Vodka Politics (40 page)

In late 1915, War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov’s newly appointed successor Alexei Polivanov corroborated prohibition’s benefits to American temperance advocate William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson: “Thanks to temperance, the results of the war are scarcely noticeable at all.” He recounted a dramatic fall in crime and arson, a prompt and orderly mobilization, and an upsurge in labor productivity, religious and patriotic sentiment—all part of prohibition’s moral
and economic rejuvenation of the countryside. Reflecting their better treatment at home, Polivanov claimed “the women are happy and pray God that the sale of alcohol may never again be allowed. In their joy, they are almost ready to bless the war.” Ever confident of Russia’s dry and shining future, Polivanov concluded: “if there will be no more liquor, Russia will be the richest country in the world.”
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At best, Russian officials just saw what they wanted to see; at worst, it was part of a grand deception. The archives of the imperial ministry of internal affairs and the main administration of the general staff is filled with hundreds of reports on mobilization riots from virtually every
guberniia
across Russia. That the tsar locked down all liquor stores apparently meant little to the marauding hordes of conscripts who stormed the padlocked stores, saloons, and warehouses in search of vodka. Indeed, the first order for military commanders in mobilizing districts was to place armed guards outside of alcohol stores and warehouses—and even that was often not enough.
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In the city of Ekaterinoslav rioters smashed the windows of those first-class hotels that were still permitted to sell alcohol. In the Igumensky district drunken mobs looted liquor stores before setting upon the local distillery.
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In Barnaul the mobs seized control of the city, torching houses, stores, and a liquor warehouse, forcing the residents to flee for their lives. More than one hundred died in the battle between the conscripts and local police.
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According to reports of the internal affairs ministry, in the last weeks of July 1914 alone, drunken mobilization riots left 51 state officials wounded and 9 dead, while 136 rioters were injured and 216 killed.
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The tsar’s dry decree was hardly as effective as it was made out to be. In some cases the drunken disorder was even worse than a decade before: the police captain of the second-largest city in the region of Bashkiria urgently telegrammed his superiors in St. Petersburg:

In Sterlitamak, over 10,000 reservists began a disturbance that is threatening devastation of the entire city. The havoc began at the liquor warehouse that was ransacked. The assistant superintendent has been wounded when the police guards opened fire. The stores and shops are all closed on account of the devastation of the property of the residents.… We never had this sort of disturbance during the war with Japan.
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Why were the tsar and his military leaders so blissfully unaware of this epidemic of drunken riots? Perhaps they simply chose not to acknowledge the severity of the problem. More likely, the leadership simply never found out.

“In Russia, ministers have no right to say what they really think,” Russia’s foreign minister candidly acknowledged to an audience of foreign dignitaries at the outbreak of the war. Since all of Russian officialdom owed their offices,
entitlements, and salaries to the benevolence of the tsar, there was little incentive to deliver bad news or otherwise rock the boat.
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Perhaps this explains why, despite reams of evidence to the contrary in the archives of each respective ministry, Tsar Nicholas received nothing but glowing reports of prohibition’s benefits from the minister of war, Gen. Vladimir Sukhomlinov, Assistant Interior Minister Vasily Gurko, and Finance Minister Bark, among others.
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Widespread reports claimed that the tsar’s prohibition was “universally approved by all his official representatives and Russia’s best people.”
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Such glowing statements accompanied a mass of letters and petitions to the tsar from his grateful subjects imploring that he make the temporary measures into a permanent prohibition decree.
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Despite his growing temperance inclinations, Nicholas could not simply order an eternal prohibition, since almost one-third of the revenues of the entire Russian government came from the vodka monopoly. So in August 1914 Nicholas commissioned his most trusted and experienced ministers to study the feasibility of prohibition by identifying replacements for the lost vodka revenues—a truly herculean task given the wartime circumstances. The commission was chaired by State Comptroller Pyotr Kharitonov and included Finance Minister Bark, trusted former Prime Minister Sergei Witte, and the ministers of agriculture, transportation, and commerce as well as prominent professors and experts on state finance, who together quickly drafted a plan to patch the gaping hole in the budget with a hodgepodge mix of taxes on income, transport, tobacco, textiles, and government bonds and foreign loans.
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Read in hindsight, the report is equal parts comedy, tragedy, and horror. The top civilian and royal leaders of the Romanov empire gambled on the blind faith that prohibition would somehow unleash the long-dormant economic capacity of Russian society, just as millions of its most productive members put down their scythes and marched off to the front. Finance Minister Bark wagered the stability of the empire itself on a miracle—one that never came. In late August 1914, Bark personally delivered to an approving tsar the report confirming exactly what Nicholas wanted to hear: vodka’s budgetary contributions were apparently quite minor, and their loss through a permanent prohibition could be easily overcome with a few painless reforms.
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With the revenue matter supposedly resolved by his most trusted ministers and the mobilization benefits of prohibition being hailed throughout the empire and by temperance advocates abroad, there was little stopping the tsar from enacting his most benevolent decree—forever banishing the liquor evil that had long tormented his dearest subjects. The tragic death of Prince Oleg provided the opportunity to attach greater symbolic meaning to prohibition, but it was still a decision based on bad information and even worse calculations.
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From Prohibition To Revolution

Ultimately the strains of total war were too great for the tsarist regime: the mobilization of fifteen million men disrupted industrial and agricultural production just when both were needed more than ever. Russia’s fragile railway infrastructure collapsed from the strain of war, hampering the delivery of food and fuel to beleaguered cities like Moscow and Petrograd. A string of demoralizing military defeats at the front unleashed a wave of deserters, who only added to the widespread hostility with the incompetent tsar and his regime. Nicholas’s actions did not help: his inept handling of the war effort at the front and the rapid turnover of key ministerial positions made governance uncertain, unstable, and ineffective.

Frustrations boiled over in February 1917, as striking factory workers and hungry citizens staged mass demonstrations in the capital, Petrograd. The military garrison called on to suppress the rioters refused to fire on their own people and defected to the demonstrators. Boldly defying the tsar, liberal Duma deputies held session to hastily form a so-called Provisional Government. Drawing on the experiences of the 1905 Revolution, workers in the capital created a separate representative body—the Petrograd
Soviet
, or Council—representing the city’s disgruntled workers and soldiers. The train on which Nicholas was returning from the front to reclaim his lost capital was blockaded by striking railroad workers and mutinous soldiers. Informed that he no longer had the support of his military commanders, the tsar sheepishly abdicated his throne (ironically, from the train’s saloon car), ending three centuries of imperial Romanov rule.
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Beyond simply mapping the empire’s road to ruin, historians and social scientists have long tried to explain what causes social revolutions in general and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular.
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Explanations for the demise of the imperial Russian regime usually come from one of two camps—one focusing on proximate causes associated with the strains of Great War, the other faulting long-term structural weaknesses and contradictions of Russia’s autocratic statecraft that made systemic collapse virtually unavoidable.
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Remarkably, vodka politics contributes to arguments on both sides. Much of this book has highlighted the fundamental dilemma of utilizing vodka as a tool of autocratic statecraft, yet no historical study has explicitly considered the role of vodka politics in felling the once mighty Romanov empire. This consistent omission is even more baffling when one realizes how thoroughly vodka politics permeated even the most often cited proximate causes for the collapse of the empire: widespread and systemic discontent with the tsarist system, the collapse of the economy amid wartime hyperinflation, and the breakdown of Russia’s infrastructure under the burdens of total war.

Distillation And Its Discontents

Accurately measuring a leader’s popularity is difficult even in modern dictatorships and becomes ever tougher looking back in time. Without modern opinion polls, figuring out whether prohibition enamored or alienated Russia’s citizenry is a daunting task. Ever since his coronation disaster on the Khodynka Fields, Nicholas II was long viewed as indifferent to the plight of his people; one would assume that commanding his subjects to go cold turkey would not be popular. “There is no evidence to suggest that prohibition, tsarist or early Soviet, received popular support from working-class Russians, for whom alcohol remained central to their social, cultural, and economic lives,” suggested historian Kate Transchel: “the strength of custom and tradition ensured that the
narod
would find ways to evade prohibition.”
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While ministers touted open letters and women’s petitions to continue prohibition, citing fantastic improvements in the health and disposition of their chronically drunken husbands, fathers, and sons,
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the actual record is… hazy. Contemporaries noted that “the population could not stand forced abstinence,” which not only promoted discontent with the imperial leadership but also led to the drinking of dangerous homebrews and liquor surrogates, such as eau-de-cologne, shoe polish, industrial lacquers and varnishes. Within months of prohibition, “dry” Russia was inundated by a nationwide wave of alcohol poisonings.
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While the tsar’s wartime patriotic support was eroding thanks to debilitating and humiliating losses on the front, prohibition did not help bolster his legitimacy. Foreign observers lamented that the tsar’s prohibition policy “did not enhance his popularity.”
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Many Russians approached the question with a dark sense of foreboding. “Our sobriety was forced upon us, and at a time when every good person, even without prohibition, cannot enjoy life,” explained one Russian survey respondent in late 1914. “Therefore such a change in the life of the people is due not only to temperance but to the expectation of something terrible and indefinite that is going to happen.”
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The sobering reality of war bred widespread distrust of the tsar, as many viewed any government restriction—however “benevolent” its intentions—as a fiendish attempt to increase the autocrat’s control over his peasant subjects while the moneyed elites were given free license to indulge as they pleased. The fact that first-class restaurants were allowed to continue serving alcohol during the first months of prohibition while the taverns and liquor stores frequented by the lower classes were locked down only entrenched the cynicism. Just as in the war itself, it was clear that the masses, rather than the elites, would sacrifice the most for the tsar’s poor decisions. Such widely held sentiments have led historians to argue explicitly that “prohibition led to the decline of the czar’s popularity and, increasingly, political radicalization.”
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Vodka In The Trenches

While long-simmering discontent with the tsar and his regime provided the backdrop for the revolution, academics point to the constant series of demoralizing losses at the front as a more proximate cause. Here, too, vodka played a dubious role: knowing full well their enemy’s traditional “weakness” for alcohol, both the Germans and Austrians allegedly enlisted alcohol as a valuable, anti-Russian weapon. In an effort to incapacitate the army and stymie Russian advances, they deliberately left bottles of vodka in the trenches and stocked houses near the battlefields with liquor to encourage drunkenness and insubordination in the ranks of the enemy.
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Surviving accounts of life in the Russian trenches are drenched in alcohol. Soldiers looked to the bottle not only to build camaraderie but also to cope with the inhuman misery of modern trench warfare. In his
Notes of a Soldier
, Dmitry Oskin wrote how Russian soldiers focused their attacks on Austrian troops who carried flasks of rum. Oskin even admitted that he was seriously wounded after stumbling drunk out of the trenches to find more rum.
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