Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State

by Mark Lawrence

  In defeat, Tsar Alexander I retreated to Russia with his armies. Following another French rout at Friedland two years later, Napoleon and Alexander concluded an uneasy armistice. Hearing rumors that Alexander was making contingency war plans, on June 23, 1812, Napoleon crossed the Nieman River and invaded the vast Russian heartland. Against his generals’ advice, he intended to force Alexander’s capitulation by capturing Moscow, a thousand kilometers to the East. It was a fateful decision, colored perhaps by Napoleon’s impressions of the weakness—and drunkenness—of the Russian army at Austerlitz.

  Early encounters confirmed Napoleon’s hunches: instead of risking direct confrontation, Alexander’s armies retreated ever further across the vast, sparsely populated terrain. The Russians scorched the earth—destroying crops, livestock, and shelter, thereby preventing the French troops from living off the land—but also straining their supply lines and morale. In the smoldering ruins of Vyazma, still 100 miles from Moscow, Napoleon grew frustrated. Finding his troops, half mad with hunger, looting the vodka and wine stores, he flew into a rage, beating and whipping them for their lack of discipline.13

  On September 7, in the fields of Borodino, Napoleon finally got his long-awaited showdown. By day’s end, over sixty-five thousand men lay dead or dying on the battlefield in one of the bloodiest battles in human history. Borodino was a pyrrhic victory for the French, who were too exhausted to pursue the withdrawing Russian army. A week later, Napoleon confidently approached Moscow, fully expecting the vanquished tsar to formally surrender and bestow upon the victorious emperor the keys to the city. Much to his disappointment, Alexander did not ride out to meet him. No one did. Incensed that the Russians had denied him his greatest triumph, Napoleon occupied the historic Kremlin while his famished troops pillaged the abandoned city.14

  But the worst lay ahead. Moscow governor Fyodor Rostopchin had vowed that were he forced to abandon the city, the French would find nothing but ashes. He made good on his promise. Rostopchin ordered the withdrawal of all of Moscow’s fire pumps and the emptying of the prisons before turning the highly flammable taverns and vodka storehouses into firebombs and igniting boats loaded with alcohol that burned three-quarters of the city to the ground.15

  At first, the French ignored the thick clouds of smoke in the distance: they had seen it in every town they occupied. But as Napoleon explored the majestic imperial palaces, burning embers began falling within the walled courtyard of the Kremlin itself. Fearing the explosion of the gunpowder in the Kremlin armory, Napoleon and his entourage fled the firestorm. Narrowly escaping the chaotic, smoke-filled streets toward the Petrovsky Palace on the northeastern outskirts of the city, Napoleon watched his coveted prize reduced to rubble.16

  In his memoirs, Napoleon blamed the city and its officials for the catastrophe.

  A great part of [Moscow was] built of wood, contained warehouses of brandy, oil, and other combustible materials. All the fire-engines had been carried off; the city kept several hundred, the service being carefully organized, but only one could be found. For some days the army struggled in vain against the fire; everything was burnt. The inhabitants who had remained in the town escaped to the wood or country-houses; none remained but the lowest rabble, who stayed for the sake of pillage. This great and superb city became a desert and sink of desolation and crime.17

  “Moscow was burned by its citizens—that is true,” Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, “not, however, by the citizens who remained, but by those who went away.”18 Those who remained confronted an orgy of drunken chaos virtually identical to the uprisings in Moscow in 1648 and 1682 (see chapter 5). Fleeing the flames, the French command lost all control of the city. Desperate French soldiers wandered the streets alongside disoriented Russians—all simply foraging for food. An eclectic mix of the few remaining well-to-do Muscovites, occupying French troops, and Russian criminals sought to save/loot anything of value, including “wine and brandy in abundance” that only fueled the drunken disorder.19

  “The army had dissolved completely,” wrote French major Pion des Loches, “everywhere one could see drunken soldiers and officers loaded with booty and provisions seized from houses which had fallen prey to the flames.”20 Muscovites—regardless of age, sex, or stature—who dared safeguard their valuables were bludgeoned to death by the French while any drunken French looter who stumbled away from his battalion mates met the same fate at the hands of the locals. The encroaching din of fire was punctuated only by screams of people and animals being burned alive, the howls of men being beaten and women raped in the streets. “The troops, no longer restrained by the fear of their superiors, indulged in every excess imaginable,” officer Eugène Labaume wrote in his memoirs. “No retreat was safe, no sanctuary sufficiently sacred to protect against their rapacity.” Soldiers even violated the tombs of the Muscovite grand princes—including Ivan the Terrible—interred in the Cathedral of the Archangel in the Kremlin.21

  To their credit, a French battalion succeeded in saving the Kremlin, to which Napoleon returned after the fires subsided. To protect against more fires and disorder he commanded that remaining vodka warehouses be defended by French guards. The miserable Grande Armée and their equally miserable emperor lived among the smoldering ruins for another full month. The remaining livestock died of starvation, and leaving the city to seize cattle risked further demoralizing skirmishes with Russian Cossacks. Starving French soldiers sifted through charred ruins hoping to find leftover wine and vodka, which they would drink from exquisite looted crystal, even though they had no food to eat.22

  Napoleon waited in vain for the tsar’s surrender, even writing Alexander to describe his commission of inquiry into the arson. The French captured and executed over four hundred Russians, whose “patriotic” acts were, according to Napoleon, “founded on the casks of brandy which had been given them.”23 The entire fiasco, Napoleon wrote Alexander, could have been avoided with a friendly letter of capitulation either before or after Borodino. He never received an answer. Winter was drawing near.24

  Thoroughly humiliated, on October 19, 1812, the French abandoned Moscow with only one hundred twenty thousand of the original half-million-man army, and most of them would perish thanks to Russia’s brutal winter and the epidemic of typhus that had infested the Grande Armée.25 Endlessly harassed by military attacks from the rear, the retreating French fought westward for hundreds of miles against fierce winds, sub-zero temperatures, and drifting snow along the same Smolensk road that had been stripped of all supplies just months before. As their horses fell from exhaustion, the starving, diseased, and demoralized troops devoured the carcasses raw. Some even resorted to cannibalism. Absent any shelter, thousands of frozen corpses littered the roadsides.

  When the starving French re-entered Vilnius, they looted the city. They “broke open the magazines, and fell, overcome with brandy and a full meal, after long exhaustion, in all parts of the city, their frozen corpses lying unheeded, while the rest hastily fled from it at the sound of the Cossacks.”26 Only forty thousand lived to see home. Within two years, Tsar Alexander I triumphantly led his troops into Paris, forcing Napoleon’s abdication before his final defeat at Waterloo a year later.

  Russia’s tremendous size and brutal climate usually are credited for Napoleon’s downfall, with estimates of French deaths from fatigue, cold, hunger, and typhus (132,000) exceeding even those slain on the battlefield (125,000).27 Compared to the toll of hardship and disease, vodka was only a minor contributing factor. Still, had the decision not been made to set Moscow’s vodka warehouses ablaze and the city with it, Russia’s biggest, richest city would have been an ideal bivouac for the Grande Armée. The soldiers could have waited out the frigid winter cloistered in Moscow’s warm residences, in (relatively) more sanitary conditions, thereby reducing the spread of typhus so that the army could emerge in the spring rejuvenated and ready to finish off the beleaguered Russians. One can only speculate as to the outcome of such a scenario—but it would likely have b
een dramatically different from the humiliating expulsion from Russia that sealed Napoleon’s political fate.

  So, did Tsar Alexander I defeat the French—or was it vodka? Even beyond the battlefield, the climate and typhus certainly ensured Napoleon’s doom. Still, the role alcohol played in making Moscow uninhabitable and hastening the drunken, diseased, and demoralized retreat cannot be overlooked. In this way, it might be argued that—at this time of its greatest crisis—vodka helped save Russia. Even so, such alco-triumphs would be short-lived.

  War And Drink In Crimea

  Modern impressions of Russia’s war against Napoleon are colored by the vivid descriptions of Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace. Yet given that the great writer was not yet born, those riveting tales were not firsthand accounts. Tolstoy’s literary realism actually drew from his experiences in the Crimean War, and his “dissipated military life” of booze, gambling, and women in the Russian army.28 During this disastrous war Tolstoy first appreciated the difficulty of finding “truth” amid the fog of war, since everyone is “too busy staggering about in smoke, squelching through wounded bodies, drunk with vodka, fear or courage, to have any clear sense of what is going on.”29

  Russia’s road to war was confused and muddled. When Tsar Nicholas I ascended the throne in December 1825, an inebriated Petersburg mob of liberal-minded “Decembrists” dared challenge his legitimacy. Without hesitation the young tsar violently dispatched the rebels with cannons and bayonets. Still, the threat of European liberalism weighed heavily on Nicholas, who hardened into an ardent defender of conservative autocracy, even sending Russian troops to Hungary in 1848 to crush the liberal uprisings there. His own geopolitical ambitions focused on the the Ottoman Empire to the south. In 1853 Nicholas’s forces pushed into the Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in present-day Romania. Fearing what an Ottoman collapse would do to the European balance of power, Britain, France, and Sardinia sided with the Turks, dealing Russia an embarrassing defeat in their own backyard.

  The combined forces soon beat back the Russian incursion before turning their attention to the Crimean citadel of Sevastopol to destroy Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which would continue to threaten the Ottoman Empire, the Dardanelles, and the Mediterranean beyond. So, in 1854, the allies landed their forces well north of the city and marched southward to take Sevastopol.

  The war in Crimea is remembered for many things: the suicidal “charge of the light brigade” immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale’s pioneering work as a battlefield nurse, and the first ever war correspondents covering the human tragedies of wartime.

  One such chronicler on the Russian side was an enlisted Pole, Robert Adolf Chodasiewicz. A decade before volunteering his services to the Union army in the American Civil War, Chodasiewicz wrote a gripping firsthand account of the Russians’ first clash with the allies at the Battle of the Alma River. There, the cocksure commander Prince Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov—great grandson of Peter the Great’s confidant of the same name (see chapter 4)—even invited the ladies of Sevastopol to join him in watching Russia’s certain victory from a nearby hilltop. Meanwhile, his troops sensed impending disaster:

  “Why?” asked Chodasiewicz.

  “As if you don’t know as well as I do!” One veteran explained: “we are to have no vodka, and how can we fight without it?” The others all agreed.30

  Why were the men denied their daily combat ration of bread, meat, a garnet of beer, and two charkas—good-sized cupfuls—of vodka? “Our worthy Colonel thought it advisable to put the money in his own pocket, remarking that half these fellows will be killed, so it will be only a waste to give them vodka.”31 Such corruption in the ranks was not unusual, but it dealt a devastating blow to Russian morale.

  On the battlefield, this despair turned to panic—and panic mixed with alcohol is a recipe for a rout. Even without their charkas soldiers could still get liquor from merchants in nearby towns, corrupt officers, and even by happenstance. Chodasiewicz’s regiment, for instance, was “saved” from sobriety when the canteen man fled the field after bullets started flying. While the allies besieged the Russian positions, the Russian soldiers—“in high spirits”—besieged vodka.32 The officers offered no tactical leadership: they were often just as drunk and confused as the troops. For Chodasiewicz, it was the demoralization and lack of leadership that spelled defeat. “During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel: we did not during the whole time receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.”33

  Not even the army high command was sober. Rather than direct the left flank of the Russian defenses, Lt. Gen. Vasily Kiryakov instead threw a champagne party. Generally described as “utterly ignorant, totally devoid of any military ability and rarely in a completely sober state,” on this day Kiryakov stumbled to his feet and—bottle of champagne in hand—ordered his Minsk regiment to open fire on what he thought was the French cavalry. It was actually his own Kiev Hussars, who were decimated by the barrage. Enraged, the Hussar commander had to be physically restrained from running Kiryakov through with his sword. With no confidence in their drunken commander, the Minsk regiment also retired—in some cases without ever firing a shot at the enemy. In the disorder Lt. Gen. Kiryakov mysteriously disappeared, only to be found hours later cowering in a hollow in the ground. Nearby, British forces discovered a Russian artillery captain sprawled dead drunk in a wagon. The jovial sot offered his captors a swig from his bottle of champagne, which turned out to be empty.34

  The battlefield fiasco rudely upset commander Menshikov’s viewing party, which was abandoned so hastily that the parasols, field glasses, and even the picnic spread were left behind. In Menshikov’s carriage the French found “letters from the Tsar, 50,000 francs, pornographic French novels, the general’s boots, and some ladies’ underwear.”35 After the disastrous battle of Alma, Menshikov withdrew his army to the interior of the Crimea, leaving the sailors and civilians of Sevastopol to their fate. When riders brought news of the catastrophe to Tsar Nicholas in St. Petersburg, he brooded in bed for days, “convinced that his beloved troops were cowards led by idiots.”36

  Things were just as bad in the imperial navy in Sevastopol. Consider for instance the heart of the naval citadel, Malakhov Hill: towering over Sevastopol Bay and its nearby estuaries where the mighty Russian fleet was anchored, it was the linchpin to the city’s defenses. Today, Malakhov Hill is a popular city attraction: a serene, wooded park and open-air memorial complex replete with an eternal flame. Given the hill’s strategic and historic importance, surely this Malakhov fellow after whom it is named was some legendary military hero, no?

  Actually… no.

  Mikhail Malakhov was a lowly ship’s purser in the tsarist navy in charge of bookkeeping and buying provisions. His position allowed him to acquire great quantities of charka liquor on the navy’s tab, which he then sold for immense personal profit. Even after being court-martialed for such corrupt abuses, Malakhov used his connections with shifty procurement officers and bootleggers to open an illegal, ramshackle (but extremely popular and lucrative) vodka shop, built into the side of the hill that now bears his name.37

  Following the defeat at the Alma River, Malakhov Hill was the city’s last defense against the allied invaders. With the Russian army in flight, the entire population of Sevastopol—military and civilian, men and women, police and prostitutes—dug trenches, built barricades, and prepared for the imminent attack. To slow the allies’ seaward advance, Russian warships were scuttled in the harbor, many fully stocked with armaments and provisions. Demoralization, insubordination, and despair swept the city. To make matters worse, the discovery of a large storehouse of liquor wharfside resulted in a three-day drunken rampage.

  “A perfect chaos reigned throughout the town,” Chodasiewicz recalled. “Drunken sailors wandered riotously
about the streets, and in some instance shouted that Menshikov had sold the place to the English, and that he had purposely been beaten at the Alma.”38 In a quixotic effort to restore sobriety and confidence, Vice Adm. Vladimir Kornilov—the fleet’s chief of staff—instituted emergency anti-alcohol measures by closing vodka stores, taverns, hotels, and restaurants, actions ultimately having “little or no effect in restraining the populace from drunkenness.”39 On October 17, 1854, the artillery barrage began. In that initial battle a British round detonated a Russian magazine, killing Adm. Kornilov, ironically, atop Malakhov Hill. Today, a monument to Kornilov’s sober heroism crowns the hill named after the city’s corrupt vodka dealer.

  The siege of Sevastopol continued for months—the tense stalemate occasionally interrupted by salvos of artillery or an occasional ground attack—while conditions in the city deteriorated. Most residents drank a tumbler of vodka with breakfast and dinner and even more in-between. In his Sevastopol Sketches, a young Count Tolstoy described how officers spent their off-duty hours drinking, gambling, singing, and carousing with what few prostitutes remained in the city. The heavy drinking was always ramped up just before an attack in order to bolster the soldiers’ courage. Stammering into battle, the unsteady soldiers made easy targets. “The army that came out of Sevastopol to attack the other day… were all drunk,” recalled one British regimental paymaster. “The hospitals smelt so bad with them that you could not remain more than a minute in the place and we were told by an officer who they took prisoner that they had been giving them wine till they had got them to the proper pitch and asked who would go out and drive the English Dogs into the sea, instead of which we drove them back into the town.”40