Vodka Politics (7 page)

Did the depiction hit too close to home? Did Stalin object to the portrayal of Ivan’s sadistic cruelty and inhumane repression for all to see? No—Stalin thought that Ivan’s “ruthlessness” was fine, so long as the reasons for his cruelty were clear. The official resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party condemned the depiction of Ivan “as weak in character and lacking in willpower, something on the lines of Hamlet”—the character and tragedy of murder and high politics that Stalin famously loathed.
³⁴
With this, the film was banned outright and Stalin was forced to rescind his earlier accolades for Eisenstein—something of a moral victory for Eisenstein the artist.

M
AKING
I
VAN THE
T
ERRIBLE
. Actor Nikolai Cherkasov (left) portrays the title character. Sergei Eisenstein (seated, center) directs, as cameraman Eduard Tisse films. January 3, 1945. Source: RIA-Novosti/Mikhail Ozersky

Along with other writers and critics, Romm concluded that the film was scrapped precisely due to the drunken feast scene, where the dictator is depicted as formidable (
grozen
) and cunning (
khiter
) in using alcohol to keep his entourage off guard. It was an attack on Stalin’s cult of personality and a direct implication of Stalin’s vodka politics. According to Romm, the dreadful “references to the contemporary situation could be sensed throughout the film, in the subtext of almost every episode.”
³⁵

When informed of Stalin’s condemnation of his film—a threat to both his life and livelihood—Eisenstein was surprisingly calm. He knew what the response would be. And while he was forced to ritualistically admit publicly that he (in the words of the Central Committee’s official decree) “displayed ignorance in his depiction of historical facts,” in private he decided to take the fight to Stalin. The great director requested—and received—a personal meeting with the great dictator.

At 11 p.m. on February 24, 1947, Eisenstein and Nikolai Cherkasov—the actor who portrayed Ivan the Terrible on screen—arrived at the Kremlin for a late-night meeting with Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Stalin’s alcoholic commissar for ideology and culture, Andrei Zhdanov. The evening lasted well into the morning. The conversation was decidedly one-sided, with Stalin and his sycophants doling out equal parts tongue-lashing and history lecture. The usually diplomatic Eisenstein was unrepentant, much to the displeasure of Stalin. The following day he blithely remarked to friends: “Went to see Stalin yesterday. We didn’t like one another.”
³⁶

Throughout the standoff, the master filmmaker had unparalleled access to the very viper’s nest he portrayed on screen. He took copious notes throughout the encounter. Eisenstein thought the outcome of the meeting was generally favorable: he was given a few years’ time to reflect and prepare changes to
Part II
in order to appease Stalin, while this firsthand encounter only strengthened Eisenstein’s resolve that his portrayal be accurate. “We’ll hardly change a thing,” he later told his co-workers. “It was an interesting meeting. I’ll tell you some time…”
³⁷

Perhaps Eisenstein was emboldened by his prophecy of an early death, which he envisaged for 1948—the same year he was to complete
Part II
. “What reshooting?” Eisenstein asked his acquaintances. “Don’t you realise that I’d die at the first shot? I can’t even think of
Ivan
without feeling a pain in my heart.”
³⁸
Indeed, Eisenstein died before making any changes to
Part II
: victim of a second heart attack while defiantly filming
Ivan the Terrible, Part III
in 1948—as he predicted—at the age of fifty.
³⁹

Who Outdrinks Whom?

Stalin died of an agonizing brain hemorrhage in 1953, five years after Eisenstein’s passing. Beria was arrested soon thereafter and charged with treason and terrorism. The trial allegations of Beria’s rapes and drunken sexual exploits only added to his damnation, culminating in his summary execution—the parting shot that signaled the end of Stalinist terror.
⁴⁰
It was left to the portly Nikita Khrushchev to confront Stalin’s legacies. The personality cult, purges, forced collectivization, famines, and horror of the Stalin era were replaced by reforms and a thawing of Soviet society, culture, economy, and foreign affairs.

Five years after the curtain fell on Stalin, Beria, and Soviet totalitarianism, the curtain finally rose on
Ivan the Terrible, Part II
. Shown publicly for the first time in 1958, on the ten-year anniversary of Eisenstein’s death, it met with national and international acclaim. His portrait of the patriotic emperor turned paranoid fratricidal murderer was dusted off and “rehabilitated”—much like Eisenstein’s legacy itself—as an implication of the tragedy of tyranny, both past and present.
⁴¹
Confronting Stalin’s brand of vodka politics became part of the nationwide catharsis of de-Stalinization under the peasant turned premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Though no longer steeped in terror, the alcoholic Kremlin traditions continued even after Stalin. During his decade in power, Khrushchev never passed up an opportunity to celebrate with a drink. Chinese premier Zhao Enlai even confided that, on occasion, “Khrushchev got me drunk,” apparently to get him to divulge truths and enhance the Soviet bargaining position.
⁴²

By the 1970s even the Americans were preparing to confront vodka as part of what they saw as high-level Soviet negotiating strategy. When President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger visited Moscow in 1972 to finalize the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Leonid Brezhnev (whose own notorious alcoholism was born of his Stalin-era party upbringing) pushed for even greater concessions “while Kissinger was exhausted and Nixon drunk.” In another instance, the American president joked that Brezhnev was trying to get his advisors inebriated during top-level arms control negotiations. Brezhnev apparently “played along” with this “gag” by constantly pouring ever-more vodka into Kissinger’s glass.
⁴³

“The highest diplomacy does not consist of trying to drown differences in champagne and vodka toasts at feel-good summits,” protested the straight-laced Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, “but in finding ways to disagree without doing profound damage to an important strategic relationship.” Apparently the sodden Brezhnev failed in this regard.
⁴⁴

Dobrynin described how the traditional high-level drinking backfired when visiting Nixon’s California compound the following year. During a chance, late-night encounter in a hallway, the longtime Soviet ambassador was forced into
“the most bizarre situation in all my years of diplomacy.” Dobrynin became the uneasy translator for the American president as a whiskey-drunk Brezhnev grumbled about his nagging Politburo comrades before Dobrynin and Nixon were forced to carry the drunken general secretary to his bed.

“Anatoly, did I talk too much yesterday?” Brezhnev later asked.

Yes, he did, but Dobrynin reassured him that not everything was translated.

“Well done,” Brezhnev replied. “Damn that whiskey, I am not used to it. I did not know I could not hold that much.”
⁴⁵

Such anecdotes are fun to tell, but there are good reasons to do so beyond providing a voyeuristic glimpse into high-level diplomacy. For one, tensions between the steady Dobrynin and the sloshed Brezhnev foreshadow the surprisingly salient wet/dry divisions within both the Soviet leadership and Russian society. Second, theses anecdotes suggest how alcohol becomes intertwined with political power at the highest levels. Vladimir Lenin artfully summarized the central question of politics as
kto kovo?
Literally meaning “who whom?” it is often translated as “who wins out over whom?” or “who does-in whom?” When it comes to diplomacy, it would be more apt to ask “who outdrinks whom?” Finally, they give us greater insights into Soviet politics in the postwar era, when Russia’s traditionally high levels of alcohol consumption soared to heights never before seen in Russia (or elsewhere)—the unshakable legacy of Stalin’s reimposition of traditional autocratic statecraft.
⁴⁶

Whether in the Soviet Union of old or the Russian Federation of today, the more time you spend in Russia, the more you are struck by how important vodka is to Russian society and culture. Likewise, the more you look, the more you find vodka politics as a pervasive element of Russia’s long and storied history. It is time to set aside well-worn cliches about Russia’s alcoholism to address the reasons for it. Alcohol abuse is not hard-wired into the genetic code of Russians, but like the elites in Stalin’s inner circle, Russians are victims of a system that has long cultivated—and to a staggering degree benefited from—social drunkenness. If Russia is a country of alcoholics, it’s because the Russian autocratic state helped make it that way.

Only by unmasking the legacies of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics can the primary contributors to a variety of Russian social, political, and economic problems be understood and confronted. This book lays bare the dynamics of vodka politics and the contentious relationship between the Russian state and society over health, revenue, and the common good throughout the imperial, Soviet, and even post-Soviet past with an eye toward a more prosperous future.

3

Cruel Liquor: Ivan the Terrible and Alcohol in the Muscovite Court

Sergei Eisenstein was a master of the historical epic. Virtually all of his films—from
The Battleship Potemkin
and
October
to
Alexander Nevsky
and his would-be
Ivan the Terrible
trilogy—depicted key events and leaders from the broad sweep of Russian history. Fortunately for storytellers such as Eisenstein, Russia’s past is littered with both great triumphs and unspeakable tragedies; heroes and villains; eclectic personalities and majestic leaders. Perhaps had he lived beyond age fifty, Eisenstein would have chronicled not only Ivan the Terrible but also other so-called great leaders of Russia’s past—such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great—all the while highlighting the pervasiveness of alcohol in courtly intrigues throughout imperial Russia and the ubiquity of vodka politics as the historical basis of Russian statecraft.

Every tsar and tsarina worth his and her salt found alcohol both a convenient and necessary tool to use in strengthening the Russian state as it grew from an isolated principality to an expansive, multiethnic, multicultural, and multicontinental empire. Peter the Great not only forcibly dragged Russia out of the Middle Ages and into modern Europe; he also perfected the art of vodka politics within his court. Catherine the Great made Russia a major European power and a center of culture, but even she owed her position to vodka politics. Yet well before Russia became the global power it is today, it was a remote kingdom on the banks of the river Moscow. And while the growth of Romanov power was hardly smooth and uniform, vodka politics was there from the beginning.

Long before Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar in 1547, before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg church doors in 1517, and even before Christopher Columbus set out to find new passages to the East Indies in 1492, the princes of Moscow had begun conquering neighboring principalities, consolidating their dominions through effective administrative institutions. The territory of Muscovy stretched from the Volga flatlands east to the Ural Mountains and north to the Arctic. In the west they did battle with the Lithuanians. In the
south they rebelled against the Golden Horde, driving back the Asiatic Mongol invaders who had for centuries demanded tribute and subservience from the Slavs. Muscovy grew into a formidable power, as its grand princes adopted the symbolic Byzantine double-headed eagle—one looking east toward Asia, the other westward over Europe—simultaneously claiming the imperial heritage of Rome.
¹

The early Russian state had the economic resources to back up such audacious strategic and symbolic moves. The fifteenth century was a boom time for the elites of Moscow. The ancient wooden and limestone walls of the city’s central fortress—or Kremlin (
kreml
’)—were replaced with solid brick, protecting gleaming new cathedrals and imperial palaces crafted by the finest Renaissance architects. Contrasted against the wrenching poverty of the peasants outside, the Kremlin court was opulent—characterized by a “barbaric grandeur” that mystified foreign visitors unfamiliar with Orthodox rituals.
²