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

by Mark Lawrence

  48. GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 346, l.5–397, esp. 51–52; Christian, “Prohibition in Russia 1914–1925,” 107.

  49. GARF, f. 1779, op. 1, d. 705, l.5; GARF, f. 1779, op. 2, d. 299, l.1–7; GARF, f. 6996 (Ministerstvo Finansov Vremennogo Pravitelistva, 1917), op. 1, d. 293, l.5, 6, 17, 28, 33–38; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 296, l.17; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 299, l.2–376; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 300, l.1–245; GARF f. 6996, op. 1, d. 340, l.1–4; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 342, l.1–8.

  50. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Viking, 1996), 307; Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142–44; Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Interregional Conflicts and the Collapse of Tsarism: The Real Reason for the Food Crisis in Russia after the Autumn of 1916,” in Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Mary Schaeffer Conroy (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 244.

  51. “The Distressed Condition of the Russian Alcohol Industry,” Pure Products 11, no. 6 (1915): 279.

  52. GARF, f. 1779, op. 1, d. 706, l.1–16; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 343, l.14, 27, 46; GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 344, l.1–8.

  53. Graham, Russia in 1916, 130.

  54. “The Distressed Condition of the Russian Alcohol Industry,” 279. It is doubtful that these plans were ever realized, as the Russians were pushed out of Galicia in the summer of 1915. It is evidence of gentry distillers’ plans to sell alcohol during prohibition and the willingness of the state to assist them.

  55. GARF, f. 6996, op. 1, d. 343, l.50, 69–71, 87.

  56. Arkadii L. Sidorov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune velikoi oktyabr’skoi sotsial-isticheskoi revolutsii: Dokumenty i materialy, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1967), 3:131. On continued private distillation see: Alexis Antsiferov et al., Russian Agriculture during the War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930), 164. On the traditional trade between peasants and distillers see Francis Palmer, Russian Life in Town and Country (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 86–88.

  57. Christian, “Prohibition in Russia 1914–1925,” 113.

  58. Sergei S. Ol’denburg, Tsarstvovanie imperatora Nikolaya II, 2 vols. (Munich: Izdanie obshchestva rasprostraneniya russkoi natsional’noi i patrioticheskoi literaturoi, 1949), 2:154–55. Likewise see Comptroller Kharitonov’s declarations in Johnson, Liquor Problem in Russia, 211.

  59. Rappoport, Home Life in Russia, 94.

  60. John Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies (London: Temple Bar Publishing Co., 1932), 79; cited in Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 152.

  Chapter 14

  1. Speech reprinted in Rabochaya gazeta, Jan. 13, 1926; quoted in Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 75.

  2. Based on f. 1779 (Kantselyariya vremennogo pravitel’stva), op. 2, d. 206, l.1–5, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF) (State archives of the Russian Federation), Moscow. See also Joseph Barnes, “Liquor Regulation in Russia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 163 (1932): 228.

  3. Ian F. W. Beckett, The Great War: 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007), 521–25.

  4. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 307–17.

  5. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Viking, 1996), 316–21.

  6. Edward T. Heald, Witness to Revolution: Letters from Russia, 1916–1919, ed. James B. Glidney (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1972), 59. See also Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 34; James L. Houghteling Jr., A Diary of the Russian Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1918), 146; R. H. Bruce Lockhart, The Two Revolutions: An Eye-Witness Study of Russia, 1917 (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1967), 51; Emile Vandervelde, Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918), 29–30.

  7. GARF, f. 1779, op. 2, d. 206, l.1–5. See also Arkadii L. Sidorov, ed., Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune velikoi oktyabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revolutsii: Dokumenty i materialy, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1957), 2:432; Barnes, “Liquor Regulation in Russia,” 228. Indeed, not even the most radical provisional government proposal to mend the state’s finances included reintroducing alcohol. Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, 3 vols. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), 2:492–522. On the institutional paralysis see Vladimir D. Nabokov, The Provisional Government (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), 30–31.

  8. See Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 100–101, 230, 88–89. Also see Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Drunkenness and Anarchy in Russia: A Case of Political Culture,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 18, no. 4 (1991): 477–79.

  9. “Like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia,” as Winston Churchill famously described it. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 5: The Aftermath (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 63.

  10. Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 28.

  11. Vladimir D. Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh fevral’skoi i oktyabr’skoi revolyutsii, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Federatsiya, 1931), 183.

  12. Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (New York: The Century Co., 1918), 333–34.

  13. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Random House, 1935), 321. See also John H. L. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976), 332; Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 330–31. Strong interviewed Trotsky, who preferred selling the liquor abroad. Anna Louise Strong, The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (August 1921 to December 1923) (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 156; Igor’ V. Narskii, “Alkogol’ v russkoi revolyutsii (1917–1922 gg.),” in: Alkogol’ v Rossii: Materialy pervoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo, 29–30 oktyabrya 2010), ed. Mikhail V. Teplyanskii (Ivanovo: Filial RGGU v g. Ivanovo, 2010), 28–31.

  14. Meriel Buchanan, Petrograd, the City of Trouble: 1914–1918 (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1919), 231–32.

  15. See Boris Segal, The Drunken Society: Alcohol Use and Abuse in the Soviet Union (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), 30. On Gorky’s criticism of the tsarist alcohol monopoly see his Bystander (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930), 538.

  16. Buchanan, Petrograd, 233–34. Narkompros was the agency in charge of education and censorship.

  17. Yuri S. Tokarev, “Dokumenty narodnykh sudov (1917–1922),” in Voprosy istoriografii i istochnikovedeniia istorii SSSR: Sbornik statei, ed. Sigismund N. Valk (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 153.

  18. Dmitrii A. Chugaev, ed., Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet; Dokumenty i materialy, 3 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 3:276–78; Buchanan, Petrograd, 231; Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, 321; Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917, 24–25. On Dzerzhinsky, vodka, and the Cheka see Neil Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR: The 1920s Campaign against Illegal Spirits,” Soviet Studies 38, no. 3 (1986): 350; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh fevral’skoi i oktyabr’skoi revolyutsii, 183–84. Value conversion from 1917 dollars to 2013 dollars, courtesy of the US Inflation Calculator, http://www.usinflationcalculator.com (accessed Aug. 20, 2013).

  19. Strong, First Time in History, 157.

  20. Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, 309. See also Anatolii I. Razgon, VTsIK Sovetov v pervye mesyatsy diktatury proletariata (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 215–38.

  21. Helena Stone, “The Soviet Government and Moonshine, 1917–1929,” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 27, nos. 3–4 (1986): 359.
<
br />   22. Vladimir A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, Zapiski o grazhdanskoi voine, 4 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, Otdel voennoi literatury, 1924), 1:19–20; cited in Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18.

  23. Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984), 316; Christopher Williams, “Old Habits Die Hard: Alcoholism under N.E.P. and Some Lessons for the Gorbachev Administration,” Irish Slavonic Studies No. 12 (1991): 74–75; Stone, “Soviet Government and Moonshine,” 359; Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 53.

  24. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” in Collected Works, vol. 10: November 1905–June 1906 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 26–27. See also Vladimir I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” in Collected Works, vol. 11: June 1906–January 1907 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 174; originally published in Proletary no. 2, Aug. 29, 1906.

  25. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Casual Notes,” in Collected Works, vol. 4: 1898–April 1901 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 406; originally published in Zarya No. 1, April 1901. See chapter 10. Also see George Snow, “Socialism, Alcoholism, and the Russian Working Classes before 1917,” in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 244, 50.

  26. Lenin, “Casual Notes,” 404–5.

  27. Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR,” 350; David Christian, “Prohibition in Russia 1914–1925,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 9, no. 2 (1995): 95–96. See also f. 733 (Tsentral’noe upravlenie i ob”edinenie spirtovoi promyshlennosti, Gosspirt), op. 1, d. 4433, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE) (Russian State Archive of the Eeconomy), Moscow.

  28. A. G. Parkhomenko, “Gosudarstvenno-pravovye meropriyatiya v bor’be s p’yanstvom v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 4 (1984): 114; Grigory G. Zaigraev, Obshchestvo i alkogol’ (Moscow: Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1992), 32–33; W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 59–60; Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 430.

  29. Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007), 285–88. See also Kenez, History of the Soviet Union, 41–48; Laura Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 28–29.

  30. Quoted in Benjamin M. Weissman, Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921–1923 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1974), 2–3.

  31. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand, 1–3.

  32. I. Gofshtetter, “Vodka ili khleb?” Russkoe bogatstvo (1891): 180–84; Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Russia under Alexander III. And in the Preceding Period, ed. Felix Volkhovsky, trans. J. Morrison (New York: Macmillan, 1893), xxi-xxii; George S. Queen, “American Relief in the Russian Famine of 1891–1892,” Russian Review 14, no. 2 (1955): 140; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 158–62.

  33. Cited in Richard G. Robbins Jr., Famine in Russia, 1891–1892 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 131. See also Stephen Dunn and Ethel Dunn, The Peasants of Central Russia (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), 29.

  34. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand, 429.

  35. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), n.p.

  36. Tovah Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), 134–36.

  37. Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 87.

  38. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand, 433; also, 440, 443, 450. Patenaude’s account has been made into an excellent PBS documentary, The Great Famine: http://video.pbs.org/video/1853678422/.

  39. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand, 440–41.

  40. Ibid., 441.

  41. George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, vol. 3: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 532 n.19.

  42. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace that Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 12. In response to the Kronstadt Uprising, Resolution 12 of the Tenth Party Congress outlawed dissenting factions within the party itself, thus eliminating any remaining opposition to bolshevism.

  43. Vladimir I. Lenin, “X vserossiiskaya konferentsiya RKP(b),” in Sochineniya, tom 32: dekabr’ 1920–avgust 1921 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1951), 403; T. P. Korzhikhina, “Bor’ba s alkogolizmom v 20-kh—nachale 30-kh godov,” Voprosi istorii no. 9 (1985): 22.

  44. Anton M. Bol’shakov, Derevnya, 1917–1927 (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniya, 1927), 337–48; V. M. Lavrov, Sibir’ v 1923–24 godu (Novonikolaevsk: Sibrevkom, 1925), 210–15. Pravda reports from Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR,” 351; Strong, First Time in History, 159. Moscow vignettes from Transchel, Under the Influence, 78. See also S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, “Veselie Rusi: Revolyutsiya i samogon,” in Veselie Rusi, XX vek: Gradus noveishei rossiiskoi istorii ot “p’yanogo byudzheta” do “sukhogo zakona”, ed. Vladislav B. Aksenov (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2007).

  45. Cited in S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 93.

  46. Dmitri P. Os’kin, Zapiski soldata (Moscow: Federatsiya, 1929), 318–19; cited in Christian, “Prohibition in Russia 1914–1925,” 104.

  47. Keep, Russian Revolution, 256; Strong, First Time in History, 160.

  48. Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand, 432.

  49. Ian D. Thatcher, “Trotsky and Bor’ba,” Historical Journal 37, no. 1 (1994): 116–17; originally published in Anon, ‘Gosudarstvo i narodnoe khozyaistvo’, Bor’ba, no. 2, pp. 3–8; reprinted in Leon Trotsky, Sochineniya, tom 4: Politicheskaya khronika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926), 525–33.

  50. Leon Trotsky, “Vodka, tserkov’, i kinematograf,” Pravda, July 12, 1923.

  51. Walter Connor, “Alcohol and Soviet Society,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (1971): 580.

  52. Trotsky, “Vodka, tserkov’, i kinematograf.”

  53. A. M. Aronovich, “Samogonshchiki,” in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, ed. M. N. Gernet (Moscow: MKhO “Liukon”, 1924), 174; Konstantin Litvak, “Samogonovarenie i potreblenie alkogolya v rossiiskoi derevne 1920-kh godov,” Otechestvennaya istoriya no. 4 (1992): 76; Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 238.

  54. British Trade Union Delegation to Russia and Caucasia, Russia Today: The Official Report of the British Trade Union Delegation (New York: International Publishers, 1925), 69.

  55. Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR,” 351; Stone, “Soviet Government and Moonshine,” 367.

  56. Bol’shakov, Derevnya, 1917–1927, 339–41; Litvak, “Samogonovarenie i potreblenie alkogolya v rossiiskoi derevne 1920-kh godov,” 76; Barnes, “Liquor Regulation in Russia,” 229.

  57. Yakov A. Yakovlev, Derevnya kak ona est’: Ocherki Nikol’skoi volosti, 4th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), 106; quoted in Transchel, Under the Influence, 76.

  58. Yakovlev, Derevnya kak ona est’, 109–10; quoted in Transchel, Under the Influence, 76.

  59. Vladimir I. Lenin, “XI s’ezd RKP(b): 21 marta–2 aprelya 1922 g.,” in Sochineniya, tom 33: avgust 1921–mart 1923 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1955), 279.

  60. E. Shirvindt, F. Traskovich, and M. Gernet, eds., Problemy prestupnosti: Sbornik, vol. 4 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo narodnogo komissariata vnutrennikh del RSFSR, 1929), 116. NKVD statistics taken from Vlast’ s
ovetov no. 31 (1925): 26–27; both quoted in Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR,” 350, 52–53.