32. More generally see Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 217.

  22. I. Gerasyuk, “Butylka za uslugu,” Sovetskaya Belarussiya, Oct. 12 1984, 4; “(A Bottle for a Favor—Or Why Does Grandma Marya Make Home Brew?),” abstract in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. 37, no. 3, Feb 13, 1985, p. 11; abstract also available in USSR: Political and Sociological Affairs, JPRS-UPS-84-098, Nov. 13, 1984, 27.

  23. Even during the anti-alcohol campaign, “compared to money, not to mention gratitude, a bottle has far more clout.” Ivan Yaskov, “Alcohol Is the Enemy of Society: Don’t Step into the Abyss,” Selskaya zhizn’, May 14, 1985, 4; translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press 37, no. 20 (1985): 7.

  24. Michael Specter, “Russia Takes Aim at Vodka Bacchanalia: Bootlegger’s Dream/A People Drowning in Drink,” International Herald Tribune, Jan. 22 1997, A3; David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Cracks Down on Alcohol Industry,” Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1996, 27; Caroline Humphrey, “How Is Barter Done? The Social Relations of Barter in Provincial Russia,” 277, and Jayasri Dutta, “Some Lasting Thing: Barter and the Value of Money,” 17, both in The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, ed. Pau
l Seabright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Grigory G. Zaigraev, “The Russian Model of Noncommercial Alcohol Consumption,” in Moonshine Markets: Issues in Unrecorded Alcohol Beverage Production and Consumption, ed. Alan Haworth and Ronald Simpson (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 38.

  25. White, Russia Goes Dry, 168; Andrei Demin, ed., Alkogol‘ i zdorov’e naseleniya Rossii: 1900–2000 (Moscow: Rossiiskaya assotsiatsiya obshchestvennogo zdorov’ya, 1998), 298. Also see Rosalko chief Vladimir Yarmosh, “Russian Vodka Outpriced at Home,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 63 (1996): 7.

  26. Michael A. Hiltzik, “Russia Thirsts for Vodka Plants’ Profits,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30, 1998, 1; Sergei Gornov, “A Sobering Thought for Russia’s Distillers,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 69 (1996): 88–89, and “Quotas: To Be or Not to Be?” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 69 (1996): 94.

  27. Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 104–6. See also Goskomstat Rossii, Prodovol’stvennyi rynok Rossii: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000), 116–52.

  28. Alla Alova, “Rossiiskie pogranichniki prishchemili khvost ‘zelenomu zmiyu’,” Obshchaya gazeta, July 31–Aug. 6, 1997; Viktor Zubanyuk, “Ukraine’s Rivers of Alcohol Hit the Shallows,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 74 (1997): 72–73. See also Nikolai Styazhkin, “Attempt to Smuggle Alcohol from Georgia to Russia Thwarted,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jan. 15, 2000; Valerii Shanaev, “Russian Border Guards Continue to Thwart Alcohol Smugglers,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jan. 3, 1998; Anatolii Yurkin, “Azeri Train Carrying Alcohol Detained on Russian Border,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jan. 5, 1998, and “Border Chief Coordinates with Georgia on Alcohol Smuggling,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jan. 5 1998; Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 115–18.

  29. Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 102. On the NFS see El’mar Guseinov, “Poslednyaya afera NFS?,” Izvestiya, June 22, 1996, 2; Andrei Grekov, “Drinking and Sport Don’t Mix,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 69 (1996): 91–92. See also “Chernomyrdin Signs Resolution on Licensing Imported Alcohol,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jan. 31, 1997; Augusto López-Claros and Sergei V. Alexashenko, Fiscal Policy Issues during the Transition in Russia (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1998), 16–20. On the Orthodox Church see Robert C. Blitt, “How to Entrench a De Facto State Church in Russia: A Guide to Progress,” Brigham Young University Law Review, no. 3 (2008): 722; Maxim Shevchenko, “Smoking Is Not Harming the Soul,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, Feb. 18, 1997, http://www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/tobacco1802eng.html (accessed Jan. 13, 2012).

  30. Rozenberg, “Proizvoditeli podpol’noi vodki mogut pereiti na legal’noe polozhenie,” 6.

  31. On the “transition” in taxation and fiscal policy see Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, Mark Rider, and Sally Wallace, Tax Reform in Russia (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2008), 144–45; Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 113–30.

  32. Rozenberg, “Proizvoditeli podpol’noi vodki mogut pereiti na legal’noe polozhenie,” 6.

  33. Hiltzik, “Russia Thirsts for Vodka Plants’ Profits,” 1.

  34. Goskomstat Rossii, Russia in Numbers: Concise Statistical Handbook (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1999), 275.

  35. Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 108; for an English translation see Aleksandr Nemtsov, A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia, trans. Howard M. Goldfinger and Andrew Stickley (Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2011), 138.

  36. Boris Yeltsin, “Perekryt’ kran spirtovoi kontrabande: Radioobrashchenie prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii B. N. El’tsina,” Rossiiskaya gazeta, Sept. 13, 1997, 1–2. See also “Return of the State Monopoly on Alcohol,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 64 (1996): 94.

  37. See Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998). Also see Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 101–3.

  38. Shleifer and Treisman, Without a Map, 117.

  39. Nemtsov, Alkogol’naya istoriya Rossii, 131. Also see Sergei Gornov, “Alcohol Producers Set Their Sights on the Regions,” Business in Russia/Deolvye lyudi 67 (1996): 66; Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev, “Vvedeniye: Alkogol’naya katastrofa: Kak ostanovit’ vymiranie Rossii,” in Alkogol’naya katastrofa i vozmozhnosti gosudarstvennoi politiki v preodolenii alkogol’noi sverkosmertnosti v Rossii, ed. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev (Moscow: Lenand, 2010), 29; Tomila V. Lankina, Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 154. For the situation in Yaroslavl see Beth Mitchneck, “The Changing Role of the Local Budget in Russian Cities: The Case of Yaroslavl,” in Local Power and Post-Soviet Politics, ed. Theodore H. Friedgut and Jeffrey W. Hahn (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1994), 82–84.

  40. Scott Gehlbach, Representation through Taxation: Revenue, Politics, and Development in Postcommunist States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9.

  41. Ibid., 3, 7–16, 131.

  42. Seguey Braguinsky and Grigory Yavlinsky, Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 234.

  43. Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformaton of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136.

  44. Humphrey, “How Is Barter Done?” 270; Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 177–81.

  45. See Khristina Narizhnaya, “As Business Becomes More Civil, So Do Its State Relations,” Moscow Times, Jan. 12, 2012, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/as-business-becomes-more-civil-so-do-its-state-relations/450927.html (accessed Jan. 12, 2012).

  46. Humphrey, “How Is Barter Done?” 273.

  47. Padma Desai and Todd Idson, Work without Wages: Russia’s Nonpayment Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 185. Similarly, see Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 40–41.

  48. Humphrey, “How Is Barter Done?” 279.

  49. David G. Anderson, “Surrogate Currencies and the ‘Wild Market’ in Central Siberia,” in The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, ed. Paul Seabright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 339.

  50. Leonid Nevzlin, quoted in David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, revised and updated (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 118.

  51. Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes, “Russia’s Virtual Economy,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 5 (1998); Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russia-Style (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 203; Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works; Sergei Guriev and Barry W. Ickes, “Barter in Russia,” in The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, ed. Paul Seabright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On strengthening the regions see David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 5.

  52. Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes, Russia’s Virtual Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2002), 248.

  53. Such as the Kristall distillery in Moscow. See chapter 22. According to Goskomstat, excise tax arrears from the alcohol sector comprised only 1.2 percent of all budgetary arrears, further suggesting that vodka producers were fairly reliable taxpayers. Goskomstat Rossii, Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1998), 654.

  54. See, for instance, Anders Åslund, “Ten Myths about the Russian Economy,” in Russia after the Fall, ed. Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute for International Peace, 2002), and Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007).

  55.
Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built, 186–87, 90–91.

  56. Ibid., 188. On the demographic deterioration in Russia, the Baltics, and Western CIS, see Khalturina and Korotaev, “Alkogol’naya katastrofa,” 7.