I've been doing a bit of research on Prohibition recently, for a project I'm planning on writing probably this summer. One of the books I've been reading for research is called Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition by Mark Lawrence Shrad. Early in the book, Shrad discusses vodka in Russia, how the spirit was monopolized by the government, and sales of the spirit were used to pad the tsar's coffers.

I found this to be fascinating, and not something I knew before, so I did what I do. I lost myself down a rabbit hole.

Vodka is nearly synonymous with Russia these days, but I've never really known (or wondered) how that came to be, until I was reading the aforementioned book. My further rabbit hole forays have filled out the details in how Vodka came to define Russia across so much of the world. I will be honest, the history is darker than I expected it to be.

According to The Atlantic, in the year 988, Prince Vladimir converted his nation to Orthodox Christianity. Part of the reason for this was because Orthodox Christianity did not prohibit drinking. In the 15th century, as legend states, a monk in the Chudov Monastery was the first to taste vodka, and thus the introduction of the spirit. However, as with most things, the popularity of the spirit does not trace back to one monk in a monastery in the 15th century. It's a bit more complex than that.

Shrad, in his book, says, "It was Ivan the Terrible who established Russia's system of profiting from the drunken misery of his own people. In besieging the rival khanate of Kazan on the Volga River in 1552, he was impressed with the state-run taverns the tartars called kabaks, and decreed Muscovy should have them too. Soon, the entire trade in alcoholic beverages was monopolized, with all profits funneled into the tsar's treasury. The same Law Code of 1649 that tied the Russian peasant to the land through serfdom also outlawed buying or selling vodka outside of the kabak system under penalty of torture." (p. 27)

The Atlantic further states, "Ivan the Terrible stablished kabaks (establishments where spirits were produced and sold) in the 1540s, and in the 1640s they had become monopolies. In 1648, tavern revolts broke out across the country, by which time a third of the male population was in debt to the taverns. In the 1700s, Russian rulers began to profit from their subjects' alcoholism, as Brown, who spent 10 year covering Russia for Forbes magazine explained. "[Peter the Great] decreed that the wives of peasants should be whipped if they dared attempt to drag their imbibing husbands out of taverns before the men were ready to leave."

But that doesn't explain why vodka became the drink of choice, does it? It just shows how early on, the government figured out how to exploit the serfs, and essentially pad their treasuries with money made off of peasants via a state-run monopoly on alcohol. But, why vodka?

According to Shrad, before the introduction of distillation, Russian peasants drank the fermented spirits just about everyone else at the time drank. They'd imbibe ales, beers, mead fermented from honey, kvas fermented from rye bread, or imported wines, and early kabaks offered peasants a variety of drinks. In the 1600s, however, things changed, and the kabaks began offering vodka (little water). Soon, they learned that serving vodka was extremely lucrative.

"According to the Russian vodka historians, vodka is 'the most primitive and cheapest (in terms of production and costs) drink in the world.' All a landlord needed was a simple still, water from the stream, and wheat or rye from the peasants working his lands, and he could turn around and sell them a concoction priced many times higher than its cost. In a peasant economy where cash was scarce, payments were more often in kind: owing ever-more harvested grains to the same landlord to whom he was already hopelessly indebted." (p. 28)

So, the system was quickly set up. The government controls the alcohol, both the production of it and the profits from its sales. The people, without access to anything else, drank the stuff up, handing over everything they had, in some cases, to the state in exchange for their quick fix. Soon, the government realized that vodka was the perfect drug. "The quick-drunk potency of distilled vodka could not be rivaled by traditional fermented brews. Vodka would never rot like the grains made to distill it, nor would it ever spoil like fermented drinks. It was the perfect drug: highly potent, highly portable, and incredibly lucrative. No wonder that by the seventeenth century, vodka had elbowed out all of the bulkier, less profitable beers, ales, and meads in the kabak. Vodka became synonymous with Russian culture not because the Russian people demanded it, but because the state supplied it." (p. 28)

The profits from the vodka trade padded imperial coffers to an extreme extent. "By the time of the temperance protests in the mid-nineteenth century, the vodka monopoly was the largest source of imperial finance, constituting over one-third of all state revenues. In a world before income taxes, fully 100 percent of the operating budget of the Russian army--the largest standing army in the world--came directly from the drunkenness of the Russian peasantry." (p.28)

Despite the fact that the influx of alcohol and drinking, more alcoholics and rampant alcoholism was a disaster for the peasants, the ruling body of Russians made bank off the stuff. The kabaks became the primary interface between peasants and "a predatory state" as Shrad says, and "the tavern-keeper was it's agent." He goes on to tell readers to do away with romantic notions of a tavern keeper who is kind and listens to your problems, and to remember that at this time, the tavern-keeper "wasn't your friend. in Russian, he was known as a "kisser", because he swore an oath to the tsar by kissing the Orthodox cross." IE: he was an agent of the state, put in place as an employee of the tsar. His job wasn't to be your friend, but to serve you drinks, and get as much money from you as he could.

"By his oath," the book says, "he could never refuse even a habitual drunkard, lest the tsar's revenue be diminished." And typically he would water down the alcohol he served, sell it at full price, and pocket the difference. So not only was he selling vodka on behalf of the state, but he was personally lining his pockets as well.

Exploitation of alcohol didn't just stop with the relentless sale of vodka to the serfs who toiled under Russia's ruling class. "Peter the Great was also able to form a phalanx of unpaid workers by allowing those who had drunk themselves into debt to stay out of debtors prison by serving 25 years in the army." (The Atlantic)

The kabak itself, however, became a sort of central hub of village life. Business was done there. Officials could mingle with commoners there. Meetings were held, salesmen came and went, newspapers and books could be read there. Celebrations were also often held at kabaks. Thus, it was nearly impossible for anyone to get away from them, or the alcohol they contained. Acting as a sort of way station between the government, business, and serfs, their central role in the gathering and mixing of civic life is likely one of the main reasons why they were so successful. They were, in just about every way, the cornerstone and bedrock upon which cultural life was built.

Things chugged along, until a few changes in the mid-1800s stirred things up enough to cause some problems. First, the serfs were emancipated, which created a huge shift in how Russian society functioned as a whole. The Tsarist state had always functioned with strict social hierarchies, and never the twain shall mix. Now, with the emancipation of the serfs, everything was thrown up in the air.

"The dual deterioration of soslovie (social estate) and chin (service rank) presented a serious problem with immediate political implications. The imperial state made matters worse when it decided to bring the old soslovie/chin hierarchies under increasingly awkward official protection. With emancipation, the state issued the death sentence, but then it mitigated matters with temporary stays of execution. Peasants were freed, but now discovered new forms of confinement. Aristocrats were also freed, but were asked not to stray too far. As the momentum of reform seemed unstoppable, the state made a second fatal decision, to treat the dying class of aristocrats to special favors and protection while leaving all other sosloviia, more or less, to their own devices under conditions of close state constraint and isolation from one another." (University of Oregon)

Secondly, while the serfs were emancipated, the kabak system was expanding in leaps and bounds. "At the same time, the number of kabaks grew dramatically. The reform of the alcohol excise tax system was one of the more effective of the modernizing reforms. Mid-century changes in the vodka excise tax farming system resulted in a dramatic growth in the number of kabaks." (University of Oregon) The changes in the vodka tax increased the cost of vodka, which, to a dependent population, was criminal. Furthermore, you have a mixing of classes of societies and ideas that had never mixed or traded ideas before.

So, you have massive social upheaval happening with the emancipation of the serfs on one hand, and an expanding kabak system on the other, which requires an overhaul of the alcohol excise tax system, the muscled arm by which the Imperial Treasury was filled with revenue. These new changes mixed together to create a fledgling temperance movement in 1859, which was the specific bugaboo of the Tsar, who saw temperance, essentially, as a threat to his income.

"In 1859 the peasantry with its temperance movement was the first soslovie to organize itself extensively for action against objectionable state policy. In this case the ostensible issue was temperance, and thus the kabak was for two reasons the institutional center of attention. First, village society gathered in the kabak. Second, village society drank vodka in the kabak. Therefore peasants took the lead in a movement that quickly opened its ranks to all sosloviia. The movement arose from the organized resistance of the "drinking public" to exploitative increases in the cost of vodka." (University of Oregon)

In Smashing the Liquor Machine, the author describes how the tsar dispatched troops to curtail these temperance movements, often with extreme violence. The issue was not the drinking. No, they were flooding these villages and kabaks specifically because people weren't drinking, and the imperial system demanded they continue their vodka consumption. Protests were put down with extreme violence and beatings. For the crime of refusing to partake, and encouraging others to abstain, "[General Tolstoy] ordered the soldiers to execute their duty "without pity". Thirteen accused peasants (in a town called Spassk) were laid on the ground, and beaten with rods for over an hour. General Tolstoy hovered above the scene, commanding the soldiers to beat ever harder, even as the guilty wailed in agony. Bloodied, the peasants "declared their obedience, and begged forgiveness for what they had done." Onlookers who pleaded for their mercy were themselves roundly whipped by the police. The irate General Tolstoy stormed out of town the following day, after ordering that sixty-six more offenders be whipped, four imprisoned, and ten soldiers court-martialed . Elsewhere in the province, ninety protesters were sent to military courts, forced to run the gauntlet--beaten three hundred to eight hundred times--before being condemned to hard-labor prison colonies or punishment battalions, or exiled to Siberia." (p.26)

"The teetotolers were flogged into drinking," observed one British journalist. "Some who doggedly held out had liquor poured into their mouths through funnels, and were afterward hauled off to prison as rebels; at the same time the clergy were ordered to preach in their churches against the new form of sedition, and the press ceoncorship thenceforth laid its veto upon all publications in which the immorality of the liquor traffic was denounced. These things sound incredible, but they are true." (p.27)

When Lenin came into power after the Revolution, he outlawed vodka, but when Stalin came into power, he did away with that ban. Though criminals were tried more harshly if they were drunk while committing the crime, yet he and his henchmen enjoyed imbibing themselves, and so the consumption of vodka was not prohibited.

"To date, there have been only two expansive anti-alcohol campaigns in Russia, both of which took place during the Soviet Union: one under Vladimir Lenin and the other under Mikhail Gorbachev. All other leaders have either ignored alcoholism or acknowledged heavy alcohol consuomption but did nothing substantial about it. As Critchlow wrote, 'Under the Stalin, Khrusshchev, and Brezhnev regimes, harsh penalties were imposed on those who committed crimes while intoxicated, but heavy drinking was not viewed as a threat to society, perhaps because the leaders, who themselves liked to indulge, saw the use of alcohol as a safety valve for low morale." (The Atlantic)

Throughout Russia's long, illustrious Romanov history and into the modern day, the nation and its people have struggled with alcoholism, and the overconsumption of drink. More modernly, "Vladimir Putin has criticized excessive drinking, and Dmitri Medvedev has called Russia's alcoholism a "natural disaster," but besides the rhetoric, little has been done to tighten regulations on the manufacture of liquor, and no coherent programs have been implemented to combat alcoholism. Gennady Onishchenko, Chief of Public Health Inspector of the Russian Federation, has urged major spending on the treatment of alcoholism as a response to the tripling of alcohol-related mortality since 1990, arguing that prohibition and excise tax hikes are counterproductive." (The Atlantic)

Though, according to the World Health Organization on October 8, 2019, "alcohol consumption in Russia declined by 43% from 2003 to 2016. In particular, Russians are drinking less liquor and "unrecorded alcohol," or alcohol which is unregulated, homemade, or smuggled into the country. The report notes a 40% decline in the consumption of recorded alcohol and a 48% decline in the consumption of unrecorded alcohol." Additionally, the report states a decrease in heavy drinking among men from 75% to 48%, and among women it has dropped from 52% to 24% during the same period. (Addiction Center)

The WHO report further states that, "fewer Russians now partake in heavy drinking because the Russian government has been enacting rules to control alcohol sales. For example, the Russian government has raised excise taxes on all alcoholic beverages, increased minimum prices for vodka, banned unlicensed stores from selling alcohol, and imposed restrictions on alcohol sales after 11 p.m. The government has also prohibited advertising for alcohol on television, on the radio, online, in public transportation, and on billboards. in Moscow, Russia's capital city, the police issue fines to people who drink alcohol in parks, courtyards, and other public spaces." (Addiction Center)

I'm sitting here trying to think of how to end this deep dive, and I don't really know how. The history of vodka in Russian culture is a lot darker, more fraught than I expected, with impacts that have spanned hundreds of years and into the present day. I'm sitting here, speechless with all I've learned. So, I guess I'll sign off with that. This somber tale of vodka paints the beverage in a whole new light.

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