Vodka Politics (8 page)

In the early sixteenth century the Austro-Hungarian baron Sigismund von Herberstein twice resided in the Kremlin palaces as the envoy from the Holy Roman Empire. Published in 1557, his extensive writings give us the earliest foreign account of the Russian court under the last Muscovite grand prince—Vasily III. Upon the Austrian’s arrival, von Herberstein was given the traditional Russian invitation: “thou wilt eat bread [
khleb
] and salt [
sol
’] with us.” The ceremonial breaking of bread and salt has deep roots in the traditional Russian lexicon, with
khlebosolny
being the Russian word for hospitality.
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The Kremlin guard led von Herberstein through torch-lit halls of cut stone adorned with magnificent tapestries to a banquet hall where he found the grand prince sitting on a magnificent throne, flanked by ranks of nobles: some in high fur caps, kaftans, or clad in white satin, each with a silver hatchet by his side. In the center of the hall stood a feast of magnificent proportions upon plates of purest gold, prepared by servers in thick robes embroidered with pearls and gems. Yet before the feast of roast swan, malmsey, and Greek wines began, the murmur in the hall hushed as Grand Prince Vasily raised his glass and spoke in a booming voice: “Thou art come from a great sovereign to a great sovereign; thou hast made a long journey. After receiving our favor and seeing the lustre of our eyes, it shall be well with thee. Drink and drink well, and eat well to thy hearty content, and then take thy rest that thou mayest at length return to thy master.”
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Unsure of their new surroundings and unaccustomed to Byzantine cultural practices, the delegates from the royal house of Habsburg consummated the toast but were confused that the drink in their cups was not the traditional fermented beverages of Europe: not wine (
vino
), which the Russians learned from the Greeks of the Eastern Empire before the fall of Constantinople; not Scandinavian mead (
myod
) made from fermented honey, which came to Moscow by way of Novgorod and the Baltic trade in the tenth century; not European beers (
pivo
) and ales that had become the main alcoholic fare of Muscovy. Nor
was the drink quintessentially Russian
kvas
, a beverage fermented from rye bread that was drunk even among Russia’s ancient ancestors, the Sclavonians, almost since the time of Christ in the first century.
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Instead, their chalices were brimming with
aqua vitae
—water of life—distilled spirits.
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Not quite the contemporary
vodka
—“little water” in Russian—consumed today, this stronger distilled alcohol, known to the Muscovite court as early as the fifteenth century, was plied by royal alchemists as a medicinal elixir. The inebriating qualities of this new drink were not lost on the Russian leaders of that day.

Once acclimated to the customs, opulence, and extravagance of the Muscovite court, foreign observers like von Herberstein quickly clued into the importance of liquor to palace intrigues. Indeed, even one of the first manuscript dictionaries of Russian compiled in the sixteenth century included the transposed English phrase
Gimi drenki okovitin
, or, “give me drink aqua vitae.” Since very few native accounts of medieval Russia are available, such foreigners’ accounts have proven invaluable to understanding early Russian history in general and the role of alcohol in particular.
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Von Herberstein’s firsthand chronicles of the gluttonous and inebriated all-night banquets of the Muscovite court in the 1550s serve as distant echoes to the liquor surprise that awaited later foreign visitors von Ribbentrop, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Milovan Djilas to Stalin’s court. Putting quill to parchment by candlelight, von Herberstein recounted how

making people tipsy is here an honour and sign of esteem; the man who is not put under the table holds himself ill respected. The Muscovites are indeed masters at talking to others and persuading them to drink. If all else fails one other stands up and proposes the health of the Grandduke, upon which all present must not fail to drink and drain the cup. After this they try to provoke toasts to the health of the Emperor and others. There is much ceremony about this drinking. The man proposing the toast stands in the middle of the room, his head bared, states what he desires for the Grand-duke or other lord—happiness, victory, health—and wishes that as much blood may remain in the veins of his enemies as drink in his cup. When he has emptied it he reverses the cup upon his head and wishes the lord good health. Or he will take upon a prominent position, have several cups filled, and distribute them with the motive for the toast. Then each goes into the middle of the room, drains his cup and claps it on his head.
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Von Herberstein found this practice just as bizarre as the generations of foreign dignitaries who followed did. Like subsequent visitors, von Herberstein too
confessed his distaste for such drunken excess and sought any means to extricate himself from the uncomfortable customs, mostly “by pretending to be drunk or saying I was too sleepy to go on and had had my fill.”
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While von Herberstein marveled at the opulence and omnipotence of his host Vasily III, the grand duke’s hold on power was not as absolute as his stature implied. While the royal family was the political and spiritual core of Muscovy, other princely boyar families wielded tremendous economic and military power from their massive estates, while the Orthodox Church held such sway that it was often exempted from state regulations. With such internal rivalries, the grand prince depended as much on his courtly elites as they did on him. The Russian state of the late Middle Ages was at once both powerful and fragile—and Vasily knew it. During the last years of his reign, so as to dilute the opposition of competing nobles who had much to gain if one of Vasily’s two brothers instead wrested the throne, the grand duke bestowed rank on a large number of boyars loyal to him and his infant sons.
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In the cold December of 1533, Vasily succumbed to a prolonged illness, leaving the grandeur and might of imperial Muscovy in the hands of his three-year-old son, Ivan. Intrigue abounded as competing clans grappled for power in an era of collective “boyar rule.” Not above blackmail, torture, and murder, the Shuiskys, Glinskys, Belskys, Staritskys, and even the church engaged in a cutthroat battle for power and influence over the infant Ivan and his regency. Whenever one clan leader had his tongue cut out or was devoured alive by wild dogs, there was always a brother, uncle, son, or nephew to vow revenge on his behalf. There was no way to cut off all heads at the same time.
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“Our boyars governed the country as they pleased, for no one opposed their power,” Ivan later recalled. Raised fatherless, “I adopted the devious ways of the people around me; I learned to be crafty like them.”
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So it should come as little surprise that the boy who became Ivan “the Terrible” was devoid of a moral compass. At a time when political decisions were being made in his stead by constantly feuding elites, the child-prince gleefully tortured birds and tossed puppies from the high palace walls to be smashed on the courtyard pavement below.
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Ivan’s bloodlust grew as a teen, as he hunted bears and wolves with an entourage of boyar teens whose families were no less affluent or respected than his. Having killed, feasted, and drunken to excess, the hunting party often set their sights on a different game: the local peasants. With heads full of drink, the carnivorous teens set upon unsuspecting villages: beating the peasant men and raping their daughters. Young Ivan reveled in the orgies of violence and debauchery—the wine, sweat, and blood—as much as his bestial pals, but Ivan never lost sense of his royal dignity as God’s appointed servant on earth. “When he became drunk, when he fornicated, it was God who was getting drunk and fornicating, through him.”
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In 1547 Ivan turned sixteen and was officially crowned, but instead of taking the traditional title of grand prince of Moscow he became the first to choose the title
tsar
—emperor of all Russia.
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Knowing his vicious past, the court certainly heaved a collective sigh of relief when the young tsar announced he was giving up his drunken orgies in order to wed his beloved Anastasia—daughter of a lesser noble family. Within a few years, however, Anastasia mysteriously fell ill and perished. As Eisenstein portrays in his Stalin Prize–winning
Ivan the Terrible
, the tsar suspected a palace plot to poison his bride, which only deepened his paranoia. And much like Stalin’s reaction to the sudden death of his own wife, the brooding tsar abandoned himself to loneliness, depression, and drunkenness. The fornication, sodomy, and unthinkable torture soon returned. Eliciting vengeance for both the suspect boyar class and whatever temperamental Almighty dared to smite the all-powerful tsar, Anastasia’s death unleashed all of the base instincts of Ivan’s childhood.
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While his conquering armies expanded the borders of the Russian state, the increasingly powerful and paranoid Ivan took pleasure in drunken debauchery, quiet prayer, and the slow and methodical torture of his would-be rivals at court. “The spurts of blood, the cracking of bones, the screams and rattles of drooling mouths—this rough cookery smelling of pus, excrement, sweat, and burnt flesh was pleasing to his nostrils,” wrote popular French historian Henri Troyat. “He took such joy in the bloodbath that he had no doubt, in these moments of horror and ecstasy, that the Lord was at his side.… To him, prayer and torture were but two aspects of piety.”
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Leading the heroic charge to topple the Khanate of Kazan on the Volga and the rebels of Udmurtia in the east, Ivan’s confidant Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky did the most to expand Russia’s borders—and was wise enough to avoid being slowly dismembered himself for the tsar’s sadistic pleasure. After leading Ivan’s army to victory over the Livonians at Dorpat (in present-day Estonia), Ivan’s general defected—fleeing to the nearby Kingdom of Poland. From the safety of his Polish asylum, Russia’s first political refugee not only addressed vitriolic letters directly to the tsar, but in 1573 he also penned Russia’s first historical monograph, the scathing
History of the Grand Prince of Moscow
.
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Just as Nikita Khrushchev gave us an insider’s view into the dictator’s drunken Kremlin banquets, Kurbsky did the same, only four hundred years earlier:

They begin with frequent feasts and drunkenness, from which all kinds of impurities sprang. And what did they add to this? Great beakers, pledged, in truth, to the devil, and beakers which were filled with extremely heady drink… and if they did not drink themselves into a
stupor, or rather a frenzy, then they added a second and a third beaker; and those who had no wish to drink or to commit such transgressions they adjured with great rebuke, while they shouted at the tsar: “Behold, this one here, and this one (naming him) does not wish to be joyful at your feast, as though he condemns and mocks you and us as drunkards, hypocritically pretending to be righteous!”
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Just as Khrushchev recounted how inebriety was forced upon the Soviet Politburo, so too was it forced on the court of Ivan the Terrible. “And with still more devilish words than these,” Kurbsky continued, “they abused many men who were sober and moderate in their good way of life and habits, and they put them to shame, pouring those accursed beakers on them, with which they did not wish—or were quite unable—to become drunk, and they threatened them with death and various tortures, in the same way as they destroyed many people a little later for this reason.”
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The parallels with Khrushchev’s descriptions of Soviet commissars transforming into toady drunkards could not be more clear.

Just as Stalin’s henchmen were pumped full of alcohol for the leader’s pleasure only to be borne home by their bodyguards, so too did guests at Ivan’s table. “The obligation to do honor to all the cups sent by the Czar induced in some a stupor bordering on coma,” says Troyat. “In their stomachs mead was mixed with Rhine wines, French wines, Malmsey,
kvas
, and vodka. And when they rose from the table to go home, it was not unusual for Ivan to send to their residences, as a token of friendship, more alcohol and food to be downed on the spot, in front of the officers who had brought it.”
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Not only did both tyrants appreciate liquor’s effectiveness in maintaining control over their inebriated courtiers, but both were also wary of alcohol being used against them—regularly forcing subordinates to quaff what was in the leader’s cup as a test for poison.
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Like the squeamish objections of Khrushchev, Beria, Mikoyan, and Stalin’s other commissars, many of Ivan’s boyars also resisted the drunken escapades. Those who refused were denounced—either secretly or openly—as foes of the tsar.
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Consider Ivan’s chancellor, Prince Mikhaylo Repnin, who once muttered that Ivan’s drunkenness was unbefitting for God’s chosen leader of Russia. Quietly stewing, the great tsar took note. The following Sunday during church vespers, Ivan’s guards found Repnin deep in solemn prayer and unceremoniously hacked him to death beside the altar.
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