Over the course of several centuries, Poland’s borders were stretched, shrunk and frequently mauled by Austria, Prussia and Russia. It was sometimes the unwilling host to foreign habits and customs, including food and alcohol. Partly as a result, Poland never regarded vodka as its only national drink as there were other contenders in the form of beer and mead.
The international trade dispute over the claim to being the true home of vodka had revealed that although one of the earliest written records of the word “vodka” occurred in a Polish document of 1405, it did not define what vodka actually was, but it seems to have been used as an antiseptic.
In 1833, Edmund Spencer made a visit to the Caucuses. In an account of his travels through Poland, he listed in the contents, “Of the Poles – Miserable condition of the peasantry – Their addiction to vodka drinking.” Travelling through Austrian-controlled Galicia, he noted:
I could not but admire the fine manly forms and broad shoulders of the peasantry of Galicia… but I do not think, in so small a town, I ever beheld such a scene of intoxication: vodka, the beloved vodka, was everywhere exposed for sale, not only in the houses, but on stands in the streets, and the peasants, having completed their sales, were then quaffing it as freely as if it was beer. It is remarkable that, of every other race, the Slavonic is the most addicted to this degrading vice; whether in Russia, or well-ordered Austria, or Prussia, we find the Slavonic part of the population slaves to their inclination for spirituous liquors.
Spencer’s observation that vodka was a popular remedy in Poland for every ailment had been made as early as the 16th century when the spirit was used “for washing the chin after showering”. This application was known to Nikolai Gogol’s main character in The Nose. Unable to accept that his nose has vanished from his face, he wonders if he could have drunk his vodka instead of using it as an aftershave.
If the social pleasures and detrimental effects of vodka for the Polish peasantry were much the same as in Russia, its development as an industry in Poland was a rather different affair.
One or two myths about Polish-produced vodka still exist. The first is that the potato is inferior to the grain in terms of the quality of vodka produced after distillation. The second myth to cast out, repeated ad infinitum, is that, “King Jan Olbracht of Poland, in 1546 gave the right to distil and sell spirits to every adult citizen.” It was an unlikely gift, as he was lacking in spirit himself after dying in 1501.
The potato, often identified with Polish vodka, did not actually feature in vodka production until the early 19th century. It was also used by some Russian distilleries, whether they owned up to it or not. (Small pink potatoes were harvested in Russia on at least one aristocratic estate during the Russian and Polish vodka prohibitions of the First World War.)
Vodka production in Russia and Poland was firmly established by the middle of the 16th century. In Polish Poznan, about 170 miles west from Warsaw, there were forty-nine distilleries, not counting those on landed estates and monasteries. Vodka was so widely available that it was used as a currency by craftsmen for goods outside Poznan. Gdansk took over from Poznan as the main vodka centre when the success of a Dutchman with a liqueur called Der Lachs was copied by others, and by 1772 Gdansk produced more vodka than anywhere else in Poland. The aristocracy could distil vodka on their land, and as with Russia, this meant that the quality was effectively controlled.
But with its sophisticated equipment, it was Poland rather than Russia which led the Slavonic race in early vodka mass production. Vodka was no longer confined to the unsanitary back room of a tavern, and when the Baczewski family built a distillery in Lvov in 1782, it would go on to become the oldest surviving vodka distillery in the world. Quick to implement new technologies, Baczewski was one of the first anywhere in the world to install a system of “double rectification” in 1832, two years after it was invented by an Irishman, Aeneas Coffey.
In this process, the spirit circulated round and back round stacked sealed columns and was condensed by cold water, thereby increasing the alcohol level and discarding impurities in its progress. This was to become the standard method of distilling alcohol with various modifications, and the old “pot still” method of producing a small amount of spirit would only be used for special or more expensive types of vodka.
Baczewski was an innovator in the way the company exported its goods and advertised them; it proved to be as skilful as Smirnov in its advertising and creation of novelty bottles. In fact, the firm used carafes instead of bottles to contain its vodka in order to make the brand instantly recognisable. The first distiller to use daily aeroplanes to transport its products to Paris and elsewhere, Baczewski also had a contract with two Polish trans-Atlantic liners to supply their vodka. Employing an unusual marketing technique to face brand rivalry straight on, the small print on one Baczewski vodka read, “the only vodka of comparable quality is produced by Pierre Smirnoff of Russia”. The compliment was reciprocated by Smirnoff, who based his factory in Lvov after the 1917 revolution.
The world’s longest surviving brand name in vodka, Wyborowa, is also Polish and based in Poznan. The test criteria of a competition in 1823 for the “most drinkable straight vodka, without added flavour to mask the basic spirit taste”, was part of a drive to improve the generally poor quality of vodka. The judges declared that the winning vodka – made from rye and not potato – was “exquisite” or “wyborny” and the hitherto nameless vodka was christened Wyborowa. Despite all of the difficulties imposed by war and the rise of Communism, production of Wyborowa has never been interrupted. In 1927 it became the first vodka in the world to register its name internationally.
Because of Poland’s relationship with Russia before and after the 1917 revolution, both countries experienced the prohibition of 1914, the monopoly and the restoration of vodka in 1924. Both countries also experienced the same upswing in vodka drinking. In the late 1950s, Poles consumed two and a half times the amount of vodka they had before the Second World War, but, as in Russia, anti-alcohol drives were not particularly successful. In 1958 the price of vodka in both Poland and Russia was increased as a deterrent.
In the previous year, the average Pole had spent twice as much money on the spirit as on bread, thereby making vodka the most expensive item in the family household budget. Vodka was very much a part of family life – an official survey in an elementary school near Warsaw showed that only two out of 1,700 children had never tasted vodka. Hooliganism caused by drunkenness was widespread, and in the first three months of 1957, the militia arrested more than 71,000 adults and 650 juveniles for drunken behaviour.
After months of disagreement on how to combat drunkenness, the Polish government legislated in 1958 to confine alcoholics to institutions and granted the right of an alcoholic’s family to collect his wages. That Poland could not confront its own inability to prevent the damaging effects of excess vodka drinking was seen in the advancing of unlikely conspiracy theories. One deputy who farmed grain claimed that: “The Nazi occupation forces had deliberately fostered production of vodka in order to undermine Poland’s resistance.”
Dark insinuations continue to swirl around the green serpent, with many Russians and Poles still believing to this day that the Communist regimes encouraged heavy drinking to keep an otherwise discontented people happy, or at least docile. The truth will probably never be known, but it was certainly strange that vodka was always available when other consumer goods were in perpetually short supply.
Such a cynical observation would have been appreciated by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish philosopher, painter and writer, who was known as Witkacy. Unfashionably, he encouraged vodka drinking because of its supposedly positive effects on the artistic, if not peasant, mind. In 1932 he published a philosophical account of addictions, Narkotyki, which included comments on the way vodka was drunk in Poland and Russia. Witkacy was extremely open regarding his own bouts of vodka drinking, priding himself on never touching it before shaving. A morphine addict to boot, he concluded that alcohol should be completely forbidden to everyone except for artists and writers who would be allowed it for inspiration.
Days after the Second World War broke out, Witkacy committed suicide in Ukraine and was buried. When the Soviet authorities returned his body to Poland in 1988 for reburial in his family grave, he was given a quasi-state funeral. Murmurings persisted that the wrong body had been sent because the authorities had refused to allow the coffin to be opened, and in 1994 the body was exhumed. An X-ray revealed the bones of a woman with a full set of teeth, whereas Witkacy had worn dentures. It was a final joke Witkacy would have approved of, as clowning was an important part of his artistic philosophy.
After Poland and Russia, Ukraine was the next significant source of early vodka production, although some distilleries used molasses instead of wheat, rye or potatoes as the basic ingredient. Perhaps unfairly, the lowest grade of Ukrainian vodka was considered inferior to even the poorest produced by Russia and Poland and was said to be unfit even for the lowest tavern. Chekhov, who rented a house near Yalta, asked for a visitor to bring a bottle of vodka, because he said that the local supply “stinks of the W.C.”.
The vodka-producing area of 18th-century Poland is now mostly located in Ukraine, and travellers who complained about the excessive consumption of vodka in Galicia would be insulting the Ukraine of today. The geographical musical chairs continue, for as we saw, Lvov, the area that was formerly a vodka centre in Poland, is now in Ukraine and known as Lviv.
In an effort to control the abuse of alcohol, vodka prices in present-day Ukraine have been increased to make it prohibitively expensive for those living in rural areas. But even if the vodka were cheap, it would not stop the tradition of producing home-made vodka, the forbidden samogon or “moonshine”, the continuing curse of Russia, Poland and Ukraine.
In 2005 an internet blogger in Ukraine left helpful instructions on how to make vodka according to a method used by his grandmother. Refining the techniques employed in the mass production of vodka, she used an adapted “pot still” process with an old pressure cooker with a sealed lid and added copper pipes. Her samogon enabled versatile bartering, as when six grave diggers dug a cousin’s grave in return for four bottles, and a labourer scythed a field for one bottle. The strength of the samogon was 96 per cent (192 proof in the US), which was considered quite commonplace, but those who drank it were warned to sit down if they had not eaten. (Spirytus, a Polish vodka with the same high proof, has only recently been allowed to be sold in New York.)
Similarly detrimental results from drinking high-proof vodka were experienced by Trotta, the hero of the novel The Radeztsky March by Joseph Roth. Arriving in Galicia just before the First World War, Trotta gradually sinks into alcoholism after tasting the very strong local vodka. He realises too late and only too well, as he is told by the well-seasoned local drinkers, that the 90 per cent vodka does not go to the head, but to the legs.
Ukraine is trying to make its own way in the vast global vodka market, and the most famous producer of many fruit-and-herb-flavoured vodka concoctions is Nemiroff. The firm’s famous pepper and honey vodka may be quite similar to the favourite vodka of Peter the Great.
Before vodka became standardised in Russia in 1894, the differences in taste between varieties of vodka can only be guessed at, but it is likely that Khlibna Sloza, or “The Tears of Bread”, which is now produced in Ukraine, tastes something like the Russian vodka of the past. It emerged victorious in a blind tasting competition in Ukraine, although its packaging, shown afterwards to the tasters, was considered old-fashioned. Based on the 19th century pre-screw bottle top method of sealing a cork with wax and wrapping the bottle in paper, the packaging was previously used by Smirnov and others as the standard method to bottle vodka.
For sheer romance – something rather lacking in the present-day hard sell of vodka – it is difficult to beat the story of the Ukrainian vodka Zorokovich 1917. Founded by Dan Edelstyn from Hackney in London, the Ukraine-based distillery produces a premium vodka.
Not a businessman but a film-maker, Edelstyn discovered an old typescript of a memoir written by his paternal grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, who was from Ukraine. Born in 1898 into a rich family, she was a dancer and writer when she fled to Europe after the 1917 revolution with a friend whom she later married. Eventually settling in Belfast, she died there in comparative poverty in 1943.
The mission to find out about his Ukraine Jewish roots began with a visit in 2008 to Edelstyn’s ancestral home village of Douboviazovka. He was astonished to discover that his great-grandfather had owned a vodka distillery there. To avoid destruction, it had been moved brick by brick to Siberia, but when Edelstyn visited the factory, it was run-down and unproductive. Despite being just 28 years old at the time, he was viewed by the local workers as a vodka baron, and they promised him their support.
Launched in 2010, and with features of the original Ukrainian recipe, the distinctive vodka is already supplied to Selfridges in London. The label features black swallows on the bottle – a symbol of his grandmother’s migration as well as a reference to her dramatic description of the “black wings all over the sky” in her account of the Russian Revolution.