Vodka Politics (41 page)

Holidays and occasional breaks in the hostilities allowed for battlefield “fraternizations”—the relaxed mingling of opposing troops who had been fighting tooth and nail for months. During such temporary ceasefires, alcohol was openly distributed to the Russian troops by their enemies. The quantity of liquor was on such a scale that front-line Russian regiments could occasionally create their own regimental liquor stocks.
³⁰
Military discipline eroded in step with morale as the Russian army suffered one crushing defeat after another.

With declining morale, Russian soldiers deserted en masse. The Germans crept further into the motherland as the clock ticked closer to the fateful year of 1917. In a futile effort to maintain discipline, army officers up and down the line smashed any liquor warehouse near the front, but all for naught.
³¹
By the time of the February Revolution, officers no longer controlled the enlisted men, many of whom actively pillaged and looted liquor stores, wine cellars, and wealthy estates. Sociologist Dmitry Shlapentokh has written of the Russian Fifth Platoon stationed near Oryol, where twenty thousand soldiers looted the wine cellars of a local nobleman, in the process destroying various Italian masterpieces, antiques, pianos, and an extensive library. When the wine ran out, the horde besieged the local distillery, which they quickly drained of alcohol and burned to the ground. A detachment sent to quell the riot disobeyed orders and instead joined in the revelry.
³²

In Moscow, the police battled to surpress drunken rioters who torched every German-named business while also looting the idle liquor stores. As one Englishman’s diary notes: “Whilst the wine-shops were being looted the police came along and had them closed and sealed up, leaving in many cases a large
number of the rioters dead drunk inside, who at the end of the war will be found like brandy-cherries!”
³³

To add insult to injury, the tsar’s prohibition threatened to undermine Russia’s wartime industry. Beyond its use as a beverage, alcohol is crucial to the manufacture of gunpowder and other war materiel. At the outset of hostilities the state had plenty of alcohol for industrial purposes, but by 1916 the closing of distilleries further disrupted Russia’s already strained defense industry.
³⁴

Certainly many factors contributed to the utter collapse and dissolution of the Russian army in World War I. Yet vodka’s role can no longer be ignored, as it facilitated the disorganization long credited with dooming the Romanov dynasty.
³⁵

Farewell, Drunken Budget

“From time immemorial countries waging war have been in want of funds,” wrote Andrei Shingarev, official
rapporteur
of the imperial Duma’s budget and finance committees, in a 1915 report on the financial effects of the tsar’s prohibition, “but never since the dawn of human history has a single country, in a time of war, renounced the principal source of its revenue.”
³⁶

Indeed, the tsar’s vodka monopoly brought in an average of four hundred million rubles a year, or between a quarter to a third of all revenues, to the imperial treasury. This vital stream of funding dried up almost immediately following Nicholas’s fateful prohibition telegram to his dear uncle Kostya. Even with the supplementary taxes, bonds, and loans cobbled together by Finance Minister Bark, state revenues decreased by over five hundred million rubles in the second half of 1914 alone and by nine hundred million rubles per year thereafter—just as Russia stumbled into the greatest military conflagration in world history.
³⁷

There are good reasons why countries typically do not renounce their principal revenue source in wartime. Wars are expensive, and countries that can’t pay for them usually meet with an unfortunate end. Despite frantic warnings from outside of government, Russia would not avoid this fate. “Government indebtedness exacerbated wartime inflation,” as prominent historians have pointed out, “which aggravated the social and economic crises that eventually toppled the tsarist government.”
³⁸

So it seems all the more ironic that, instead of sounding the alarm about the obvious financial disaster awaiting the country,
rapporteur
Shingarev’s claim that Russia would be the first country to renounce its principal source of revenue was, if anything,
boastful
. In fact his report claims that “the government’s repudiation of the fiscal taxation of spiritous liquors and the discontinuation of their sale will provide the greatest economic, social and moral benefaction for
the population.”
³⁹
While difficult to comprehend in hindsight, Shingarev was not alone in disastrously misreading the state’s finances. Similar unbridled optimism was shared by temperance advocates in Russia, Europe, and North America who believed that the people’s natural industriousness would be miraculously unleashed once liberated from the yoke of alcohol. According to this logic, any lost vodka revenues would be more than made up for by the overall growth of economic activity.
⁴⁰
Unfortunately for prohibitionists the world over—and for the fate of Russia in particular—prohibition’s much-anticipated productivity boost never happened. Compounded by the astronomical costs of war, the hole in the budget grew ever larger.

Trying to patch the hole, the imperial government simply printed more rubles, without regard for the hyperinflationary consequences. “What if we do lose eight hundred million rubles in revenue?” asked the dismissive Premier Ivan Goremykin. “We shall print that much paper money; it’s all the same to the people.”
⁴¹
Even embattled Finance Minister Bark seemed oblivious to the consequences of uncontrolled inflation: in submitting his 1917 budget estimates to Tsar Nicholas II (against the backdrop of escalating war costs, growing social resentment, and the worthlessness of paper rubles), Bark forecast an astounding increase in government revenue that “enables us also to increase our expenditure on the Church, Education, Public Health, Agriculture, Trade and Industry, Postal and Telegraphic Service, and the construction of railway lines, thus providing for the spiritual and practical needs of the nation.”
⁴²
With the economy and state crumbling around him, it seemed as though Russia’s finance minister was living on some distant planet.

Russia’s hyperinflationary spiral has always been considered a primary cause of dethroning both the tsar (in the revolution of February 1917) and his successor—the Provisional Government—in the Bolshevik Revolution that October.
⁴³
Yet the destruction that prohibition wrought on imperial finances was not simply the result of the sudden lack of alcohol sales. The old vodka monopoly was a retail and distribution monopoly—a compromise arrangement that not only allowed the treasury to reap tremendous revenues from the sale of alcohol (and manipulate the retail price of alcohol as it saw fit) but also left the lucrative production of alcoholic beverages in the hands of gentry distillers and brewers who had long enjoyed the exclusive right to production.
⁴⁴
Prohibition not only left the imperial government with huge stores of unsold alcohol; it also left politically influential gentry distillers with massive liquor stockpiles they could not legally sell, depriving many of their primary source of wealth—and they were not happy. As part of existing long-term contracts, many distillers had already paid taxes on future alcohol deliveries. If that alcohol was not to be delivered, the producers wanted their money back, draining even more rubles from the treasury.
⁴⁵

For every distiller who effectively served as a creditor to the ministry of finance by paying their taxes in advance there were debtors, like Pyotr Pavlovich Bukhov mentioned earlier, who owed back taxes to the treasury. Thanks to prohibition, Bukhov and many like him had built tremendous debts to the treasury only to suddenly find themselves without a stream of income with which to repay them. While the finance ministry later allowed debtors to renegotiate contracts, in the short term the treasury was starved of badly needed funds, causing the financial hole to grow ever deeper.
⁴⁶

Meanwhile, the costs of enforcing prohibition rose dramatically. Think of the murderous reign of the gangster Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago: the conventional wisdom among historians is that Russian prohibition also begot rampant moonshining and smuggling but it actually took years for it to become pervasive.
⁴⁷
A stack of letters and telegrams in the archives of the ministry of finance tells a much different story: already by the first months of 1915, Finance Minister Bark was buried under an avalanche of reports describing an explosion of illegal activities: alarms of a “broad increase in the clandestine trade in alcohol” from neighboring Manchurian territories were sounded from Russia’s Far East. Reports from the taiga proclaimed that “secret distilling is increasing completely unimpeded,” while memos from every region of Russia chronicled a disturbing increase in underground distilling. In the last half of 1914 alone, the ministry of agriculture uncovered some 1,825 illegal distilleries, while the following year, the excise department discovered 5,707 cases of illicit distilling
⁴⁸
—all underscoring the authorities’ need for dramatic reinforcements to keep Russia dry.

Then came the military fallout. Whether sacked by marauding recruits in mobilization riots or by deserters looting stores, distilleries, and private residences, the imperial government was liable for the destructive actions of their officers and conscripts, and the gentry class demanded compensation for their losses. Given their political influence, they often got it. Most straightforward were the instances when military commanders destroyed alcohol warehouses, stores, and production facilities near the front so as not to tempt insubordination. In perhaps history’s biggest example of “you break it, you bought it,” gentry alcohol producers presented the treasury with the bill for their lost alcohol stocks. With the Russian army backpedaling furiously, and the zone of mandatory destruction of alcohol marching steadily eastward across Russia’s populous western territories—the expected remuneration ran into the millions, if not tens of millions, of rubles.
⁴⁹

Thus, far beyond simply starving the imperial treasury of its single greatest source of revenue in the midst of Russia’s grandest military engagement, prohibition bled the treasury dry by paying for alcohol the government was destroying. The combined effect was predictably tragic: by deepening the government’s
debts, prohibition exacerbated wartime inflation, which compounded the political, economic, and social crises that ultimately doomed the entire regime. Vodka politics may not have single-handedly caused the downfall of the tsarist government, but it certainly hastened its fall.

Alcohol And Infrastructural Paralysis

A final alleged cause of revolution was the infrastructural paralysis that accompanied the total war raging on Russian territory. Russia’s infamously cold winters discouraged travel while the spring thaw and rains turned the country’s dirt roads into impassable bogs, increasing the reliance on Russia’s anemic railway network to both supply the war effort and maintain the traditional exchange of food and grain from Russia’s rural provinces for manufactured goods produced in its cities. As it turns out, Russia’s overburdened railroads failed spectacularly on both counts: woefully undersupplying the forces at the front and preventing grains from being delivered to cities from the countryside, leading to food shortages and even starvation.
⁵⁰
Certainly, alcohol could not have contributed to this problem too… or could it?

As it turns out, many enterprising gentry distillers did not complacently let their investments—their alcohol stocks—fall victim to roving hordes, or worse: sit idle until the cessation of hostilities. The tsar’s prohibition barred distillers from selling their wares at home, but that did not prevent them from selling their alcohol to foreign markets. Some distillers even secured promises from the imperial government to open new markets in foreign countries to compensate for prohibition at home.
⁵¹
Many well-connected Russian elites inked deals to ship their alcohol to Russia’s primary ally, France. The only problem was the front: from the Gulf of Riga in the north to the mouth of the Danube in the south (and later from the outskirts of Petrograd to the mouth of the Don), the war zone and trade embargo halted all east-west commerce in Europe, while Entente warships shut down all maritime commercial traffic in the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean seas.

Embattled distillers planned to load their massive stores of alcohol into railway cars—chronically in short supply—from threatened territories near the front (Petrograd, Vilnius, Poltava, and Kuban districts), first to safer locations away from the hostilities and then north to the White Sea ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk for the long sea voyage to markets in France.
⁵²
Foreign observers remarked that “enormous quantities have been exported to France” in such a manner.
⁵³
Emboldened by Russia’s initial and ephemeral victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Galicia in 1915, a convention of potato growers and alcohol manufacturers in Minsk gleefully noted that these newly “liberated”
territories were technically outside the purview of the prohibition decree. Subsequently, “The representatives of the Russian Government promised to pave the way for the Russian alcohol industry and trade toward the Galician territories,” and “The assembly decided to take up at once the necessary steps for an extensive export trade of Russian alcohol to Galicia.”
⁵⁴