Vodka Politics (38 page)

Beyond the military, the civil rights enshrined in the October Manifesto unleashed the pent-up temperance activism that had been building since the boycotts of the 1850s. “Words were straining to be free but were held back in vices,” wrote Dr. Aleksandr Korovin in October 1905. “We spoke earlier of drunkenness but not in connection with the circumstances that generated it.” No longer muzzled by censorship, writers who once masked their criticism of the government with allusions to alcohol now freely joined their foreign counterparts in laying blame for the poverty, ignorance, and drunkenness of the Russian people squarely on their government.
²³

Shortly before his untimely death in 1894, Tsar Alexander III charged his young Minister of Finance Sergei Witte with reforming the system of excise taxes that had been levied on vodka since the abolition of the tax farm in the 1860s. Gradually replacing the excise tax system with a crown monopoly on the retail sale of vodka, Witte declared that his system “must be directed first of all toward increasing popular sobriety, and only then can it concern itself with the treasury.”
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While the gentry reclaimed their right to distill alcohol, it could only be sold to the state, which controlled the entire retail market—ostensibly in the interest of temperance—while simultaneously making a hefty profit. In a now-familiar pattern, the allure of easy money was too great, and the cause of temperance was sacrificed to the interests of the treasury. The tsar’s “drunken budget” became a favorite target of critics and revolutionaries, including Vladimir Lenin. In 1913, even Sergei Witte—the architect of the vodka monopoly—condemned his own creation, claiming it had been corrupted by his replacement as minister of finance, Vladimir Kokovtsov.
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Also under fire after 1905 was the handmaiden of the imperial vodka monopoly—the Guardianship of Public Sobriety (
Popechitel’stvo o narodnoi trezvosti
). This sole nationwide temperance organization was an appendage of the ministry of finance and as such never promoted abstinence from vodka, only “moderation.”
²⁶
For true advocates of temperance like Tolstoy, the Guardianship was an abomination: its activities were dictated from on high, making it unable to tap into whatever zeal for temperance existed at the local level. Ever mistrustful of grass-roots activism, the Guardianship and its leaders refused to cooperate with the smattering of small, independent, genuine temperance societies emerging
from elite intelligentsia circles concerned with peasant health and welfare, the concerned medical community, or even the church.
²⁷
When the powerful Witte went to meet with Tolstoy, who made temperance the cornerstone of his civic religion (see
chapter 10
), Tolstoy angrily refused to even meet him. “Temperance societies established by a government that is not ashamed that it itself sells the poison ruining the people through its own officials seem to me to be either hypocritical, silly, or misguided—or perhaps all three—something with which I can no way sympathize,” Tolstoy wrote. “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 spiritual well-being of millions of people.”
²⁸
Tolstoy was hardly alone: both liberal and conservative parliamentarians, such as representative Mikhail Chelyshev of Samara, openly derided the Guardianship and the “drunken budget” on the floor of the new Duma itself.
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The politicization of the alcohol question was on full display at the First All-Russian Congress on the Struggle against Drunkenness held in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1909–10. Officially convened by President of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin, thousands of delegates representing all manner of interests were invited to discuss the alcohol problem. Representatives of the church, physicians’ groups, women’s groups, trade unions, village
zemstva
and city
dumas
confronted officials from the ministry of finance, the Guardianship of Public Sobriety, ministers, and members of the state Duma. Alongside other workers’ representatives, Lenin sent a Bolshevik delegation to the congress. As you might expect, conflict was inevitable. The scene devolved into angry confrontations between supporters of the system and their radical opponents. The clergy angrily stormed out, rabble-rousing workers’ delegates were arrested, and scholars who linked alcoholism to poverty were barred by the police from presenting their research. The Congress’s final report on the liquor monopoly was unequivocal: “Down with the whole system.”
³⁰
Reported widely, the debates drew considerable interest throughout the empire—especially the workers’ condemnations of the Guardianship and vodka monopoly for enriching the state and the landlords at the expense of the people. Before 1905, Russia’s autocratic vodka politics could only be alluded to; after 1905 the system was laid bare for all to see.

Many in the tsar’s inner circle were steadily pushing the tsar toward temperance. Nicholas held fond memories of his uncle Sergei, who actively patronized temperance before his untimely detonation. His widow was still active in the cause, as were Aleksandr, Prince of Oldenburg, Prince Meshchersky, and the Grand Duke Konstantin, all of whom pleaded with the tsar to wean the treasury from its unhealthy reliance on vodka revenues while weaning his subjects from their unhealthy reliance on alcohol.

No consideration of palace intrigues under the last tsar would be complete without the “Mad Monk,” Grigory Rasputin. The story of how this dubious Siberian mystic won influence with the royal family for his “miraculous” ability to heal the hemophilia of the tsarevich Alexei is well known. Equally well known are Rasputin’s infamous debauches: his tremendous clout won him many female admirers within the aristocracy, who willingly partook in the drunken orgies of this “holy man” who preached grace through sin.
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So it is quite ironic that the strongest admonishments to temperance and prohibition came from Russia’s most infamous drunken and lustful debaucher. “It is unbefitting for a Tsar to deal in vodka and make drunkards out of honest people,” Rasputin bluntly said. “The time has come to lock up the Tsar’s saloons.”
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It seems that, over time, such entreaties—both public and private—persuaded Tsar Nicholas II that the vodka monopoly was the root of Russia’s economic, social, and political problems. After the upheavals of 1905, the tsar’s excessive drinking moderated greatly. To his ministers, the normally hands-off tsar expressed dissatisfaction over efforts to combat drunkenness and demanded research on the liquor question. By the 1910s, Nicholas was a full convert: on an extensive tour of his domain in 1913, he claimed to be moved by “the painful pictures of public distress, the desolation of homes, the dissipation of economies, the inevitable consequences of drunkenness.”
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In January 1914 Nicholas fired the man synonymous with the loathsome monopoly—Finance Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov—for ruthlessly squeezing every last ruble from the vodka trade. In his stead Nicholas appointed Pyotr Lvovich Bark, with the charge of no longer making “the treasury dependent on the ruination of the spiritual and economic forces of the majority of My faithful subjects.” Bark’s mission to reform the very foundations of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics would be preempted by the outbreak of World War I later that year, which led to the demise of the entire tsarist system itself.
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Great War And The Royal Family

On June 28, 1914, the presumptive heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip—a nineteen-year-old nationalist dedicated to the liberation of the south Slavic (Yugoslav) peoples from Austrian rule. The entanglement of military alliances in the Balkans quickly drew all of the major European powers into a conflagration that would claim sixteen million lives, devastate an entire continent, and see the Romanov dynasty sacrificed to the flames of revolution.

Exactly one month after the assassination Austria declared war on Russia’s ally, Serbia. When Russia mobilized for war, Austria and Germany declared war
on Russia, too. While Britain, France, and later the United States joined with Russia in fighting the so-called Central Powers on the Western Front, Russia stood alone in confronting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in the east.

Suddenly facing the challenges of war, Nicholas II turned (as usual) to the royal family—quickly appointing his cousin Nikolasha as supreme commander of the entire Russian military despite his never having commanded armies in the field. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s temperance proclamation ringing in his ears and the drunken debacle with Japan on his mind, Nikolasha requested an emergency prohibition on the sale of alcohol in areas actively being mobilized for war. His petition was granted by the temperance-minded tsar, marking Russia’s first steps down the disastrous road toward prohibition and revolution.
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Nicholas romanticized the discipline and honor of the military. For him, “orderliness was a cardinal virtue.” So it makes sense that arguments about prohibition promoting discipline and virtue in the ranks resonated with the tsar.
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Events of the next few weeks seemingly confirmed the wisdom of the decision. The high command received nothing but glowing news about the mobilization measures. Field reports assured the leadership that prohibition facilitated the deployment of troops to the front in half the time expected, well before their German and Austrian enemies were prepared to meet them. Accolades from domestic and foreign temperance advocates flooded the tsar, lauding his benevolence in adopting prohibition. Witnessing the benefits to their once-alcoholic fathers, sons, and husbands, women across Russia urged his highness to make prohibition permanent.
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T
SAR
N
ICHOLAS
II
DISEMBARKS
H
IS
A
UTOMOBILE ON A
V
ISIT TO THE
F
RONT
,
CIRCA
1914–15. Commander of the Armed Forces, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov (“Nikolasha,” right) stands in the car with Count Dobrinsky. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Bain News Service.

“With the closing of the vodka-shops Russia has become sober,” wrote one British observer. “True, it is a sobriety enforced, and drunkenness is too inherent a trait of the Russian for this temporary abstinence to be taken as anything but a break in the usual pastime, yet even if it is regarded as nothing better, it is certainly a sign of miraculous times.”
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Still, the prohibition was both temporary and partial: it did not apply to the aristocracy’s well-to-do restaurants, and it applied only in militarized districts. Plus, so long as vodka still provided between one-quarter to one-third of the empire’s budget (
figure 9.1
), swearing off liquor revenues would be financial suicide. What’s more, a complete prohibition would infuriate both powerful nobles and Romanov family members who, like Grand Duke Nikolasha, owed much of their wealth to their private distilleries.
³⁹

Bolstered by the apparent good news from all sides, in August 1914 the tsar decreed that the partial, emergency prohibition be extended for the duration of the war, again prompting adulation from bootlicks throughout the government. Foremost among them was Finance Minister Bark, who was charged with the utterly impossible task of weaning the empire from its primary source of revenue at its time of greatest crisis. Telling the tsar exactly what he wanted to hear, Bark informed Nicholas that “the difficulties of the Treasury are only temporary and that a judicious financial policy will enable us to overcome them.”
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Quickly convening a high-level government commission that included Bark, the tsar’s trusted former Prime Minister Sergei Witte, economists, academics, and Duma representatives, Bark presented his sovereign with a most audacious plan.

By early September, the commission devised an alternative budget without vodka. Assuming that prohibition would miraculously unleash the long pent-up industriousness of the entire country, it forecast tremendous economic growth, even as millions of able-bodied men abandoned their jobs for the front lines. With such growth, they assumed that the hole in the budget left by the loss of vodka revenues could easily be patched with a slapdash mix of foreign loans, war bonds, and taxes on income, textiles, transport and tobacco. “Well, we have stopped the gap without difficulty or effort,” Bark later reassured foreign journalists. Even with the cost of supporting the largest army ever put in the field, Bark explained how easily “the problem was solved. I increased some few taxes during the remaining months of last year [1914], and I found that the solvency of the peasants had been raised very considerably by the law prohibiting the consumption of alcohol.”
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Bark’s arrogance was matched only by his obliviousness. It was a fantastic proposal—in that it was pure fantasy.