Vodka Politics (43 page)

Even as far down the Quay as the Embassy the air was infected with the reek of spirits, and everywhere drunken soldiers lay about, broken bottles littered the streets, the snow was stained rose red and yellow in many places where the wine had been spilt. All through the town the drunken hordes spread themselves, firing indiscriminately at each other or anybody who molested them. Scenes of indescribable horror and disgust took place, the crowds in some instances scooping up the dirty, wine-stained snow, drinking it out of their hands, fighting with each other over the remains.… A drunken soldier stood before one of the huge fires that burned at the corners of all the streets, a broken bottle held in one hand, a pistol in the other, while a Red Guard leaning
on his gun watched him with an indulgent smile. Singing and laughing the soldier swayed, perilously near to the leaping flames, now and then pointing his pistol at the passers-by, cursing them, or laughing at them as they drew nervously away. Still a little farther along another soldier lay face down in the snow, an empty bottle still clutched in one hand, while two little boys stood nervously at a distance, and a third, more courageous, tried to loosen the fast-clasped fingers from the bottle, to see perhaps whether there were a few drops left.
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Before his newspaper
Novaya zhizn
’ (
New Life
) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship (and before he himself became a Bolshevik apologist), in 1917 the liberal writer and critic Maxim Gorky reported how the communist mob looted alcohol stores nightly, falling into the mire “like pigs,” covered in blood from smashed liquor bottles. As for the official claim that “bourgeois provocation” was to blame for the drunken disorder? “It is a blatant lie.” Gorky argued it was the product of the socialist revolution itself—devoid as it was of social consciousness.
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Whatever their source, the constant threat of drunken pogroms was perhaps the new government’s most immediate challenge. “What would you have?” the exasperated People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, told a reporter, throwing up his hands. “The whole of Petrograd is drunk.”
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The new communist government—the Military Revolutionary Committee—took quick and drastic action by forming a new internal security organization to confront the drunken disorder: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter revolution and Sabotage—often referred to simply as the Extraordinary Commission or by its Russian initials “Ch” and “K”: the “CheKa.” Later reorganized as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and then as the Committee for State Security (KGB)—the Soviet secret police was associated with the darkest horrors of totalitarian terror. The most fearful symbol of Soviet repression and intimidation was a massive, fifteen-ton “Iron Felix” statue erected in 1958 in front of Stalin’s NKVD headquarters at the notorious Lubyanka Prison in downtown Moscow. This despised monument to the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was among the first statues toppled when communism collapsed in 1991.

Long before his likeness was immortalized in iron, Dzerzhinsky was charged with mercilessly suppressing the counterrevolutionary vodka threat. “The bourgeoisie perpetuates the most evil crimes,” Lenin wrote Dzerzhinsky in December 1917, “bribing the cast-offs and dregs of society, getting them drunk for pogroms.”
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In Petrograd, all alcohol producers were to immediately disclose the whereabouts of their liquor stores or stand trial before the Military Revolutionary Court. Bootleggers were to be shot on sight. The mammoth collection of liquors and vintage wines in the Winter Palace wine cellars—valued at
$5 million ($91 million in 2013 dollars)—was flooded by an emergency fire battalion, drowning those soldiers too drunk to escape. The frigid waters did little to deter would-be thieves, so the entire collection was later removed to the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt that defended the approaches to the capital and dutifully smashed by Red sailors there.
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“The men who wanted that wine were so mad for it that even machine guns would not keep them back. So the comrade in charge turned the machine guns on the bottles and destroyed them,” described American journalist Anna Louise Strong. “The wine rose to the tops of his hip-boots so that he was wading in it. He used to be a drinker himself before he became a Communist and it hurt him to see that good wine destroyed. But it was necessary to preserve order in Petrograd.”
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The seriousness of vodka’s counterrevolutionary threat was also chronicled in American socialist John Reed’s famous firsthand account,
Ten Days that Shook the World
. Reed even reproduced a Bolshevik order posted throughout the neighborhoods of Vasily Island, just across the Neva River due west of the Winter Palace.

The bourgeoisie has chosen a very sinister method of fighting against the proletariat; it has established in various parts of the city huge wine depots, and distributes liquor among the soldiers, in this manner attempting to sow dissatisfaction in the ranks of the Revolutionary army.

It is herewith ordered to all house committees, that at 3 o’clock, the time set for posting this order, they shall in person and secretly notify the President of the Committee of the Finland Guard Regiment, concerning the amount of wine in their premises.

Those who violate this order will be arrested and given trial before a merciless court, and their property will be confiscated, and the stock of wine discovered will be

BLOWN UP WITH DYNAMITE
2 hours after this warning,

because more lenient measures, as experience has shown, do not bring the desired results.

REMEMBER, THERE WILL BE NO OTHER

WARNINGBEFORE THE EXPLOSIONS.

—
Regimental Committee of the Finland Guard Regiment
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With the city under martial law, Lenin appointed both a commissar to combat drunkenness and pogroms and an official anti-riot committee to aid Dzerzhinsky
and his chekists’ fight against alcohol. Together, their confrontations with drunken instigators often escalated into pitched street battles involving machine guns and armored cars. Outside the Petrov Vodka Factory, for instance, Red Guard detachments sworn to be “sober and loyal to the revolution” clashed with unruly and drunken elements of the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, leaving eleven dead.
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The normally reliable Preobrazhensky Regiment assigned to guard the liquor warehouses “got completely drunk.” The Pavlovsky Regiment also “did not withstand temptation.” Other assigned guards likewise “succumbed.” Armored brigades ordered to disperse inebriated crowds “paraded a little to and fro, and then began to sway suspiciously on their feet.”
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Scenes like these were repeated in Moscow, Saratov, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod, and throughout Russia in the tumultuous months following the October Revolution, forcing authorities to use only their most loyal and untouchable Red Guards to quell the counterrevolutionary alco-disorder. “The duty of the Red Guard,” according to its own pledge, “includes the struggle with drunkenness so as not to allow liberty and revolution to drown in wine.”
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Such extreme countermeasures against vodka were hardly new. A decade earlier, during the so-called dress rehearsal Revolution of 1905, socialist battalions were often infiltrated by royalists and extremists, including the ultra-nationalist “Black Hundreds,” which terrorized would-be revolutionaries by inciting violent pogroms with vodka. Even then, Lenin preached vigilance: “Prepare for the decisive struggle, citizens! We will not allow the Black-Hundred government to use violence against Russia,” he declared. “We shall order our army units to arrest the Black-Hundred heroes who fuddle ignorant people with vodka and corrupt them; we shall commit all those monsters… for public, revolutionary trial by the whole people.”
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Whether aspiring for power in 1905 or maintaining power in 1917, such “practical” defenses only hardened Lenin’s intellectual disdain for alcohol. Like many early socialists, he derided alcohol as a tool of capitalist domination of the working classes, especially in Russia (
chapter 10
). For Lenin, the imperial liquor trade was an “unparalleled and shameless exploitation of the peasantry”; the noble landlord was “a usurer and robber, a beast of prey,” and “village bloodsucker” for promoting the booze trade.
²⁵

“Death is preferable to selling vodka!” Lenin declared prior to the revolution. True to his prohibitionist principles, he held fast to that conviction after seizing power.
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Even with vodka’s counterrevolutionary threat subsiding, Lenin’s ruling Sovnarkom, or Council of People’s Commissars (“commissar” being proletarian-speak for the bourgeois title of “minister”), nationalized all alcohol production facilities and existing alcohol stocks. In 1919, the Sovnarkom forbid distilling “by any means, in any quantity and at any strength”—punishable by confiscation of all property and a minimum of five years in Siberian labor camps.
²⁷

Such draconian penalties were necessary for a Bolshevik government in a fight for survival. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) freed Russia from the nightmare of World War I—and all it cost them was control of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and most of present-day Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. But the horrors of the Great War were replaced by the tragedy of civil war: of Russia’s vast territories, the Bolsheviks effectively controlled only those areas from Petrograd on the Baltic southeast to Astrakhan on the Caspian. In the Urals to the east, the “reds” fought against the “white” royalist forces of Adm. Aleksandr Kolchak and a legion of Czech volunteers. In the Caucasus and Central Asia to the south, they faced British and Turkish forces, white Cossacks, and an indigenous Basmachi rebellion. To the southwest were the white armies of Anton Denikin, Cossacks, Ukrainian separatists, and a well-armed anarchist movement. In the west, they confronted Poles, Germans, and the white armies of Nikolai Yudenich. From the northwest, the Finns advanced on Petrograd. American and British forces occupied the arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the north.

From 1917 through 1923 the Bolsheviks had their hands full. Lenin’s right-hand man Leon Trotsky hastily assembled a Red Army of five million men: mostly peasants and former imperial soldiers who often joined only out of fear that they or their families would be taken hostage or shot—a common terror tactic on both sides.

In this light, the Bolsheviks’ anti-alcohol measures seem only slightly less draconian. This was “War Communism”: everything in their control was mobilized for victory. Trade was abolished. All industries were nationalized. To feed the urban workers, food was requisitioned from the rural peasantry at gunpoint. Bootleggers who distilled grains into vodka were declared enemies of the revolution for sabotaging the state’s food supply and often were imprisoned or shot. Even so, hundreds of thousands of tons of grain were annually made into alcohol, often with the connivance of corrupt local Bolshevik officials. In one town in south-central Russia alone, authorities discovered that the peasants had distilled vodka from grain that could have fed a city of ten thousand people.
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This system may have delivered Red victory in the civil war, but it also produced unthinkable desperation and hardship.

Misery

As the civil war wound down, the human misery left in its wake is difficult to fathom, much less quantify. Four disastrous years of world war killed upwards of three million Russians. The ensuing civil war, red terror, white terror, and Cheka executions claimed at least as many. Another two million fled the country. Then
came epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and Spanish flu claiming millions more. Years of total war destroyed both infrastructure and authority: people did not know who might come the next day to take their food, forcibly conscript them, or senselessly terrorize them. There were no schools, no transportation. Struggling to survive, hungry orphans roamed the rubble-strewn streets of deserted cities. Moscow lost over half its population—Petrograd lost two-thirds. Most fled to the countryside, but even there they had no incentive to farm or produce, as anything they reaped would likely be torn from them. In the early 1920s, Russia’s agricultural output was less than half of what it was before the Great War—with its factories in ruins, industrial output was less than twenty percent. Within a decade, the national income of Russia—one of the world’s greatest powers—was only forty percent of what it was in 1913, “a fall of the productive forces,” as one economic historian describes it, that “is unexampled in the history of mankind.”
²⁹
And to this laundry list of horrors, we now add famine.

As the Bolsheviks consolidated control in the spring of 1921, the Volga basin grappled with a crippling drought. In normal times a peasant family held a small surplus of grain to get through a bad harvest: they might go hungry, but they wouldn’t starve. But with the terror of War Communism, all grain that wasn’t forcibly seized by “collection squads” was distilled into vodka, leaving desperate millions to face starvation.

Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership admitted that “we actually took from the peasant his entire surplus, and, sometimes we took not only the surplus but part of his necessary supply in order to meet the expenses of the army and to support the workers.” With the news of drought in the Volga region, Lenin concerned himself not so much with the threat it posed to the peoples’ welfare but to the government itself—announcing to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921: “If there is a crop failure, it will be impossible to appropriate any surplus, because there will be no surplus.” He added, “since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means of satisfying their own hunger, the government will perish.”
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