Vodka Politics (54 page)

Andropov used his very first policy address to launch a wide-ranging labor-discipline campaign patterned on his KGB reforms—including a sweeping anti-vodka initiative—which was carried out with all the subtlety one might expect from a former KGB chief. In a move completely unthinkable during Brezhnev’s two decades in power, the new secretary general checked in on workplace drunkenness through widely publicized surprise visits to factories. He launched “Operation Trawl,” a nationwide dragnet of restaurants, movie theaters, saunas, metro stations, and parks for anyone getting drunk and playing hooky from work.
⁶

Andropov was serious. The Presidium also made drunkenness on the job grounds for immediate termination—a dramatic move in the land of full employment. Even if the terminated worker found another job, the stigma of alcoholism followed him, as a disciplined drunkard could receive only half the usual bonuses. Drunks were now liable for damage—including defective
output—caused in an intoxicated state. Managers who did not root out shop floor drunkenness lost their coveted bonuses.
⁷

Since it only addressed the symptom of labor indiscipline, rather than the disease of vodka politics, Andropov’s approach was doomed to fail. Indeed, stiff penalties for drunkenness remained the same as in the past—as did their lax enforcement. There were no attempts to improve education, living standards, or healthcare or to limit state vodka sales.

In fact, Andropov’s other break from traditional practices—
reducing
rather than raising the price of vodka—seriously hampered his labor-discipline campaign. Cheap bottles of “Andropovka” (as drinkers affectionately dubbed them) were meant to draw customers away from dangerous
samogon
. Still, despite the stepped-up penalties, home brewing endured, especially in rural areas.
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Historians are left to debate whether Andropov’s reforms would have succeeded had he not succumbed to his failing kidneys. At least he shook up the drunken, aging “cadres” of the Brezhnev era by promoting young, like-minded, and mostly “dry” reformers like Yegor Ligachev and Mikhail Gorbachev. By the summer of 1983 Andropov was conspicuously absent from official meetings, leaving the day-to-day operations to the elderly second secretary, Konstantin Chernenko. From his bed Andropov wrote that since he was unable to chair Committee meetings, “I would therefore request members of the Central Committee to examine the question of entrusting the leadership of the Politburo and Secretariat to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” as his anointed successor rather than the corrupt and stodgy old Chernenko. Yet when the Brezhnevite old guard disseminated his letter to the Politburo, this final paragraph was conveniently redacted.
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On February 9, 1984, Yury Andropov died of kidney failure. At his state funeral on Red Square a virtually unintelligible eulogy was delivered by his successor—Konstantin Chernenko—who was already dying from chronic lung, heart, and liver diseases. The 72-year-old “new” secretary general was perhaps the most ineffectual leader of any state at any time. Despite expressing “serious concern” about pervasive alcohol abuse that “destroys people’s health and brings misfortune to the home” and preaching a desire to “free society from this great evil,” Chernenko’s words were not matched with deeds.
¹⁰
His inability to continue the labor-discipline campaign can be chalked up to his failing health while his unwillingness to do so was rooted in his loyalties to his former drinking buddy, Brezhnev. Indeed, if there was anything at all remarkable about Chernenko it may have been that he could drink even Brezhnev under the table. Ever boastful of his “amazing capacity to consume alcohol”—a trait he ascribed to his upbringing in the harsh Siberian climate—“Chernenko never got drunk, no matter how much he consumed.”
¹¹

His prodigious alcoholism no doubt compounded the liver cirrhosis and lung and heart aliments that killed him on March 10, 1985. “Whatever the cause of Mr. Chernenko’s cirrhosis,” diplomatically concluded the official Kremlin autopsy, “the disease reduced his liver function and disrupted the complicated biochemical reactions necessary to sustain life.”
¹²

The Soviet superpower was now poised to get its fourth leader in as many years—a political embarrassment both at home and abroad. “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?” recalled a frustrated American President Ronald Reagan in his memoirs.
¹³

The Choice Of A Dry Generation

Reagan wasn’t the only one fed up with the gerontocracy. As the usual story goes: with the demise of Chernenko the Soviet elders reluctantly agreed that a new generation must lead. And so the Politburo chose its youngest, most promising member—the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev—as his successor. Yet this conventional wisdom is overdetermined.

The choice was not simply whether the next general secretary would be old or young but also whether he would be drunk or sober. This was no trivial matter, since the leader’s personal relationship with the bottle seemed to be a reliable bellwether for reform. As we have seen, aside from Lenin most Soviet leaders were heavy drinkers with little interest in weaning society (or themselves) off the bottle. The relatively more sober leaders, including Khrushchev and Andropov, weren’t content with the drunken stagnation and initiated reform. It is worth bearing this distinction in mind when considering the two top contenders for secretary general in 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev and Grigory Romanov.

Born in the southern region of Stavropol in 1931, Gorbachev—like Andropov—was not a complete abstainer but leaned toward the “dry” side. In his
Memoirs
, he traced his distaste for distilled spirits to a rite of passage in 1946, when he was fifteen years old. After a hard day working in the fields alongside his father, the harvesting team leader declared, “It’s time you became a real man” and forced the boy to down a full mug of what he thought was vodka. It turned out to be one hundred percent pure medical alcohol. “After that experience I have never felt any pleasure in drinking vodka or spirits.”
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Gorbachev left Stavropol to attend the prestigious Moscow State University, where he met his future wife, Raisa. The two wed in 1953. Following graduation, they returned to Stavropol, where Mikhail rose through the ranks as an able reformer of the notoriously inefficient collective farms. When in 1978 his mentor and patron—Politburo member Fyodor Kulakov—died of a sudden heart attack after a night of heavy drinking, Gorbachev succeeded him as secretary of
agriculture, where he enjoyed the support of his like-minded, fellow Stavropol-native Yury Andropov. As a regional party secretary in the 1970s, Gorbachev pioneered the fight against indiscipline, corruption, and drunkenness in agriculture, which Andropov drew from once in power.
¹⁵

Gorbachev did not rock the boat when Chernenko succeeded Andropov, but he made waves by highlighting the need for thoroughgoing economic, political, and legal reform. Hidden between the usual invocations of Marxism-Leninism in his landmark December 1984 speech on ideology, Gorbachev suggested wide-ranging reforms—from market-like incentives and greater enterprise autonomy to greater openness and self-government throughout the party—to remedy the economic slowdown. In candid discussions with his future foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev went further: agreeing that “Everything had gone rotten” in the Soviet system. “It has to be changed.”
¹⁶

Gorbachev’s main contender for the top post was Grigory Romanov (no relation to the old royal family, though conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confessed she would have loved to have seen a Romanov return to rule Russia). At sixty-two, Romanov was the second-youngest Politburo member and—had he been selected—would also have been the first general secretary born after the Revolution. Like Gorbachev, the long-time first secretary of the powerful Leningrad region was a smart, competent organizer empowered by Andropov. Responsible for the military and defense industry, he had a portfolio that overshadowed Gorbachev’s base in agriculture. And while Gorbachev assumed a greater role under the ailing Chernenko, it was Romanov who was nominally the second secretary.

In terms of age, competence, and ability there was little separating Gorbachev and Romanov. Indeed, Romanov had more power and responsibility within the party, and his amicable links to Brezhnev’s retinue arguably made him an even more desirable alternative for the remaining old guard.
¹⁷

The primary difference between the two—and potentially the deciding factor—was personal temperament. Unlike Gorbachev, Romanov was a raging alcoholic. Beyond his daily drunkenness were damaging rumors that he abused his power as Leningrad party chief by commandeering Catherine the Great’s priceless dinner service for his daughter’s wedding, where in the ensuing bacchanal it was smashed by the revelers. Romanov denied such rumors—blaming his opponents for trying to discredit him. Yet Thatcher had heard it even in London and admitted that the rumor colored her opinion of his candidacy.
¹⁸

Politburo members were more aware than anyone of Romanov’s temperament and indiscretions, which were heavily reminiscent of the Brezhnevite past. Andropov was “perfectly aware that Grigory Vasilievich Romanov was a narrow-minded and insidious man, with dictatorial ways, and he recognized that at Politburo meetings Romanov rarely came up with a sound proposal or idea,” at
least according to Gorbachev’s account.
¹⁹
Others in the Politburo affirmed that “he proved to be incompetent” and that “his style showed traces of
vozhdizm
[authoritarianism].”
²⁰

“We were different kinds of people, and we had different outlooks,” wrote the teetotaling junior Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, describing his strained relations with Romanov and his Brezhnevite drinking buddies.
²¹
Such divisions grew deeper with reports from Leningrad that a drunken Romanov—with a pop singer girlfriend thirty years his junior—was apprehended by a Finnish patrol vessel as their boat somehow strayed into Finnish waters in the Baltic. On Romanov’s last official visit to Helsinki just weeks before Chernenko’s death, he got so drunk that “the Soviet embassy doctor had been required to restore him to a condition suitable for making a speech.”
²²

This was a far cry from Gorbachev’s temperate temperament: even during the well-lubricated banquets of the Brezhnev era, Gorbachev limited himself to two glasses of wine—never more—before diplomatically deflecting pressures to drink.
²³
How much Romanov’s alcoholism and dictatorial personality harmed his candidacy is difficult to tell, but his vices certainly accentuated Gorbachev’s virtues.

Firsthand accounts largely agree that the weighty endorsement of longtime Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was the determining factor in the selection of Gorbachev as general secretary. Known in the West as “Mr. Nyet,” the hard-nosed diplomat seemed an unlikely ally from the old guard, but as it turned out, Gromyko was even more “dry” than Gorbachev. In circumstances eerily similar to Gorbachev’s, Gromyko gave up drinking at a very young age after his boyhood friend nearly died from sneaking bootleg
samogon
.
²⁴
Gromyko shared not only Gorbachev’s disdain for liquor but also his conviction that the Soviet system desperately needed fundamental reform—starting with vodka politics.

In his
Memoirs
, Gromyko described working closely with Gorbachev and having “intensive discussions on the most varied aspects of domestic and foreign policy” with the experienced and capable reformer.
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And so when Gromyko rose to sing Gorbachev’s praises, not a voice was raised in opposition. Gorbachev was selected unanimously.

Historians widely assume that that the Soviet economy was such a mess that whoever came to power in 1985 would face the same need for a major overhaul, and that the only thing that prevented it was the older generation. Accordingly, the subsequent reform program “was not a personal whim of Gorbachev” but, rather, “a natural result of the emergence of a new generation of leaders.”
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But there was nothing “natural,” “inevitable,” or “inescapable” about reform just because there was demand for it.
²⁷
There also needed to be a supply: a leader willing to initiate reforms. Otherwise the stagnant Soviet system could have continued to limp along, just as it had under the three previous
leaders. Suggesting that the younger generation was united in demanding reform—and that the older generation was uniformly against it—is not just misleading; it is wrong. There were influential members of the older generation—like Andropov and Gromyko—who understood the need for change. Likewise there were those in the younger generation, including Romanov, who were more content with the stability, corruption, and alcoholism of the Brezhnevite past.

From Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan in 1928 through the Twelfth Five-Year Plan in 1986, the most consistent predictor of the willingness to undertake meaningful reforms of the Soviet administrative-command economy was not age or generation, but rather the leader’s relation to the bottle. It follows, then, that the more important impetus to reform was not that Gorbachev was young but that he was dry.