Vodka Politics (15 page)

Pokhlebkin claimed that definitively “proving” the origins of vodka with any degree of reliability was next to impossible due to a lack of surviving documents. Neither side could point to a page from their respective archives—such as the Scottish Exchequer Roll of 1494–95 that established the origins of whiskey or the famous German Beer Purity Law, the
Reinheitsgebot
of 1516—to settle the dispute.
⁵
As his story goes, the Soviet export ministry, known as Soyuzplodoimport, first turned to the organization known (in typically bureaucratic parlance) as the Higher Scientific Research Institute of the Fermentation Products Division of the Central Department of Distilling of the ministry of the food industry of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which could not pin down the origins of vodka. In a move that has been immortalized as a pivotal scene in a recent Russian novel, the dismayed government authorities turned to Pokhlebkin: the only man who could establish the Soviet Union’s legal claims before the international court and in the process defend Russia’s national pride.
⁶

According to Pokhlebkin, his work was a success! In 1982 the tribunal found on behalf of the Soviets, based primarily on Vilyam’s research that “proved” the Poles began making vodka several decades after the Russians. This finding allowed Soviet products such as Stolichnaya—which had been sold in American stores since 1972 through a barter deal with Pepsi Cola—to trade under the proud (yet slightly redundant) motto: “Only vodka from Russia is genuine Russian vodka.”
⁷

Pokhlebkin’s landmark victory was all the more impressive—as subsequent Russian writers noted—because “he
alone
performed the work, and built the entire system of circumstantial evidence ultimately recognized by the international legal experts.”
⁸
This research—which Pokhlebkin claimed was never meant for public consumption—was not published until 1991, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
Istoriya vodki
only added to Pokhlebkin’s celebrity as dispenser of folk wisdom on Russia’s favorite vice, including claims that if one does not drink before 3p.m. or after midnight it is impossible to become what he called “a professional alcoholic.”
⁹

In private, Pokhlebkin was eccentric and ascetic: though amassing an impressive collection of historical manuscripts and exotic teas, he nonetheless denied himself a simple television or telephone, relying instead on written correspondence and telegrams. In his later years, Pokhlebkin became a paranoid recluse—seldom emerging from behind the numerous locks on his Podolsk apartment door for fear of being followed… or worse. Thirty years in the same three-room apartment, he never opened the door to strangers—including all manner of inspectors, repairmen, and plumbers.

Vilyam Vasilyevich Pokhlebkin was last seen alive on March 26, 2000: the same day that a man with the same monogram—Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—was first elected president of Russia.

After returning on the suburban commuter train from a meeting with his publisher in Moscow, Pokhlebkin was apparently followed from the train station, set upon by thugs, and brutally murdered in his own home. Pokhlebkin’s body—stabbed eleven times with a long-handled screwdriver—was found weeks later by his chief editor, Boris Pasternak (grandson of the world-famous author of
Dr. Zhivago
), who demanded that the police smash in the door to Pokhlebkin’s apartment after his dependably punctual writer suddenly stopped returning his letters.
¹⁰

According to the police investigation, none of Pokhlebkin’s most valuable possessions—his vast collection of rare manuscripts—were taken from the apartment. Moreover, according to the autopsy, Pokhlebkin had the equivalent of an entire bottle’s worth of vodka in his bloodstream—very suspicious, since despite his subject of expertise, Pokhlebkin never drank alcohol.
¹¹

The brutal murder of Vilyam Pokhlebkin remains unsolved. Speculation continues to swirl over culprits and motives: some even alleging that he was murdered by a vengeful Pole in retaliation for securing “vodka” for the Soviets.
¹²
As claimed by the producer of the 2005 investigative documentary
Death of a Culinarian: Vilyam Pokhlebkin
—which aired nationwide on Rossiya channel 1—“Pokhlebkin has reserved for himself a place in Russian history by saving Russia millions of dollars, perhaps tens of millions of dollars” by conquering Poland in this so-called vodka war. As the tragic stories of Pokhlebkin have grown, so has his legend.
¹³

Pokhlebkin Reconsidered

“His name was magical. Legendary,” claimed an article in the newspaper
Vechernyaya Moskva
(Evening Moscow) on the third anniversary of Pokhlebkin’s death. “Many believed it to be a pseudonym for an entire research institute, since one man could not know so much.” Moreover, the eulogy continued, if a debate ever erupted about Russian food or drink, “if one simply says to another ‘Pokhlebkin wrote it’—that was enough to end any dispute.”
¹⁴

Clearly, Vilyam Pokhlebkin is the unquestioned authority on vodka history. Over the past twenty years dozens of popular books and hundreds of articles and webpages—in Russian, English, and other world languages—have recounted his research and findings, his stories and anecdotes from the pages of
Istoriya vodki
, almost verbatim.
¹⁵

The problem is that Pokhlebkin is dead wrong, and much of his heralded
Istoriya vodki
is a complete fabrication.

H
ISTORIAN
V
ILYAM
P
OKHLEBKIN
(1923–2000). October 2, 1984. Source: RIA-Novosti/Prihodko

“If you read this book,” wrote alcohol historian David Christian, “keep a bottle of strong vodka by your side to stun the more thoughtful parts of your brain.” His scathing 1994 review of Pokhlebkin in the flagship academic journal
Slavic Review
certainly pulled no punches. “The parts that are left should enjoy this eccentric collection of curious facts, crackpot hypotheses, phony statistics, anticapitalist polemics and stalinist snobberies without worrying if it all fits together.”
¹⁶

Christian soberly chronicles Pokhlebkin’s many inaccuracies and misleading conclusions, from his claims that no etymological dictionaries mention the word
vodka
to suggesting that unlike vodka, beers and mead were never subject to taxation. Beyond these, I have uncovered even more factual errors, from the sloppy—dating Ivan the Terrible’s establishment of taverns from 1533 instead of 1553—to the substantive, such as discussing the reign of Vasily III Temnyi (“the Blind”) in the 1420s, even though such a leader never existed. Perhaps he was referring to Muscovite grand prince Vasily III—but as we saw in
Chapter 3
, that Vasily reigned in the early 1500s, making Pokhlebkin’s timeline off by one hundred years! Whether from sloppy research or (in some cases) mistakes in translation, the sheer quantity of obvious historical inaccuracies casts serious doubt
on Pokhlebkin’s authority and legend: a problem multiplied as his mistakes are renowned as unquestionable truths and reproduced far and wide.
¹⁷

David Christian’s manhandling of Russia’s culinary icon suddenly seems warranted, especially since Pokhlebkin’s “definitive” conclusion that vodka was discovered in Moscow in 1478 is far more precise than the sparse, murky evidence permits. “Most frustrating of all,” Christian writes, “Pokhlebkin often does not bother to offer evidence for his sometimes fascinating claims. How can we know if he is writing fiction or fact?”
¹⁸

Indeed, Pokhlebkin asks that his arguments be taken on trust—and for whatever reason, most Russians continue to extend him that trust. Many popular vodka books are composed not by trained historians, but rather by uncritical writers, journalists, and the culinary curious, like Pokhlebkin himself. Moreover, just as the front and back covers of Pokhlebkin’s
Istoriya vodki
are adorned with alluring bottles of Moskovskaya brand vodka, many such trade publications include page after page of nostalgic, full-page product placements for all manner of vodka brands—and often are printed by the publishing wing of Russia’s most famous distilleries. So perhaps the producers of such pop histories aren’t particularly interested in investigating the matter further.

The biggest hoax of all is the so-called Soviet–Polish vodka war that allegedly prompted Pokhlebkin’s investigation. Against the backdrop of the international Peace Palace in the Hague, the nationally televised
Death of a Culinarian
documentary boldly proclaims: “The 1982 decision of the international arbitration in favor of the USSR indisputably secured the precedence of the creation of vodka as a uniquely Russian alcoholic drink, giving them the exclusive right to advertise under that name on international markets, with the Soviet export-advertisement slogan recognizing the founding: ‘Only vodka from Russia is genuine Russian vodka.’”
¹⁹

However, neither of the international courts of the Peace Palace—the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA)—ever heard such a case between the Soviets and their fraternal counterparts in communist Poland.
²⁰
According to Peter Maggs, a foremost expert on Russian trademark law and international commercial arbitration, “the USSR as a matter of principle did not submit to international state-versus-state arbitration, because it regarded—with considerable justification—the major international arbitration institutions as dominated by the capitalist West.”
²¹

This is not to suggest that there was no sparring over the geography of alcohol. As in previous battles over geographically specific alcoholic products, such as French champagne, cognac, and Bordeaux, it follows that similar disputes could arise over vodka. Throughout the 1970s, the Poles claimed that vodka had been drunk in Poland since the early fourteenth century and that by the sixteenth century distillation was taxed.
²²
But such a definitive, internationally recognized legal ruling “proving” beyond doubt that vodka originated in Russia simply never happened.

Following the anti-Soviet rumblings of the Solidarity movement, one would expect that such a symbolic “victory” for the Soviets over their restless subordinates in Poland would make headlines globally—or at the very least in the Soviet Union. But even researchers at the Library of Congress could find no mention of it in the global press. Scouring the archives of the main Soviet newspapers,
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
, likewise uncovered nothing. In fact, no Russian periodical or academic journal ever mentions this alleged “case” until
after
the release of Pokhlebkin’s book in 1991.
²³

Only recently have Russian writers stopped taking Pokhlebkin’s claims on faith and started to aggressively fact-check them. In his 2011 book
Bolshoi obman
(
Grand Deception: Truth and Lies about Russian Vodka
), Boris Rodionov concludes that virtually everything Pokhlebkin wrote about vodka was “a grandiose mystification.” Too many questions remained: If this dispute with Poland was so crucial to both Soviet finances and national pride, why wasn’t Pokhlebkin immediately given unfettered access to the Soviets’ vast archives? Why wasn’t this lone, outcast academic given an army of research assistants? And how could such a herculean research task be completed by one man in just a few short months?

Interviews with Yuri Zhizhin, the director of Soyuzplodoimport from 1974 to 1987, and Boris Seglin, the head of the firm’s legal department, confirmed that no one commissioned Pokhlebkin to undertake such research. Moreover, they claimed that the Poles had never taken the Soviet Union to any international court over vodka’s origins… ever.
²⁴
In a little-known 2002 interview, Zhizhin stated that Soviet relations with fraternal Poland had actually been quite amicable. The vodka question “was never even raised at the Coordination Council of Comecon”: the organization that oversaw trade among East European satellite states. “The volume of vodka traded between our countries was so small that such a dispute didn’t make sense,” claimed Zhizhin. “Since most of the world’s population already associates vodka with Russia, proving that we alone have the rights to the word ‘vodka’ is like trying to stake our claim to a perpetual motion machine. It’d be a waste of effort and money.”
²⁵