The King of Vodka

by Linda Himelstein

  His situation darkened even more when Grigoriy died unexpectedly in 1844 from edema. Time did not just seem to stop after that; it appeared to move backward. Little of the details are known about what exactly happened to Grigoriy’s dreamed-about hotel empire, but it seems as if it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The family, too, appeared to stall. It did not take long for Grigoriy’s wife and sons to fall from the merchant class into the petite bourgeoisie, a rung just above peasant status.

  This episode, then, became another valuable lesson for Pyotr: Success was not tangible or guaranteed. It could be there one moment, gone the next.

  NOW PYOTR SAW his time in Uglich disappear. In less than a day, he was back where he started, but Pyotr was not the same little boy who had left his village four years earlier. To him, what had once been a comfortable, beloved home, a place full of belonging, felt worn. It was as if life in the village suddenly came into focus, and the picture was dull, as flat as the land surrounding the Yaroslavl province.

  Pyotr probably never said a word to his family about his wanderlust. Ever the dutiful son, he had learned not to question his father. Arseniy, a rational, calculating man who did things for a reason, must have had a plan for Pyotr. So Pyotr waited. For almost two years, he went about his business on the farm, performing all the usual tasks.

  Arseniy could see that his son was restless and ready to move on—needed to move on, so perhaps it was time. His brother, Ivan, seemed to be gaining both financially and in stature with every passing week. His son, Yakov, gone nearly four years, was thriving, too. He came home from time to time, full of stories about the rush of Moscow, the thrill that permeated the city and created opportunities for anyone sharp enough to find them.

  It was time, Arseniy concluded. Pyotr would go to Moscow.

  Chapter 2

  Moscow

  Pyotr probably was up before the sun. So were his parents, who gathered around him. They prayed together as a family, asking for safe travels. His bag was packed. It contained clothes, bread, cheese, water, and small gifts for friends. Pyotr also brought an extra pair of shoes. The walk from his small village would be a long 170 mile journey.[8]

  In his jacket Pyotr carried the obligatory passport. It was a permission slip, of sorts, which allowed him to be away from his village and landowner. It listed the usual facts—name, age, physical description, religion, and residence. It also included details about his owner. Pyotr would need this document, purchased for a few rubles, in order to enter Moscow and navigate his way around the city. Anyone caught without a properly issued passport could be severely punished, even exiled to Siberia.

  With everything in hand, Pyotr hitched his bag over his shoulder and kissed his family good-bye. Pyotr most likely hooked up with his father’s brother, Uncle Venedikt, for this journey: according to church confession books, they were together in their village and then in Moscow at the same time. The duo made for the dirt road, worn by trading carts that delivered sugar, wheat, and other necessities to Russia’s countryside, that would take them to their first stop. Pyotr and Venedikt likely hopped aboard one of these carts, saving their legs for less well-traveled portions of their journey. They no doubt passed by their friends and acquaintances. Travelers to and from the cities and towns were so plentiful that each village had a person specifically designated to welcome them with tea, food, and shelter.

  This road was familiar to the fifteen-year-old Smirnov. It was the same one he had traveled en route to Uglich. So he moved with a confidence not expected of a boy embarking on his first expedition so far from home. He stopped with his uncle for some tea at a nearby village before continuing on the twenty-two-mile stretch that would take him back to Uglich. The trip was straightforward—except when the couple arrived at the Volga River, which they had to cross to get to Uglich. There were no bridges or makeshift paths to follow, so they had to find a ferry-man willing to take them along for the ten-minute ride.

  Pyotr basked in those moments. Beyond the water, Uglich looked beautiful, just as Pyotr remembered it. He could see the golden domes from the churches in the distance as well as the former residence of Ivan the Terrible’s son, Dmitriy. He also heard a chorus of bells coming from the cathedrals as worshipers entered for their late afternoon prayers. The melody comforted Pyotr. Yet he practically flew off the ferry as it connected with the shore, so anxious was he to get on with his journey.

  Once on the other side, he made his way with Venedikt to the center of town, where they sought out Pyotr’s older sister, Glafira, who had married the son of a beer factory owner in Uglich. They would stay with her for the night.

  The next day was much the same, beginning with a prayer followed by long stretches of walking. Every now and then, Pyotr and Venedikt would climb aboard a passing dray. Often, the draymen would sing old Russian tunes. Pyotr listened to the music from his childhood while he studied the dense forests and ravines going by. The leaves had begun to turn bright shades of red and gold even though it was not yet autumn. The days still had the feel of summer in them.

  The nights were getting cooler, though, and they came too quickly for Pyotr. The darkness slowed the uncle and nephew down, forcing them to find a patch of grass or a room in a friendly shelter. Pyotr would have preferred to have kept moving, anxious to get to Moscow. In his brief life, he had always had his father to guide him and instruct him. He was the obedient son, never questioning his elders’ wishes. But now, even with Venedikt at his side, Pyotr felt as if he were on his own, able to choose when to stop for bread and where he would rest. It brought out powerful feelings inside him, urges that he had not really understood were there before. At first, he tried to suppress them, thinking it unbecoming of a Christian boy in a staunchly patriarchal society to embrace so fully the idea of independence or of self. But Pyotr could not deny the truth—he liked navigating his own way.

  And he was good at it. Pyotr and Venedikt made superb time. By the seventh day, they were closing in on Sergiyev Posad, perhaps the holiest site in all of Russia since its founding in 1340. They could see the fortress monastery in the distance, surrounded by dark pine forests. The trees framed the church’s blue and gold domes, which shot bright reflections into the light blue sky. Pyotr sat in awe as he looked out at the horizon. He had heard about this place, and now, seeing it in the distance, he felt a sense of deep spirituality. He quickened his step, anxious to get a closer look.

  The road had swelled suddenly with a crush of people. Most, like Pyotr, were traveling by foot. But the more well-to-do came by stage coaches usually pulled by a team of four horses. France’s Alexandre Dumas came to Sergiyev Posad some years later by this kind of coach. However people arrived, many were unified by their motivations to be at this sacred place—to pray for whatever their lives lacked. More specifically, they had come to kiss the bones of St. Sergiy, a famous Russian saint.

  The bones were kept in a small white chapel inside the vast compound. Pyotr and Venedikt threaded themselves through small openings in the crowd. A monk marked the doorway, guiding them and others through a narrow entrance surrounded by dimly lit candles. The saint’s bones, set in the center of the room, high atop a long table, were covered with a pink shroud. Finally it was Pyotr’s turn. He followed the lead of others, bending down and kissing the embroidered cross on the pink covering and then backing away. He crossed himself in the elongated Russian Orthodox manner with his right hand and turned to exit, allowing the waiting masses to inch closer to the holy relics.

  Once back outside, Pyotr took in the grandness of it all. A new world lay ahead of him.

  MOSCOW WAS STILL forty-five miles away so the duo needed to get another early start the next morning. If they could keep up their pace, they thought they might reach Moscow within three days. The road stretched out before them, lined with pine forests and more fields of rye. Before long, the scenery changed to birch groves and ravines. If they listened closely, they could hear the two-note calls of the cuckoos.

  The
next two days passed slowly. On day ten of the journey, the paths closer to Moscow ceased to be flat and silent. They almost heaved, so intense was the motion. The noise was just as fierce, buzzing softly one moment and then almost booming the next, as people flowed to and fro. The commotion hypnotized the village boy. Travelers darted about him as well as peasants who made their living catering to Moscow’s comings and goings. They lived along the road, between the numerous pubs and teahouses, selling random goods. They traded religious trinkets, tobacco, and food. Here, customers were plentiful. Scores of Muscovites joined the transients by riding outside the city’s boundaries to buy cheaper vodka at the border pubs.

  Pyotr had to be careful to avoid getting trampled by the carriages and coaches that thundered by. He stayed close to the road’s edge, keeping his eyes fixed in the direction of Moscow. He thought about his mother and father and the life that had been. More often, though, the serf from Kayurovo dreamed of the life still yet to be discovered. Now, he could even smell it.

  Factory chimneys set up outside the city skirts of Moscow burped black smoke. This scent was mixed with the odors coming from the blacksmith shops, where coal gas burned constantly. And then there was the most powerful stench: sewage. The city’s population had exploded in the last three decades adding some eighty thousand new residents and countless other migrants. By the 1840s, 300,000 people lived in Moscow, forcing the city to cope with a sea of new bodies and their refuse.1 Strings of these sewage-laden carts lined the streets, hauling away what they could. Uncovered, their contents often spilled out onto the uneven dirt roads, forming pools of waste. Some pedestrians wore rubber boots to wade through these cesspools. A local newspaper remarked on the situation: “Moscow is filled up in the inside and covered from the outside with sewage.”2

  The sour air did little to hamper Pyotr’s enthusiasm. Just ahead of him was one of eighteen gates marking the official entrances to Moscow. He and Venedikt would pass through the Krestovskaya Zastava gates, joining the more than five thousand others who came through them daily in summer. Initially, the gates had been erected to collect custom taxes and register visitors. But the tax function ended in 1754, and it no longer made sense to log everybody coming through. Many travelers offered fake names or counterfeit passports anyway, making it almost impossible to verify identities. Officials, then, did a mere visual check of a person’s credentials.

  In the distance, Pyotr would have spied the two stone obelisks that framed the city’s gate—each about the height of three grown men. Atop both obelisks perched a two-headed eagle, the state emblem. A stone fence continued out from the obelisks, encasing two yellow houses. A booth sat nearby, too, the place for officers, soldiers, or guardians to mind the gate. Supposedly no one could pass through without one of the officials lifting a black-and-white wooden stick that ran the length of the obelisks, but of course, anyone could get by if they really wanted to. The stick was easily bypassed and the guards often too preoccupied with playing cards or chewing tobacco to notice someone slipping through.

  Pyotr had no intention of slipping through. He had no need. A typical exchange between guards and new entrants was perfunctory, nonthreatening. Few words were uttered, as a guard usually inquired of a newcomer like Pyotr: “Who are you?” Obediently, Pyotr would have presented his passport and replied: “I am Pyotr Smirnov, a peasant from Yaroslavl.” It probably took less than twenty seconds from the time Pyotr met the guard to the time he and Venedikt passed through the gates and into Moscow.

  They headed directly to Varvarka Street, the home of his uncle Ivan, brother Yakov, and a handful of cousins and other relatives. They would not have wanted to dally, for although Moscow was beginning to change, to modernize, it was still a place of strict laws and rules. A general-governor, appointed by the tsar, controlled the city; his henchmen enforced a seemingly endless list of arbitrary prohibitions, including smoking on the streets, beards or mustaches worn by government officials, and long hair on male students. The long hair was considered revolutionary, something only done by “free thinkers” who opposed the existing social and political order. Failure to comply with any of these so-called laws, which varied somewhat from city to city, could result in severe penalties.

  Pyotr was probably unfamiliar with Moscow’s rigid customs. And although Venedikt had been to the big city before, they likely decided to get to Ivan’s place quickly. They did not want to get caught in Moscow’s nighttime. Street lighting, what little there was, was primitive. Lamps illuminated with naphtha, a colorless liquid derived from petroleum, were fixed atop clumsy, gray-colored wooden pillars that appeared sporadically on the streets, offering only a dim light. Once the sun went down, pockets of the city were shrouded in a dense, ominous darkness.

  Varvarka was a snake of a street. It was one of three that began to unwind just beyond the Moscow River and to the east of Red Square. It was sandwiched between a bustling and important trading center, Gostiniy Dvor, and one of Moscow’s crammed Jewish hubs, Zaryadye. Gostiniy Dvor, meaning Guest Yard, featured a three-floored building containing warehouses and almost eight hundred small shops. Thousands of buyers and sellers came here daily to trade goods, wandering the long, narrow trading aisles, each dedicated to product lines ranging from saddles to cloth to religious icons. On the other side, Zaryadye (“behind the rows”) was thick with crowds of Orthodox Jews wandering around its narrow, curved lanes. The segregated neighborhood was considered a slum, low and gray, and the people who lived there, it was rumored, mainly traded stolen goods.

  In the middle of this eclectic setting was bustling Varvarka, a dirt-covered street. Varvarka, which was named after a cathedral built to honor St. Varvara, was ancient, almost medieval. Five churches, marked by golden domes and tall belfries, dominated the landscape of the street as well as its tenor. The neighborhood was a haven for Russia’s entrenched religious traditions and old beliefs. Residents here, many of whom were serfs, ex-serfs, merchants, or artisans, prayed daily and led simple, devout lives. Their homes, scattered between shops that sold groceries, spices, and wax, were unadorned and made of stone. Their clothes were plain; many men wore long black kaftans and beards instead of more stylish European garments of the more progressive, clean-shaven, educated classes.

  There were two exceptions to the street’s modesty. The first was located at No. 10 Varvarka Street.[9] In the sixteenth century, the building had belonged to the grandfather of Russia’s first Romanov tsar. The house, or palace, had been restored two centuries later and turned into a museum devoted to the Romanov Boyars.[10] Ivan’s home was just a few paces from it. The second, even more notable exception, was the litter of cellars and shops making or peddling grape wines, beer, and vodka. These establishments, including the one Ivan operated, were generally situated directly under or next to Orthodox churches. Ivan’s wine cellar butted up against the small parish church of St. Maksim the Confessor. The church, as it turned out, was also Ivan’s landlord. The resident clergy, along with his family, were his housemates.

  This arrangement was more than peculiar, it was illegal. Russian law prohibited any liquor establishment to exist closer than 280 feet from a church entrance. Restrictions of this kind first appeared in 1806 in St. Petersburg and in 1821 in Moscow after the clergy, moralists, and temperance leaders complained bitterly about the abuses of alcohol throughout society. Church leaders worried that some members of their congregation were getting too drunk, either immediately before or after services, to remain spiritual and devout. There was also the fear that alcoholism was chipping away at the moral values they preached to parishioners.

  Enforcement of the law was, however, difficult. Indeed, it was almost nonexistent. Like so many other clashes of conscience in Russia, this one proved easy to overlook—as long as certain financial arrangements were made. Ivan, for instance, was a chief benefactor at St. Maksim’s. He contributed funds to renovate the church, and cultivated good relations with local officials, working for a time with the police as chief of a n
eighborhood watch group whose job it was to report on suspicious or illegal activities by local merchants. This relationship, which likely included financial payoffs or offerings of free liquor, ensured that Ivan received preferential treatment when it came to his own business dealings.

  Varvarka Street, it turns out, was the epitome of contradictions. But so, too, was Pyotr. The street and the young man were unusual mixtures of devout religion, ferocious merchantry, and incessant booze making. They made a perfect couple. Pyotr had found his launching pad.

  HE AND VENEDIKT made their way to the fourth block of Varvarka where Ivan lived. His uncle, brother, and cousins lived together—eleven of them—in Ivan’s humble but ample home. The upstairs served as the living quarters while the street level and basement worked as a wine cellar and shop. Here customers could buy and drink wine and other spirits, including vodka. In those days, vodka was sold by the pail, bottle, or shtof, which equaled about one-tenth of a pail or 1.2 liters. Prices varied, of course, depending on the quality and way in which the drink was sold. But generally, a shtof could be had for as little as sixty cents and as much as $1.50. Ivan sold only drinks in his establishment. He did not have a license to sell food.[11]

  This house/bar/shop was to be Pyotr’s home. He settled in and got to work. Having made it to Moscow without incident, he was eager to show Ivan that he was no ordinary teenager. Pyotr, when it came to the ins and outs of tavern life, was an old pro—Grigoriy had taught him well. He served drinks, washed glasses, and mopped floors. He hauled whatever needed hauling. Pyotr proved his worth—and potential—in no time. Ivan, sensing his nephew’s drive and quick mind, also put him to work in his shop in Gostiniy Dvor. The shop was more like a small room or stall, and it was filed between hundreds of others in Gostiniy Dvor’s mall-like setup. Ivan sold liquor, to be sure, but he also likely sold tobacco and kefir, a distinctly Russian drink made of sour milk. He did not trade goods at Red Square. In the nineteenth century, the cobblestoned square was the purview of food peddlers, those who mainly sold cakes and sweets. It was also a gathering place for large celebrations and feasts. Alcohol was not a welcome commodity there.