Vodka Politics (39 page)

Still—satisfied that the empire’s finances were in order, Nicholas made the most disastrous decision in the history of Russian vodka politics: on September
28, 1914, the tsar announced that Russia would forever go dry by decree. But strangely, instead of a traditional imperial proclamation, prohibition was declared in the form of a widely reprinted telegram from Tsar Nicholas II to his uncle, the temperance advocate Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov, which simply read:

Petrograd. To the Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich. I thank the Russian Christian Labor Temperance Organization. I have already decided to abolish forever the government sale of vodka in Russia.

NICHOLAS
⁴²

Not only would there be no state trade in vodka; there would be no private commercial trade in vodka either. Russia’s all-powerful temperance convert assumed that his sovereign command was all that it would take to banish all vodka from Russia forever.

Swearing off vodka—and the lucrative vodka revenues—flew in the face of centuries of autocratic tradition. Now, at the hour of Russia’s greatest military crisis, the tsar effectively sawed the legs off his own empire. But to get the complete picture of this monumental decision it is necessary to decipher the intentions behind the tsar’s telegram.

Dearest Uncle Kostya

“It can be said without exaggeration,” wrote Russian historian Pyotr Zaionchkovsky, “that the members of the imperial family were for the most part rather stupid individuals who divided their lives between the barracks and the restaurant,” where the elite went to get drunk. This book, even to this point, seems to confirm as much. Yet the one outlier Zaionchkovsky found was the truly “exceptional” Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov, to whom the tsar’s fateful prohibition telegram was addressed.
⁴³

Lamentably, for all his talents, Konstantin took little interest in politics. Perhaps on account of this disinterest (which he and Nicholas II had long shared), little Niki forged an especially close bond with his “dearest uncle Kostya”—his favorite of all his uncles.
⁴⁴
(Yes, for anyone keeping track, that makes him the third different “favorite uncle” of the tsar mentioned in this chapter.)

Something of a bohemian, Konstantin Konstantinovich spurned the military training expected of male Romanovs in favor of the arts. A gifted pianist, he was a close friend of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He wrote poetry of exceptional quality and even performed as a stage actor, portraying the role of Joseph of Arimathea in the play
King of Judea
, which he himself wrote. He translated the works of Shakespeare into Russian for a number of literary societies he founded and was
appointed president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Notably, he sponsored the All-Russian Labor Union of Christian Teetotalers (Vserossiiskii trudovoi soyuz khristian trezvennikov or VTSKhT), which made mild, though frequent, temperance admonishments to Nicholas II and other prominent leaders.
⁴⁵
Practicing what he preached, the town of Pavlovsk that housed his royal palace (a quick five miles south of the tsar’s palace at Tsarskoe Selo) was an island of prohibition in a vast, drunken Russian sea.
⁴⁶

Konstantin’s candid diaries contrast a high-profile royal lifestyle with a private turmoil over his bisexuality.
⁴⁷
By night, Konstantin frequented St. Petersburg’s male brothels, but by day he was a loving husband and dedicated father to his eight children. The apple of his eye was unquestionably his fourth son, Prince Oleg. Nurturing his natural curiosity and intellectual gifts, Konstantin enrolled Oleg in the Alexander Lyceum—a prestigious school of high culture—instead of the conventional royal military academies. Yet with the outbreak of war, the twenty-two-year-old Oleg voluntarily enlisted, ultimately commanding an entire cavalry platoon. Seeing active duty on the front west of Vilnius in the early days of the war, Oleg valiantly pursued a battalion of German cavalry when he was wounded by the shot of the retreating German horsemen. Entering through his right hip and lodging in his gut (
kishka
), the bullet left a wound that quickly became infected. Unfortunately, the combined efforts of military doctors could do nothing to save the doomed prince. Even on his deathbed Oleg proclaimed that his passing would benefit the war effort—conveying to the troops that the Imperial House was not afraid to shed its own blood.
⁴⁸
On September 27, 1914, succumbing to his injuries, Prince Oleg Konstantinovich became the first—and ultimately the only—Romanov to die in battle during World War I.

The news took a devastating toll on the doting father, Grand Duke Konstantin, who was already in ill health. The outbreak of war caught Konstantin and the grand duchess at a health spa in Germany, where their entire entourage was arrested as political prisoners. Only entreaties by the Russian court to their cousins in the German royal family secured their release. But with all borders between east and west closed amid total war, Konstantin, his wife, and their entire retinue were forced to cross the front lines into Russia on foot, which further weakened the ailing grand duke.

Upon hearing that his son had been wounded, on September 28, Kostya hastily wrote to inform his nephew the tsar of the tragedy before rushing from Pavlovsk to be by his son’s bedside. It was all for naught. By the time they reached Vilnius, death had already claimed the young prince.
⁴⁹

The now-famous prohibition telegram from Tsar Nicholas II to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich was sent as a response on that very day—September 28, 1914—and was confirmed by the tsar’s Council of Ministers on the following day. While the tsar never penned a memoir shedding light on these events, it would seem that the momentous decision to wean Russia from vodka was in part a sympathetic gesture from a doting nephew to his much-loved prohibitionist uncle in his time of greatest sorrow. The death of Prince Oleg allowed the tsar to attach even greater personal significance in executing a vital decision of public policy—one that would have devastating consequences.

G
RAND
D
UKE
K
ONSTANTIN
K
ONSTANTINOVICH
R
OMANOV
(1858–1915)

Coda

The State Archives of the Russian Federation—a drab, concrete monolith in downtown Moscow chiseled with figures of Soviet heroism—contains many holdings related to the last years of the royal family. Yet the files of Tsar “Niki” and his dearest uncle Kostya are mute on the prohibition telegram. It was only on the following day, September 29, that the tsar wrote in his diary how moved he had been by the sad news of Oleg’s passing. Four days later Niki was at his uncle’s side at the state funeral for the young prince.
⁵⁰
It would be the first of many devastating tragedies for the royal family.

Grieving to the end for the loss of his beloved son, Konstantin Konstantinovich died less than a year later. His other sons—Ivan, Igor, and Konstantin (the younger)—were arrested shortly following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and exiled to Alapaevsk—a small Ural town north of Ekaterinburg. On the night of July 17–18, 1918, Bolshevik forces marched the grand duke’s family into the woods, where they were beaten, shot, and their bodies tossed into a mineshaft—a mere one hundred miles away from the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where, just the night before, Tsar Nicholas II, the tsarina, their daughters, and the ruling House of Romanov had met a similarly grisly fate.
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P
RINCE
O
LEG
K
ONSTANTINOVICH
R
OMANOV
(1892–1914)

13

Did Prohibition Cause the Russian Revolution?

Pyotr Pavlovich Bukhov had a problem.

To be sure, in 1916, with Russia embroiled in a disastrous military fiasco that was decimating the conscripts on the front line, creating bread shortages and social unrest on the home front and runaway inflation threatening national economic collapse, the troubles of this provincial gentleman from Voronezh may have seemed insignificant by comparison: he had a tax bill from the imperial ministry of finance that he could not pay. As a member of the privileged Russian gentry, Bukhov was in the business of providing alcoholic beverages—mostly fruit and berry wines—to the imperial alcohol monopoly, but since Tsar Nicholas II made Russia dry by decree at the outset of the Great War, Bukhov had a warehouse full of alcohol that he could not legally sell and an enormous burden of overdue taxes that he could no longer pay—and he was not alone.
¹

Some of Bukhov’s colleagues probably found his circumstances enviable—or at least coveted his location far from the thunder of war that was daily growing louder and closer. Not only were the gentry alcohol producers in the empire’s western borderlands prohibited from selling their liquor, but they were also faced with an imperial decree that all alcohol warehouses located in militarized districts near the battlefields be summarily destroyed, lest they entice the weak-willed peasant-soldiers into drunken insubordination. Every day the front was inching uncomfortably closer. While the travails of well-to-do aristocratic distillers may seem inconsequential against the backdrop of global war and revolutionary upheavals in Russia, their activities highlight the variety of ways that vodka politics—and the decision to enact a general prohibition—actually helped destroy the old imperial order.

Bark’s Dilemma

Sir Pyotr Bark is a largely forgotten figure in the sunset of imperial Russia. His extensive, unpublished memoirs—written in English as an émigré fleeing bolshevism—gather dust in the archives in Leeds. Yet it is hard to understand this critical moment in world history without him. The onset of total war in 1914 required tremendous dexterity and sleight of hand from this newly appointed finance minister to pay the tremendous costs of putting the world’s largest army in the field. Bark was hamstrung in this titanic endeavor by the decision of the tsar to institute prohibition—with a single stroke wiping out between one-quarter and one-third of all government revenues, blowing a massive hole in the treasury that was impossible to fill, even without the added burden of total war. Expected to reassure his tsar, foreign creditors, and the Russian people, Bark became the ultimate spinmeister: everywhere promoting an image of a stable, functioning, and even prospering Russia while the entire economy and the state crumbled around him. Bark’s public proclamations, interviews, and reports based on them led many to believe that prohibition was having an overwhelmingly positive impact on Russia.
²
But it was all a lie.

Having learned the painful lessons of the drunken debacle of the Russo-Japanese War, at the outset of the Great War in 1914, the newly minted supreme commander, Grand Duke “Nikolasha” (Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov), immediately ordered the lockdown of all liquor stores in districts being actively mobilized for war. Military experts believed it necessary to maintain tranquility, which allowed Russia to mobilize nearly four million men in
half
the usual timespan—a resounding success.
³

Sir Alfred Knox, the British military attaché in the patriotically rechristened capital of Petrograd, dutifully reported the orderliness of the mobilization: “The spirit of the people appeared excellent. All the wine shops were closed and there was no drunkenness—a striking contrast to the scenes witnessed in 1904. Wives and mothers with children accompanied the reservists from point to point, but the women cried silently and there was no hysterics.”
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In his memoirs, Bark confirmed it: “With a few trifling exceptions, the mobilization had been carried out everywhere with great precision and order and His Majesty attributed this happy state of affairs largely to the fact that the young men who were joining their regiments had been unable to obtain drink.”
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