Vodka Politics

Vodka Politics

VODKA POLITICS

Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State

MARK LAWRENCE SCHRAD

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ISBN 978–0–199–75559–2

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Printed in the United States of America
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For my wife, Jennifer.
I have so many words to express so many things, but none could hope to describe my love and appreciation for who you are and all you do
.

CONTENTS

Note on Proper Names

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Vodka Politics

3. Cruel Liquor: Ivan the Terrible and Alcohol in the Muscovite Court

4. Peter the Great: Modernization and Intoxication

5. Russia’s Empresses: Power, Conspiracy, and Vodka

6. Murder, Intrigue, and the Mysterious Origins of Vodka

7. Why Vodka? Russian Statecraft and the Origins of Addiction

8. Vodka and the Origins of Corruption in Russia

9. Vodka Domination, Vodka Resistance … Vodka Emancipation?

10. The Pen, the Sword, and the Bottle

11. Drunk at the Front: Alcohol and the Imperial Russian Army

12. Nicholas the Drunk, Nicholas the Sober

13. Did Prohibition Cause the Russian Revolution?

14. Vodka Communism

15. Industrialization, Collectivization, Alcoholization

16. Vodka and Dissent in the Soviet Union

17. Gorbachev and the (Vodka) Politics of Reform

18. Did Alcohol Make the Soviets Collapse?

19. The Bottle and Boris Yeltsin

20. Alcohol and the Demodernization of Russia

21. The Russian Cross

22. The Rise and Fall of Putin’s Champion

23. Medvedev against History

24. An End to Vodka Politics?

Notes

Index

NOTE ON PROPER NAMES

In this book, Russian names generally follow the British standard (BGN/PCGN) transliteration, with some alterations to accommodate the widely accepted English equivalents of familiar historical figures (for example, Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Catherine, rather than Tsar Nikolai and Tsaritsa Ekaterina). To aid pronunciation, I have opted to change the Russian “ii” ending to a “y,” and eliminate the Russian soft sign from personal and place names (so Maksim Gor’kii becomes Maxim Gorky). These alterations do not apply to the bibliographic references in the notes, which maintain the standard transliteration for those who wish to consult the original sources.

PREFACE

A book about Russia based on vodka? How’s that going to sit with Russian readers? Well, when a
New York Times
article I wrote related to the subject found its way onto the Russian-language blogosphere, it certainly didn’t take me long to find out: “Vodka? Hey, while you’re at it, don’t forget the bears and balalaikas” came one understandable rejoinder, drenched in the requisite sarcasm about gullible foreigners and their misguided perceptions about Russia. Dozens more jibes and sneers quickly followed.
¹

To be sure, confronting well-worn clichés is an uncomfortable business. Especially when unflattering broadsides are made against an entire nation, they prompt a response from both those outside and inside the group such stereotypes purport to describe. For insiders, the usual response to a hurtful platitude is to downplay or deny it. Sympathetic outsiders normally try to politely ignore it. Rarely do offended parties embrace a perceived insult, and rarer still does anyone stop to investigate and explore it.

Obviously, in studying Russia—its people, culture, politics, and history—we encounter just such a widely held and uncomfortable stereotype in the form of the hopelessly drunken Russian. People who can barely locate Russia on a map readily associate it with insobriety, while foreigners studying the Russian language surely know how to say “vodka” well before they even learn to say “hello.”

Yet that image is not exclusive to foreigners: as the new millennium dawned, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) asked actual Russian citizens what they considered the main symbol of twentieth-century Russia: vodka beat out not just bears and balalaikas, but also nesting dolls and even AK-47s for the top spot.
²
When it comes to perceived challenges for Russia’s future, such concerns as “national security,” “economic crisis,” and “human rights” are routinely listed as national threats only by some ten percent of VTsIOM poll respondents. “Terrorism” and “crime” are consistently named around twenty-five to thirty percent of the time. The challenge that usually
claims the top spot as Russia’s most pressing challenge is “alcohol and drug addiction”—voiced by some fifty to sixty percent of respondents, year in and year out.
³
Still, while everyone knows alcohol is a major social problem, vodka’s roots run so deep in Russian history and culture that simply acknowledging—much less unpacking and confronting—this endemic challenge seems somehow impolite, especially for an outsider.

Yet while virtually every developed country on earth put their so-called liquor question to bed a century ago, alcohol continues to bedevil high politics in Russia. For instance, in late 2011 and 2012, an unprecedented wave of popular opposition in Moscow nearly thwarted Vladimir Putin’s return to a third term as Russia’s president following four years as prime minister alongside his protégé Dmitry Medvedev. In his last major speech to the Duma—the lower house of Russia’s parliament—before his re-inauguration, Putin highlighted Russia’s precarious health and demographic situation as one of his administration’s most pressing political challenges. “Without any wars or calamities,” Putin said, “smoking, alcohol, and drug abuse [alone] claim 500,000 lives of our countrymen every year. This is simply a horrific figure.” Unless Putin suffers from amnesia, these indeed-horrific figures should not have come as any surprise: he repeatedly lamented vodka’s ghastly toll during both his first and second administrations (2000–2008) in almost the same language.
⁴

Since Putin emerged on the political scene in 1999, Russian social indicators have unquestionably improved upon the unimaginable social devastation and economic demodernization in the years immediately following communism’s collapse in 1991. The economy grew at some seven percent per year for an entire decade from 1998 to 2008 before getting hammered by the global financial crisis. Yet while the macroeconomic indicators were on the rebound, figures on Russian life expectancy more closely resembled sub-Saharan Africa than postindustrial Europe. Even today, the average teenage Russian boy has a
worse
chance of living to age sixty-five than do boys in failed states like Somalia and Ethiopia.
⁵
But unlike these desperate places, it isn’t malnourishment or famine that is to blame—nor is it the errant bullets of civil war: it is vodka, pure and simple. With Russians consuming on average eighteen liters of pure alcohol per year—or more than twice the maximum amount deemed safe by the World Health Organization—in 2009 then-president Dmitry Medvedev called alcohol a “national disaster,” ushering in a new attempt to combat the eternal Russian vice.
⁶

Russia’s tragic cultural weakness for vodka is often chalked up to the torments of the “Russian soul.” But simply assuming that intoxication and self-destruction are somehow inherent cultural traits—unalienable parts of what it is to be Russian, almost down to the genetic level—is akin to blaming the victim. There is nothing natural about Russia’s vodka disaster.

As I argue here, Russian society’s longstanding attachment to the vodka bottle—and the misfortune that follows in its wake—is instead a
political
disaster generated by the modern, autocratic Russian state. Before the rise of the modern Russian autocracy, the people of medieval
Rus
’ drank beers and ales naturally fermented from grains, plus meads naturally fermented from honey, and
kvas
naturally fermented from bread. If they were well-to-do, they imported wines fermented from grapes and berries. They not only drank beverages similar to those elsewhere on the European continent; they also imbibed similar amounts and in a similar manner. That all changed with the introduction of the very unnatural process of distillation, which created spirits and vodkas of a potency—and profitability—that nature simply could not match. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the grand princes and tsars of Muscovy monopolized the lucrative vodka trade, quickly promoting it as the primary means of extracting money and resources from their lowly subjects.

The state’s subjugation of society through alcohol was not unique to Russia: even into the nineteenth century distilled spirits were instrumental in “proletarianizing” colonial Africa and subjugating the slaves of the antebellum United States—but nowhere did alcohol become a more intractable part of the state’s financial and political dominance over society than in Russia’s autocratic tsarist and Soviet empires, which has left disturbing legacies for the present and future of today’s Russian Federation.
⁷
The moral, social, and health decay that resulted from plying the people with copious amounts of vodka could be easily overlooked so long as the treasury was flush and the state was strong. That the people’s misery led them back to the tavern rather than forward to the picket line was an added benefit, at least as far as the stability of the autocratic leadership was concerned. In sum: vodka is only as natural as autocracy is natural—in Russia, they are woven together as part of the same cloth.

Does this mean that vodka is
everything
in Russia? Certainly not, but it is a lot of things. I don’t claim to offer a monocausal explanation of Russian history: it would be the height of foolishness to claim that everything of political significance can be explained with reference to alcohol. Instead, I present vodka politics as an alternative lens through which to view and thereby understand Russia’s complex political development. Think of it as beer goggles for Russian history—but unlike beer goggles that distort our perceptions, viewing history through the lens of vodka politics actually brings things into clearer focus. Vodka politics helps us to understand the temperament of Russia’s famed autocratic leaders from both the distant and not-so-distant past and how they relate to their subjects. It highlights the significance of previously overlooked factors in major events in world history, including wars, coups, and revolutions. It fills in significant gaps in our understanding of politics and economics with Russian society and culture. It gives us new appreciation for the greatest works
of Russian literature and casts stale understandings of Russia’s internal dynamics in a completely new light. Finally, it may just help us confront the monumental challenges that these historical legacies of autocratic vodka politics present for a healthy, prosperous, and democratic future.