Vodka Politics (87 page)

45
. King,
Black Sea
, 100; Pokhlebkin,
Istoriya vodki
, 120. Here too there are discrepancies between Pokhlebkin’s Russian text and the English translation: the former has the conquest of Kaffa in 1395, and its incorporation into the Crimean Khanate of Girei in 1465, whereas the latter merges the conquest and incorporation into a single event, deleting any mention of 1465. R. E. F. Smith and David Christian are skeptical that a trade in alcoholic beverages would have been permitted via this route following the the conversion of the Tatars to Islam in 1389—the
knowledge
of distillation, however, is another matter. R. E. F. Smith and David Christian,
Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 88.

46
. Billington,
Icon and the Axe
, 86.

47
. Erofeyev, “The Russian God”; Erofeev,
Russkii apokalipsis
, 15. Here again we find more Pokhlebkin misinformation regarding the legend: suggesting Isidore was held under the command of Vasily III (pp. 163–64, Russian; pp. 83–84, English), apparently meaning Vasily II, since Vasily III—again—did not rule until 1503 (see note 17 above). In the end, even Pokhlebkin dismisses the legend. Pokhlebkin,
Istoriya vodki
, 163–64. Others who present the legend as fact include Sergei I. Shubin,
Severnyi vektor politiki Rossii: Problemy i perspektivy
(Arkhangel’sk: Pomorskii universitet, 2006), 190; Krichevskii,
Russian vodka
, 76; Anthony Dias Blue,
The Complete Book of Spirits: A Guide to Their History, Production, and Enjoyment
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 13; Bob Emmons,
The Book of Gins and Vodkas: A Complete Guide
(Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1999), 101–2; Karagodin,
Kniga o vodke i vinodelii
, 44.

48
. Anna L. Khoroshkevich,
Torgovlya Velikogo Novgoroda s Pribaltikoi i zapadnoi Evropoi v XIV–XV vekakh
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 323–32; Smith and Christian,
Bread and Salt
, 88–89.

49
. Rodionov,
Istoriya russkoi vodki
, 266.

50
. Grigor’eva,
Vodka izvestnaya i neizvestnaya: XIV–XX veka
, 19. Another source of ongoing confusion in the history of vodka concerns the use of the word
vino
, which translates as
wine
but was often used in reference to grain-based distilled alcohol—vodka—rather than wine. Christian,
Living Water
, 26. Rodionov’s central thesis is that early distilled “burnt wine” and
polugar
were substantively distinct from “modern” rectified vodka, which emerges only with Sergei Witte’s vodka monopoly in 1895. Rodionov,
Bol’shoi obman
, 394–410; Rodionov,
Istoriya russkoi vodki
, 13–33.

Chapter 7

1
. One noteworthy recent exception is Oliver Bullough,
The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
(New York: Basic Books, 2013), who sees the roots of Russian intemperance in the post–World War II Soviet political system.

2
. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu,
Esprit De Lois
(Paris: Libraire de firmin didot freres, 1856), 194.

3
. William Hepworth Dixon,
Free Russia
, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Berhard Tauchnitz, 1872), 1:254. Similar notions can be found in the works of novelist Nikolai Gogol; see Lady Frances Verney, “Rural Life in Russia,” in
Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers
, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 247. See also D. MacKenzie Wallace,
Russia
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877), 98.

4
. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev, “Vvedeniye: Alkogol’naya katastrofa: kak ostanovit’ vymiranie Rossii,” in
Alkogol’naya katastrofa i vozmozhnosti gosudarstvennoi politiki v preodolenii alkogol’noi sverkosmertnosti v Rossii
, ed. Dar’ya A. Khalturina and Andrei V. Korotaev (Moscow: Lenand, 2010), 24–25; Frank Jacobs, “442—Distilled Geography: Europe’s Alcohol Belts,” Strange Maps (blog), Jan. 30, 2010,
http://bigthink.com/ideas/21495
(accessed Feb. 23, 2010). The term “geoalcoholics” is borrowed from Alex De Jonge,
Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union
(New York: Morrow, 1986), 19–20.

5
. The first Russian vineyards were planted in Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in 1613, beginning a modest domestic trade in wine. H. Sutherland Edwards, “Food and Drink,” in
Russia as Seen and Described by Famous Writers
, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906), 260–61; Igor Smirennyi, Ivan Gorbunov, and Sergei Zaitsev,
Pivo Rossiiskoi Imperii
(Moscow: Ayaks, 1998), 9–14; Stanislav I. Smetanin and Mikhail V. Konotopov,
Razvitie promyshlennosti v krepostnoi Rossii
(Moscow: Akademicheskii proect, 2001), 169–71.

6
. Nathan Haskell Dole,
Young Folks’ History of Russia
(New York: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1903), 108.

7
. The ninth-century Arabian traveler Ahmad Beh-Fodhlan Ibn al Abbas Ben-Assam Ben-Hammad even described the ubiquity of alcohol and drunkenness in Russian pagan rituals. Dole,
Young Folks’ History of Russia
, 52.

8
. Ivan Pryzhov,
Istoriya kabakov v Rossii
(Moscow: Molodiya sily, 1914), 10; Horace Lunt, “Food in the Rus’ Primary Chronicle,” in
Food in Russian History and Culture
, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 24.

9
. René J. Dubos,
Pasteur and Modern Science
, ed. Thomas D. Brock (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Microbiology Press, 1998), 54–60.

10
. See, for instance, Ernest H. Cherrington, ed.,
Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem
, 6 vols. (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue, 1926), 3:910–39.

11
. “Flavored Vodka Fuels Vodka Volume and Sales,”
Reuters
, Oct. 11, 2012,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/11/idUS149559+11-Oct-2012+PRN20121011
(accessed Feb. 13, 2013).

12
. Victor Erofeyev, “The Russian God,”
New Yorker
Dec. 16, 2002; Viktor Erofeev,
Russkii apokalipsis: Opyt khudozhestvennoi eskhatologii
(Moscow: Zebra E, 2008), 19–20. Similarly, see Selina Bunbury,
Russia after the War
, 2 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1857), 2:156–57; Andrei Makarevich,
Zanimatel’naya narkologiya
(Moscow: Makhaon, 2005), 9–10.

13
. Vladimir P. Nuzhnyi,
Vino v zhinzni i zhizn‘ v vine
(Moscow: Sinteg, 2001), 15–16.

14
. David Christian,
Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 25.

15
. George Vernadsky, “Feudalism in Russia,”
Speculum
14, no. 3 (1939): 301; K. V. Bazilevich,
Gorodskie vosstaniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVII v.: Sbornik dokumentov
(Moscoe: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’noekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1936), 39–40; Richard Hellie, “Early Modern Russian Law: The Ulozhenie of 1649,”
Russian History
2, no. 4 (1988). On the importance of history to drinking patterns see V. A. Terekhina, ed.,
Profilaktika p’yanstva i alkogolizma
(Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literaturna, 1983), 28.

16
. This section draws largely from Christian,
Living Water
, 26–33; Pryzhov,
Istoriya kabakov v Rossii
, 27–40.

17
. Rodionov suggests that this early distilled
polugar
was fundamentally different from “modern” rectified vodka, which he dates from 1895. Boris V. Rodionov,
Istoriya russkoi vodki ot polugara do nashikh dnei
(Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), 43–81. To avoid confusion I will refer to both distilled and rectified products as vodka.

18
. Boris V. Rodionov,
Bol’shoi obman: Pravda i lozh‘ o russkoi vodke
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2011), 413; William Blackwell,
The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization: 1800–1860
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 26.

19
. Vilyam Pokhlebkin,
Istoriya vodki (A History of Vodka
) (Moscow: Tsentpoligraf, 2000), 100. This becomes one of Pokhlebkin’s arguments for the timing of vodka’s birth, as the prosperity of the three-field system gave rise to vodka production, or vice versa. Ibid., 144, 51–54. Distilling as a primary link between state formation and economic prosperity has been borne out in historical comparison. Charles van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic,”
History Workshop
1, no. 2 (1976).

20
. Boris Segal,
Russian Drinking: Use and Abuse of Alcohol in Pre-Revolutionary Russia
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1987), 30; Paul Bushkovitch, “Taxation, Tax Farming and Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Russia,”
Slavic Review
37, no. 3 (1978): 391.

21
. Giles Fletcher,
Of the Russe Commonwealth: 1591
, facsimile ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 43–44. The Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoi presents a remarkably similar description in
Petr Pervyi
(Kishinev: Kartya Moldovenyaske, 1970), 22.

22
. On torture in early imperial Russia see Jean Chappe d’Auteroche,
Voyage en Sibérie, fait par ordre du roi en 1761, contenant les Mœurs, les Usages des Russes, & l’État actuel de cette Puissance; &c
. (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1769), 193–94; Edward Peters,
Torture
, expanded ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 95–96.

23
. Samuel H. Baron, ed.,
The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), 198, 42.

24
. Ibid., 144.

25
. Christian,
Living Water
, 30–31, 39. See also Mikhail E. Saltykov,
Tchinovnicks: Sketches of Provincial Life, from the Memoirs of the Retired Conseiller de Cour Stchedrin (Saltikow
), trans. Frederic Aston (London: L. Booth, 1861), 99. On indirect rule and Russian internal colonization see Alexander Etkind,
Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience
(Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2011), 145.

26
. This is largely in line with Etkind’s thesis on the state’s “internal colonization” of early Russia. Etkind,
Internal Colonization
, 65. See also Mikhail Ya Volkov,
Ocerki istorii promyslov Rossii vtoraya polovina XVII–pervaya polovina XVIII v
. (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 25–27; Richard Hellie,
Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 106; Christian,
Living Water
, 33, 36, 47.

27
. McKee quoted in Richard Weitz, “Russia: Binge Drinking and Sudden Death,” Eurasianet. org, Dec. 15, 2010,
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62577
(accessed Dec. 17, 2010). See also
http://csis.org/event/new-insights-catastrophic-level-mortality-russian-men
.

28
. Iosaphat Barbaro, “Viaggio alla Tana,” in
Barbaro i kontarini o Rossii: K istorii italo-russkikh svyazei v XV v
., ed. Elizaveta Ch. Skrzhinskaya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), 133; V. Z. Grigor’eva,
Vodka izvestnaya i neizvestnaya: XIV–XX veka
(Moscow: Enneagon, 2007), 16.

29
. Ambrogio Contarini, “Viaggio in Persia,” in
Barbaro i kontarini o Rossii: K istorii italo-russkikh svyazei v XV v
., ed. Elizaveta Ch. Skrzhinskaya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), 204–5.

30
. Vladimir B. Bezgin, “Alkogol’ v obydennoi zhizni russkogo sela (konets XIX–nachalo XX v.,”
NB: Problemy obshchestva i politiki
, no. 3 (2013).
http://www.e-notabene.ru/pr/article_549.html
(accessed July 15, 2013). David Christian, “Traditional and Modern Drinking Cultures in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation,”
Australian Slavonic and East European Studies
1, no. 1 (1987): 66–67; R. E. F. Smith and David Christian,
Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 84–85; Vera Efron, “Russia, Yesterday,” in
Drinking and Intoxication: Selected Readings in Social Attitudes and Controls
, ed. Raymond G. McCarthy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, 1959), 131.

31
. Quoted in: Paul Bushkovitch, “The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,”
Russian Review
49, no. 1 (1990): 12–13.

32
. Segal,
Russian Drinking
, 47–48.

33
. Sergei M. Soloviev,
History of Russia, vol. 12: Russian Society under Ivan the Terrible
, trans. T. Allan Smith (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International, 1996), 211. The
Domostroi
also stipulated that women “must be preserved from intoxicating beverages” and only drink nonalcoholic beers and
kvas
. Ibid., 208–9. See also Grigor’eva,
Vodka izvestnaya i neizvestnaya: XIV–XX veka
, 18.