Vodka Politics (44 page)

As a part of his NEP, or New Economic Policy, Lenin relented: strategically retreating from the bayonet-point requisitions of War Communism to in-kind taxation, NEP left some surplus for the peasants to sell at market, providing a “breathing space” for Russian agriculture to recover. But for the starving millions along the Volga, it was already too late. Within months Russia would be rocked by the deadliest famine in modern European history. Diseased and dying livestock was set upon by children with distended bellies; the weathered, gaunt-faced men who piled corpses like cordwood into mass graves ate grass, tree bark, or worse. In the city of Samara alone, ten butcher shops were closed for peddling in human flesh.
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This was not the first devastating famine in Russia, and it would not be the last. A generation earlier in tsarist Russia a hard freeze followed by extended drought created a famine that claimed a half-million souls in 1891–92. Yet it was the famine’s all-too-human causes and the callous indifference of the tsarist government that galvanized many critics—including Lenin—into steadfast opponents of the old regime. That fall, peasants rushed to sell their meager harvest to pay their taxes, debts, and liquor bills—glutting the market and driving down grain prices, forcing the peasants to sell even their precious reserves to get by. By mid-winter, their food stocks were gone. In a vicious cycle, the only means of survival was by going deeper in debt to the local pawnbroker or landlord, but that only increased the peasant’s burden and narrowed next year’s margin of survival.

The tone-deaf government response, which included resurrecting the imperial spirits monopoly that “contributed so much to its impoverishment and demoralisation” at the hour of the peasantry’s greatest need, drew the ire of many both in Russia and abroad.
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Even the relief efforts were exacerbated by alcohol: both the food to tide the needy over until the next harvest and the seed grain needed to grow it was often “either drunk up in the taverns or sold to speculators at an unusually low price.”
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The situation in 1921 was an eerie echo to the famine thirty years earlier, especially concerning alcohol. In both cases—despite the widespread food shortage—vodka was everywhere. While providing a temporary psychological respite for both the victims and aid providers, vodka—and the clandestine distillation of grain to prevent its requisition—was partially to blame for the misery. As before—even amid widespread hunger—both the relief provisions and the seed grain necessary for future crops were often distilled by bootleggers into vodka. In the heart of the famine zone, one aid worker explained: “The principal distraction of the villages (grown wild as they are) is generally drink, which fills up all the hours of all the holidays and festivals. No idea can be formed of the huge extension of secret vodka-distilling; it has pervaded Russian life throughout and is a calamity both for the national morals and the national health.”
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Famine politics are fascinating in their own right. Amartya Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research into the causes of poverty, has argued that famines are never caused by crop failures alone but rather are symptomatic of autocratic political systems that can easily ignore the needs of their citizens.
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This resonates with the thesis of this book: Russia’s society-wide addiction to alcohol is not only a social and cultural problem in its own right but is also symptomatic of a deeper political illness—an autocratic state that benefits from alcoholic excess and is consequently hostile to grass-roots activism that promotes the interests and welfare of society.

There is perhaps no clearer illustration of these dynamics than the American Relief Administration (ARA) expedition to alleviate the Russian famine of 1921–22. A quasi-governmental aid agency directed by future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, the ARA delivered food and relief supplies to war-ravaged Europe during and after the Great War. Along with the International Committee of the Red Cross and Britain’s Save the Children Fund, Hoover and the ARA answered an appeal by famed writer Maxim Gorky (who by now had become reluctantly allied with the communist leadership), pleading that millions were at risk of starvation.
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Following delicate, high-level negotiations with the new Bolshevik government, the ARA was permitted to extend its reach into the famine-ravaged Volga area, where they had to tread a thin line: if they were seen as strengthening Lenin’s communist regime, they would run afoul of American public opinion and lose their logistical support. But if the Russians viewed the Americans as using aid to destabilize the Bolshevik government, they would be evicted, leaving millions more to die. Still, by 1922, ARA kitchens were feeding nearly eleven million Russians a day.
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Between communists and capitalists, “vodka was the supreme test of good government relations,” writes Bertrand Patenaude in his history of the ARA,
The Big Show in Bololand
—the Americans’ name for the exotic land of the Bolsheviks. The letters, diaries, and memoirs of the cowboys, college students, and former doughboys of the ARA repeatedly tell of the jarring discord between the needs of the starving population and the ostentatious local Bolshevik authorities on whom they relied to deliver their much-needed relief. Whether well-intentioned displays of traditional hospitality (as the Russians thought) or efforts to get the Americans drunk in order to rob them of their “dignified reserve” (as the Americans thought), throughout the famine zone the ARA was welcomed with festive banquets and copious amounts of liquor. Some were treated to 85-year-old port requisitioned from old imperial cellars; others were given bootleg kerosene seasoned with ammonia. In either case, ARA workers were struck by the “curious contradiction” that such prolific indulgence could take place in the shadows of the apocalyptical scenes of famine just beyond the commissars’ doors. “Just as incongruous,” Patenaude wrote, “was the fact that the sponsors of these events were representatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat, who it might have been thought would have banished banqueting to the irretrievable past. Instead, the proletariat’s parvenu vanguard seemed intent upon outdoing the defeated class enemy even in the social sphere, as if to demonstrate its suitability to rule the country.”
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The letters of ARA officer William Kelley describe life as the government’s guest in the Bashkir city of Sterlitamak. In one instance, a surreal banquet of Bolshevik leaders and four ladies began over a gallon of “the vilest” bootleg vodka.

With the first toast the fight was on, they fighting to get me drunk, and I determined to stay on deck.… Midnight found the bottle empty. The Commissar of Transport was oozing vodka at every port, but still cheerful and peaceful. [The government host] Bishoff was sick and very quiet. Churnishev was unperturbed. Lady No. 4 had been led away to bed. Nos. 2 and 3 were plainly drunk. The hostess, I must say, was well mannered and well poised throughout. I caught her eye once and we toasted each other quietly across the table.
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The next morning, with his head still pounding from the (alleged) beverages as he returned to the ARA offices, Kelley prided himself on at least not drunkenly blabbing something undiplomatic. “Along the road he passed the body of a soldier who had been killed during the night,” describes Patenaude, “through the crowd of onlookers he could see a ‘mass of human brains in the mud.’ Half a block down the road he came upon a group of children playing hopscotch at a place where the entire previous day had lain the corpse of a child, its clothing and flesh chewed up by dogs. It had been removed, but nearby lay an apparent successor, a woman lying on a doorstep.”
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Just as the socialists of 1891 were horrified at the tsarist regime’s callous indifference to its famine-stricken people, the new “Bolo” government was no different, even though their famine claimed ten times as many victims: capitalist or communist, both regimes were autocracies that transformed the hardship of drought into the tragedy of famine. “The difference between democracy and autocracy,” claimed relief-administrator Hoover, “is a question of whether people can be organized from the bottom up or from the top down.”
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Whether private agencies marshaling food relief to famine victims or grass-roots temperance organizations grappling with insobriety, that autocracies actively stifle bottom-up welfare initiatives goes far toward explaining why liberal democracies generally allay mass suffering while autocracies perpetuate it.

Vodka And NEP

The white forces having been vanquished on all fronts in the Civil War, the biggest threat to the new Bolshevik government came from the eternally suffering peasants themselves. Even in areas not decimated by war and famine, bands of peasants (and in the case of the Kronstadt garrison in 1921, even soldiers) rose up against the authorities. But since the landlords of old were gone, these became revolts against the state itself. Compounding the problem was the peasants’ hoarding and distilling of grain. Between the insurrections and hoarding,
Lenin concluded that that the only way to save the communist revolution was to pacify the disgruntled peasantry.

Even as a counterrevolutionary mutiny among the Kronstadt sailors was being violently repressed, at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Lenin announced what would become known as the New Economic Policy: while the “commanding heights” of the economy—foreign trade, banks, and heavy industry—would stay in state hands, private commercial enterprises were legalized, and the forced grain requisitions were replaced with an in-kind tax, giving the peasantry the incentive to cultivate and sell surplus yields for profit. This strategic retreat from War Communism opened an economic “breathing space” that allowed both manufacturing and agriculture to rebound. To critics, it was a return to capitalism.
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Before an audience of hundreds of Communist Party delegates, Lenin argued that along with the “commanding heights,” vodka production should also not be ceded to the people. In this way, Lenin claimed alcohol was fundamentally different from other consumer goods like, say, toiletries: “I think that we should not follow the example of the capitalist countries and put vodka and other intoxicants on the market, because, profitable though they are, they will lead us back to capitalism and not forward to communism.” His sarcastic addendum that “there is no such danger in pomade” was met with laughter throughout the hall.
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In reality, the joke may have been on Lenin: beyond the congress hall in Moscow, very few Russians heeded the proclamation. Indeed, the ARA accounts of widespread illegal alcohol consumption even amid the horrors of famine testified to the indifference to Lenin’s prohibition throughout Russia. From outside the famine zone in Smolensk, the
Pravda
correspondent reported “an ocean of home brew,” as entire villages had essentially become spirit-distilling cooperatives, shipping liquor as far as Gomel and Bryansk provinces. From Ivanovo came reports of moonshiners popping up “like mushrooms after a rain.” “Everywhere you look, stills” was the word from Kursk. The writer, Anton Bolshakov, reported from Tver that virtually every household in the district was engaged in making
samogon
or home-brew. So prevalent was the practice in Tomsk that state prosecutors simply gave up. Illegal alcohol could even be found in Moscow’s kiosks, cafés, and restaurants—usually sold as “lemonade in an unsealed bottle.” Even in the shadow of the Kremlin anyone could buy
samogon
by simply “requesting ‘lemonade’ and winking at the salesman meaningfully.”
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Much of that liquor was never meant for human consumption. In Petrograd, the workers’ committee at the Atlas Metal Works complained that employees “drink methylated spirits, varnish and all kinds of other substitutes. They come to work drunk, speak at meetings, bawl inappropriate exclamations, prevent their more class-conscious comrades from speaking, paralyze organisational
work, and the result is chaos in the workshops.”
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In Moscow, many warmed to “Eau-de-cologne No. 3.” According to the accounts of soldiers,

It was nothing but 100-proof alcohol, lightly scented. This eau-de-cologne is sold in flasks of 200 or 400 grams, or in other words: by the half-bottle or bottle.… Soldiers, artisans, clerks and officials stock up on this eau-de-cologne, go into the tea-houses, ask for a bottle of lemonade for the sake of appearances, pour some lemonade into a glass before filling it with cologne. Two flasks of it, and you’re drunk.
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When vodka—either genuine or bootleg—could not be found, Russians increasingly turned to surrogates. During the revolutionary struggle in Samara, a riotous mob got drunk on printers’ ink. Others quaffed shoe polish, rectified varnish, or medical and industrial alcohols. The preferred “drink for intellectuals” in Rostov-on-Don was the local eau-de-cologne.
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Foreigners frequently noted the lengths to which Russians would go for a drink. As part of his mission in the famine zone, Harold Fleming—a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar—wrote home describing a Russian wedding where the host handed out drinks in cups refashioned from ARA milk cans. “May I never have a disease such as will call for such a combination of fuel-oil, benzine, and kerosine, as that liquor was.”
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Most common was what the Americans called the “k-v cocktail”—a mix of kerosene and vodka, which they occasionally used to replace the gasoline in their supply trucks. There are good reasons that we generally don’t drink the same industrial alcohols we use to fuel our trucks, light our lamps or polish our shoes: they are poisonous. Not surprisingly, many Russian revelers fatally succumbed to these deadly surrogates.