Vodka Politics (57 page)

For centuries, alcohol revenues were the central economic pillar of the Russian autocratic state, so it is no surprise that the most vocal opposition came from those most aware of the economic consequences. When the deputy director of the state economic planning agency Gosplan warned that there was no
conceivable way to cover the gap of five billion rubles that would result from the campaign, Gorbachev gave him a dressing down: “You want to build communism on vodka?”
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After refusing to sign off on the plan three different times, the Gosplan director was threatened with expulsion from the Communist Party. He was joined in his dissent by Vasily Garbuzov. Promoted to minister of finance under Khrushchev in 1960, Garbuzov oversaw and promoted vodka as “Commodity Number One” for the Soviet treasury over the following twenty-five years. As architect of late-Soviet vodka politics he understood more than anyone the economic implications of the proposed measures, so it was Garbuzov whom Gorbachev first summoned to discuss the issue. His protests notwithstanding, Garbuzov also refused to sign the anti-alcohol resolution. Within weeks the elderly finance minister followed Gorbachev’s rival Romanov into forced retirement.
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Gorbachev’s threat of dismissal sufficiently intimidated those on-the-fence Politburo members, including Eduard Shevardnadze—who soon replaced Gromyko as Soviet foreign minister and later became president of an independent Georgia. Reflecting the moderate traditions of the predominantly wine-drinking Caucasus, Shevardnadze says he was “horrified” over the anti-alcohol plans but admitted that he voted for them, “although inwardly I disagreed.”
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Others were not so easily cowed, including Heydar Aliyev, who later became president of post-Soviet Azerbaijan, next door to Shevardnadze’s Georgia. The Politburo’s only Muslim member, the cultured Aliyev drank only the cognac of his native Caucasus and preferred the company of composers, actors, and artists over the usual “alcoholics, foul-mouthed swearers and womanizers” of the Kremlin.
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Yet the powerful deputy prime minister embodied the corruption and nepotism of the old Brezhnev era—transforming Soviet Azerbaijan into a personal fiefdom of oil, cotton, and caviar.

In protecting his own interests, Aliyev also refused to sign the anti-alcohol resolution. He continued even after the campaign was in full swing: protesting—ultimately in vain—the closure of a champagne factory he recently had set up in Azerbaijan with high-end equipment imported from West Germany. This continued opposition brought him toe to toe with the drys: Gorbachev, Ligachev, and Solomentsev. When he later protested the closing of breweries on the grounds that beer was “not really alcohol,” Solomentsev threatened to produce a report “proving that people got more drunk from beer than vodka.” When he argued that drunkenness was not a big problem in traditionally Muslim, wine-producing Azerbaijan and that ninety-five percent of their wine was exported to other regions, “Ligachev went to Azerbaijan and carpeted the republic’s leaders, accusing them of poisoning the rest of Russia with their drink.”
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Aliyev’s opposition to the anti-alcohol campaign only hardened the reformers’ view that he exemplified the nepotism, privilege, and corruption of the
Brezhnev era. In 1987 “Gorbachev unleashed a full-blown, Stalin-style denunciation of Aliyev,” dismissing him for corruption and cronyism.
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Just like that—as with Romanov and Garbuzov—another powerful critic of the anti-alcohol campaign was gone.

Ultimately, when it came to launching Gorbachev’s historic reforms with an all-out war against vodka politics—the very foundations of the Russian autocracy itself—there is plenty of blame (or credit) to go around. As Ligachev and Gorbachev both acknowledged, the decision was made collectively—which is not to say that it was unanimous. What’s more, the personal rivalries that emerged from the heated debates over the anti-alcohol campaign shaped the course of future reforms, while the mismanagement of the campaign itself hastened the unraveling of the entire Soviet autocracy.

18

Did Alcohol Make the Soviets Collapse?

Q: What is a Soviet historian?

A: Someone who can accurately predict the past
.
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Even in Soviet dissident circles the above was perhaps not the funniest political joke. Still, that did not stop American president Ronald Reagan from delivering it—and others like it—to great political effect with domestic audiences. As a former actor, Reagan understood the power of wit, and he had aides collect wisecracks told in the Soviet Union that captured the Russians’ wry sense of humor. Dropped into the middle of a speech, a well-delivered Soviet pun could not only win over a crowd but also convey that beyond the bombastic rhetoric of “evil empire” there were human beings on the other side of the Iron Curtain: regular, cynical people who well understood the substance of their system’s shortcomings. Plus, Reagan loved to tell audiences jokes they had never heard.

Two fellas are walking down the street in the Soviet Union, and one of them says “Have we really achieved full communism? Is this it?” Then the other one says, “Oh hell no—things are going to get a lot worse
.”
²

Beyond just his comedy stylings, Russians might be shocked to hear just how many present-day Americans believe that it was actually Reagan’s oratorical skill that singlehandedly ended the Cold War and fell the mighty Soviet Union. Consider this: according to historian Garry Wills, Reagan said “‘Tear down this wall,’ and it was done.” And today “we see no Soviet Union. He called it an Evil Empire, and it evaporated overnight.”
³

That
guy won a Pulitzer Prize.

Overstated? Certainly—but such arguments are increasingly common in an ever-growing Reaganology literature dedicated to valorizing “the Gipper.” As the standard line goes: Reagan’s steadfast moral resolve against a “godless” enemy and the dramatic increase in American defense spending overextended the Soviet Union and exposed the bankruptcy of communism, leading to Soviet capitulation, democratization of Eastern Europe, and liberalization throughout
the socialist world. That is how Reagan alone “freed a billion slaves from their Communist masters.”
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And no, that wasn’t meant to get a laugh.

There are (at least) two fatal flaws that plague this literature. The first is that most Reaganology writers lack even the slightest familiarity with Soviet politics or history, focusing instead on the bountiful charisma of the American president. The other is sloppy reasoning. Pundits who credited Barack Obama for the Arab Spring beginning in late 2010 made the same error: there is little causal connection between a foreign leader’s rhetoric on one side of the globe and domestic political developments on the other.
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Reagan’s oratory was far less important to the future of the Soviet Union than the actual ills of the autocratic system itself. Many of those problems—from public dissatisfaction with the leadership, rising inflation amid a shortage economy, and even the exacerbation of nationalist tensions—were linked to vodka politics. Upon coming to power, Gorbachev was particularly horrified by the appalling social statistics, which showed that by the late 1970s the Soviet Union had begun a process of “demodernization.” Rather than expanding, economic productivity was on the decline; instead of blossoming, Soviet society was becoming more corrupt and stagnant. Instead of living longer, healthier lives, Soviets were becoming more sickly and dying earlier. The raw health statistics, shown for the first time under Gorbachev, confirmed that not only was infant mortality on the rise—as Western demographers like Murray Feshbach had suggested—but also that “life expectancies began to fall, a development without precedent in the industrial world in peacetime.”
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Indeed, the statistics that were made available thanks to Gorbachev’s alco-
glasnost
were horrific. The following is just a taste:

In 1985, Russians consumed on average of 14.9 liters of pure alcohol per person per year: according to the World Health Organization, anything over 8 liters is damaging to the overall health of the population. In other words, the
average
Russian man consumed 130 of the conventional half-liter bottles of vodka per year—or a bottle of vodka every three days for every man in the Soviet Union.
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While life expectancy for Soviet women was 72.6 years at the end of the 1970s, for men it had dropped to 62.5 years—lower than in any other European country. Not only did alcohol poisoning claim twenty thousand lives annually, but vodka also killed working-age Soviets through accidents, traumas, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Together, it was estimated that between 1960 and 1987 thirty to thirty-five million Soviets had been sacrificed to vodka—ten million more than were lost to Adolph Hitler in World War II.
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Once a mostly male activity, by the early 1980s more than ninety percent of Soviet women drank regularly. Even without including Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, drinking mothers were prone to dramatically higher rates of infant mortality, underweight and premature deliveries, and children born with physical and
mental disabilities. Drinking often led to unwanted sex and unwanted pregnancies. The dramatic upsurge in abortions rendered more women barren at a younger age. Vodka invaded Russian universities, high schools, and even elementary schools: 84 percent of Soviet kids began drinking before the age of sixteen. According to a controversial report by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk—headed by Gorbachev’s future chief economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan—of those receiving anti-alcoholism treatments for the first time, ninety percent were under the age of fifteen, and a third were under the age of ten.
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This was devastating.

Vodka also tore apart Soviet families. Alcoholism was a major factor in up to eighty percent of divorces and eighty percent of traffic deaths. Alcohol was the single largest cause of suicides, drownings, and new cases of syphilis and gonorrhea. Statistics on crime were even more stark: in the Russian Republic, seventy-four percent of all murders were committed in a state of intoxication and sixty percent of all thefts, two-third of all fires, seventy-four percent of rapes, eighty-four percent of robberies, and ninety percent of all cases of hooliganism were attributable to alcohol. As one Soviet study concluded, “if there was no drunkenness and alcoholism, there would be no more of the crimes that make up most of the elements of the criminal statistics, above all violent, domestic and mercenary crime.”
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The costs to the Soviet economy were equally astonishing. The economic costs of illness and early death, workplace accidents, absenteeism, and the lack of labor discipline—so vividly described in Venedikt Erofeyev’s
Moscow to the End of the Line
—leeched billions of rubles from the economy every year. According to exhaustive studies, alcohol abuse cost the Soviet economy more than a third (36.9%) of national income—or more than five times what the state was reaping in vodka profits. Aganbegyan’s Academy of Sciences claimed that drunkenness contributed more than any other factor to the failure of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (1981–85) before concluding that alcoholism constituted the “most appalling tragedy in Russia’s thousand-year history.”
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If you were the new leader confronted with unending statistics like these, what would you do? It is clear why Gorbachev began his reforms with an anti-alcohol campaign aimed at improving the health, morality, and economic productivity of the Soviet people.
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Although we tend to focus on the campaign’s failures, it did have some demonstrable early successes: in its first year vodka production and sales dropped by a third; within two-and-a-half years it was down by two-thirds.
¹³
By 1989 per capita alcohol consumption dropped from 14.9 to 12.5 liters. In the first year alone, overall crime dropped by a quarter. There were far fewer divorces, automobile accidents were down twenty percent, and absenteeism fell by a third.
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Early on, the draconian restrictions on sales and availability seemed to deliver results.

Twenty- to thirty-year-olds saw an instant twenty percent drop in mortality. In the Russian Republic, alcohol-related mortality plummeted from 26.4 per 100,000 in 1980 to 9.1 in 1987. Deaths from accidents at work dropped by a third; deaths from alcohol poisoning were cut in half. Happily, just as the death rate was dropping, the number of births was rising, and the babies were statistically far healthier than in the past. Perhaps most astonishing was the dramatic rise in life expectancy. From 1984 to 1987 average female life expectancy increased by a full year while Soviet men could expect to live fully three years longer.
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Indeed, before the policy was quietly withdrawn in 1988, the campaign was credited with saving up to a million Soviet lives.
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“It would be wrong to say that the anti-alcohol measures were absolutely useless,” Gorbachev later claimed in defense of the policy. “There were decreases in accidents, fatalities, lost working time, hooliganism and divorces due to drunkenness and alcoholism.… For the first time information was available on the manufacture and use of alcoholic beverages, along with statistical data that had previously been kept secret. However, the negative consequences of the anti-alcohol campaign greatly exceeded its positive aspects.”
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