Vodka Politics (58 page)

Gorbachev certainly had a good appreciation for the benefits of the campaign, but he also kept his sense of humor about the frustration his policies caused the average Soviet drinker. Even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, a jolly, self-effacing Gorbachev himself told foreign audiences this well-known joke:

Fed-up at a mile-long line for vodka at the liquor store, one guy finally snaps:

“
That’s it. I’m going to the Kremlin to kill Gorbachev
!”

An hour later, he came back to the same line
.

“
Well?” Everyone asked. “Did you kill him
?”

“
Kill him?” the man replied. “That line’s even longer than this one
!”
¹⁸

So, what went wrong? Despite the social and demographic achievements, the campaign’s political and economic losses were too great to ignore, beginning with the growing dissatisfaction with the Kremlin and a cynicism toward
perestroika
that proved difficult to overcome.

“The state, in effect, created two hundred million criminals,” explained Russian journalist Leonid Ionin, by forcing thirsty customers turn to illegal
samogon
. “The
perestroika
rhetoric was discredited. The authorities showed their stupidity and powerlessness. The people’s belief that the new leaders knew what they were doing, and could do it, was undermined.”
¹⁹

The unpopular policies caused prime minister of the Russian Republic Vitaly Vorotnikov some uncomfortable public encounters. “The people were outraged,” he told the Politburo. “You couldn’t visit a factory without being shoved into a corner and shouted at, ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this to us!’” Fellow
opponent of the anti-alcohol measures, candidate Politburo member Vladimir Dolgikh explained to his colleagues not only how the ubiquitous liquor store lines were caused by an undiversified economy that failed to deliver anything else to spend their rubles on but also how he was personally shouted down every time he passed one in his black Zil limousine.
²⁰

It wasn’t just irredeemable drunks who were inconvenienced—even casual drinkers waited in long lines to get drinks for family celebrations and holidays. At the height of the campaign, the
average
Muscovite spent over ninety hours—or almost four full days—in line waiting for alcohol. Simply to maintain order in the capital’s vodka queues required four hundred police officers and dozens of additional patrol cars every day.
²¹

Even the well-meaning propaganda about the harms of alcohol was met with cynicism and scorn. Beyond the constant temperance entreaties in magazines and newspapers, drinking and party scenes were expunged from theaters, cinema, radio, and television programs. And still, when friends gathered to drink the very first toast often was raised “to the struggle against drunkenness.”
²²

“People became more and more frustrated by hours of queuing and the impossibility of buying a bottle of vodka or wine for some special occasion,” Gorbachev recognized in his
Memoirs
. “They cursed the leadership, most of all the General Secretary, who was traditionally held responsible for everything. It was then that I got the nickname ‘Mineral Water Secretary’,” or
mineralny sekretar
as a snide take on the title of
generalny sekretar
, or General Secretary.
²³

Yet while Soviets naturally vented their angst toward Gorbachev the man, the real source of frustration lay with the autocratic system itself. From their perch atop a closed, autocratic hierarchy, the insulated leadership often bolstered their legitimacy with bold proclamations. But policy implementation was always complicated by Russia’s traditionally obsequious bureaucracy. As it was before communism, and just as it is today, bootlick bureaucrats dutifully advance even the most misguided policies so long as it keeps them in good standing with their immediate superiors. Consequently, even the most unrealistic directives are amplified to the point of absurdity. As with Stalin’s collectivization campaign, it seemed as though the Soviet bureaucracy was again “dizzy with success” in persecuting alcohol. The overfulfillment mentality led local officials to exaggerate their successes and downplay their failures. Gorbachev admitted as much: “As is often the case [in the traditional Russian autocracy at least], the idea and its implementation were miles apart. I would say that we were both realistic and responsible during the discussion and decision-making, but when the time came to carry out our decisions we began to do things helter-skelter and to allow excesses, and thus we ruined a useful and good initiative.”
²⁴

In the name of socialist competition village leaders went far beyond the original decree, forcing “dry months” upon their jurisdictions. Local and regional
bureaucrats across the USSR proclaimed their results were so encouraging that there was a real prospect of eliminating
all
alcohol consumption within five years or at least by the year 2000. “The leadership, for its part, left no room for doubt about what it wanted to hear,” claimed historian Stephen White, “calling (as Ligachev did in late 1985) for sobriety zones to be established and ‘the sooner, the better,’ or even for total prohibition.”
²⁵

If Solomentsev was the program’s architect, and Gorbachev its enabler, it was Yegor Ligachev who kicked the policy into hyperdrive. Ligachev encouraged regional leaders to overfulfill the plan: close down even more retail outlets and encourage greater competition between vodka producers to see who could slash output the most. Those who hesitated were given a public dressing down or booted straight out of the Party. Before he retired in 1988, Mikhail Solomentsev did the same. They “punished so many people,” recalled Vorotnikov, “ruined so many people with terror if they dared to decline to carry out the decisions.”
²⁶

“Ligachev and Solomentsev… began with irrepressible zeal, but eventually they took everything to the point of absurdity,” Gorbachev later recalled. “Well, I must admit that I bear a great share of the responsibility for this failure. I should not have entrusted the implementation of the policy entirely to others.”
²⁷

The rift between Gorbachev and the conservative Ligachev over the botched anti-alcohol campaign widened when Ligachev openly derided Gorbachev and his reforms as going to far. His hard-line economic criticisms first won Ligachev a demotion to agriculture secretary in 1988 and then dismissal from Gorbachev’s Politburo in 1990. “I am not dodging responsibility for the fact that these measures initially turned out to be excessively harsh and bureaucratic,” Ligachev responded to those blaming him for the anti-alcohol mess. “As a nondrinker, I was psychologically unprepared to accept the fact that someone would not be able to ‘kick’ drinking if the possibility of obtaining alcohol were sharply curtailed. This was undoubtedly a mistake on my part, [but it] seemed to be that if you went at it with a will, drunkenness could be eliminated quickly.”
²⁸
Only later did he realize that undoing the alcoholization of an entire society would be a gradual, long-term undertaking, not something that could be solved with shock tactics.

Q: What is Soviet business?

A: Soviet business is when you steal a wagonload of vodka, sell it, and spend the money on vodka
.
²⁹

As we learned in
chapter 13
about prohibition’s role in the demise of the Romanov dynasty, it takes more than just discontent to topple an autocracy. There is usually a precipitating crisis: a disastrous war or economic collapse that weighs heavily on the people. In the case of Nicholas II those crises were only
exacerbated by the tsar’s ill-fated prohibition, which blew a massive hole in the treasury at the worst possible time. Patching the hole with paper rubles accelerated the hyperinflation that pushed the empire toward revolution. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, his reform followed the exact same script, leading to the demise of the Soviet superpower itself.

Let’s begin with another unfortunate parallel with the ill-fated imperial prohibition: unrealistic expectations. Dusting-off imperial Finance Minister Peter Bark’s script from some seventy years earlier, defenders of the Soviet anti-alcohol campaign declared that any loss of revenue from decreased vodka sales would be more than compensated by a miraculous economic growth from casting off the yoke of vodka that had long stifled the peoples’ productive capacity.
³⁰
The treasury’s prayers would again go unanswered.

Gorbachev inherited an absolute mess of Soviet state finances. While, on paper, state income neatly covered expenditures, the two largest contributors were the domestic vodka sales and international oil and natural gas exports. Just as Finance Minister Garbuzov continuously ratcheted up vodka production, the Soviet Union also increased its petrochemical production eightfold from 1971 to 1980.
³¹
So long as international oil prices hovered between thirty to forty dollars per barrel, the Soviet treasury was assured a constant stream of hard-currency revenues. But just as Gorbachev assumed power, the global price of oil collapsed to less than ten dollars a barrel. The Kremlin suddenly lost the foreign-currency reserves that funded the Brezhnev-era illusion of growth. By slashing supply in a futile attempt to drive global prices higher, they lost even more.
³²

On its own, the falling price of oil wasn’t a fatal blow to Soviet finance. Unfortunately, there were more budgetary hardships to come. On April 26, 1986, the electro-energy station at Chernobyl—north of Kiev in present-day Ukraine—suffered a full meltdown, causing the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history. In addition to the widespread radioactive contamination and the incalculable human costs, the cleanup and relocation cost the government billions of rubles. Two years later, in December 1988, the Soviet republic of Armenia was rocked by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. More than twenty-five thousand perished, mostly in shoddily constructed Brezhnev-era buildings. The reconstruction costs further strained the government, so much so that “the leadership included losses of alcohol revenues alongside the cost of the Chernobyl disaster and the earthquake in Armenia as the major disruptions threatening the success of
perestroika
.’”
³³

While economic historians are quick to fault the oil glut for the Soviet Union’s woes, few likewise consider the financial impact of the anti-alcohol campaign. Ed Hewett—President George H. W. Bush’s economic advisor on the Soviet Union—calculated that the declining oil prices had cost the Soviets thirty billion rubles. Based on numbers provided by Gorbachev’s outspoken prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, Hewett added another eight billion rubles for Chernobyl,
unspecified expenditures for Armenian earthquake relief, and twenty-one billion in unanticipated expenditures for reforming healthcare, education, and other social initiatives tangentially related to the anti-alcohol campaign. For comparison, Ryzhkov estimated that lost tax receipts from vodka amounted to fifteen billion rubles in 1988
alone
.
³⁴

In sum, after three years of the anti-alcohol campaign, Soviets spent thirty-seven billion fewer rubles on government alcohol, creating a loss of tax revenues of at least twenty-eight billion rubles—which is to say, a loss similar to the collapse of world oil prices. Gorbachev admitted as much in a public speech in 1988: “Now that the world business cycle has changed and energy prices have fallen and we have been compelled to cut down the production and sale of wine and vodka to safeguard the social health of our population, the economy of our country is faced with a most serious financial problem.”
³⁵

Since the communist Soviet Union did not have the tradable financial instruments of the capitalist world, the only ways to finance their budget deficit were either through foreign loans or monetary emission—simply printing more rubles to cover the difference. Like their ill-fated tsarist predecessors, the Soviets chose the latter.

“I disagree with those who believe that we did not plan how to compensate for the loss to the state budget resulting from reduced alcohol sales,” claims Gorbachev in his
Memoirs
. “Special economic calculations took into account the losses to industry due to drunkenness. The plan was to reduce alcohol sales gradually (I emphasize—gradually), as it was replaced by other goods in circulation and sources of budget revenue.”
³⁶
Yet as we know, alcohol sales were reduced rapidly rather than gradually, and there were no alternative products to sop up the excess rubles.

So, where did all of that money go? Where it always goes in times of drastic alcohol restrictions: underground.

Signs of a home-brewing epidemic popped up quickly. As Ryzhkov had foreseen in his debates with the Politburo, Cuban sugar—a primary ingredient in home brewing—disappeared from store shelves. This “sugar panic” of 1988 prompted the imposition of strict rations the following year. The satirical magazine
Krokodil
even ran a political cartoon of a man with a gin-blossomed nose in an upscale restaurant ordering “300 glasses of tea. The sugar—on the side”!
³⁷
Better yet, a popular Soviet ditty invoked the bootleggers’ practice of igniting their drink to test its proof strength: