Not long after the introduction of the vodka reform in 1863, the government discussed introducing changes to control the quality of vodka. The ministry of finance enlisted the help of the Russian scientist D.I. Mendeleev who had researched alcohol-water solutions. Famous for publishing the periodic table of elements, but less well known for bigamy and his expertise in making leather goods, Mendeleev was asked to devise a system in which vodka would be measured metrically and not by weight.
He advised that the government should insist on testing vodka by alcoholometry – the method of determining the proportion of pure alcohol in spirituous liquors. This would not only improve the standard of vodka but would ensure uniformity of the base product in all distilleries.
At last it seemed that something would be done to eradicate the adulterated, low-quality vodka that had flowed unchecked for centuries. Changes were slow, but by 1884 a scientific committee of the nation’s foremost scientists supervised all research on vodka and quality testing. A Distiller’s Congress had also been investigating the varieties of vodka-based drinks and commented unfavourably on fruit-flavoured vodkas known as nalivkas. Its report listed the harmful chemicals found in them and noted that, “this slush is poured into bottles with beautiful labels… Then it is baptized with names such as raspberry nalivka and sent… to all ends of Russia.”
This was one of several veiled comments aimed at Smirnov, and many such flavoured vodkas were found by the report to have had alcohol contents reaching just twenty-four per cent whilst also being laden with fusel oil – an impurity that was already illegal. This was eventually eradicated when the monopoly distillers were legally required to use one pound of charcoal to filter every bucket of vodka.
Working towards the changes that would be introduced when the vodka monopoly was implemented, the government had agreed to accept the result of Mendeleev’s experiments on water and alcohol. A biographer of Mendeleev is at pains to state that the scientist did not invent the formula for vodka of forty per cent proof, as is often suggested, but that his experiments confirmed that this was the result of triple distillation. When adding the pure vodka spirit to an equal weight – rather than an equal volume – of water, the actual liquid volume was reduced to forty per cent. This is because when water and ethyl alcohol mix, strong hydrogen bonding draws the different molecules closer together than in a pure solution, resulting in a loss of volume.
Mendeleev also insisted that as the spirit would consistently have the same alcohol content no matter where it was purchased, it should be known throughout the Russian Empire as “vodka”. The various names that had been used for vodka types, such as “bread wine”, “grain wine” and “Russian table wine”, would become redundant.
The committee investigating the state of alcohol in the country found that the cost of making vodka was extremely cheap. A bucket of vodka would sell for more than six roubles, but the cost, even after taxes were paid by the distiller, amounted to less than half of the price. With the government anticipating such profits enhancing the state treasury instead of enriching the distillers, nothing would stop the monopoly, but it could not be introduced overnight. Initially introduced in the provinces and later in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the measure was enforced across the country by 1902.
Not only was the standard alcohol content fixed at forty per cent proof, but only rye was to be used. Potato-based distillation was cheaper but messier and, it was claimed, did not suit the distilling plants, which had been adapted to process Russian rye.
Using local Moscow soft water and eschewing any added flavouring, the “monopoly vodka” set a new standard of vodka purity. It was the vodka by which all others were to be judged. The vodka spirit would continue to be distilled by private distillers, but other changes would include bottling vodka in sealed, tamper-proof bottles to guarantee its quality and purity.
The brief for implementing this change was given to Count Sergei de Witte, the minister of finance, who intimated that the idea came from Tsar Alexander III himself, supposedly out of concern for his intemperate subjects. Witte related in his memoirs that he had enforced the monopoly throughout most of Russia by 1903. But there was naturally a great deal of opposition and well-founded suspicion that the monopoly was introduced to expand the exchequer rather than reduce vodka drinking. Witte toured the vodka distillers and told them that the success of the monopoly would be judged, “not by the amount of income derived by the state from the monopoly but by the beneficent effect of the measure upon the morals and health of the people…”
He did not fool the Anglo-Russian News, a supposedly protsarist paper published in London. In 1897 it commented on the vodka monopoly and what it regarded as the easy manipulation of a drunken nation by autocracy:
The Russian minister of finance has presented to the tsar a glowing account of the beneficial results of the working of the government monopoly of the liquor traffic when… the revenue to the crown from the sale of spirits, has practically doubled, trebled, and, in some provinces, even as much as quadrupled… Such a government as the Russian cannot possibly dispense with vodka without endangering its very existence… Vodka renders an actual practical political service… as long as the [peasant] is obedient, the official can command… Where vodka is altogether or nearly absent, there you will also find the tsar’s authority shaken and general prosperity developed.
The peasant in Russia contributed more in indirect tax than the lower orders of any other country in Europe, and the government’s financial optimism was justified in 1900 when it was calculated that sixty per cent of Russia’s revenue came from vodka. By way of comparison, the revenues from oil and gas production accounted for fifty per cent of the Russian state’s revenues in 2012.
The disastrous Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 instigated the slow crumbling of Imperial Russia and the shaking of the tsar’s authority. Bolstered by vodka, the soldiers were often drunk during battles. Although it was probably an exaggeration, a temperance worker stated that, “The Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk that they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs.” A field-doctor more reliably reported that he saw “masses of aimlessly wandering soldiers, red-eyed from alcohol, dust and exhaustion, surrounding an official from the quartermaster’s office who ladled vodka from a huge barrel to anyone who wanted it.”
What was described as “the great vodka debauch” occurred during the Russian retreat from Mukden:
The vodka casks were hacked open with knives, swords and axes, attracting an orgy of men who pushed and crowded in, trying to swallow the gushing vodka with their mouths, or to catch the spirit in any container they could grab, including empty sardine tins and even the cases of the Japanese shells… The vodka that overflowed collected a foot deep in a depression in the ground. Men knelt down to drink the muddy liquor, scooping it up in the hollows of their hands as one would scoop up water from a well. Some fell into it bodily. Many were wetted by the jets of liquor from the barrels squirting over them. Buriat Cossacks, Mohammedans from the Caucasus forbidden by their religion to touch drink, riflemen, dragoons and every other sort of military person joined in this mad spree. With the dust and the smoke from the burning stores eddying around them, they looked like alcoholic demons struggling in the wreck of hell.
Part of the problem lay in soldiers’ entitlement to a daily ration of vodka. Even regular officers were forced to drink under the threat of dismissal. For the soldiers, vodka was a central part of their lives, whether on or off the battlefield. After the reports of the drunkenness that featured in the Russo-Japanese war, distribution of vodka in the army and its sale in soldiers’ shops was prohibited in 1908.
Witte’s successor as minister of finance died shortly after assuming office and was replaced by Vladimir Kokovtsov, who was desperate to raise revenue to fund the war. According to Witte, Kokovtsov “distorted the meaning of the reform”. Now that the government needed vodka to produce as great a profit as possible, “no police measures were taken against drunkenness” in order to encourage the consumption of vodka.
The price of vodka was increased, which had some effect on “habitual consumers but not so high as to render the vodka inaccessible to the masses”. But when the war ended, the government campaign continued to promote the sale of vodka. A disgusted Witte noted that the number of vodka shops had doubled. Faithful to Alexander’s memory, he wrote reprovingly, “It was the minister’s duty to remember the late emperor’s original purpose in carrying out his vodka reform…”
At the same time as war was being waged with Japan, hunger and discontent raged amongst the lower orders of Russian society. On 22 January 1905, a peaceful workers’ march in St. Petersburg was fired on by troops and erupted into a nationwide revolution. Relaying the carnage, The Guardian reported the looting of a government vodka shop where £320 of vodka was destroyed and the area was strewn with the wreckage of broken glass.
The unrest grew in momentum such that Russia was almost closed down by strikes in October. The navy and army were mutinous, and revolutionary parties were attracting new recruits. Witte was appointed prime minister and gained Nicholas II’s grudging acceptance of the demands contained in the October Manifesto, which called for the duma to be allowed to assemble, civil rights including the freedom of speech and progress towards a universal franchise. But the unrest continued into the next month when four government vodka distilleries and the imperial glass factory went on strike, and Witte’s appeal for law and order was ignored.
Despite having negotiated a brilliant face-saving settlement to end the Russo-Japanese conflict in September 1905, Witte was dismissed from government service a few months later by his furious royal master and replaced by the reactionary Stolypin.
Witte noted of Stolypin’s views and policies that, “Men and women, adults and mere youngsters are executed alike for a political assassination and for robbing a vodka shop of five roubles. Sometimes a prisoner is executed for a crime committed five or six years previously.”
Ironically, when four drunk extremists arrived at Stolypin’s house to make an attempt on his life, they failed due to an excess of vodka. Two came disguised as policemen escorting a “prisoner” with the assistance of their “coach driver”. While they were talking to the doorkeeper, a bomb fell from the helmet of one of the assassins and exploded, killing two of the terrorists. The grounds of the house were strewn with fragments of bodies, pieces of clothing, watches and uniforms. In the house itself, the remaining walls and plaster were spattered with blood and fragments of the victims. A witness stated that he saw “three bodies without heads and a heap of almost unrecognisable flesh and clothing”.
“Stolypin,” The Guardian reported, “was saved by the would-be assassins having drunk numerous glasses of vodka which they had imbibed on several evenings in order to lull suspicions while maturing their preparations.” The following evening, as foreign journalists tried to explain to their readers why the Russian government was so hated, a correspondent for The Observer bought two bottles of vodka to encourage an interview with a soldier on night-sentry duty. The soldier told him that he had a deep distrust of the tsar, whom he regarded as a coward hiding away from his troubled people: “A man of no mind or no will, who cared nothing for the thousands and thousands who were killed through his worthlessness.”
Stolypin’s daughter suffered the amputation of both of her legs as a result of injuries from the bomb. He was later shot dead in 1911 while viewing a performance at the Kiev Opera as he sat next to his “worthless” master, the tsar.
Promoters of the vodka monopoly had stated that it would reduce crime, but it was found that the monopoly encouraged illegal distillation. Meanwhile, drinking in public resulted in hooliganism. A commentator wrote in 1905 that, “Drinkers who previously remained hidden in various taverns and ‘dens of drink’ now exhibit their vice on the streets, which cannot help but have a harmful effect on the public.”
In St. Petersburg, drunken youths walked in broad daylight along the Nevski Prospekt and thrust pornography into women’s faces, fluttering the pages as they went. One spot in the city became notorious because two drunk masked men dressed in black would frequently leap out of the bushes to startle passing women. Other youths drunk on vodka removed the bolts from park benches and stood by jeering and laughing when those who sat on them collapsed to the ground. A man who regaled the passengers on a tram with a song before trying to press vodka on a woman had his bottle grabbed by two other drunks. Perhaps surprisingly, they did not drink the vodka themselves but instead forced the contents down the singer’s throat.
An official government temperance department, known as the the Guardianship of Public Sobriety, had been established at the same time as the introduction of the monopoly law. For obvious reasons, the department recommended moderation rather than complete abstinence. Various incentives to give up vodka drinking were promoted in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Reading rooms, amusements and entertainments were offered in the main cities to those who signed the pledge. Most remarkably, a new church was built in St. Petersburg in 1908 for the city’s temperance movement, “The All-Russian Alexander Nevsky Society of Sobriety”. Built next to a large slum area, this Church of the Resurrection of Christ was constructed without central pillars to maximise space and may have been paid for by a one-kopek temperance tax that tavern owners had to pay for every ten roubles they took from alcohol sales.
In the provinces, stories akin to religious testaments were told of how peasants previously ruined by vodka had mended their ways, saved and bought horses and were leading contented lives. It was not what the government wanted to hear, especially when rural areas were allowed to control vodka sales and had shut down seventeen taverns in Ryazan. Governors of other Russian provinces then vetoed similar attempts in their fiefdoms, and the rural temperance movement slowly died.
The October Manifesto so grudgingly signed by Nicholas II had removed some restrictions on civic meetings. This made it possible for a conference known as the “First All-Russian Congress on the Struggle against Drunkenness”, which met in late December 1909 and continued into early January. The conference was a disaster. Instead of discussing alcoholism in Russia, some members of the conference ranted against the tsar for reaping a vast financial harvest from the vodka monopoly at vodka-drinking peasants’ expense.
Vodka had never been absent from any aspect of Russian life, and as the First World War approached and more peasants came to live in the cities, their beliefs that devilry rather than vodka was responsible for their domestic crises were half-jokingly exposed in court reports. Vodka featured in student magazines as the subject of silly jokes: “Alcoholic: a man who drinks vodka on only two occasions: when he has herring and when he doesn’t have herring.” On the Russian stage too, a glass of vodka was the symbolic shorthand that instantly summed up the drunk stock character that often featured in comic operas and plays, thereby rendering lengthy explanations redundant. Vodka in Russian life was as ever present as air.
But with a few strokes of the imperial pen, vodka supplies would be reduced by the state monopoly before being prohibited – less than ten years after vodka had been officially created and given its name.
Warning signs of trouble came early in 1914 when Sergei Witte, the architect of the 1894 monopoly, spoke out against his creation. He had always intended that the reform would be a control against drunkenness, but instead, “the suppression of alcoholism was pushed to the rear, and the object of the monopoly became the pumping of the people’s money into the government treasury.” By neglecting the evils of alcoholism, a new evil had arisen, “…the so-called ‘Hooliganism’. Hooliganism is a legitimated child of alcoholism.”
The death rattle in the throats of vodka drinkers began in February 1914 when the tsar, after seeing the results of vodka on households for himself – “tragic scenes of the degeneration of the people, the poverty of families, and the decline of households as a result of drunkenness” – sacked his minister of finance who had been urging the sale of vodka. Nicholas II told his new finance minister that the state would have to exploit other resources and issued an edict to that effect.
If there was any doubt about the wisdom and necessity of once again revising the vodka laws, it was banished when reports circulated in St. Petersburg that the vodka shops, closed for three days at Easter, were mobbed after they reopened. As a result, twenty thousand arrests for drunken behaviour were made in one day.
Over the next six months, at an enormous cost of lost jobs, distilleries were closed, vodka shops were shut down and the state vodka monopoly was ended by order of the tsar. Specially-designated policemen went round all of the nation’s vodka outlets and locked up the supplies, which were then secured by the Imperial Seal.
The end of the monopoly cut the entire national revenue by £90,000,000 – more than a quarter of the government’s income. The Guardian speculated that the peasantry, “so habituated to drink”, would find it “highly improbable that they could accept such a drastic reform”. The newspaper reported that in 1913 the peasant class had “consumed no fewer than 283.5 million gallons of spirits – an increase of 24 million on the figure of the preceding year”. The paper quoted figures stating that there were 2,983 vodka distilleries in Russia in 1912 and that the state owned and managed 28,016 drink-shops. Adopting a rather censorious tone, The Guardian reminded readers that:
It must not be forgotten that the Russian drink-shops only sell spirits and must necessarily exercise a more deteriorating effect on public health on account of the much lower consumption of food by the Russian peasant and working-class masses… the quantity of vodka sold in Russia was… nearly nine times as large as spirits sold in the United Kingdom in the corresponding year.
When Russia entered the First World War, the revenue from the former vodka monopoly was no longer there to help finance the war machine. Worse was to come when Nicholas II astonished the nation by stating on the 4 September that the sale of spirits would be prohibited for the duration of the war, an example which was copied by the other European nations fighting in the war.
It was not in the character of Nicholas II to pay attention to anything his people wanted, particularly the peasants, and the increasing unrest of the people was matched by the tsar’s determination to stamp it out. The duma could be rendered powerless by the tsar’s ability to overrule laws he did not like. The ruinous effects of vodka, due in part to the state monopoly, had been raised in the duma by Michael Chelysev, the Samara representative. He claimed that the results of drunkenness, such as frequent wife beating, starvation and poverty, could be wiped out if local councils were allowed to accept the petitions of teetotal-minded peasants to shut down local drink-shops and taverns. According to his own account, he was received shortly afterwards by the tsar in the Crimea: “He was impressed with my recital that most of the revolutionary and Socialist excesses were committed by drunkards and that the navy revolts and other mutinous movements were all caused by inebriates.”
According to The Guardian, the tsar sent a telegram on 20 October to the Association of Peasant Teetotallers announcing that it was “the tsar’s firm will to abolish for ever in Russia the sale of spirits by the state”.
Socialists who had attacked the tsar for creating the monopoly and enslaving the peasants to vodka found that its removal had robbed them of a useful propaganda weapon. Instead they now complained that prohibition interfered in personal liberty.
The vodka prohibition was a well-intentioned decision, but possibly the most fatal to be made by Nicholas. Along with the First World War, its ramifications contributed more to his abdication and assassination than anything else. This may seem an exaggeration, but the influence of the green wine would be felt beyond falling revenues due to prohibition.
The First World War was a disaster for Russia. In its desperation for money, it printed more, which led to inflation. Everyday necessities, especially food, soared in price. The country’s military failure, which was apparent after one year of conflict, would lead to widespread dissatisfaction amongst its troops.
The only cheerful reports were of a reformed peasantry. The Guardian newspaper informed its readers that “the ‘green serpent’, as the drink habit is called by the Russian peasant, is defeated”. The newspaper reported that the country was, “in the unanimous opinion of the Russian press, celebrating the grandest victory in the present war”. Effusive accounts of the vodka ban resulting in lives reborn and rich prosperity were published throughout Russia. According to a village priest, the closing of the drink-shops amounted to a:
transformation, which has overtaken our villagers… They are all now better dressed, industrious, more sensible. It is a pleasure to see how one of the ‘weak men’, who always used to go about drunk and would carry to the public house the last sack of flour or the last dozen eggs from under the hen, is now putting up a new gate at his courtyard and passing the evenings in the company of his wife who had for years never been free from the traces of his fists, discussing with her various household things rendered possible by a new superfluity of money. All, without exception, are only wishing that the sale of drink may never be renewed.
Almost six months later, The Guardian reported that the astonishingly positive effects of vodka’s absence were still being maintained. The difference to the prosperity of rural families was significant. One peasant woman, wanting her own happiness to be known, asked a country newspaper reporter to write on her behalf that, “We were poor. But then, when my man gave up drink, we bought hens and a cow.”
The same newspaper confidently noted that: “By one of the greatest reforms in the history of the world – great because it has achieved the greatest results in the shortest time – a nation of 150,000,000 souls has passed as it were in a night from the empire of vodka into the empire of light.”
It all seemed too good to be true, and it was. There were rumours that vodka was being served in certain places in teapots, and in some districts there were reports of cases of poisoning from “turpentine, eau-de-cologne, methylated spirits, children’s balsam and other ‘medicinal mixtures’”.
Once it was realised that vodka really had gone and there was no end to the war in sight, many peasants in rural areas became increasingly gloomy and fed up. They found that celebrations had become boring without vodka. Weddings were badly attended for the same reason and were as “merry as funerals”. Tea proved to be an inadequate substitute. In one province, godparents were hard to find for baptisms, since the traditional presents of vodka had been abolished. Funerals were also harder to arrange now that payment could no longer be made in vodka for coffins or the digging of graves.
The unkindest truth about vodka to infuriate the peasant was that it could still be had during the prohibition. It was available at restaurants, which paid a high price for the licence to sell vodka, and was consequently a preserve of the rich. Although fruit vodkas could be bought because the state was anxious to encourage the growth of fruit markets, the alcohol content was fairly low.
While many peasants were desperate to find vodka, by early 1916 the duma was equally desperate to find ways of disposing of the vast amount, some 260 million gallons, that lay in storage. The minister of finance had been accused of keeping it stored in order to sell it once the war was over. He declared categorically that: “The government will encourage temperance after the war. A return to the old state of affairs is impossible.” Instead, the government announced that vodka would be used in combination with benzine for motorists, and longer opening hours would be granted to traders who used it for lighting. Most novel of all, the ministry would fund a factory to manufacture artificial india-rubber from vodka. (In fact some years before the war, Britain had bought fusel oil – the unwanted by-product found at the end of vodka distillation – from Russia to use in its own artificial rubber.)
Sensing revolution in the air, the aristocracy were having what would be a last, desperate fling with privilege by indulging in champagne and caviar parties. They sang a popular song which indicated how even they could not find ready supplies of vodka:
We do not take defeat amiss,
And victory gives us no delight
The source of all our cares is this:
Can we get vodka for tonight.
By this time, the monarchy would only survive for another year, but the process of decline had already started when Rasputin was murdered in December 1916. Exactly how Rasputin managed to control the haemophilia of the tsarevich will never be known, but his constant contact with Nicholas and Alexandra became the subject of damaging gossip and rumour, which was even portrayed on the stage.
It was said that Rasputin had been constantly drunk on vodka and that the poison administered in his drink by his assassins was slow to work because he had a high vodka tolerance. Rasputin was under constant observation by the Russian secret service for months before he died. The amount he drank and his frequent drunkenness, were duly noted, but what he actually drank could not be monitored. The secret service could only observe him from a distance, as it did not wish to arouse suspicion by entering premises that Rasputin lived in or visited. On the morning of 10 August, following a wild party the night before, vodka is given only this mention:
Rasputin came out of his house… sighing and wondering at having got so drunk, since, according to his own words, he had had only three bottles of vodka. He repeated over and over again: “Ah, my dear fellows, that was an ugly business.”
Rasputin’s admission suggests that he was capable of far more in the way of vodka consumption than three bottles a night. The spirit was not produced on the night of his murder, and the poison which failed to work was dropped in his sweet madeira, thereby masking its taste. If Rasputin had drunk vodka, he would probably have detected the taste of poison at once.
More startlingly, however, is recent evidence that his murder was organised by the British secret service and that the fatal shot was fired by a British agent. The British government was afraid that if Rasputin’s constant pleas to the tsar to withdraw from the war succeeded, the Allies would be vulnerable to a build-up of German troops on the western front.
The inflation brought about by the depleted, vodka-less tax base and the subsequent printing of paper money meant that the peasants were unwilling to sell their grain on the open market. Although they were paid high prices for it, the money they received lost value with every passing minute. Instead, they preferred to dispose of the grain locally, and only small amounts became available for city use. Much of it was used for making the infamous samogon, which had become a useful bartering tool for goods that were in short supply. Grain that should have been in surplus was not reaching Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was now called.
Peter the Great’s city was difficult to keep stocked with fresh supplies, marooned as it was on the Baltic coast, and food could not be readily transported there because many of the trains previously available were reserved for the war effort. Bread was inevitably in short supply, and when bread queues were found throughout Petrograd, it was announced on 19 February that bread would be rationed. Even when flour was found, a shortage of fuel to light the ovens contributed to the bread shortage. Strikes and riots spread rapidly across Petrograd with the rallying cry, “Give us bread”. This was followed by, “Down with the government”, and “Down with war!” The Russian revolution had begun and would last just ten days.
An attempt to protect the Winter Palace in Petrograd from the revolutionaries failed, and when it was stormed, the imperial wine cellars were looted. The palace was supposedly guarded by the top regiment, the Preobrazhensky, but this had been rendered uncommandable because of vodka-fuelled drunkenness amongst the troops. Countless replacement regiments were sent in as one after another became intoxicated. The looting only stopped when a Finnish regiment was brought in, which threatened to blow up the wine cellars and shoot the looters if the plundering did not stop.
Deprived of alcohol for so long, soldiers in Petrograd led a series of vodka riots which escalated into street battles. The Red Guard was assigned the task of protecting stores of alcohol but had to use an armoured car against their own men, killing three of them and eight soldiers from the Semenov regiment who joined the attack on the Petrov vodka distillery. Lenin, who had seized power from the Provisional Government, was not present at the storming of the Winter Palace in October, but he was disgusted to notice that soldiers who had attacked the distillery were licking up the vodka that was flowing on the ground.
He ordered that all marauders who tried to steal alcohol were to be shot, declaring that vodka was the enemy of communism. Orders were given for all of the Imperial stores of vodka and wine to be poured into the Neva. In the new capital, it was decreed that:
All the stores of grape wine, cognac, flavoured vodka… are announced to be property of the Moscow Soviet of Peasant and Working Deputies… All the warehouses where these products are kept, all the equipment related to the industry, i.e. glass, boxes, covering material, dressing and fuel; also cash money in the wine-shops and warehouses belonging to the company and to [private persons] now belong to the Moscow Soviet of Peasant and Working Deputies.
It was a sobering start to a revolution.
The Provisional Government had declared that all grain including the produce of the harvest due in 1917 would be under government control and would be distributed via central government edicts. When the new Bolshevik minister of food reported that illegal vodka distillation was on the rise, the grain distribution was abandoned as there was no guarantee that it would be used for bread.
In March 1918 the Bolshevik government withdrew from the First World War and six months later, ordered the assassination of Nicholas along with his wife and children. It was the end of the Romanov dynasty.
A British Member of Parliament understood the situation very well when he stated in the House of Commons that:
It is perfectly plain that if you interfere with the deep-seated social habits of a people, you will have an enormous disturbance, and that is what the poor foolish tsar did. He thought he had dethroned vodka and vodka soon dethroned the tsar.