The church is near but the road is icy. The tavern is far but I will walk carefully.
Russian saying
Visitors to Russia never ceased to be surprised that they seemed to see vodka wherever they turned. In the early 19th century, vodka-fuelled celebrations in the cities were just as lively as in the country. The joy of religious festivals were not hindered by any false piety. The conclusion of Divine Service to celebrate a feast day in August in the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow was “the signal for general mirth” which witnessed the congregation rushing outside to the “immense, circular, and elegant Votki-Tents ” full of:
numerous great copper pots or tubs, filled with votkii. The persons employed to sell this nectar of the day can scarcely answer the demands of the crowd, who, according to the quantity they purchase, receive it in a larger or smaller unglazed shallow, earthen vessel, for which a deposit is given till returned… Then come quarrels and abuse: drunkenness, rolling and tumbling usually conclude the day. Such a fete is a perfect Russian scene… As soon as the twilight approaches, the police interdict the sale of votkii; but when the weather is fine, great exertions are required to disperse the crowd, so that it is eleven or twelve o’clock at night before the curtain drops.
The bowls were probably made of pottery due to the scarcity of glass in Moscow, a problem not affecting St. Petersburg. At a summer festival in the latter, some tents sold vodka wholesale in large square bottles, but “in general it was doled out in small measures, the purchaser spilling a portion into a tub as the perquisite of the waiter.”
The backwardness of Russia compared to western European nations was highlighted by its defeat in the Crimean War. The tsar and the nobles ruled over a largely primitive and illiterate peasantry which formed four-fifths of the population. The living conditions for that vast majority had hardly altered since the reign of Peter the Great.
The stop-start and confusing system of farmers and merchants retailing vodka under state licence had resulted in several peasant tavern revolts. From the end of the 18th century through to the 1850s, vodka found in the taverns was often watered down two or three times and did not measure up to the 40-50 per cent pure alcohol volume that it was supposed to contain. To encourage the peasants to drink even this, the accompanying food was spiced up with pepper and salt to make them even thirstier. The absence of fixed closing hours offered further impetus to consume more.
The profit to the farmer-retailer was as much as 100,000 per cent of the cost of production. By the 1850s, the highest earning vodka farmers were making as much as 80 million roubles in profit per year. (One rouble in 1850 has been calculated as having roughly £10 of purchasing power in today’s Britain.) The high price of the spirit, and its adulteration with anything from poisonous weed to soap and copper deposits, encouraged smuggling of cheap vodka from outside the easily controlled regions.
The government did nothing to stop the vodka farmers, for as the minister of finance commented in 1810, “No other major source of revenue enters the treasury so regularly and punctually… its regular receipt on a fixed day of the month greatly eases the task of finding cash for other expenditures.”
Nothing had changed by 1826 when a government statement expressed hope that the peasants would drink rather more than moderately. As Russia was suffering a decline in grain export, the only way it could benefit financially was if the excess grain was distilled into vodka. The state’s “thirst for revenue [and] the peasant’s thirst for forgetfulness” combined to make the vodka industry “Russia’s most technologically advanced”. This technological savvy was buttressed by new types of stills and production techniques from western Europe that had been imported to Russia by the early 19th century.
A traveller from California, used to the widespread drunkenness in the state’s bars, felt quite homesick when in Moscow in 1867 and wrote affectionately that, after the sobriety he had observed in most of continental Europe, it had cheered him up when he saw bearded peasants drunk and enjoying vodka:
Of all the traits I discovered in the Russian people, none impressed me so favourably as their love of vodka… I admired their long and filthy beards and matted heads of hair… but in nothing did I experience a greater fellowship with them than in their constitutional thirst for intoxicating liquors. It was absolutely refreshing, after a year’s travel over the continent of Europe… to meet at every corner of the street a great bearded fellow staggering along blind drunk… There was something very congenial in the spectacle that greeted me on the very first day of my arrival in Moscow.
Even if visitors did not like vodka, they could at least be grateful that the mention of the spirit was almost a holy utterance, so instantly could it lubricate a difficult request. Vodka was demanded by each new coach driver on a journey of any length and was not begrudged in the severe winter conditions of Siberia. It was essential for travellers to be able to say the phrases “I will give you vodka money – Damn na vodku”, and “I won’t give you vodka money – Nedam na vodku”. Both statements were included along with the Polish equivalent in the useful phrases of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland, published in 1865. The writer George Sala found “Damn na vodku” indispensable when he was in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but to him, vodka tasted of “bilge-water, vitriol, turpentine, copal-varnish, fire, and castor oil”.
The obligation to drink vodka to mark every significant event in the average Russian’s life was never questioned, least of all by the peasants who could ill afford the quantities required for a good celebration. At every event in village life, vodka was always the main guest and the last to leave. A Russian peasant interviewed in the 1860s remarked, “we drink the damned vodka at weddings and christenings, at funerals and church holidays, when receiving guests, at every purchase and sale, on going to the market and at meetings… on every occasion.”
It was suggested by some observers that if the peasants could enjoy “more civilised forms of entertainment, such as balls, concerts, and literature” instead of overindulging in vodka, they would “escape the burdens of their dreary lives”. In the meantime, the peasants had to forego the pleasure of the ballroom. Instead, there was near-complete acceptance of widespread drunkenness amongst the peasantry as well as town dwellers.
In the 1830s, an inspector looking at the way peasants lived in a Russian province noted that children began to “drink at an early age and continue all their life. Their parents give them vodka with bread, and they soon acquire a taste for it and begin to drink it in large quantities.” The best time to start them off was at the end of September on Michaelmas Day at harvest time when everyone in the parish got drunk. The inspector complained that, “Everyone drinks – the young, the middle-aged, and the old; the men and the women.” In the taverns, both sexes were “drinking together with abandon and often forgetting about the children they have left at home with a crust of bread.”
When work requiring a communal effort was needed, such as road-making or help with the harvest, whoever needed labour, known as pomoch, could not expect the workers’ assistance without the offer of vodka – despite the fact that the work would often drag on or not be well done because of the resultant drunkenness:
Pomoch is inconceivable without vodka. The work begins with vodka, continues with vodka, and ends with vodka… If you do not give the peasant plenty to drink, he will work poorly out of annoyance; if you do, he will work poorly because he is so drunk…
Just how much vodka would be doled out was fixed by local tradition. When the work was finally finished, the employer invited everyone back the next day to celebrate its completion and to finish off any drink that might have been forgotten. Everyone involved, from the young to old grandmothers, came along to the party.
If an offer of cash was made instead of vodka, it was usually turned down, for the communal working scheme meant that when individual workers needed similar help, they would expect it to be reciprocated. If there was any skimping on the quantity of vodka, the temporary employer would be cold-shouldered by everyone.
Being part of the pomochi and showing that they were old enough to drink and take part in an adult world was a rite of passage for young men who thereby demonstrated their independence from their families. They had to learn how to hold their drink and, as a result of conversations with seasoned older drinkers, they became part of the village network through which they could hear about opportunities to work. If they were lucky, they could also learn about the local women available for marriage.
In fact it was at weddings that the greatest amount of vodka was drunk, and it was not uncommon for the bridegroom to provide six to eight vedros of vodka – a vedro is 3.249 gallons of U. S. standard measure, or 2.706 imperial gallons – which was all drunk before the wedding. The cost of the wedding celebrations fell on the bride’s family, which might spend as much as two hundred roubles on vodka. It was a colossal expenditure for poor peasants to find – but found it had to be. In the winter, a wedding guest arriving late for the wedding breakfast discovered that:
Everyone had already regaled themselves well. Many lay unconscious in the street with uncovered heads and were buried in snowdrifts as the wind covered them with snow… In another place, I saw them put a senseless drunk on a sledge, tie him to it, harness his reindeer to the sledge and drive off… The bridegroom himself was lying among the completely drunken guests. Even the bride, a child of 13, was already drunk.
The Church was not forgotten either, and the priest’s fee for a wedding, apart from cash and food, was three bottles of vodka. The rural parish priest was often as drunk as his parishioners, as depicted in the painting of 1861 by Vasily Perov, Easter Procession in a Village. He owned nothing and, like the peasants, had to work in the fields. For him:
…the epitome of pleasure is to fraternise with the peasants in noisy, wild drinking bouts; with joy he sets off to the tavern, drinking house, whatever – just so he is invited; if they do not invite him, he will unabashedly go and get senselessly drunk with a friend from his parish.
Not all priests were drunks or even willing drinkers. During religious festivals, the local priest would process through the village bearing an ikon. He would be obliged to call on every house, where he would be offered food and vodka. Declining the offer often resulted in the whole family falling to their knees and refusing to stand up again until the priest drank some vodka. If the priest refused once more and then walked out, leaving the still-kneeling family, the host would be furious, and there could be problems later on. If the priest approached the peasant to ask for help, he risked a tongue-lashing for his perceived lack of respect in the past. But if the priest drank the vodka to be tactful, by the time he had called on every house, he would be unable to utter even a simple prayer.
Tradition demanded that young men who were conscripted to join the army would go on a tavern crawl for weeks in advance of leaving home. If their money ran out, they would take the last kopek from their family, else they would be considered dishonoured. Smashing windows as they rampaged through the village, the revellers would play the accordion and sing all through the night. They were tolerated with good humour – if anyone asked what the racket was, the explanation dissolved any anger. More dangerous were the drunken celebrations at Lent when the villages were invaded with relatives, with some of the arrivals falling off troikas while others plunged into deep water ravines. During one celebration, a vodka soak was swiftly dispatched when unable to move quickly enough away from a wagon that tipped over and crushed him to death.
Those who were not conscripted into the army did not lose out from the chance to take part in heavy-drinking sessions, which spontaneously erupted during street parties. Illegal moonshine called samogon was sold from a stall, often by an enterprising old widow, which saved the drinkers the walk to the tavern. Visits to friends were only considered a success if there was a good supply of vodka, but there were few complaints if there was little to eat.
The first grain from the harvest would be taken to the miller to be ground. It was celebrated with vodka in exchange for some of the grain. The landowner, needing workers to take the grain to the market, would also treat them to liquid refreshment. Occasionally the workforce was reduced due to fights in the fields at harvest time, which saw scythes proving to be fatal weapons.
Those harvest workers who overcame such dangers would start working at sunrise and come home for breakfast. On the way back to work, the peasants would drop in at the local tavern for a few vodkas and repeat the visit after dinner and supper. Holidays and Sundays would also involve a quick trip to the tavern as part of the journey to Mass. After a rural christening, which normally took place at about eleven o’clock in the morning or at noon, participants would go back to the house. A typical scene was described as follows:
Vodka is served immediately. The average peasant provides, depending on the harvest, from one bottle up to five pints of vodka and even more if he is the type that does not pass up an occasion to get drunk and, at the same time, happens to have extra money to spend on liquor. The hosts offer drinks first to the godparents, and only after that to the rest of the guests. If the vodka is plentiful, everyone gets drunk. But songs are not sung, as this is not appropriate at a christening dinner. The new mother is also in attendance, but, because the christening usually takes place the day after the delivery, she stays removed from the crowd, resting on a bench in the back of the room. The newborn wails. The guests joke around. When the baby makes too much noise, they say [to the mother]: “Hey, you little cow, where did you hide your teats?”
Visitors’ censorious accounts of Russians’ drinking habits were rarely challenged, but an Englishman in St. Petersburg, W. R. S. Ralston, a noted folk-tale researcher and translator of Turgenev – having heard mainly from his fellow countrymen about “the drunkenness of the lower classes” – decided to investigate the subject for himself and form his own opinion. He was “always on the lookout for drunkards”, but after spending over six weeks in Russia, he did not see as much drunkenness as in London, nor as much violence.
Nevertheless, Ralston went into several, mainly “women only”, pubs, bringing a plainclothed police officer with him for safety. In one unnamed city, they descended some steps into dingy vaults where Ralston was struck by the number of poorly-dressed women he found there. They were friendly despite being “horrible to look at”. He invited them to join his table and sent for their “favourite liquor… the horrible vodka, or coarse whisky, which is sold at about three half-pence a tumbler.”
A token effort was made to provide a basic version of zakuski with the vodka, which arrived “with the black bread which always accompanies it, cut into little cubes, and sprinkled with salt”. They went into another tavern and climbed up some rickety stairs. By groping their way in the dark and by feeling the damp and greasy wall, they found themselves in a half-lit attic with almost no furniture beyond “a tottering table and two or three paralytic chairs”.
Despite the fact that the women became maudlin in their conversation, they were never nasty, but explained that they were driven to the taverns because of poverty. One woman confessed that “she was so given to drink that, even if a place were found for her as a servant and she were able to keep it for six months without reproach, the seventh would be sure to see her back here again.”
It was not until 1881 that the Russian government decided to make sweeping changes, which would involve replacing the dingy taverns, or kabaks, with inns that sold food to soak up the vodka. A completely new concept was to be introduced: off-licence sales would offer vodka in bottles in the hope that less would be drunk at home than in an evening at the tavern. Since the Middle Ages, vodka drinkers had been forced to take the spirit home in either a barrel or a bucket, and the measures inside the tavern were no less than one charka, or 150 ml.
The premises selling off-licence vodka were purposefully unfriendly and contained no furniture so that it was impossible to sit down to drink any purchases. A note of religious devotion and patriotic loyalty was to be introduced with the result that the walls had to be hung with pictures of saints and the tsar. A grill was to separate the tavern keeper from the customer, who had to leave the premises immediately after paying.
The concept of bottled vodka had never previously been mooted as Russia lacked a good glass factory, and although bottled vodka could be found in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, the spirit was usually put in old wine bottles.
When the bottles were manufactured for vodka, many had a green complexion, which may have contributed to the nickname for vodka of “the green serpent”. The creation of vodka bottles meant that distillers could “brand” their vodka on a label, and many of the new labels were strongly pictorial to help the illiterate remember which vodka they liked. Pyotr Smirnov, the son of two illiterate peasants, made sure to sell his standard vodka in distinctive, light blue bottles.
Smirnov’s firm made bottles shaped like bears for its strongest vodka, while other containers took the form of elephants and busts of the tsar. Smirnov also created a unique bottle shape for a rowanberry vodka that became particularly popular and was instantly recognisable. As vodka had not yet been officially named, the spirit was often confusingly labelled as “table wine”. (In Poland, the bottle itself was a cause for confusion. The use of vodka there had often literally been medicinal, and the typical vodka bottle resembled something found in the medical chest where it could be discreetly hidden amongst less appealing mixtures.)
But the introduction of bottles and the revised law made very little difference to the drinking habits or the lack of sobriety of those who had drunk vodka in the taverns. They might be called “inns”, but they were still used as taverns, for the habit of drinking by “the lower classes” without food had become ingrained. When quarter bottles of vodka were available, the contents were often quickly drunk outside the off-licence door in order to recover the deposit on the bottle without delay.
Because taverns were such a central feature of Russian life, they were a popular subject for painters. Morning at the Tavern (1873), by Leonid Ivanovich Solomatkin, cheerfully depicts a small crowd freezing in the winter snow and waiting for the tavern to open. Many are clutching large kettles to take the vodka away. It is past opening time, and an old soldier checks his watch while a man thumps on the door. They are all longing to be let in. The Last Tavern at the City Gates (1868), by Vasily Grigorievich Perov, displays a bleak scene in which a frozen woman sits on a horse-pulled sleigh while a dog shivers nearby in the deep snow. She waits for her husband to leave the warm tavern and return home with her.
The ridicule of the foreigner that was heaped on the vodka-soaked Russians in the kabaks often showed a misunderstanding of the function of the village inn. There was no other building in the community where the locals could meet to conduct business or hear about local activities. Large gatherings outside of the tavern were forbidden and in any case, it was often too cold to talk in the open air. The tavern was the only place where the locals could read a free newspaper, meet travellers with news from beyond, buy from travelling salesmen and where strangers could mix with the local inhabitants. All village business was concluded in the tavern with a vodka toast. The glass had to be full to the brim up to the moment of quaffing and could not be sipped. To show the glass really was empty, tavern dwellers upended it and proclaimed “Postai”.
The tsarist officials were often suspicious of what was said there, for the tavern was usually a safe haven from officialdom. They might have been filthy and insanitary, but the Russians made the taverns “something like free churches, or open debating societies”. The tavern was later described as “the secular soul of rural Russia”.
From birth to death, every breath inhaled seemed to reek of vodka. In the case of the executioner, vodka fumes would be exhaled on those about to breathe their last. One of the bonuses of the executioner, himself a prisoner, was the right to demand a free shot of vodka from every tavern passed on the way to the place of execution. Unsurprisingly, the journey would be arranged along the most provident route. For the executioner, it was a cause for joviality and he would generally throw back the vodka with an obscene joke. The vodka seller would make the sign of the cross and smash the empty glass to pieces.
The habitually large volume of vodka drunk by the peasants was also the result of the spirit having been watered down. It had acquired a few nicknames from the peasants themselves, such as “Thinner than water”, “Oh to be drunk!” and most frustrated of all: “Scalds the tongue but leaves you sober”. In 1859, peasants attacked the taverns and drink shops in protest at the diluted vodka that they were drinking, and those individuals caught were sent to Siberia. Old problems of the past had returned, and it was found that many farmers responsible for supplying the taverns had diluted the vodka by fifty per cent with water. In some cases, they had also included tobacco, narcotic herbs and belladonna to make it intoxicating.
But the situation was soon to change as a result of social reforms introduced in the 1860s by Tsar Alexander II. Serfs – peasants owned by the state, the aristocracy and landowners by hereditary right – were granted their freedom. The reform had a massive impact on the vodka industry and would in due course lead to the foundation of the House of Smirnov.
Zakuski