Vodka Politics (45 page)

The Bolsheviks knew full well about their growing problem with illegal alcohol and about their inability to do anything meaningful to stop it. Nevertheless, the new government continued to heave one rhetorical salvo after another against the evils of alcohol because—practical realities aside—prohibition was an issue of pivotal ideological importance. Often it was left to the founder and commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, to launch such ideological broadsides against vodka.

Before the Revolution, Trotsky was an outspoken critic of the tsar’s “drunken budget” that provided up to one-third of state income. Not only did vodka exploit the workers financially, it also distracted the workers from political activism and perpetuated the moral and financial bankruptcy that forever binds them to their capitalist oppressors. “The propertied classes and the state bear responsibility for that culture which cannot exist without the constant lubricant of alcohol,” the loquacious Trotsky argued. “But their historical guilt is still incomparably more terrible. Through fiscal means they turn alcohol, that physical, moral and
social poison, into the main source of nourishment for the state. Vodka not only makes the people incompetent to manage their own destiny, it also covers the expenditures of the privileged. What a real devil’s system!”
⁴⁹

The Bolsheviks planned to turn the prohibition they inherited from their imperial predecessors as a weapon against that same system of capitalist alcooppression. As Trotsky wrote in
Pravda
—the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party—prohibition was “one of the iron assets of the revolution.”
⁵⁰
Without alcohol, Russians could turn to more productive tasks, express their real interests through communist political activism, and bring the state budget in line with the real needs of the people. For it was not simply a change in leadership that the communists had long desired but, rather, a dramatic change in all manner of social relationships. Years of war, revolution, chaos, and disorder destroyed the old capitalist structure of oppressor versus oppressed; the task that remained was to form the culture of a new species—
Homo Sovieticus
—with a culture that glorified modesty, honesty, and sobriety. In this world of reborn labor, the state would tutor society and wean the worker from the vices of old. When it came to alcohol, the bland sermonizing of temperance activism would be replaced with modern amusements promoted by the state—cinema, theater, education, and sports—to enlighten and satisfy the working class and to convince them that they no longer needed vodka to cure their boredom.
⁵¹

So even as the Bolsheviks confronted piles of evidence that their prohibition was ineffective and practical voices called for reinstating the traditional vodka monopoly, temperance was such a crucial tenet of the new ruling ideology that it was difficult to imagine any capitulation to alcohol so long as chief ideologues like Lenin and Trotsky were in charge.
⁵²

The communists’ ironclad commitment to prohibition is even more striking when compared to their ideological concessions to capitalist markets as part of the New Economic Policy, which only exacerbated the problem of black market hooch. Under War Communism, to avoid having their harvests forcibly requisitioned, many peasants turned to distilling. Now given control over their own (after-tax) surpluses, even more of the peasant’s grain went to the still.
⁵³
But why would so many risk hard labor or even death if they got caught? Were they just
that
hard-up for a drink?

Surely—to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart’s character in
The Roaring Twenties
—there will always be guys wanting a drink, whether in Russia, America, or elsewhere. Basic economic theory suggests (and global experiences confirm) that restricting the supply only drives prices higher and brings the insatiable allure of ever-greater profits along with it. But neither simple economics, nor the inability of the new government to exercise their authority, nor even allusions to the allegedly “eternal” Russian penchant for drink, can explain the widespread proliferation of illegal distillation.

We must consider the role of official corruption—borne of the tsarist vodka trade—which remained entrenched in the early Soviet era.
⁵⁴
As in the past, most moonshiners knew they had little to fear from the local authorities other than pressure for a periodic bribe. Plus those bribes were repaid with tip-offs about upcoming raids. In many cases, the authorities were themselves complicit in the local alcohol trade, just as in the imperial past. In the first half of 1918, for example, the Commissariat of State Control discovered over thirty places where the local communist governments legalized vodka sales in contravention to the official law. Regional soviets occasionally even fixed local prices for
samogon
.
⁵⁵

The collapse of the economy from years of war and devastation also contributed to the illegal practice. For many, their traditional trades—centered on flax, cloth, and grain—had been destroyed, leaving
samogon
as the only viable source of income.
⁵⁶
What’s more, vodka was often not just the source of income and a primary household expenditure; frequently it was the medium of exchange, too. Thanks to hyperinflation, the ruble was worthless. As in earlier centuries when money meant nothing, the value-holding, nonspoiling, easily divisible, and even more easily consumable vodka stepped in as a surrogate currency. And as in the past when the economy faltered, Russians turned to unofficial exchanges—barter,
blat
, and
pomoch
’ (
chapter 8
)—just to survive.

I
N THE
F
IGHT AGAINST
S
AMOGON
(
CIRCA
1920
S
). “Homebrewing ruins peasant farming, destroys a man’s health, harms his offspring and leads to crime.” The bottle contains statistics on the health of alcoholics, as well as birth defects, while practical equivalents of the 200 million pud (3.3 million metric tons) and 140 million rubles are tabulated at right. Note the priest (holding the icon) and
kulak
atop the still, reveling in the peasant’s misery and bondage to the bottle. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

In order get a complete picture of conditions in the countryside, in 1923 the high-ranking Central Committee sent an official delegation to interview typical peasants in Kursk province. Their report affirmed the centrality of vodka in village life. “A peasant needs
samogon
or vodka, it does not matter which. For example, if one needs to build a house, one can never find workers; but if there is vodka or
samogon
, you treat the neighbors to it, and the house is soon ready.”
⁵⁷

That the countryside was swimming in alcohol despite the draconian dry law was hardly surprising to the investigators, nor was vodka’s durability as a medium of exchange. If there was one surprise for Moscow, it was how unreceptive the peasantry was of the new Soviets’ high-minded cultural revolution. “Do not rely on the peasants in your battle with
samogon
,” one interviewee bluntly told the commissars: “Do it yourselves.” Such ungrateful—and clearly capitalist—sentiments only confirmed the leadership’s suspicions that the conservative peasantry remained ignorant, backward, and a dangerous source of potential counterrevolution.
⁵⁸

With the economy finally showing signs of life, in March 1922 Lenin rose before the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party to defend NEP against critics who saw it as selling out their hard-won communist revolution to the principles of capitalism. With famine raging, Lenin remained resolute that—ideologically unpalatable as it was—NEP’s pragmatic concessions were the only way forward. Yet he remained steadfast that there would be no compromise with vodka: “If under present conditions the peasant must have freedom to trade within certain limits, we must give it to him, but this does not mean that we are permitting trade in raw brandy. We shall punish people for that sort of trade.”
⁵⁹

Lenin’s threats were only a prelude: the relatively lax attitude toward distillation in the countryside was soon met by a systemic clampdown. The new 1922 criminal code categorically outlawed private distillation. Anti-alcohol propaganda was ratcheted up. Particularly during the high tide of drunkenness around Christmas and Easter, the Soviets stepped up “shock campaigns” against home brewing. Police conducted more than forty thousand searches in fifty-two provinces during the winter of 1922, busting over twenty-three thousand private distilling and confiscating over sixteen thousand stills. The seventy-eight thousand Easter-time searches the following spring produced similar yields. “Wanted” signs advertised rewards for information leading to uncovering secret operations, and both police and informants were paid handsomely. Statistics from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs recorded 904,078 cases of illicit brewing in 1922–23 alone. Yet moonshining was so widespread that these shock campaigns were—as one observer described it—like “shooting a cannon at sparrows.”
⁶⁰

Despite the difficulties of enforcement, Lenin held firm to his revolutionary prohibition until the end—which was not long in coming. Less than a month after his rousing defense of NEP and prohibition, in April 1922, a surgeon finally succeeded in removing the bullet that had been lodged in Lenin’s neck since an assassination attempt four years earlier. A month after the surgery, Lenin suffered the first in a series of debilitating strokes that threw the country’s leadership into disarray. A second stroke in December 1922 paralyzed his right side, at which time Lenin—the illustrious revolutionary leader and unquestioned ruler—withdrew from politics. A third stroke in March 1923 left him mute and bedridden until his death from complications from a final, massive stroke on January 21, 1924, at the age of fifty-three.

The Russian people’s worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth, later claimed Winston Churchill. “Their next worst—his death.”
⁶¹
A cult-like veneration of the hero Lenin quickly ensued: the old imperial capital of Petrograd (née St. Petersburg) was quickly renamed Leningrad in his honor. Back in Moscow, Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum on Red Square, where he has lain—part revered icon and part macabre tourist attraction—ever since.

Lenin’s gradual fade from politics cast the future of NEP, prohibition, and the leadership of the country into doubt. With no clear line of succession and no one individual able to fill Lenin’s shoes, the party’s collective Politburo leadership confronted a decade-long succession struggle from the very first stroke. By the end of the 1920s, the Georgian-born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili—better known to the world as Stalin—had outmaneuvered Trotsky and his other rivals to become the unquestioned leader of this newly proclaimed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Many of Stalin’s policies were a dramatic break from Lenin’s—perhaps none more so than his decision to repeal the prohibition on alcohol and resurrect Russia’s centuries-old system of autocratic vodka politics.

15

Industrialization, Collectivization, Alcoholization

“The Russian Peasant may be Illiterate, but he is not what you would call Dumb,” noted American satirist Will Rogers in the late 1920s. Equal parts cowboy, actor, comedian, and philosopher, the Oklahoma-born Rogers was the foremost social commentator of the age. Writing in his telltale easygoing, folksy style, Rogers clearly identified the new Soviet regime’s most pressing challenge: the peasant.

“He knows what’s the use raising anything if you can’t trade it or sell it for what you want,” Rogers wrote. “Sometimes he hides it; but, anyhow, he is not selling it, and that has got the whole Communistic Party about cuckoo right at this minute.” While NEP freed the peasantry to live off the land they cultivated, the problem—as Rogers astutely noted—was that “the old Boys in town has got to get enough nourishment from whatever the farmer raises to make those brotherhood-of-man speeches on. The old farmer just grinds his extra up into Vodka, lays in a lot of wood and hibernates for the winter.”
¹

Within the Communistic Party leadership, opinions differed on the vodka problem, which was now inextricably intertwined with other pressing challenges: promoting industrial development and subduing the independence of the peasantry. Even though the Bolsheviks outlawed opposition parties and factionalism within the party itself, policy debates, proclamations, and even rumors were routinely printed in the party’s official newspaper,
Pravda
. In September 1922
Pravda
reported that the government was considering reintroducing the old vodka monopoly in the interest of financial solvency. In the closed-door meetings, Mikhail Kalinin—the nominal head of state—reportedly declared that “we have no choice” about building the new Soviet state on the same
vodkapolitik
principles as the imperial system they worked so hard to overthrow: “we’ve got to do it!”
²
Yet even while recovering from his first stroke, Lenin was resolutely opposed: vodka would never return so long as he had anything to say about it. But in December 1922 Lenin suffered his second stroke, forcing his withdrawal from politics and intensifying the behind-the-scenes rivalries in the Politburo.
As it turns out, of all the political challenges, the vodka question perhaps most starkly divided his potential successors, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.