Stalin belatedly discovered the virtues of vodka as an efficient social instrument to keep the proletariat subdued. The first industrial facilities to resume production, sometimes under direct artillery attacks, in the territories re-conquered from Nazis were – no surprise – alcohol distilleries.
Nicholas Ermochkine & Peter Ilikowski, Forty Degrees East
The revolution and the collapse of Imperial Russia did not mean the end of prohibition. Vodka had reigned as the supreme spirit but was absent for ten years from the start of the First World War until its restoration in 1924. Lenin drank very little alcohol and was resolutely in favour of maintaining the prohibition, declaring that there would be “no trade in rotgut”.
The only known conversation Lenin had on vodka was recalled by P.I. Voyevodin, later renowned as a film scriptwriter. Then one of the leading Bolsheviks in western Siberia, Voyevodin had come to Moscow in 1918 where he met Lenin for the first time:
I told him about an occasion when there had been a big argument… over the problem of how to sell the vodka which had been stored in vast quantities in warehouses in Siberia. When the problem was discussed… some people, including me, suggested that we should sell the vodka to the peasants in exchange for grain. Only three Party members supported my suggestions. Ilyich said: ‘The fools! What fools! You are in charge of economic affairs… Why didn’t you push it through?’ Then Lenin said: ‘But could you have sold that vodka abroad?’ I said that we could have kept France supplied with spirits for fifteen years. Then Ilyich asked, ‘But could you actually get the vodka out?’… I told Lenin that we couldn’t have transported it all down the River Ob [in western Siberia] because we didn’t have the tanker barges or appropriate containers. What was more, in the lower reaches of the Ob, we’d have had to transfer all of it onto sea-going steamers. After reflecting, Vladimir Ilyich said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t sell it to the peasants. You should have ordered it. It ought to have been done.’ I started to explain that it was not for us to decide to do it off our own bat. Ilyich said, ‘If you’d done it, we’d have approved it.’ I laughed and asked him, ‘And then you would have condemned us?’ Ilyich began to laugh, ‘That’s all right! We’d have condemned you for it, but you’d have done the right thing.’
It was believed that about a third of rural households were making samogon during the post-revolutionary prohibition years. The penalties for illegal distilling were very severe, including exile to Siberia, but the risk of being caught was less in the country than in cities. Nevertheless, vodka leaked into certain shops in Moscow where the coded request “for lemonade”, along with a significant wink at the assistant, was perfectly understood.
Lenin had set up a “Commission to Combat Drunkenness” because he was afraid that if grain continued to be used for samogon, it might cause a bread shortage. The green serpent, which had consumed the tsar and brought Lenin to power, could rear its head and remove him. He reluctantly agreed for fiscal reasons to remove the prohibition in 1923 and instead control vodka through a state monopoly. But he did not live to see the change after dying in January 1924. Lenin’s funeral was held on what proved to be the coldest day of the year. Ironically, vodka had to be given to the trumpeters to put on their mouthpieces so as to prevent their breath freezing on their lips.
He was succeeded by Stalin, who had no reservations about the necessity of the vodka revenue. At a party conference in 1925, he said:
What is better, the yoke of foreign capital or the sale of vodka? This is the question facing us. Naturally we will opt for vodka because we believe that if we have to get a bit dirty for the sake of the victory of the proletariat and the peasantry, we will take this extreme measure in the interest of our cause.
Born in Georgia in 1879 with the cumbersome name of Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Stalin, as he renamed himself, read Lenin’s writings and became a Marxist revolutionary. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and raised money for them by robbing banks. He became close to Lenin after the 1917 revolution, but the latter criticised Stalin in his Testament. The document was prepared not long before his death – an event hastened by an arrogant and insensitive letter he received from Stalin, which barely apologised for inexcusably rude remarks he had made about Lenin’s wife. Lenin clearly expressed his wish that Stalin should be removed from the post of General Secretary and not succeed him. Testament was not made public, and Stalin would die in office in 1953.
It was joked that Stalin’s father gave him a rag soaked in vodka to stop him howling as a baby, but he was never seen drunk and was rarely seen by the Russians. A virtual recluse, Stalin made very few public appearances.
He seemed to have enjoyed drinking heavily only with his close friends late at night, “mixing Georgian wine, brandy and vodka” and listening carefully for any indiscreet comments. He hinted to one colleague that his glass sometimes held diluted beer masquerading as vodka, which, resembling the brown-shaded Okhotnichya or “hunter’s vodka” made by Stolichnaya, was flavoured with cloves, juniper, aniseed and coffee as well as black and red pepper. For maintaining the nation in a stupor, vodka was Stalin’s most useful weapon in peace and in war. It was the familiar story of a drunken nation being easier to control than a sober one, but Stalin’s reign was one of terror and control by fear.
As he increased his atrocities, making use of a network of secret police, Russia slipped back into vodka drinking as if there were no future, and for many there would not be. If anything, mass vodka drinking was greater than in the days of the tsar, with one commentator writing that “a wave of alcoholism engulfed the whole country”. Everyone seemed to be drinking: “the well, the sick… adults… children… at celebrations… for appetite, for warmth and to refresh themselves.”
Part of the problem with the return of vodka was that there were no longer kabaks to drink it in. As the taverns had been privately owned, most of them were now closed. Vodka could not be bought at bars or clubs and could only be drunk in restaurants or at home. It was available at workers’ clubs, but for many the severe punishments for the pleasure of being drunk on vodka was not worth the risk of being caught.
A delegation of British trade unionists visiting Moscow in 1924 reported that vodka had been reintroduced at 20 per cent proof, half the strength of the spirit when last available in 1914. The weaker vodka was replaced the following year by the first Soviet vodka, which was 40 per cent proof and was informally known as “Rykovka” after A.V. Rykov, the chairman of the USSR. Moscow Vodka was reintroduced in 1925 and was the reputed favourite at the Kremlin. Its premises were developed from a former Imperial monopoly bottling factory, and despite the fact that the building was bombed by the Germans in 1941, it was appropriately used to make Molotov cocktails. It would later become the factory that continues to produce Kristall vodka.
There was no hesitation about buying vodka in Leningrad. The government released 180,000 gallons of vodka on the first day that prohibition ended and maintained a daily issue of 30,000 gallons to meet demand. Unfortunately, there were not enough bottles to cope with the quantity of spirit being produced despite all the bottle factories working overtime. The government ordered a nationwide increase in bottle production, requisitioning two hundred and fifty million bottles from just one factory.
For those peasants preferring a stronger vodka, samogon was often produced at 90 per cent. Thus a convivial evening drinking it at home would cost a third of the price of legal vodka. The production of samogon for “one’s own use” was helpfully decriminalised after 1926. By 1928 greater standardisation resulted in 40 per cent vodka becoming the norm.
The end of prohibition had some unintended consequences for the Kremlin. The Russian Supreme Economic Council was cut off from the outside world for three months because one of its junior employees succumbed to a thirst for vodka. The RSEC supervised the work of state industries that were based in Russia and not the wider Communist bloc.
The task of stamping and posting the mail from that department was entrusted to one clerk, but the reintroduction of 40 per cent vodka proved an irresistible temptation to him. Unfortunately, he did not earn enough to satisfy his thirst, so he converted the stamps into cash, and the cash into vodka. He had a vague plan to buy stamps to post the growing pile of letters, but three months passed with the clerk still drinking away the department’s stamp budget.
He failed to turn up to work for two consecutive days due to a massive hangover. By chance, a question about a letter was asked, and when the absent clerk’s desk was searched, it was stuffed with the unposted mail. The most surprising feature of the clerk’s lack of action was that all of the departments which were supposed to receive instructions in the unsent letters had functioned perfectly well without them.
After prohibition ended, traditional celebratory customs were resumed with gusto in the countryside. On one festive day, a family of eight living in a shack, was reported to have polished off 36 litres of vodka, a sheep and a pig with the aid of thirty guests. They had to live off bread, cucumbers and potatoes for the rest of the year.
Such regular occurrences stirred temperance societies into action with the result that in 1928, the estimated forty per cent of children who did not drink were encouraged to wave placards outside factories with touching appeals that read, “We demand sober parents”, “Down with drunk fathers”, and “Down with vodka”. Less touching was the placard commanding, “Shoot drunks!”
Various temperance campaigns at the end of the decade were undertaken but were consigned to failure, partly because temperance activity did not suit Stalin at all. His solution was to merge the temperance movement with the anti-religious movement, “The Union of the Godless”, along with the campaign to encourage the teaching of reading, known as the “Down with Illiteracy Society”, into a composite body called “The Healthy Life Society”. One of its magazine covers showed a modern version of Christ generously filling cups at the Wedding in Cana on a table cluttered with vodka bottles. Officially, alcoholism was no longer an issue, and as a state problem, it simply vanished.
In September 1929 Stalin wrote to Molotov, who was in effect his deputy, that it was essential for Soviet military forces to be increased. But he added:
Where can we find the money? I think vodka production should be expanded… We need to get rid of a false sense of shame and directly and openly promote the greatest expansion of vodka production possible for the sake of a real and serious defence of our country.
He was opposed by Bukharin, a member of the board of the “Societies for the Struggle with Alcoholism”. Stalin had him shot ten years later, while Molotov outlived nearly all of his contemporaries, dying at the age of 96 in 1986.
A propaganda film, The General Line by Sergei Eisenstein, appeared in 1929 and centres on a tough peasant woman who manages to persuade the hard-drinking male members of a commune to pool their money to buy a tractor instead of the vodka they would rather spend it on. The happy ending sees everyone working harmoniously together. In reality, the situation was dire because the peasants did not understand the concepts of communism, were unwilling to surrender the grain necessary for vodka and bread, and did not wish to work in collectives. The greatest suffering came in Ukraine where those who resisted Stalin’s agricultural plans were left to starve to death.
Having seen off the temperance movement, vodka was an essential part of the 1931 Five Year Plan. But the spirit’s ability to boost revenues meant that it was not cheap. The price had increased several times such that a two-third litre bottle cost four roubles, of which about three roubles consisted of tax.
Vodka retained its ability to make or break social interactions. Factory hands forced new workers to bring in vodka as part of their initiation rite and were shunned or given no instructions on how to work if they did not. But efforts to combat alcohol at the workplace continued. In some factories, models of cemeteries were placed near the doorway, with planted crosses clearly inscribed with the names of workers who were inefficient through drunkenness. If they did not reform their ways, the “habituals” were sent to rehab clinics.
Stalin’s encouragement of others to drink vodka heavily in his company in the hope of careless talk was a triumph. The horror of having to endure an evening with Stalin could be mitigated by moderate vodka drinking, but too much was likely to prove fatal. Tomsky, one of his most loyal and trusted comrades, wagged a finger at his leader after consuming too much vodka, declaring loudly, “We’ll find a bullet for you too.” Not long afterwards, on learning he was to be tried for treason, Tomsky found a bullet for himself.
The evidence seems to suggest that Stalin never drank during a working day. If he had been a seasoned drinker, his air marshal, Alexander Golovanov, would not have been concerned when, during the Yalta conference, Winston Churchill initiated a vodka-drinking contest between himself and Stalin. Their glasses were refilled at an alarming rate, and those with Stalin were worried if he could keep up with Churchill, whose reputation as a heavy drinker was notorious. Stalin was holding his own, but when Churchill was carried away to have a rest, Stalin approached Golovanov and said: “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t worry, I won’t drink Russia away. But tomorrow, he’ll feel like a fish on a frying pan.”
Stalin’s nephew remembered a different state of affairs, recalling that his uncle “was in a state of collapse” after the Yalta Conference, where the “Churchill-Stalin vodka-drinking duel had been bad for him”. But Stalin declared, “I don’t admit his superiority even in the matter of how much alcohol we can take.”
The two leaders had never enjoyed spending time together, and they had exchanged insults during their first meeting in 1942. Churchill sulked during the Kremlin banquet given in his honour, while the British chief of the imperial general staff, Alan Brooke, found that the minute they sat down, “vodka flowed freely and one’s glass kept being filled up… During the first hour we must have got through at least a dozen toasts. Luckily, I had a jug of water in front of me, and when I was not being watched I filled up my glass with water instead of vodka.”
Stalin’s marshal, Kliment Voroshilov sent for a new vodka, which was coloured yellow and arrived in a jug with a large red chilli floating on the top. Brooke found it too hot to swallow: “It was just like drinking liquid cayenne pepper and completely choked up one’s throat.”
The Soviet marshal had no reservations about the pepper-infused vodka and drank two glasses in quick succession. Stalin deliberately waited until Voroshilov was drunk and, grinning broadly, walked round to his seat to propose a toast to him. Barely able to rise to his feet, Voroshilov gripped the table with both hands and rocked backwards and forwards, staring vacantly ahead:
The critical moment arrived… Stalin held up his glass for Voroshilov to clink with. Voroshilov must have seen at least half a dozen glasses… he trusted to luck and lunged forward…Fortune was with him and he clicked the right one! Stalin walked off to fill his glass another dozen times for the other toasts, whilst Voroshilov with a deep sigh sank back on to his chair.
Stalin was remembered in a comic, grotesque and vodka-laden evening by William Christian Bullitt, the newly appointed first American ambassador to Soviet Russia in 1934 who was entertained with others by the Soviet minister of defence. The ambassador was completely unfamiliar with Russian customs, and his first surprise was the lavish banquet. After ten toasts had been proposed, the foreign minister Litvinov noticed that the American was sipping vodka from his glass. He told the ambassador quietly that “it was an insult not to drink to the bottom” and that he must do so. Bullitt managed the next fifty vodka toasts, grateful for having a head that was “impervious to any quantity of alcohol”.
Stalin raised his glass to the “American army, the navy, the president and whole USA”, while Bullitt toasted the continued success of the Soviet Union and the memory of Lenin. By this time the vodka clearly had gone to Stalin’s head, a turn of events which must have chilled his deputy commissar for heavy industry, Georgy Pyatakov, a small and slight man who was a brilliant pianist. After marching him over to a piano, Stalin commanded Pyatakov to play, standing behind the hapless performer who was forced to launch into a series of wild Russian dances “with a manic furiosity at the keyboard, spurred on by Stalin’s hands around his neck”. Pyatakov was later shot for supposedly collaborating with the exiled Trostsky, charges which were subsequently proved to be false.
The hospitality was returned by Bullitt in a lavish party, which was later parodied by Bulgakov, one of the four hundred guests, in a chapter entitled “Satan’s Grand Ball” in his novel The Master and Margarita. It sees champagne ruling during the evening, but vodka is provided as a restorative on the following morning.
It is claimed wrongly that the vodka brand “Red Army” was created especially by Stalin to give to his troops during the Second World War. Perstovka, a peppery vodka, was enjoyed by the Soviet army generals, but the vodka given out as a daily ration to the Red Army during the Second World War was Stolichnaya, which was not on general sale until much later. Superior to Moskovskaya, the vodka that had been made in 1894 and resurrected by the Soviets, Stolichnaya was created during the siege of Stalingrad when the state’s chief distiller had time on his hands.
Stalin’s reign was one of the longest Russia has ever seen, and through vodka he loosened the tongues of those close to him, and numbed an entire nation into submission. When he died in 1953, official mourning meetings were organised where the response was mixed. A Moscow carpenter remarked that: “I wish they had given us at least two hundred grams of vodka; then we would drink to the memory of the Leader.”
Others felt that it was inappropriate to celebrate birthdays, drink vodka or laugh a few days after Stalin’s funeral. When it was finally accepted that Stalin really was dead, some spoke their minds without fear of retribution. Brandishing a bottle of vodka, the leader of a tractor team from Rostov said to those present: “Let’s drink to Stalin – to Stalin’s death! Let’s thank him for building a hundred and ninety thousand concentration camps for us.”
Stalin was replaced and denounced by Khrushchev, who made a feeble effort to reduce vodka drinking. Poster campaigns were used by the Soviet government to warn against drunkenness and being “in the embrace of the green snake”. Killing the dragon or snake was a useful image in various anti-vodka campaigns. Posters depicted the green serpent in its many evil forms, from strangling neglected babies in their prams to coiling around the bottles clutched by men as they drink vodka.
The most effective poster was also the simplest and became an iconic image of Soviet Russian art. A neatly-dressed young man, seated at a table with a rather unappetising meal of steak, peas and something unidentifiable on his plate, holds out a hand to reject a proffered glass of vodka. Simply captioned “No!” it is still reprinted as a postcard and a poster. It attracted an amusing riposte in the form of a near-identical poster in which a grinning Russian bear seated at the same table is offered a glass of vodka held in a pig’s trotter, with the caption reading “Yes!”
Khrushchev tried to intoxicate Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister, and his entourage during a visit to Russia in 1955 by proposing countless peppered-vodka toasts. As soon as the glasses were empty, they were refilled at once. Perhaps out of historically-motivated spite, Khrushchev targeted a Canadian-Russian diplomat, George Ignatieff, who was the son of Nicholas II’s last minister of education.
“I tried to spill some of the drink over my shoulder as I drained each glassful,” Ignatieff recalled, “but Khrushchev immediately spotted my stratagem and announced that the ‘count (or should I say ex-count?) was trying to cheat’.” Ignatieff was pressed to, “Drink up like a Russian”, which he did until he was violently sick during the meal. Khrushchev was so drunk that he had to be helped to his car by his bodyguards, but he sent a message to Pearson the next day, telling the minister that he was impressed by the way he had handled his vodka.
Khrushchev was a great fan of John Wayne and would watch pirated copies of the actor’s films. During the Soviet premier’s visit to America in 1958, he asked to meet the film star, and they met at a formal reception. They slipped away to a private room with a bar where Khrushchev told Wayne that he understood that the star enjoyed a drink. Wayne told him he had heard much the same thing about Khrushchev, and they discussed the merits of vodka versus Wayne’s favoured Mexican tequila, drinking heavily as they chatted. A drunken Khrushchev babbled to Wayne via his interpreter that he was the leader of “the biggest state in the world and [I] will one day rule the world”, to which an amused Wayne asked the interpreter to tell Khrushchev that he was “gonna knock him on his sorry fucking ass”. This was tactfully changed by the interpreter, who told Khrushchev that Wayne “would buy him a drink the day he rules America”.
The drinking contest was judged to be a draw, and when Wayne later received a box of premium Russian vodka with a handwritten note that read, “Duke, Merry Christmas, Nikita”, he sent a special box of tequila to the Kremlin.
Khrushchev increased the price of vodka at the beginning of 1958 in an attempt to reduce heavy drinking. The press was bombarding the populus with anti-alcohol propaganda, particularly targeting late New Year revellers. Vodka was removed from films in which it appeared, and anyone shown celebrating a success by lifting a vodka glass was reprimanded.
Vodka addicts who were frequently found drunk in the street were rounded up and dumped in “drunk tanks”, familiar to readers of Martin Cruz Smith’s detective novels. It was quite a useful way to have free hospitality, for addicts were given a bath and coffee at the sobering-up stations and were allowed to sleep the vodka off before being released without any charge. The government half-heartedly targeted pseudo traditions such as workers spending their first wage on vodka. But when an anti-vodka campaign was given publicity in 1964, even the state’s mouthpiece Pravda did not suggest that excessive drinking had stopped. The newspaper stated that: “The reasons for drinking have been eliminated – there is no poverty or unemployment.”
The western world heard little of how Russian factories were in reality extremely unproductive, but the more amusing stories of vodka-related misconduct did leak out. A Soviet mother was awarded a “Heroine Mother Medal” for giving birth to ten children. Unfortunately it was discovered that the single mother had the children by ten different fathers and had packed off eight of them to a home. The two lucky enough to be kept with their mother were starved, while the generous family allowance helped the single mum to maintain a steady supply of vodka.
The succession of leaders which followed the bloodless coup that removed Khrushchev in 1964 made little impact on vodka overindulgence until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. A grim-faced Brezhnev, himself an alcoholic, later featured on a spoof poster that satirised the Soviet anti-alcohol campaign. Alongside portraits of Stalin and Lenin fixed on an office wall, images of Brezhnev and the other leaders frown disapprovingly on two young men who lounge about. Laughing women, with their dresses pulled up to display stocking tops, guzzle champagne as they prance on top of a desk. Several copies of Pravda lie in piles on the floor. The poster parodied typical slogans of the Soviet regime, in this case a reminder to young Communists of their duty to work and their duty to the state, but one which became irreverently known to some as the “Work, not Dick” poster.
Brezhnev often seemed unaware about the state of the country, and although the use of vodka as “liquid cash” was forbidden, a story popular at the time neatly summarised how the spirit was still useful as an alternative currency. During a visit to an industrial plant, Brezhnev supposedly asked a machine turner:
“If I raise the price of a bottle of vodka to ten roubles, will you continue to drink?”
“Yes.”
“But if I raise the price to twenty roubles?”
“Yes, Leonid Illyich. You can raise it as high as you like and I shall continue to drink.”
“Why?”
“Look at this spare part. It costs one bottle of vodka today, and it will always cost one bottle of vodka tomorrow!”
When asked about Russia’s vodka problem, Brezhnev replied, “The Russians have always drunk vodka. They can’t get by without it.” The image of vodka, as well as appearing in anti-vodka posters, was:
…omnipresent in every single art form during the Brezhnev period, creating the impression that is and was the Russians’ most cherished companion, in joy, love or sorrow. This was of course an incredibly dangerous image, which very few people in Russia attempted to undermine.
Vodka had always been present in art forms throughout Russian history in varying degrees of quality. Impressive art objects included imperial glass vodka flasks and cups with decorative features such as dancing devils as well as vodka cups adorned with the green snake in silver with bejewelled eyes.
After being used to toast six hundred years of historic events, vodka was preparing – or rather being prepared – to make its own dramatic contribution to world history. It would make its mark on an event that was just as powerful and turbulent as the 1917 Russian revolution. Having come to power in March 1985, Gorbachev decided that it was time that Russia really did “get by without vodka”, making the Soviet Union’s drink problem his number one priority for reform. Two months after becoming general secretary of the Communist Party, he took the strongest steps to combat alcoholism since 1914. It soon became known that Gorbachev, although not an abstainer, drank very little – something that made him suspect to his compatriots inclined to believe an old saying that Russians only trust each other when they are drunk.
If Gorbachev had simply made vodka difficult to buy, it would have been bad enough. It seemed as if the days of Stalin had returned, when anyone with the smell of alcohol was hauled into police stations. When the drunk tanks across the country were full up, thousands of people were driven out into the countryside and dumped. Every night, hordes of so-called drunks were seen walking back to their homes, often in the middle of the winter, in the dark and cold.
The price of vodka increased, and production of the spirit was reduced. It was Gorbachev’s intention that the vodka control would encourage factory and agricultural productivity, as innumerable working days were lost through excessive vodka drinking.
It was only part of a complicated economic revival plan, but the cost of lost vodka revenue was thought to be 100 billion roubles. Although vodka coupons were given out allocating two vodka bottles per month, the spirit was in short supply. Vodka shops opened later, attracting three-hour queues in some of the busiest city areas – a dreadful ordeal during the winter. Vodka had never been particularly cheap, and it took seven hours for the average Moscow worker to earn enough to buy one bottle compared to one hour for an average American wage earner.
Those Russians who felt deprived of vodka could only joke about its shortage, and even Gorbachev is supposed to have enjoyed the following joke at his expense. After standing for hours in a vodka-shop queue near Red Square, two men complain about the delay. One says to the other, “I’ve had enough – I’m going to the Kremlin and I am going to knock Gorbie’s head off.” When he returned a few minutes later, he was asked what the situation was, and said: “The queues for people wanting to do the same are even longer than this one.”
As the first Christmas under Gorbachev approached, the incentive to make illegal vodka had never been greater, and the run on sugar created a national shortage. A cartoon of 1987 showed a drunk at a restaurant table asking for “three hundred glasses of tea – the sugar separately!”
Satiric verse, referring to the price of vodka, which had reached ten roubles, and Gorbachev’s nickname of “Minister Lemonade” or “Komrade Kvas”, made it clear that the Russian would always obtain vodka come what may:
Price it high or price it low
We shall never let it go,
You tell Misha, Komrade Kvas
Even ten’s ok by us.
For some, ten roubles was too high, and three years later, Russia was awash with samogon, which was causing widespread poisoning and thousands of fatalities.
The better-off alcoholics were turning to eau de cologne and causing a shortage by buying it in boxloads. Soon, eaudecholics could only drink during licensing hours and were rationed to two bottles per person. Travellers in the Moscow underground remarked that in the morning it “smelled heavenly”, and others told the joke about a man who asked for two bottles of aftershave and one bottle of eau de cologne. Knowing what it was for, the assistant asked if he would not prefer three bottles of aftershave as this would be cheaper. “Certainly not!” the man replied. “One of the drinkers is a lady!”
Substitutes for vodka such as perfume were not new, and were eagerly sought and used during the First World War prohibition. Now the last refuge for the desperate, perfume and eau de cologne were well known to the writer of the only modern poetic masterpiece devoted to vodka, Moscow-Petushki. Just how much vodka its Russian creator Benedict Erofeev consumed could not be guessed at even by him, but the spirit was inspirational. The only comparable European work is probably Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle, which for exuberance, volume of alcohol, comic humour and erudition, Erofeev’s effort easily matches.
Erofeev may have been influenced by Moscow Taverns, the series of poems written by Esenin in 1922, which celebrated the lives of those who sought consolation from vodka. Like Esenin, Erofeev wanted his poem to have a broad appeal and not be limited to an academic readership.
The interest in the novelistic prose poem of loosely constructed verse is confirmed by the number of translations that have appeared under different titles. Moscow-Petushki has also been published as Moscow to the End of the Line, Moscow Stations and Moscow Circle. The Paris edition, Moscow on Vodka, while unfaithful to the original title, has a certain apt succinctness. Because the work is in Russian, certain finely-tuned allusions are inevitably lost in translation, but the overall effect remains comic. It also happens to be an incidental guide to vodka brands of the Soviet Union, referring to Bison Grass, Hunter’s Vodka and Coriander Vodka as well as the illegal vodka concoctions that alcoholics drank in desperation.
Nothing is quite as it seems, for although the framework of the poem is a train journey that starts in Moscow and ends seventy-eight miles later at Petushki, the physical journey itself may not have taken place.
Between departing and arriving, a character called Benny recounts a series of episodes and escapades from his life, which involve people who are as outlandish and as fantastic as the tales themselves. Benny is trying to travel to Petushki to see his girlfriend and his son, but his need for vodka, sometimes fulfilled but generally not, contributes to the whole uncertainty of what is real and what is imagined. Petushki is a place of idealistic perfection because Benny’s loved ones reside there. It is a utopia too perfect to exist, “where original sin… does not burden anyone there”, and can therefore never be visited.
The doubt about the journey taking place on a moving train is evident from the start, for Benny intends to see the Kremlin when next visiting Red Square but always somehow misses it. As he is already blind drunk and staggering in Red Square, knowing this simple fact suggests that everything about the rest of the tale is uncertain except Benny’s need to be saturated in vodka.
When the vodka shop is closed at night, Benny endures a living hell until it reopens in the morning, and his desperate efforts to find vodka are both pathetic and absurdly comic. He chats to a wide range of travelling companions who all become drunk together. All Benny’s money has gone on vodka and a little food, but he knows he can travel for nothing by giving the conductor a swig of vodka instead of the fare. The comedy is learned and frequently alludes to Russian novels and European life, even mentioning British prime minister Harold Wilson and an imaginary visit to London. Moscow-Petushki can only go round in circles, typifying the political system, which then seemed unending.
The characters, almost all of whom have been dragged down by alcoholism, are unable to contribute to the productivity of the state and symbolise the blind alley of Communism. The poem is a vivid comment on the sterility and dullness of Soviet life, which for some could only be endured through a perpetual vodka haze.
Like the Benny of the poem, Erofeev was a telephone-cable layer until he was sacked for drinking; he said that the poem was written to amuse those with whom he worked. They deliberately let the cable become rain-soaked and endlessly delayed the completion of the job so that they could instead play poker, talk and drink vodka.
Erofeev was a brilliant intellectual who won a gold medal for his scholastic achievements when he was young. But he was expelled from Moscow University for erratic behaviour. After an early failed marriage, he settled with his second wife, who encouraged his writing. Dying of throat cancer in 1990, Erofeev just lived long enough to see his work gaining critical acclaim.
Moscow-Petushki first attracted attention in the United Kingdom when it appeared in the form of a play in London’s West End in 1994. Tom Courtenay took on the leading role and won the Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for his performance.
An indispensable guide to the poem and the scenes it depicts can be found on a YouTube video, which includes a visit to the Stolichnaya distillery. The all-women tasters there are seen taking bites of apples to cleanse their mouths, a necessity after trying Erofeev’s samogon-cocktail, The Spirit of Geneva. Its recipe includes the following ingredients:
White Lilac – 50 grams,
Anti-perspirant for feet – 50 grams,
Zhigulkev beer – 200 grams
Varnish – 150 grams.
With the knowledge of a skilled bartender, Erofeev insisted on the use of White Lilac, “for which there is no substitute. Jasmine, Cypress or Lily of the Valley simply won’t do.”
Unleashing samogon and increasing his own unpopularity, Gorbachev’s vodka policy proved to be the unwitting means of his own destruction. In response to the widespread discontent, he reversed the measure. Vodka production increased and was sold everywhere, including in toy shops. Die-hard Communists, opposed to Gorbachev’s economic liberalism and determined to salvage something out of the wreckage, attempted to remove him in a coup in August 1991. Rescued temporarily by Boris Yeltsin, the man who would become his successor, Gorbachev finally bowed out after both men formally dissolved the Soviet Union in December 1991.
A celebrated vodka drinker, Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Federation. It seemed almost symbolic that the priest who baptised Yeltsin was drunk on vodka and dropped baby Boris in the font. Tales of the president’s heavy drinking became legion. In Berlin, at a ceremony in August 1994 marking the departure of the last Russian troops from Germany, Yeltsin grabbed the baton from the conductor of the Berlin police orchestra and squirmed on the podium as if he were desperate to visit the lavatory. Disorientated during his stay at the White House when visiting President Clinton in 1995, Yeltsin was found outside the building in his underwear, mumbling something about wanting a pizza. Even The Simpsons immortalised his drinking, with the highest reading on a breathalyser being called “Boris Yeltsin”.
Seen by the West as a clown, Yeltsin rarely allowed vodka to make him appear anything but mellow. For Russia, his economic policy created hyper-inflation, with grim results. Four thousand roubles would have bought a one-room flat when housing was privatised, but by 1993, it could only buy a kilo of frankfurters. Moscow police discovered the corpses of ten pensioners during an average day. They had usually sold their flats in order to make ends meet or just to buy another bottle of vodka.
The Curative Labour Clinics, which had forcibly held chronic alcoholics, closed in July 1992, pushing 11,000 inmates onto the streets. Some celebrated their release with a drink when they were met by friends clutching welcoming bottles of vodka. Others would soon join the heavy drinkers who were homeless and slept in parks, curling up around a bottle of cheap vodka. Cut and bruised from fights and falls, few would survive the severe winters.
Yeltsin resigned in 1999 and died ten years later. As Russian vodka moved into the 21st century, it began to have a new look and was dressed up neatly for the export market, free of the shackles of both the Imperial and Soviet past.