Vodka Politics (31 page)

It was Saturday evening; there were few passing in the street; but, on the other hand, the taverns were crammed. They could hear hoarse voices, drunken singing, mingling with the nasal sound of an accordion.… At times, a peasant, with his shirt and waistcoat open, his belt loosened, on his head a winter cap, of which the top hung down over his back like a bag, would be seen staggering out of the tavern, resting his chest against one of the shafts and standing there still, groping about with his hands, as if seeking for something; or else it was some puny, feeble factory hand, his cap all awry, his feet bare—his boots being left in pawn at the tavern—who, after staggering a little, would stop, scratch his neck, and, with a sudden exclamation, retrace his steps.

“That’s what’s killing the Russian peasant,” gloomily professed Turgenev’s hero Markelov—“vodka.” As they pass tavern upon tavern, his coachman morosely notes “It’s to drown sorrow.”
⁵⁶

Reminiscent of Chernyshevsky’s implication of alcohol as the primary affliction of the old order, Turgenev’s
narodniki
likewise diagnose the condition of Russia in prose.

Sleep.

It was long since I had seen the place of my birth, but I found there no change. Deathlike torpor, absence of thought, roofless houses, ruined walls, filth, and vileness, and poverty, and misery, the insolent or sullen looks of slaves, all is as before.…the peasants are sleeping the sleep of death; the gather in the harvest, they toil in the fields—they sleep; they thresh the corn, still sleeping; father, mother, and children all asleep. He who beats and he who is beaten, both sleep. The tavern alone is awake, its eye always open. And clasping between its five fingers a jug of brandy, its head toward the North Pole, its feet at the Caucasus, sleeps in an eternal sleep—

Russia, the holy country!
⁵⁷

Turgenev was no fan of the socialists’ “to the people” campaign, portraying them as fish out of water, especially in the village tavern. “I went into six taverns,” complains Alexei Nezhdanov, the main
narodniki
protagonist. “I can’t bear that drug vodka! How can our peasants drink it as they do? It is inconceivable! If it is necessary to drink vodka in order to simplify ourselves, then no, thank you!” Underscoring the culture clash the revolutionaries encountered, Turgenev concludes: “What hard work it is for an ascetic to bring himself into contact with real life!”
⁵⁸

In many ways, the culmination of the story comes when the revolutionary Nezhdanov gets uproariously drunk in the tavern, invoking the “slumber” of the peasantry as he incites them to riot:

“Hulloh!” he shouted, “are you asleep? Get up! the hour has come. Down with taxation; down with the proprietors!”
⁵⁹

Ironically, the peasants initially mistook Nezhdanov’s ravings for drunkenness. Yet as his words gained traction, he was welcomed by a burly, approving peasant into the tavern, where—unsurprisingly—things went awry for the young intellectual. To prove his allegiance with his peasant comrades, the firebrand lightweight accepted round after round of their vodka-laced hospitality.

Ugh! He swallowed it with the resolution of despair, as he would have marched up to a battery or to a line of bayonets. But, heavens, what has happened? Something struck him down his back and legs, burned his throat, and chest, and stomach, and brought tears to his eyes—a qualm of nausea, which he could hardly conquer, ran over his whole body. He shouted as loud as he could the first thing that came into his head, to dull that terrible feeling….

A voice shouted again, “Drink!” and Nezhdanov swallowed another draught of the vile poison. It was as if iron hooks were tearing him inside, his head began to spin, green circles were turning before his eyes. There was a ringing in his ear—a roar. Horror—a third glass! Is it possible that he swallowed it? Red noses flew toward him; dusty heads of hair, sunburned necks, furrowed, scarred throats. Hairy hands took hold of him. “Come, finish your speech!” shouted wild voices. “Come, speak! Day before yesterday a stranger, like you, told us lots of things. Go on! You four-legged son of a sea cook!”

The earth waved beneath Nezhdanov’s feet. His voice sounded strange to him, as if some one else was speaking. Could he be dead?
⁶⁰

He wasn’t dead, of course, but he well could have been had the naive
narodnik
not been carried away from the frenzied crowd by his more level-headed comrade, Paul. As the peasants pressed for his views as Paul hauled away the
drunken revolutionary we get perhaps the best taste of Tugenev’s disdain for the
narodniki
: “It would be perfect, if there were no masters and if the whole world belonged to us, of course,” he replied. “But, up to the present time, there has been no
ukase
[government decree] ordering that.”
⁶¹

Like the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Turgenev’s
Virgin Soil
spurned Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary ideology, all the while sharing the same language of all of Russia’s great writers—the language of vodka.

The Brothers Ulyanov

Historian Orlando Figes argues that letting Chernyshevsky’s brilliantly awful novel slip through their fingers was one of the tsarist state’s greatest mistakes, “for it converted more people to the cause of the revolution than all of the Marx and Engels put together.”
⁶²
And that gets it just about right, as the educated Russian youth of the 1870s and 1880s became increasingly restive and the universities churned out revolutionaries who made the “populist”
narodniki
look amateurish by comparison.

The most infamous group inspired by Chernyshevsky came to be known as
Narodnaya volya
or the People’s Will. This faction of perhaps five hundred revolutionary radicals sought to replace the “propaganda of ideas” condemning the autocratic system with the “propaganda by deed”—in the process becoming the first modern terrorist organization. For them, Alexander II’s emancipatory reforms did not go far enough: the people could never be truly free until the tsarist system was destroyed, which could best be achieved by assassinating key government officials, members of the royal family, and the tsar himself.
⁶³

On a cold Sunday in St. Petersburg in March of 1881, the tsar-liberator Alexander II fell victim to the People’s Will. That Sunday, as on every Sunday, the tsar’s motorcade was riding along the Griboedov (literally, mushroom-eater) Canal when a revolutionary chucked a bomb at the bulletproof horse-drawn carriage of the tsar, killing one of the tsar’s Cossack guards and injuring nearby civilians. Stepping out to survey the damage, Alexander was easy prey for a second revolutionary, whose bomb killed both tsar and assassin. The magnificent Church of the Savior on the Spilt Blood was erected in the middle of the street to commemorate the very spot where the tsar met his gruesome end.

The assassination prompted a police clampdown, domestic espionage, and the infiltration of radical student groups. Since explicit meetings of revolutionary groups could land them in jail or Siberia, radical students held innocent-looking parties—replete with music, dancing, and gratuitous amounts of vodka—as a
front for serious back-room plotting. And in a now-familiar pattern, the revelers served their guests “enough strong drink to soften their vigilance”: and occasionally potential collaborators revealed themselves as stool pigeons for the police.
⁶⁴

One extreme, Chernyshevsky-inspired group was the Terrorists’ Faction of the People’s Will. Its leader was a young biology student at the University of St. Petersburg named Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known later by his nom de guerre, Lenin. Inspired to revolution, Aleksandr set aside his study of sea spiders to learn bomb making. On the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, the elder Ulyanov was arrested with a larger circle of comrades-in-arms as they planned to hurl bombs at the new tsar, Alexander III, as he rode down the Nevsky Prospekt after paying tribute to his slain father at the Church on the Spilt Blood. Despite the radicals’ best efforts, the secret police had infiltrated the organization and found sufficient reason to arrest everyone.

While all of the conspirators were sentenced to death, the tsar pardoned all but five: one whose bragging about the effectiveness of terrorism tipped off the authorities, the three bomb throwers, and Ulyanov—their chief ideologue and bomb maker. Unrepentant to the end, in May 1887 the 21-year-old revolutionary hung from the gallows at the tsar’s island prison of Schlüsselburg—executed by the autocracy he so vehemently opposed.
⁶⁵

News of his brother’s martyrdom only hardened the revolutionary resolve of the younger Ulyanov, then a mere seventeen. The young Lenin took up his brother’s cause of Marxist revolution with unmatched vigor, beginning by picking up his brother’s copy of
What Is to Be Done?
Lenin later reminisced over his inspirations, most notably Chernyshevsky:

He fascinated my brother and he fascinated me. He plowed me up more profoundly than anyone else. When did you read
What Is to Be Done?
… I myself tried to read it when I was about fourteen. It was no use, a superficial reading. And then, after my brother’s execution, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favorite books, I really undertook to read it, and I sat over it not for several days but for several weeks. Only then did I understand its depth.…It’s a thing that supplies energy for a whole lifetime. An ungifted work could not have that kind of influence.
⁶⁶

Lenin fondly kept a number of photos of Chernyshevsky and frequently lauded him in print. And when he later penned his manifesto calling for a professional, Marxist vanguard party to push forward with revolution by all means necessary he gave it a now familiar title:
Chto delat’?
—In English:
What Is to Be Done
?
⁶⁷

To be sure, Lenin did not go to absurd lengths to emulate the heroes in Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?
—such as the enigmatic Rakhmetov who slept on bare boards and denied himself both drink and women in the name of revolution.
⁶⁸
The radicalism of Lenin’s public politics stood in stark contrast to the modesty and temperance of his private life. Whether conspiring in underground circles in St. Petersburg, enduring the epic brutality of Siberia, or writing in European exile, both Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya only occasionally drank wine or beer, and never to excess. For them, vodka was completely off limits, not as a matter of taste, but as an extension of their revolutionary philosophy and lifestyle. “Religion is opium for the people,” Lenin wrote, invoking Marx’s famous maxim. But he continued in terms that would do Tolstoy proud: “Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.”
⁶⁹

And while religion may be the opiate of the masses, as American satirist Stephen Colbert (or, more likely, one of his writers) reminds us, “vodka… is the vodka of the masses.”
⁷⁰

Lenin would have wholeheartedly agreed—though it is hard to say whether the trite turn of phrase would have elicited a chuckle from the generally humorless revolutionary, whose cold and businesslike reputation preceded him. The widow Krupskaya reminisced that even before she first met Lenin, she was told that he read only “serious” books and never read a novel in his life, a caricature she was surprised to debunk during their shared Siberian exile. “Vladimir Ilyich had not only read Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?
but reread them many times and was generally fond of the classics which he knew intimately.”
⁷¹

Of course, these were hardly just works of fiction. As we have seen, each of these classics conveyed important social and political commentary. Does it come as any surprise, then, that both Lenin’s personal temperament and political philosophy greatly resembled Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy—at least in terms of vodka politics?

Echoing these great writers, Lenin often lambasted the tsarist government for systemically debauching and repressing the impoverished Russian masses whose lives were often cut short by alcoholism and domestic violence. While in Siberian exile in 1899 Lenin completed his first academic critique of capitalism and tsarist autocracy in
The Development of Capitalism in Russia
, which devoted an entire section to the importance of distilling to capitalist development and strengthening the local landlords and nobility at the expense of the peasantry.
⁷²
In particular, he railed against the state liquor monopoly as one lever “of that organized robbery, that systematic, unconscionable plunder of national property by a handful of
pomeshchiki
, bureaucrats, and all sorts of parasites, plunder which is called the ‘state economy of Russia’.”
⁷³

Lenin’s general understanding of the role of alcohol in tsarist statecraft informed his journalistic critiques of imperial policies in the pages of revolutionary periodicals like
Iskra
(
Spark
),
Zvezda
(
Star
) and
Pravda (Truth)
. For instance, beginning in 1901, Lenin blasted the tax on vodka—an indirect and therefore regressive tax—as “
the most unfair
form of taxation,” tantamount to a tax on the poor.
⁷⁴
Responding to the resurrection of the imperial vodka monopoly under Finance Minister Sergei Witte, Lenin argued that the move would enrich the noble aristocratic exploiters while “dooming millions of peasants and workers to permanent bondage.”
⁷⁵