Vodka Politics (3 page)

But that was early on. Over time, the pressures of totalitarian dictatorship bore down on Stalin. In 1932, following a drunken public spat, his second wife died under mysterious circumstances, which sent Stalin into a bout of loneliness. The looming specter of war with Adolph Hitler—and the very real prospect of
losing
that war—sent him into ever gloomier depression.
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Stalin grew dark. He drank more and more. Even worse, he began to force others to drink for his pleasure. As Khrushchev recalled, “At that time there were no dinners with Stalin at which people did not drink heavily, whether they wanted to or not. He evidentially wanted to drown his conscience and keep himself stupefied, or so it seemed. He never left the table sober and still less did he allow any of those close to him to leave sober.”
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With the appointment of Stalin’s sadistic hatchet-man, Lavrenty Beria, to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD—precursor to the KGB), the
once-pleasant Politburo dinners became steeped in terse competition to curry favor with the boss. Eternally suspicious of plots to do him in, Stalin used alcohol to keep his inner circle off balance: make his closest comrades (or potential rivals) drink to excess in order to draw out their honest opinions and lay bare their true intentions. If they were unable to control themselves, they would remain suspicious of one another and couldn’t collectively topple his reign. “Stalin liked this,” Khrushchev remembered. “He liked to set us against one another, and he encouraged and strengthened [our] baser inclinations.”
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Throughout the 1940s and 1950s—from near-annihilation at the hands of the German Wehrmacht to boastful global superpower—Soviet high politics assumed the air of a college frat party with the devil. Either in the Kremlin or at Stalin’s dacha, political decisions were made over drinking games and toasts of Russian vodka, Crimean champagne, Armenian brandy, and Georgian wine, beginning with the late-evening dinner and ending only with the dawn. Before attending to their assigned duties in the morning—or, more often, early afternoon—the Soviet leadership staggered outside to vomit or soil themselves before being borne home by their guards. As Yugoslav partisan Milovan Djilas ruminated after his Kremlin visits: “It was at these dinners that the destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories, and, to a considerable degree, of the human race was decided. And even if the dinners failed to inspire those spiritual creators—the ‘engineers of the human spirit’—to great deeds, many such deeds were probably buried there forever.”
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While Djilas
didn’t
appreciate was that the members of Stalin’s Politburo—the elite leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—were hardly willing participants in these dinners. Khrushchev’s gravelly voice recounted how the inner circle loathed meeting with Stalin—due mostly to the drunken bacchanals:

Almost every evening the phone rang: “C’mon over, we’ll have dinner.” Those were dreadful dinners. We would get home toward dawn, and yet we had to go to work. I would try to reach the office by 10:00 a.m. and during the lunch break take a nap because there was always the danger that if you didn’t sleep and he called you again to come to dinner you would end up dozing off at his table. Things went badly for people who dozed off at Stalin’s table.
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Foreign guests weren’t spared either. After slicing up Eastern Europe with Adolph Hitler through the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin treated the delegation of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to an elaborate twenty-four course state dinner in the sumptuous Grand Palace of the Kremlin. For many of the visitors, it was the most remarkable event they had ever experienced.
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But
before anyone could eat, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed a round of toasts to each and every member of the two delegations—twenty-two in all. Stalin exchanged a few words with each guest and clinked glasses. Having so “honored” each guest in turn, the now-sauced Germans sighed with relief and finally turned to eat—that is, until a visibly inebriated Molotov declared: “Now we’ll drink to all members of the delegations who could
not
attend this dinner.”
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And on it went.

Of that fateful night, Ribbentrop recalled that the brown pepper vodka they drank was “so potent it almost took your breath away”—yet somehow Stalin seemed steady and unaffected. Tipsy, Ribbentrop stammered toward Stalin to express his “admiration for Russian throats compared with those of us Germans.” The great dictator chuckled. Pulling the Nazi minister aside, Stalin revealed that his own cup held only a light Crimean wine, the same color as the “devilish vodka” he made everyone else drink.
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Perhaps the saving grace for foreign dignitaries was that—unlike the Politburo members—they didn’t meet with Stalin regularly: the Nazi delegate Gustav Hilger later described the confrontation with Beria that erupted when Hilger refused to get drunk. “What’s the argument about?” Stalin interrupted, later joking, “Well if you don’t want to drink, no one can force you.”

“Not even the chief of the NKVD himself?” Hilger pressed.

“Here at this table,” replied Stalin, “even the NKVD chief has no more say than anyone else.”

For the Germans, these confrontations underscored that the Soviet leadership was both unpretentious and unpredictable. Reflecting on how swiftly Stalin could swing from jovial to deathly serious, Hilger noted his “paternal benevolence with which he knew how to win his opponents and make them less vigilant.”
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Forcing others to drink until they lost touch with their senses was certainly useful for that.

Whether entertaining Stalin’s erstwhile Axis allies at the outset of the war or his Allied allies during the war, alcohol was integral to high-level diplomacy. Three short years after the sodden Nazi delegation left Stalin’s court, in August 1942, British prime minister Winston Churchill’s delegation arrived only to endure the same treatment. These were the darkest days of World War II, and the British mission had intended to shore up relations with their new Soviet allies, who were then enduring the full force of the Nazi
blitzkrieg
. Churchill also broke the bad news that relief in the form of a second front in Western Europe would not be quick in coming. Having professed that the “drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them” was his “sacred rite,” Churchill seemed well prepared to confront the Kremlin’s drunken bacchanals on their own terms.
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Still, the Soviets retained their home court advantage. “Nothing can be imagined more awful than a Kremlin banquet, but it has to be endured,” recalled the British permanent undersecretary at the foreign office, Sir Alexander Cadogan. “Unfortunately, Winston didn’t suffer it gladly.”

Undaunted by the first banquet, before leaving Russia, Churchill requested a final audience with Stalin. At 1 a.m. on the morning of their departure, Cadogan was summoned to Stalin’s private Kremlin residence, where he found the two leaders, now flanked by Molotov, in high spirits—feasting on all manner of food, a suckling pig, already having downed countless bottles of alcohol. “What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.” Still, according to Cadogan, the goodwill forged in that night of heavy drinking solidified the grand alliance that ultimately laid low the Nazi juggernaut.
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The Kremlin banquet scene was in full swing again when French president Charles de Gaulle arrived near the conclusion of the European war in December 1944. The jubilance of impending victory was tinged with unease over Stalin’s looming drunkenness, as the great dictator presented a series of toasts to his circle—thirty by de Gaulle’s count—each more chilling than the next.

To his rear army commander Andrei Khrulev (whose wife had recently been arrested under suspicions of conspiracy): “He’d better do his best, or he’ll be hanged for it, that’s the custom in our country!” This was followed by a joyous clinking of glasses and an understandably awkward embrace.
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To his air force commander Aleksandr Novikov: a “good Marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly, we’ll hang him!” (Two years later, Novikov would be stripped of his rank, arrested, and tortured by Beria before being sentenced to fifteen years in a hard-labor camp.)
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Then there was Lazar Kaganovich, Khrushchev’s mentor and mastermind behind Stalin’s Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s that claimed millions of lives. During the prewar banquet with Ribbentrop, Stalin took special pleasure in making his Nazi guests squirm by celebrating a toast to the Jewish Kaganovich.
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But by the end of the war, both the guests and the toasts had changed. Stalin proclaimed of Kaganovich: “a brave man. He knows that if the trains do not arrive on time—we shall shoot him!”

Could the uncomfortable de Gaulle have known that Kaganovich had sacrificed his own brother, Mikhail, to Stalin’s bloodthirsty paranoia? “What has to be done must be done,” Lazar coldly shrugged once informed that his brother had roused Stalin’s suspicion. Mikhail was shot during the interrogation the following day. But that was at the outset of the war—like all the others, all Lazar could do now was endure such menacing toasts with a facade of good humor and an obedient clinking of the glasses.
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For any normal observer, much less a foreign dignitary such as de Gaulle, this was simply shocking. Reading the displeasure on his guest’s face, Stalin put his hand on de Gaulle’s shoulder and smiled: “People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not horrible after all.”
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On that evening, at least, Nikita Khrushchev avoided Stalin’s ire, but such was not always the case. On other nights, Stalin cleaned his burning pipe by knocking it against Khrushchev’s bald head before forcing the rotund, aging former peasant-turned-court-jester to drink glass after glass of vodka and perform the
gapak
, the traditional knees-bent Ukrainian folk dance, which caused him excruciating pain. Occasionally KGB chief Beria pinned the word
prick
to the back of Khrushchev’s overcoat, which he would not notice until the company burst into rollicking laughter. Others left ripe tomatoes on his chair for Nikita to sit on. A proud and temperate man by upbringing, as with all of his compatriots, Khrushchev became a prodigious drinker for no other reason than to please Stalin. Sometimes he got so drunk that Beria had to help him to bed, on which he would promptly piss. As later biographers would note: “Awful as these sessions were, it was better to be there than not, better to be humiliated than annihilated.”
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In his own words Khrushchev later recalled:

He literally forced us to drink! Among ourselves we had brief discussions about how to bring the supper or dinner to an end more quickly. Sometimes before supper or dinner, people would say: “Well, what’s it going to be today, will there be a drinking contest or not?” We didn’t want to have such contests because we had work to do, but Stalin deprived us of that opportunity. … Stalin himself would just drink a glass of cognac or vodka at the beginning of the dinner and then wine. … Everyone felt repelled by this; it made you sick to the stomach; but Stalin was implacable on this matter.
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So is it any wonder that virtually every member of the Soviet Politburo of the 1940s was a drop-dead alcoholic? It was not because alcoholism was hardwired into their DNA but, rather, because they were products of a political system that compelled drunken excess. Stalin’s inebriated inner circle, including Khrushchev, Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, and Anastas Mikoyan was a collection of some of the most ruthless thugs the world had ever seen—yet all of them were made to drink against their will to keep them off balance and prevent them from plotting to topple the paranoid secretary general. “Stalin forced us drink a lot,” Mikoyan confirmed in his memoirs, “apparently to loosen our tongues, so that we couldn’t control what we said, and he would later know who was thinking what.”
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According to one of Stalin’s biographers, “Forcing his tough comrades to lose control of themselves became his sport and a measure of dominance.”
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The toughest of them all was Stalin’s executioner, Lavrenty Beria—the sadistic head of the secret police who was notorious for cruising in his black limousine to select women (reportedly upwards of two hundred) from the streets of Moscow to be delivered to his apartment, where he would fill them with alcohol and rape them. When the tables were turned, however, Beria despised being forced to drink for someone else’s pleasure. Still, not only did he drink, but he also made others do so out of servility to Stalin. Khrushchev’s fading tapes recount Beria’s predicament: “We’ve got to get drunk,” said Beria, “the sooner the better. The sooner we’re drunk, the sooner the party will be over. No matter what, he’s not going to let us leave sober.”
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Like Beria, everyone tried their best to endure—or, better yet, avoid—Stalin’s loathsome drinking bouts.

Not surprisingly, by the late 1940s the constant drinking caught up to Khrushchev, who began having kidney trouble. While Stalin was initially sympathetic to doctors’ orders for Nikita to abstain from alcohol, Beria butted in that he too had kidney troubles but that he drank anyway, without a problem. “So I was deprived of my defensive armor (that I couldn’t drink because of my bad kidneys): no matter, drink! As long as you’re walking around, as long as you’re alive, drink!”
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