Vodka Politics (48 page)

The response to this scissors crisis would be different from the last—much different. Rather than concede to the peasantry, as Lenin did with NEP, Stalin used this crisis as a pretext for all-out class warfare against the peasantry through a brutal collectivization campaign which—by the estimates that Stalin later confided to Winston Churchill at Potsdam—cost over ten million lives. For Stalin, forcing peasants into modern agricultural communes—oversized, mechanized, and rationalized—was the only way to forever smash the power of the conservative peasantry, eliminate the threat they posed to the food supply by moonshining, and drive out the ideological threat of agricultural capitalism in the countryside.
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“The struggle for bread is the struggle for socialism,” Stalin declared. The opponent in this struggle was the
kulak
—the class of “rich” peasants that Stalin slated for complete and ruthless liquidation. The line between a (bad)
kulak
and a (good) poor peasant was blurry, leaving the regime tremendous leeway in eliminating suspected opponents. Meanwhile, locals settled private scores by ratting out neighbors as an alleged
kulak
and, thus, an enemy of the people.
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Viewed through the lens of vodka politics, strangely, this blurry distinction actually comes into crisper view. Being a
kulak
was not just about having marginally more land, livestock, or “surpluses” than other peasants—it was also about debauching poorer peasants with
samogon
. Indeed, going back to the earliest days of the revolution,
kulak
was virtually synonymous with bootlegger, since bootlegging was the primary means of peasant enrichment. Even in May 1918, when the Russian Republic’s government passed its decree on the “Granting of Emergency Power to the People’s Commissar of Produce for the Struggle against the Rural Bourgeoisie, Which Conceals Grain Supplies and Speculates with Them,” moonshiners and
kulaks
were indistinguishable as counterrevolutionary enemies of the people.
³⁹

“In many places,” explained Committee Chairman Yakov Sverdlov, “the
kulak
elements lure the poorest peasants to their side by inviting them to share in the profits from moonshine. The entire countryside, entire villages, entire rural districts are captured by the spirit of drunkenness; so in order to destroy the corrosive influence of the
kulak
elements by any means, we are sending punishment expeditions and death squads from the cities to these districts to destroy the bootleggers by force.”
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This association of
kulak
with profiteer and bootlegger continued under NEP, as the path to wealth in the countryside was paved with vodka bottles. The most prosperous
kulaks
did not hoard grain but distilled it into more profitable
samogon
. This association was even apparent in Soviet propaganda movies of the 1920s, in which “the
kulak
and the priest are never portrayed without a bottle of vodka in their hands.” (Even according to the cinematic journal of the day,
Sovetsky ekran
, this portrayal was ineffective even as propaganda “because the peasant knows that it is not only the
kulak
who drinks home brew.”
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)

The food shortage of 1927 prompted a return to forcible grain requisitions a la War Communism—only more brutal. When the grain deliveries to the state fell short by two million tons in 1928, Stalin was incensed that the harvests were being “hoarded” by
kulak
s. The demands for 1929 would be even greater.

Local Communists Party delegates—aided by the Red Army, NKVD secret police, and self-appointed committees of resentful, poorer peasants—infiltrated the countryside, arresting
kulak
hoarders and looting their wares. Many alleged
kulaks
were deported to Siberia; others were summarily executed. The enforcers were hardly the principled communist idealists state propaganda made them out to be: they were terrorist bands of cynical opportunists, addicts, and drunks—not unlike the
oprichniki
of Ivan the Terrible. At mass execution sites, including the infamous KGB firing range at Butovo (on the road to Podolsk just south of Moscow)—where today more than twenty thousand victims of the terror of the 1930s are thought to lie in mass graves—barrels of free vodka numbed the senses of the secret police. Execution brigades drank as much as they pleased. Others sought vodka from the victims themselves—either through appropriation or extortion. Untold millions of
kulaks
were imprisoned or executed as part of what Stalin heralded as a “great break” with the imperial past.
⁴²

For the marauding hordes, “for a glass of vodka or a bottle of
samogon
, a kulak could be transformed into a poor peasant or, in the absence of a glass of vodka or a bottle of
samogon
, a poor peasant could be transformed into a kulak,” so subjective was the distinction, and so pervasive the corruption amid the murderous chaos.
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According to economic historian Alec Nove (born Alexander Novakovsky),

Those engaged in the process of dekulakization were known to requisition and drink any vodka found in the kulak house. Orders were issued to stop such behaviour. But what could the government expect? There were few reliable party members in the villages and they had to utilize and encourage any ragged ruffians who could be prevailed upon to expropriate and chase out their better-off neighbours (in the name of the class struggle, of course).
⁴⁴

In some cases, having collected whatever
kulak
crops could be found in a particular district, some requisition brigades themselves distilled the grain into
samogon
instead of turning it over to the state.
⁴⁵

W
HAT
M
OONSHINE
C
ONSUMES IN
O
NE
Y
EAR
(1930). Train transporting annual quantities of grain, potatoes, and flour either to the grain factory or a moonshine distillery. Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

By way of resistance many
kulaks
reverted to a scorched-earth policy, destroying everything they owned rather than hand it over to the state: in 1928 there were 70.5 million head of cattle in the Soviet Union; by 1933 there were only 38.4 million. The number of pigs dropped from 26 million to only 12 million. “Farmsteads were burned down, machinery wrecked in Luddite fashion, rail and truck transports taking peasant grain away were sabotaged, home brewed vodka was consumed to the point of stupor, and livestock was slaughtered en masse.”
⁴⁶
Soviet agriculture would not fully recover until the 1950s—to say nothing of the incalculable human toll. Forewarned, some
kulaks
opted instead for suicide, entire families at a time.
⁴⁷

By 1930, collectivization had taken on a life all its own. With unimaginable speed, over sixty percent of peasant households had been forcibly uprooted and swept into the massive collective farms. Afraid the rampage of terror in the heartland might threaten the spring planting—possibly producing another famine—on March 2 Stalin called for a temporary halt, blaming local authorities for the bloody excesses of collectivization: “Some of our comrades have become dizzy with success,” Stalin famously wrote, “and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision.”
⁴⁸

This pause allowed the Soviets to consolidate their gains before later resuming a less chaotic collectivization offensive. The entire peasantry was collectivized
in four years, with private agriculture completely abolished by 1937. Even after being transformed into state farms akin to massive rural factories, collectivized agriculture suffered the same labor discipline problems of drunkenness, absenteeism, and “wrecking” that bedeviled the urban factories.

The Soviet Union paid a tremendous toll for Stalin’s twin campaigns of industrialization and collectivization. Between the terror, purges, collectivization, and a devastating terror-famine in the agricultural heartland stretching from Ukraine to northern Kazakhstan (which Stalin naturally blamed on
kulaks
hoarding and distilling grain), the long-suffering Soviet people endured an unrivaled demographic nightmare. With the power of the peasantry broken and collectivization completed, in 1937 the state conducted a nationwide census. Surprisingly, there were roughly fifteen million fewer people in the country than the government originally estimated. Stalin reacted as only a totalitarian despot can: the secret police suppressed the figures and had the census statisticians arrested as “Trotskyist-Bukharinist spies” and shot.
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The Great Patriotic War

It is impossible, within the space of a few of pages, to do justice to the unfathomable hardships endured by the Soviet people during the Second World War. In the United States, famed television journalist Tom Brokaw praised American wartime sacrifices by dubbing those who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”
⁵⁰
Not to disparage their hardships and tribulations—much less the loss of four hundred thousand Americans and another four hundred thousand British soldiers (comprising less than one percent of the population) who did not return from the global battles against fascism—these sacrifices pale in comparison to the horrors on the Eastern Front, where Adolf Hitler was ultimately defeated. More than twenty-four million Soviets—or fourteen percent of the entire population—were sacrificed there. In other words, for every American or British wartime death, more than fifty Soviets paid the ultimate price. Having built a world superpower from scratch while sacrificing millions more to Stalin’s totalitarian terror, crash industrialization, gunpoint collectivization, famine, civil war, and revolution, the Soviet people have a legitimate claim to being an even greater generation. Such heroic sacrifice and endurance makes a discussion about alcohol seem almost trivial.
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Yet even in a time of unimaginable sorrow and loss, there was vodka.

We have already heard the tale of the liquor-soaked 1939 Kremlin meetings with the Nazis that produced the Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, which secretly divided most of Central and Eastern Europe between the two
totalitarian titans (
chapter 1
). As international tensions increased, so too did alcohol consumption in the Kremlin. While observing an uneasy peace with the German fascists to the west, Stalin mended fences with the fascist Japanese foe to the east as well. When Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited Moscow in April 1941 to meet with Stalin, according to contemporary accounts, “They both got most gloriously drunk and a Pact of Non-Aggression and Neutrality was signed between them.”
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Indeed. The weekly Trans-Siberian Express that would carry the Japanese delegation home had to wait for an hour and a half at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station before the foreign minister stammered in with an inebriated entourage… including Stalin himself. Stalin was rarely seen in public, and certainly never drunk. Yet according to one journalist, “Stalin went up to the aged and diminutive Japanese Ambassador-General, punched him on the shoulder rather hard, with a grin and an ‘ah… ah’, so that the General, who has a bald and freckled pate, and is not more than four feet ten in height, staggered back three or four steps, which caused Matsuoka to laugh in glee.”
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According to the astonished Bulgarian ambassador, the “least drunk” of the participants at the send-off was Molotov—stammering a few feet behind Stalin, “saluting all the time, shouting: I am a pioneer, I am ready!” in the manner of the Soviet youth league.
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Yet the Soviet leadership was anything but ready when two months later, on June 22, 1941, Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa—the largest and most deadly military operation in human history. As part of the Nazi
blitzkrieg
, over three million Axis troops spilled into Soviet-held territories from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Decimated by endless purges, the Soviet high command was in disarray and incapable of mounting a meaningful defense. On the first day of the invasion twelve hundred Soviet planes—most of the Soviet air force—were destroyed; most were still on the tarmac, having never engaged in combat.
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