Vodka Politics (30 page)

Indeed, as critics have noted, alcoholism “runs like a red thread throughout the novel.” Marmeladov is only the first noteworthy drunkard. Both the rural village setting of Raskolnikov’s horse-beating dream and the dingy urban thoroughfares of St. Petersburg are littered with drunkards, young and old, male and female. Raskolnikov is often mistaken for a drunk, and he frequently meets friends in taverns, where they get him “to drink like a pig.” By contrast, the diligent police investigator Porfiry Petrovich makes a point of noting that he does not drink at all. Even the most positive male character in the story, Razumikhin (whose name in Russian connotes level-headed reason), is a heavy drinker: stumbling drunk when he meets his friend’s family and downing bottles of beer even while caring for his sick friend, Raskolnikov. To repeat a now-familiar theme, Dostoevsky stresses how Razumikhin was “extremely worried by the fact that… while drunk, he let out to Raskolnikov that he was suspected of the murder.”
³⁸

As in
What Is to Be Done?
Dostoevsky’s allusions to drunkenness are understandable against not only the backdrop of mass inebriation but also the ongoing public debates in the “thick journals” over alcohol, poverty, and disease. Herzen’s
Kolokol
, Chernyshevsky’s
Soveremmenik
, and even Dostoevsky’s
Vremya
(
Time
) sparred over various proposals to address the liquor problem, the appropriateness of the state’s involvement in the liquor trade, and the morality of basing the economic well-being of the state on the degradation of its people.
³⁹

While millions have been engrossed by Dostoevsky’s morose exposition on murder and human psychology, most might be surprised that this was not the original intent behind
Crime and Punishment
—nor was that the original title. With his gambling debts piling up, in June 1865, Dostoevsky wrote to the editor Andrei Krayevsky asking for an advance of three thousand rubles for this proposed work. His letter reads: “My novel is called ‘The Drunkards’ and it will be connected with the current problem of drunkenness. Not only is the problem examined, but all of its ramifications are represented, most of all depictions of families, the bringing up of children under these circumstances, and so on.”
⁴⁰
Apparently, this idea didn’t fly, so Dostoevsky folded
The Drunkards
into
Crime and Punishment
by way of the tragedies of Marmeladov and his family.

Dostoevsky’s diaries contain fragments from early drafts of
The Drunkards
, including the following exchange, which sounds downright Chernyshevskian:

—We drink because there is nothing to do.

—You lie!

—It’s because there is no morality.

—Yes, and there is no morality…

—Because for a long time there has been nothing to do.
⁴¹

Were that not enough to make his position clear, Dostoevsky privately confided: “The consumption of alcoholic beverages brutalizes and makes a man savage, hardens him, distracts him from bright thoughts, blunts all good propaganda and above all weakens the will, and in general uproots any kind of humanity.”
⁴²
A close reading of
Crime and Punishment
clearly reveals Dostoevsky’s denunciation of alcohol as an impediment to the blossoming of Russian society.

Contemporaries read it that way, too—including the great Tolstoy, author of such classics as
Anna Karenina
and
War and Peace
. Tolstoy admired
Crime and Punishment
more as a temperance parable than psycho-thriller. Tolstoy demanded that it was alcohol that clouded Raskolnikov’s judgment and led to his inhuman axe murders: “The greatest possible lucidity of thought is particularly important for the correct solution of the question which arises,” wrote Tolstoy, “and it is then that one glass of beer, one smoked cigarette can impair the solution of the problem, hinder its solution, deafen the voice of the conscience, and cause the question to be decided in favor of one’s lower animal nature, as it was with Raskolnikov.”
⁴³

In his famous 1890 essay, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” Tolstoy invoked Raskolnikov to argue that humans have both a physical and a spiritual existence and that they turn to alcohol and drugs to suffocate their higher spirituality, concluding that the entire purpose of drinking was to blind one’s own conscience and put oneself in the state of mind to rape, murder, and rob.
⁴⁴
Like
his predecessors, Tolstoy was a literary realist who exposed social and political inadequacies, and as with Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky, vodka topped that list. Since his international celebrity status afforded him greater leeway with the censors, Tolstoy wrote straightforward nonfiction essays in which he need not cloak his words.

While Tolstoy admitted hating the “bedbug-stinking” Chernyshevsky and his dangerous radicalism, when in 1886 he composed his foremost political treatise he gave it a familiar-sounding title:
What Is to Be Done?
Even given their profound personal and political disagreements, both similarly condemned the tsarist autocracy and capitalist order for profiting from the misery of the lower classes.
⁴⁵

While conventional Marxists highlighted the plight of urban factory workers as the oppressed proletariat, Tolstoy looked to the rural peasantry: “freed” from serfdom, but still burdened by the local landlord, the state, the village commune, and above all, by vodka. “Observe toward autumn how much wealth is gathered together in villages,” Tolstoy began.

Then come the demands of taxes, rents, recruiting; then the temptations of vodka, marriages, feasts, peddlers, and all sorts of other snares; so that in one way or other, this property, in all its various forms, passes into the hands of strangers, and is taken first to provincial towns and from them to the capitals. A villager is compelled to dispose of all these in order to satisfy the demands made upon him, and the temptations offered him, and, having this dispensed his goods, he is left in want, and must follow [to the cities] where his wealth has been taken.
⁴⁶

Once there, the peasant is tempted by sin and alcohol, leading even the most temperate to succumb to drunkenness, poverty, and ruin.

“Let us not deceive ourselves,” Tolstoy wrote in laying bare the motivations of the capitalist bourgeoisie,

all that [the worker] makes and devises he makes and devises for the purposes of the government or of the capitalist and the rich people. The most cunning of his inventions are directly aimed either at injuring the people—as with cannon, torpedoes, solitary confinement cells, apparatus for the spirit monopoly, telegraphs, and so forth, or… for things by which people can be corrupted and induced to part with the last of their money—that is, their last labour—such as, first of all vodka, spirits, beer, opium, and tobacco.
⁴⁷

Tolstoy went to great lengths to underscore how vodka was both the source of the peasant’s poverty and the autocracy’s wealth.

Count Tolstoy’s inward dedication to the common people was matched by an outward one. Born into affluence and plenty, Tolstoy chose to till the land by hand with a simple scythe in a simple tunic, as peasants had done for ages. In the peasant’s blind faith he sought salvation from his own spiritual restlessness and doubt. “Was it reason that helped them to bear the burden of their existence?” asked Tolstoy biographer Henri Troyat. No—it was their unquestioning Christianity. “They drew their courage from the most simple blind faith, as taught by the pope in the little country church with the tarnished gilt cupola. God, like vodka, was to be swallowed at a gulp, without thinking.”
⁴⁸

Tolstoy emulated everything about the peasant except their reliance on alcohol, which clouded their spiritual endeavors. To that end, in 1887, Tolstoy built his own temperance society, the Union against Drunkenness (
Soglasie protiv p’yanstva
), consisting of adherents who pledged not only abstinence from alcohol but also to publicize its harmful effects. As with previous grass-roots temperance activities, the tsarist autocracy refused to officially recognize the organization.

Tolstoy’s temperance was both a moral statement and a political one, as he chastised the Russian Orthodox Church for relations with the tsarist state that hindered the spiritual and material advancement of the people. True Christian dedication—Tolstoy maintained—was based on universal love rather than dogmatism. His resulting pacifism would inspire world leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., and since the state was the sole instrument of warfare, this necessitated also that Tolstoy take an anarchist position against the autocracy. In 1901, the Orthodox Church officially excommunicated the great writer for such blasphemy.
⁴⁹

Blackballed by both church and state, Tolstoy’s authority only grew. One popular joke held that Russia had two tsars: Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy.
⁵⁰
His Christian-anarchist philosophy drew followers both at home and abroad, and his church was built on a foundation of temperance. “Intoxication,” he wrote, “no matter of what kind, is the sin, abandonment to which makes struggle with any other sin impossible; the intoxicated person will not struggle with idleness, nor with list, nor with fornication, nor with the love of power. And so in order to struggle with the other sins, a man must first of all free himself from the sin of intoxication.”
⁵¹

It is impossible to understand Tolstoy without his opposition to alcohol: it was not just the cornerstone of his religion; it was also the basis for his fearless opposition to the Russian autocracy. In November 1896 Tolstoy angrily rebuffed a request to meet with the powerful finance minister, Sergei Witte. Instead Tolstoy wrote Witte—the architect of Russia’s newly reestablished vodka monopoly—arguing that “the chief evil from which mankind suffers and the disorders of life come from the activities of the government.… The
government not only permits but encourages the manufacture and distribution of the poisonous evil of liquor, from the sale of which comes one-third of the budget. In my opinion, if the government really was making every effort for the good of the people, then the first step should be the complete prohibition of the poison which destroys both the physical and the spiritual well-being of millions of people.”
⁵²

It seems we have now come full circle. Despite Tolstoy’s deep loathing for Chernyshevsky and the radicalism he inspired, their critiques of autocracy through vodka are virtually indistinguishable. But instead of facing banishment to Siberia for their opposition, many Tolstoyans within the government—and even the royal family—welcomed the old man’s wisdom, imploring him to advise Tsar Nicholas II to “help save Russia.” Tolstoy replied in the starkest possible terms, writing directly to the tsar that both His state and His alcohol monopoly were guilty of shackling the people. This tension between the autocracy and the people’s progress and well-being could not continue. “That is why it is impossible to maintain this form of government, and the orthodoxy that is attached to it, except by violence,” he concluded.
⁵³

Tolstoy never received a reply from the tsar, though the number of plainclothes secret police observers around his Yasnaya Polyana estate outside Tula increased markedly. Despite the similarity of their denunciations, the state could hardly send the famed Tolstoy to the same Siberian exile that left Chernyshevsky a broken man—leaving him instead to wander the countryside as a monkish and tormented sage in a threadbare peasant’s sheath.
⁵⁴

Taking It To The People

Tolstoy wasn’t alone in seeing Russia’s peasantry as victims of autocracy, capitalism, and vodka. While the count embarked on a lifelong spiritual journey to the countryside, other educated city folk made sporadic—and ultimately unsuccessful—excursions to “the people” in hopes of inciting them to topple the tsar.

Many of these would-be revolutionaries were less inspired by Tolstoy’s pacifism and other-serving Christian asceticism than by the single-minded revolutionary abstinence of Chernyshevsky’s heroes in
What Is to Be Done?
They gave up alcohol, sex, and worldly pleasure as distractions not from spiritual enlightenment (as per Tolstoy) but, rather, from the cause of proletarian revolution. Leaving their comfortable urban dormitories, many so-called
narodniki
(populists) went to the countryside—not to learn from the simple peasant as Tolstoy did—but to overcome their simplicity and ignorance that caused their oppression and misery. All the peasants needed, the
narodniki
thought, was a vanguard of Chernyshevskian “great men” to lead them to revolt. Eventually scuttled by
the imperial authorities, the movement ended in complete failure, partly because its valorization of the rural poor was misplaced. Once in the countryside, the
narodniki
came face to face with the obstacles of autocracy: namely, a population hopelessly mired in superstition and vodka.
⁵⁵

In the tradition of literature-as-political-commentary, another great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev, published his last novel,
Virgin Soil
(1877), on this very theme. Early on Turgenev describes the reality of the village that confronted the
narodniki
newcomers.