Vodka Politics (32 page)

“There is nothing patriotic in the liquor trade,” Lenin railed on the pages of
Zarya
(
Dawn
) in 1901 in perhaps his most scathing critique of the “notorious” imperial liquor monopoly:

What benefits our official and semi-official press expected from it! Increased revenues, improved quality, and less drunkenness! But instead of increased revenues, all we actually have so far is an increase in the price of spirits, confusion in the budget, and the impossibility of determining the exact financial results of the whole operation. Instead of improvement in quality, we have deterioration; and the government is hardly likely to impress the public with its reports, displayed in the entire press, of the successful results of the “degustation” of the new “government vodka.” Instead of less drunkenness, we have more illicit trading in spirits, augmented police incomes from this trading, the opening of liquor shops over the protests of the population, which is petitioning against their being opened, and increased drunkenness in the streets. But above all, what a new and gigantic field is opened for official arbitrariness, tyranny, favor-currying and embezzlement by the creation of this new state enterprise, with a turnover off many millions of rubles, and the creation of a whole army of new officials! It is the invasion of a locust-swarm of officials, boot-licking, intriguing, plundering, wasting seas of ink and reams upon reams of paper. [It] is nothing but an attempt to cloak in legal forms the striving to grab the fattest possible slices of the state pie, a desire which is so prevalent in our provinces, and which, in view of the unrestrained power of the officials and the gagging of the people, threatens to intensify the reign of tyranny and plunder.
⁷⁶

Lenin’s condemnations, often written in exile, continued throughout the end of the tsarist regime. In 1908, when the imperial government effectively increased the price of vodka by 42 kopecks per pail to generate an additional 185 million rubles in needed revenue, Lenin blasted it as a foremost “specimen” of the autocracy’s “predatory economy.”
⁷⁷

He also blasted the government’s use of alcohol as a mechanism of social control. For instance, in response to the 1905 Revolution—generally considered a dress rehearsal for 1917—Tsar Nicholas II conceded to create a representative parliament and constitution in order to keep his tenuous hold on power. Much of the revolt took place in St. Petersburg, but there were uprisings in cities throughout the empire. Regiments had to be called in from St. Petersburg to suppress the uprising in Moscow, as the imperial authorities admitted that only perhaps one-third of the 15,000-strong Moscow garrison was “reliable.” For those who were wavering toward the cause of socialist revolution, Lenin described how the government bribed and “doped them with vodka,” thus removing the least reliable “through treachery and violence. And we must have the courage to confess,” Lenin declared, “openly and unreservedly, that in this respect we lagged behind the government.”
⁷⁸

Beyond such revolutionary polemics and abstract economic critiques, Lenin—much like his idol Chernyshevsky—occasionally delivered his message of revolutionary struggle through vignettes of everyday life in the tsarist system. In one such case, Lenin recounted the trial in the murder of Nizhny-Novgorod peasant Timofei Vozdukhov, who was arrested, hatless, while lodging a complaint with the regional governor that earlier he had been mistreated and assaulted by the local police. Determining that he was “drinking but was not drunk,” the governor’s superintendent turned the man back over to the police, who took the quiet, not-drunk Vozdukhov to the drunk tank, where (according to witness testimonial) he was beaten to death by—ironically—three policemen “who had been continuously drinking in the police-station since the first day of Easter week” three days earlier. Intent on “teaching the peasant a lesson,” the drunken officers bloodied his face and body and broke ten of his ribs before hauling the passive and repentant Vozdukhov to the infirmary, where he soon died of a brain hemorrhage. Lenin replayed the courtroom drama to highlight the everyday brutality of the imperial police as well as shortcomings in the autocratic judicial system that let the officers off with a minor slap on the wrist.
⁷⁹
Like Chernyshevsky, here too Lenin’s portrayal of alcohol, corruption, and brutality were a none-too-subtle avatar of the entire autocratic system. Of course, despite such creativity, Lenin’s direct language won him about as much adulation as a writer among literature critics as Chernyshevsky’s overwrought prose in
What Is to Be Done?
… which is to say, none at all.

Lenin was resolute when it came to dealing with vodka. Like all manner of Marxists, liberals, nihilists, and other critics of the tsarist autocracy in the late nineteenth century, Lenin agreed that alcohol was a scourge on Russian society—the parasitic means by which the state and the capitalist elites at once both subordinated and leached off the impoverished workers and peasants. “The proletariat as a rising class does not need drunkenness that would deafen or provoke
them,” Lenin proclaimed. “They need only clarity, clarity, and again clarity. The communist upbringing of the working class requires the rooting-out of all vestiges of the capitalist past, especially such a dangerous vestige as drunkenness.”
⁸⁰

As it turns out, Lenin’s vodka politics were not unusual in this regard. Using alcohol to speak out against the excesses of the Russian autocratic system was not a tactic reserved for communist extremists. The ubiquity of alcoholism and degeneracy in imperial Russia, and the extent to which it was promoted for the benefit of the government, was evident to sapient observers from across the political spectrum. Liberals, Marxists, democrats, nihilists, and others—anyone who felt that the people were being held back by the autocratic system, or anyone who had a personal axe to grind with the tsar, were quick to point out the unseemly contradiction of making the prosperity of the Russian state dependent on the misery of its people.

11

Drunk at the Front: Alcohol and the Imperial Russian Army

For all of the derision heaped upon the autocratic state for exploiting and encouraging the drunkenness of the lower classes, even stalwart opponents of tsarism like Chernyshevsky acknowledged that vodka revenues were not an end in themselves but rather a means to provide for defense, military expansion, and the greater glory of the Russian empire.
¹
And many Russian soldiers fought for that glory with ice in their veins… and vodka in their bloodstream.

Who could blame them? In the barracks, trenches, or at sea, drinking boosts camaraderie and morale. It numbs the senses of soldiers ordered to kill their fellow man while surrounded by carnage and bloodshed. Unfortunately, drunkenness also undercuts military preparedness, leads to bad strategic decisions, and undermines the effectiveness of the military as a fighting force—in some cases, with disastrous results. By the mid-nineteenth century, the autocratic vodka politics that had long enriched the state while wedding the people to the bottle started backfiring on the Russian state by corroding its military might.

Russia’s long military history is filled with alcohol-laced turning-points. One could begin with the 1506 Trojan Horse–style ambush of Muscovite Grand Prince Vasily III’s army during a siege of the Khanate of Kazan. Outgunned and outmanned, the cunning Kazanites built an encampment outside their city walls and sent their bravest fighters to hide in the hills. When the Muscovites approached, the people fled as though in panic, leaving the Russians to pillage the camp, eating and drinking their fill. Once their guests were sufficiently drunk, the khan’s army hacked the Muscovites to pieces. Only a handful staggered back to the boats on the Volga to take news of the complete destruction of the Russian army back to the Kremlin.
²
Six years later Vasily III led his reconstituted army into battle against the grand duchy of Lithuania. After six weeks laying siege to the imposing Smolensk kremlin, Vasily “strengthened the heart of his army with beer and mead” before his decisive midnight assault, which ended with the decimation of the drunken Muscovites by Lithuanian cannon fire.
³

Of course a few hundred soldiers assaulting a medieval fortress is a far cry from modern European warfare. By the nineteenth century, military tactics and technology had improved dramatically. The armaments and artillery borne of the Industrial Revolution made killing at a distance ever easier. Wars got bloodier. They also got bigger and more expensive, as the mercenaries and professional warriors of yesteryear gave way to mass armies of peasant conscripts. In Russia this meant that the empire’s awesome military might increasingly relied on the very alcoholic peasantry it had for ages been plying with vodka.
⁴

By the eighteenth century, mass conscription was essential to nationalism and the modern nation-state as we know them. Before the American and French revolutions,
volunteering
to fight and die for your country was almost unheard of. Before then, most military recruits were desperate for work or were fleeing an even worse fate elsewhere. Others were forced or tricked into service. “Throughout the eighteenth century,” Margaret Levi explains, “a single shilling pressed into the hand of a drunken man in a public house by a recruiting sergeant constituted enlistment of a soldier in the British army.”
⁵

Throughout Europe liquor was the recruiter’s favorite tool. While attending the University of Marburg in Germany, the luminary Russian scientist, writer, poet, and philosopher Mikhail Lomonosov—for whom the prestigious Moscow State University would later be named—similarly fell in with a Prussian recruiter in 1740. The morning after a night of heavy drinking, Lomonosov found himself in the uniform of a Prussian cavalry soldier. His protests that he wasn’t even German did not matter to the officer.
⁶

Universal conscription was first introduced in France in 1793, and within a decade it provided Napoleon’s Grande Armée with more than a half-million fighters. Armed with the most formidable military the world had ever seen, Napoleon was intent on subduing virtually all of Europe.
⁷
The army of Russian Tsar Alexander I was pretty much the only fighting force standing in his way.

Russia still used Peter the Great’s system of conscription: divide the country into blocks of peasant households from which either serf owners or the village councils chose which unfortunate boys would be drafted to fulfill the villages’ communal obligations. As Russia’s territory and population grew, so too did its pool of available recruits, with an incredible 1.5 million men serving in the army in the twenty-five years of Tsar Alexander I’s reign.
⁸

“Conscription,” writes Russian military historian William C. Fuller Jr., “was a species of death.” So much so that women sang funeral dirges outside assembly points for the young call-ups who—torn from families and friends—were likely never to return. The Russian conscript faced not only the enemy’s bayonets and bullets but also epidemic diseases, supply shortages, and his superiors’ brutal discipline. Then there’s the military’s machismo culture of heavy drinking that—through hazing and ridicule—forced even the most temperate recruit to the bottle.
⁹

Even in modern-day Russia, the military seems stuck in the distant past. Rather than a volunteer army, today’s Russian armed forces continue to rely on military conscripts, and the brutality, corruption, and alcoholism in the ranks have only gotten worse. “Even if you are not an alcoholic when you go into the Army,” a Soviet soldier claimed in the 1970s, “you are when you come out.”
¹⁰

But certainly, when the troops left the barracks for the front they dropped the bottle to pick up a rifle, right? Alcohol itself could not be a decisive factor on battlefield… could it?

Did Vodka Beat Napoleon?

Certainly there are any number of factors that contribute to the success or failure of a military campaign: from training, equipment, and strategy to topography, weather, and even disease. Yet could it be that the insatiable ambitions of the great Napoleon Bonaparte and his unstoppable army were ultimately subdued not so much by the heroism of the Russian people as by their liquor?

Having vanquished most continental powers, Napoleon first confronted the formidable Russian army in 1805 on the fields outside Austerlitz (now Slavkov u Brna in the present-day Czech Republic). The French heard of the Russian soldier’s fearsome reputation for “blind obedience,” “savage valor,” and ability to hold his liquor.
¹¹
Yet that reputation was earned defeating “mere” Turks and Persians—the Grande Armée would be another matter. According to Napoleon’s spies, the heretofore menacing Russian army “was marked by riot and intemperance” and spent the eve of battle “in drunkenness, noise and revelry.” Later writers suggested that Napoleon chose to commence the battle at dawn, when “the fumes of brandy had not yet evaporated from the heads of the soldiers, [which] may have assisted to produce, or at least to heighten the disasters of that fatal day.”
¹²
Despite being vastly outnumbered, the French dealt the Russians and their Austrian allies a quick, humiliating, and total defeat. The resulting Peace of Pressburg marked the pinnacle of Napoleon’s power: not only did it knock Austria out of the war; it also dissolved the Third Coalition against France and effectively ended the Holy Roman Empire.