Vodka Politics (24 page)

Compounding the problem, the moral authority of the priest—along with any entreaties to temperance—was undercut by the fact that on
pomoch
’ Sundays he himself poured the liquor until his parishioners were drunk. If the priest ever browbeat his flock for their drunkenness, he would surely never get their “help” again. So in order to get the fields plowed and repairs done, the priest would take a drink—then another, and another—until he became just as sodden as his sinful flock. Meanwhile, the drunken handiwork was often so shoddy that it had to be redone almost immediately, beginning the whole sad process anew. In the end, the priest spent an unforgivable amount of money on vodka and materials and got nothing but headaches and hangovers.
⁵⁹

The Orthodox Church’s multitude of holidays presented further opportunities for the priest’s undoing. During Easter, for instance, the village priest proceeded from house to house with his holy icons. At each peasant hut the distinguished guest was offered food and drink. Lest he offend the master of the house and ensure never receiving his help in the future, the priest dared not refuse the gift of vodka. “By the time he has gone through the whole village even the most cautious, sturdiest soul hardly has the strength to perform his duty,” Bellyustin reported. “A priest who is less cautious or whose constitution is weaker simply passes out. And what scandals do not occur when the priest is in such a condition!”
⁶⁰

How could the clergy ever escape such omnipresent intemperance? As early as the 1630s Adam Olearius described inebriated priests who stumbled through the streets dispensing blessings in their underwear, having pawned their cloaks. “Since such spectacles may be seen daily,” he claimed, “none of the Russians are astonished by them.”
⁶¹
Two and a half centuries later, Bellyustin painted a similar picture of the typical village priest as the ever-present, unwanted, and drunken guest who long ago surrendered his piety to drunkenness, bribery, and thievery. These pervasive, corrupting influences provide insight into the infamous Russian proverb: “All steal except Christ” (and its blasphemous addendum: “and He would too, if his hands weren’t nailed to the cross.”)
⁶²

Virtually the only group beyond reproach was the sect of so-called “Old Believers,” who were persecuted as heretics for resisting the seventeenth-century ecumenical reforms of the Russian church. These most conservative “schismatics” (
raskolniki
) of the Orthodox faith fiercely rejected the alterations to sacred texts and traditional rites that followed the great church schism (
raskol
) of the mid-seventeenth century as well as such modern social innovations as tobacco and distilled liquors. As a result, while the Russian authorities openly oppressed—exiled, imprisoned, even tortured—the Old Believers as a threat to both church and state, in their seclusion they established a reputation for incorruptibility, industriousness, temperance, and integrity. It is a blunt, yet telling illustration that the imperial Russian state would for so long and so vociferously condemn those dedicated to honesty, purity, and sobriety as a threat to the corrupt system of autocratic governance, which promoted thriftlessness, indolence, and inebriety.
⁶³

Since feudal Russia was so vast, so poor in capital, and so lacking in effective administration, such coercion-intensive measures like vodka tax farming made sense. Unfortunately, continuing to rely on the unscrupulous tax farmers to quench the insatiable thirst of the imperial treasury only entrenched Russia’s twin miseries of alcohol and corruption. “Upon closer inspection,” concludes the influential
Kolokol
exposé that placed tax reform on the political agenda, “the treasury receives so little benefit in proportion to the losses of the people, that
all would likely say with revulsion—was all of this worth the soiling of our conscience and honor?”
⁶⁴

A Tenacious Legacy

Corruption is a weed that grows in the cracks between the public and the private, between the political and the economic. So it makes sense that the roots of this weed go down all the way to the feudal origins of the Russian state, where these distinctions were blurred: when the interests of the state reflected those of the ruling classes and private profits were interlaced with public taxes in the name of the state.
⁶⁵

But what does this history lesson tell us about Russia’s corrupt governance
sistema
today and the prospects for Navalny and the anti-corruption movement? Today, as back then, the divisions between politics and business in Russia are horribly blurred. Kremlin politics has taken on a distinctly feudal character—a ruling caste dominating a system of vassals in which political loyalty and profitable public positions are bought and sold. Then, as now, corrupt practices among the political leadership provide a model for the rest of society—which in turn casts doubt on who is actually in control: the government or the agents of corruption? Then, as now, the state is saddled with an inefficient, corrupt, and ever-growing bureaucracy that nobody designed and nobody seems to control.
⁶⁶
Now, as then, the resulting economic incentive is to invest in bribes rather than legitimate business practices to spare harassment by the authorities, which only further entrenches these practices. Now, as then, this systemic corruption hinders economic development by obstructing investment and inhibiting trade.
⁶⁷

Intriguingly, there is implicit acknowledgment by contemporary Kremlin opponents that now, as then, vodka politics is part of the problem. In his closing defense of a politically motivated embezzlement trial in July 2013—allegedly orchestrated to discredit him and prevent him from holding future office—Alexei Navalny declared he would “do everything possible to defeat this feudal regime… under which 83 percent of national wealth belongs to 0.5 percent of the population.” Navalny challenged the judge, those assembled in the courtroom, and those watching the live online broadcast to consider what benefits they’ve seen from skyrocketing oil and gas revenues over the past decade.

Has anyone received access to a better medical care, education? To new apartments? What have we got?… We have only got one thing. You all know the one product that since Soviet time has become more
affordable: vodka. This is why the only thing that is guaranteed to all of us, citizens of this country, is the degradation and the chance of drinking ourselves to death.
⁶⁸

Popular apathy “only helps this disgusting feudal regime, which, like a spider, is sitting in the Kremlin.” In concluding, Navalny declared that indifference toward the corrupt
sistema
only benefits the state and the well-connected few, while putting the rest of “the Russian people on the path of degradation and drinking to death, and to take away all of the national wealth from the country,” just as in imperial Russia.
⁶⁹
Well then—if the parallels are so stark, what does history suggest in terms of the prospects for genuine reform? Here too, the outlook is gloomy.

Following its embarrassing military defeat in the Crimean War in 1855, the great reformer, Tsar Alexander II, enacted sweeping reforms: revamping the military, judiciary, bureaucracy, and financial system and abolishing both serfdom and the tax farm. But corruption has a cockroach-like tenacity in systems of personalized power: even though the cause of obligatory corruption was gone, the corrupt officials remained, finding other dubious paths to riches. For instance, the notorious, aforementioned tax farmer Vasily Kokorev simply moved into distilling while using his government contacts to snag upwards of eight million rubles.
⁷⁰
What’s more, these reforms did nothing to stop the petty corruption of the tavern keepers, who still watered down and undermeasured drinks while maintaining a lucrative pawn-and-credit trade on the side. It did nothing to remedy the infiltration of vodka, money, and influence into Russia’s traditional institutions of local self-government and the Orthodox Church.

Simply changing the method of tax collection could not undo generations of systemic corruption. Even approaching the dawn of the twentieth century, German author Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna explained that the highest civil servants appointed by Emperor Alexander III were “the most hopeless mediocrites, bigots or mere seekers of wealth and position” and explained how below this ruling mediocracy toils

an innumerable army of minor officials, of whom many are good, intelligent, honest men, who, however are compelled by the acting
system
of government to act mostly in the capacity of tyrants, of stiflers of every token of personal independence and intellectual life, and agents for pressing taxes out of the economically exhausted population. The better part of these officials try to avoid doing, so far as they possibly can, what the system forces them to do; the worse part try to turn their power into a means for personal profit; and this creates a most unnatural position of things in the country: both parts practically (though silently) teach the population that laws are created in order not to be observed.
⁷¹

For Samson-Himmelstjerna, the disconnect between the corrupt, out-of-touch leadership and the suffering of the Russian people was most vividly illustrated in 1892, as the government debated resurrecting the reviled vodka tax farm amid a devastating famine along the Volga that claimed nearly a half-million lives. To the horrors of typhus, scurvy, and cholera the imperial ministry of finance sought to add the burden of a salt tax and the vodka tax farm—“those two scourges of the unfortunate nation, that contributed so much to its impoverishment and demoralisation—speak for themselves of what is the present Tsar’s government from the economic point of view.”
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Since corrupt individuals and practices outlast the reasons for their formation, generations of imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have had to grapple with these consequences. Indeed, placing debates over present-day anti-corruption measures in this deep historical context underscores corruption’s intractability and the inadequacy of proposed remedies.

On the one hand, many of the practical policy suggestions for grappling with corruption in present day Russia—like empowering autonomous business organizations, redrawing legal districts, or rotating judges to reduce the potential for patronage—are simply not enough to meaningfully overcome the problem. Even the monumental reforms enacted by Alexander II—which fundamentally attacked the roots of systemic corruption—hardly made a dent. Why should we expect greater results from smaller, more easily circumvented initiatives like rotating judges?

On the other hand, academic accounts claiming that—theoretically—corruption can be restrained by “strengthening the rule of law” or by empowering “accountable local self-government” may well be true, but these suggestions are vague and impractical.
⁷³
Virtually every Russian leader over the past hundred years—including some of the world’s most powerful autocrats—has vowed a war on corruption, and each one has failed. “
Blat
is higher than Stalin,” as the old Soviet saying goes—and it isn’t far from the truth.
⁷⁴
Patronage, bribery, and corruption are the legacies of Russian state building. Along with the corrupt officials who secured positions of economic and political power through such means—they are also the intractable foundations of the autocratic state itself. They serve the needs of the autocracy, which in turn relies on them.
⁷⁵

The only conclusions for true reform, then, are the most pessimistic ones. Some suggest that real change will come with only a complete overhaul of the social and political systems that make corrupt behavior in people’s economic interest. Not only are such wholesale structural changes in contemporary Russia unrealistic, but history suggests that they are not adequate.
⁷⁶
To root out corruption, Russia would need to completely demolish its political, economic, and social structures, develop a vibrant economy that makes bribery and graft less vital to a household’s bottom line,
and
adjust to cultural norms that no longer
tolerate the rewards of position.
⁷⁷
As with drinking cultures, cultures of corruption change only glacially over generations—and this says nothing about how such mass socio-cultural re-education could ever be done.

The sad prognosis is that Putin and every Russian autocrat who follows will continue the eternal battle with corruption.
⁷⁸
And whether genuine or halfhearted, every such attempt is likewise doomed to fail until they meaningfully confront the nexus of alcohol, corruption, and autocracy that constitutes Russian vodka politics.

9

Vodka Domination, Vodka Resistance… Vodka Emancipation?

From Peter the Great onward, the history of modern Russia is often told in terms of its imperial conquests: an expansive empire searching for warm-water ports from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and eastward to the Pacific Ocean. These geopolitical ambitions brought Russia in conflict with Swedes and Turks, Poles and Persians, and the empires of Japan and Britain. While
realpolitik
characterized imperial Russian foreign policy, the domestic foundations for these conquests were provided by
vodkapolitik
. Russia’s great power status was built not only by her massive military but also by the Russian peasantry who paid dearly to support it.