Vodka Politics (5 page)

Vodka Politics

Just as vodka is the touchstone of Russians’ social lives,
vodka politics
—encompassing both policy decisions to manipulate alcohol consumption and the influence of alcohol on political developments—is a central fulcrum of statecraft in Russia. Historically, vodka has been a main exchange point between Russian state and society, and just as vodka is simultaneously the solace of the downtrodden and the reason for their poverty, vodka is both one way the Russian state imposes itself on the individual and how society avoids the state. The might of the tsarist empire was largely built on vodka, and when the empire fell to the flames of revolution, vodka politics was partly to blame. Vodka helped keep the Russian people docile and passive, yet vodka has played a role in every Russian coup d’état and hastened every Russian revolution. Vodka has toasted international peace and helped bring Russia to the brink of war. Vodka has occasionally saved Russia from foreign invasion but, more often, hastened its military’s defeat. And just as vodka politics facilitated the demise of the imperial Russian empire, a century later it helped do-in its Soviet successor as well. Vodka is not only the source of immeasurable revenue; it also is used as currency. After the collapse of communism, vodka facilitated the wholesale demodernization of Russian economy and society while unleashing a demographic catastrophe unlike anything before seen in the peacetime history of the world. In so many ways then, vodka politics is key to understanding Russia’s tumultuous past, present, and future.

Today, Russia’s greatest political challenge isn’t terrorism, nuclear confrontation, or navigating the ever-changing global economic landscape—it is confronting the health and demographic crises produced by centuries of autocratic vodka politics. Before modestly rebounding in recent years, average male life expectancy in Russia during the 1990s fell to fifty-nine years—a level on par with Ghana. The primary culprit is unquestionably vodka. More than cardiovascular diseases, more than AIDS, more than tuberculosis or even cancer, study after study has laid the lion’s share of the blame on vodka.
¹
In announcing his anti-alcohol campaign in 2009, then-president Dmitry Medvedev bemoaned that, on average, Russians drank a “mind-boggling” eighteen liters of pure alcohol per
year, roughly twice that of the United States and about ten liters more than what the World Health Organization considers healthy. In practical terms, this means that the normal Russian drinking man downs 180 bottles of vodka per year—or a half bottle per day … and that is the
average
.
²

In the waning days of Soviet power, Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew military forces from the quagmire of Afghanistan, referring to the decade-long occupation as a “bleeding sore” on the underbelly of the Soviet Union: an unending drain on badly needed resources.
³
Over ten years in Afghanistan, the Soviets lost some fourteen thousand men. By contrast, directly or indirectly, Russia has lost more than four hundred thousand victims to alcohol
every year
since the collapse of communism, combined with life-expectancy figures for the average Russian man cratering at 57.6 years in 1994. Exhaustive health studies have concluded that Russia’s vodka epidemic was the cause of
more than half
of all premature deaths in the 1990s. According to the country’s foremost health experts, if you are a Russian, there is about a one-in-four chance (23.4%) that your death will have something to do with alcohol. No wonder Vladimir Putin consistently refers to Russia’s resulting demographic crisis “the most acute problem facing our country today.”
⁴

In late 2009 the Kremlin finally took notice, outlining a dramatic plan to halve Russian alcohol consumption within ten years through a combination of alcohol-control measures.
⁵
In the meantime, health professionals both in Russia and abroad still investigate the wide array of negative implications of the demographic crisis: from a permanent drag on economic growth and the inability to field an effective standing army to social disarray and potential political disintegration.
⁶
To be sure, the consequences of Russia’s addiction to alcohol are real, urgent, and truly a matter of life and death. However, such well-meaning government initiatives are doomed to fail without realizing that Russia’s societal alcohol addiction is only a symptom of the Russian
state’s
addiction to vodka revenues and the traditional role of vodka as an instrument of Russian statecraft—one that is a hallmark of autocratic rule.
⁷

While the source of Russia’s societal addiction to alcohol is to be found in autocracy, so too are the reasons for the state’s persistent inability to do anything meaningful about it. Over centuries, generations of Russia’s autocratic rulers nurtured society’s dependence on alcohol. Such practices have become deeply rooted in Russian culture and are not easily—or quickly—altered. Weaning Russia from the bottle will take generations, requiring consistent efforts to change perceptions of the appropriateness of getting drunk, altering destructive drinking habits, and overhauling Russia’s ramshackle healthcare infrastructure. However, since autocracies lack the legitimacy that comes from democratic procedures and guarantees of civil liberties, the Kremlin is under consistent pressure to deliver immediate (rather than long-term) results—to bolster its
legitimacy. It should come as no surprise then that generations of Russian autocrats—tsarist, communist, and post-Soviet—have initiated “crash” sobriety initiatives and that each and every one failed within the span of a few months or years. Unfortunately, no matter how noble their aims, the government’s current efforts to slice Russian alcohol consumption by more than half by 2020 seems doomed to repeat this failure.
⁸

Alcohol And Autocracy In Russia

It may seem strange that a book on the political history of alcohol in Russia should begin with Stalin and his inner circle. His reign marked neither the beginning of Russia’s long and contentious political relationship with vodka nor the height of Russia’s alcoholism. But what we find in Stalin’s Soviet Union of the 1920s through the 1950s is the merger of alcohol with the politics of authoritarian high-modernism, which most clearly illustrates the role of alcohol in the autocratic Russian system.

Stalin inherited the vision of re-creating Russia from his revolutionary predecessor, Vladimir Lenin: the communist leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Not above using terror, Lenin orchestrated Red victory in a brutally destructive civil war through the 1920s—which effectively dissolved the prerevolutionary societal order—only to suffer a series of strokes that led to his premature death in 1924. As Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw it, the revolution was not simply the replacement of one ruling elite with another but an extreme makeover of economics, society, and culture according to the communists’ “high modern” design. Forced collectivization and mechanization were to rationalize agriculture in the service of the state; crash industrialization and electrification were to subjugate the totality of economic activity to the commands of the Soviet leadership. This physical transformation was to be accompanied by a cultural one: education, literacy, architecture, and city planning were all marshaled in the interest of creating a “new man” embodying the social ethics that inspired George Orwell’s
1984
.
⁹
Ideally, under Lenin and Stalin, the new Soviet culture was to promote modesty, punctuality, cleanliness, and sobriety—all great departures from the drunken, unwashed peasant produced by imperial Russia’s hated capitalist past.

Despite his monumental brutality and bloodletting—the relentless purges, summary executions, gunpoint collectivization, famine, and mass deportations to forced labor camps—Joseph Stalin surprisingly still has admirers both in Russia and abroad.
¹⁰
Some point to his accomplishments: leading a technologically inferior military to victory over the Nazi juggernaut in World War II and the simultaneous transformation of the Soviet Union from a war-ravaged, backward
agrarian society on the periphery of Europe to a global superpower rivaled only by the United States. Whether they know it or not, these apologists are highlighting Stalin’s role in confronting the central problem of statecraft: making a complex society legible to the political leadership.

In his classic work
Seeing Like a State
, Yale political anthropologist James C. Scott explains legibility as the government’s arranging the population to simplify the classic state functions: taxation, conscription, and preventing rebellion. All states engage in these core functions, and the development of the modern nation-state can be read as a history of extracting of societal resources (taxation and conscription), and neutralizing internal rivals.
¹¹
Accordingly, many of the stories in the following pages highlight how alcohol has been used in the Russian state-building project: to bolster the economic and military resources of the state and to bludgeon internal dissent.

Under Lenin and Stalin, the Bolsheviks unveiled grandiose designs for the Soviet Union. Everything Stalin’s regime created—from its military and government buildings to collective farms and factory towns—was done on a gigantic scale.
¹²
Yet a constant impediment to such high-modernist plans was the poverty and backwardness of a decimated countryside still recovering from decades of war, famine, and destruction. To ease recovery, Lenin made concessions to the overburdened peasantry in the form of his New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s, but he steadfastly refused to concede to alcohol and its corrupting influence on the new Soviet man. When confronted with the question of repealing the nationwide prohibition that had been in force since the last Romanov tsar, Nicholas II, decreed it as a wartime measure in 1914, Lenin refused, claiming that despite the badly needed revenues it would generate, reviving the vodka monopoly would lead Russia “back to capitalism rather than forward to communism.”
¹³

As the economy slowly recovered under NEP, illegal distillation of home-brewed vodka—or
samogon
—flourished, as did drunkenness, assaults, absenteeism in Soviet factories, and alcoholism within the communist party itself. Not only was such inebriety inconsistent with the vision of the new Soviet man, but the loss of billions of pounds of grain to illegal home distillation was unacceptable economic leakage—especially for a leadership that demanded iron discipline if they ever hoped to repel the imperialist forces of global capitalism that were unrelentingly scheming to snuff out their great communist experiment.
¹⁴
While in 1923 Leon Trotsky—the firebrand founder of the Red Army—resolutely declared that there would be no concessions to alcohol, behind the scenes Trotsky’s Politburo nemesis Stalin was hatching plans to do just that. Just as Stalin fully consolidated his might as the Soviet Union’s unquestioned ruler, in 1925 he ended Lenin’s “noble experiment” with prohibition and reinstated the traditional vodka monopoly in the name of state finance. Perhaps more than any
other move, Stalin’s sacrificing the “new Soviet man” to the economic interests of the state showed just how little difference there was between the proletarian Soviet autocracy and their bourgeois tsarist predecessors. The basic building blocks of statecraft transcend even the most revolutionary political upheavals, and in Russia, vodka politics is one of them.

Vodka Statecraft

All countries—democracies and dictatorships alike—extract resources from society, and most have utilized alcohol in that capacity. The foundation of the modern American state, for example, was built on taxes and tariffs on liquor. Indeed, immediately after passing the Bill of Rights, the very first item of business for America’s founding fathers was raising alcohol revenues.
¹⁵
What makes Russian vodka politics different from the politics of alcohol in the United States or elsewhere in Europe is the longstanding legacy of autocratic government.

“In European culture,” James Scott suggests, “the alehouse, the pub, the tavern, the inn, the cabaret, the beer cellar, the gin mill were seen by secular authorities and by the church as places of subversion. Here subordinate classes met offstage and off-duty in an atmosphere of freedom encouraged by alcohol.”
¹⁶
Indeed, the American Revolution was itself born in dank taverns of England’s thirteen colonies—away from the prying eyes of the British authorities. In the autocratic Russian context, however, the entire alcohol trade was controlled by the state, from production to sale in the local
kabak
, or “tsar’s tavern,” where even the tavern-keeper kissed the Orthodox cross to swear allegiance to the tsar.
¹⁷
As a consequence, not only were the lucrative alcohol revenues siphoned off to the benefit of the state rather than entrepreneurs, but also Russians were deprived of that space for association and potential dissent against the ruling order. Under the Soviets, this dynamic was compounded by a paternalistic Communist Party leadership that used the excessive drinking of functionaries and rank-and-file party members as grounds for public castigation and outright purges.
¹⁸
Here too, alcohol became another of the state’s weapons over the individual. In short, while the general contours of statecraft are similar across countries, the particular manifestations in terms of Russian vodka politics are numerous, including not only generating revenue but also stymieing dissent and promoting autocracy.