Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State, Page 2

  I feel blessed to have known Murray Feshbach—who plays a starring role in this book—as an advisor, mentor, and friend. Russia owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude for some five decades of tireless investigation; I owe you just as much in terms of guidance and inspiration.

  Beyond my confines on the Main Line, I am thankful to a wide variety of scholars and friends who were gracious enough to endure my questions, impositions, or just provide friendly support, including Mark Steinberg, Mark Beissinger, Aleksandr Nemtsov, Nicholas Eberstadt, David Christian, Jim Sweigert, Richard Tempest, Kate Transchel, Robin Room, Martin McKee, David Leon, David Fahey, Charles King, Harley Balzer, Scott Gehlbach, Judy Twigg, Carol Leff, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Steve Trusa, Herb Meyer, Adrianne Jacobs, Anna Bailey, Dmitry Fedotov, Thomas Jabine at the Library of Congress, Jos Schaeken at the Birchbark Literacy project at Leiden University, Peter Maggs at the University of Illinois Law School, and Kristy Ironside, who saved me from making a separate transatlantic voyage to the archives in Moscow. Whether they know it or not, support and inspiration were often provided from afar by Vlad Treml, Jeremy Duff, Cliff Gaddy, Quinn Ernster, Daniel Treisman, Chris Walker, Clint Fuller, Lyndon Allin, Brian Varney, Tony Dutcher, Mark Adomanis, Anatoly Karlin, Sean Guillory, Duncan Redmonds, Jeff Williams, Tim Shriver, Dave Deibler and Barb Schilf, Steve Perry and the good folks at CPD, Fishbone, Templeton Rye, and Mitchell & Ness. Special appreciation goes to those active in the special needs community everywhere—both in the United States and abroad—for their often unheralded work with the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the brutalized. In a similar vein, much of my research in Russia would not have been possible without the kindness of Georgia and Andrew Williams and their charitable work with ROOF—the Russian Orphan Opportunity Fund. My experiences with disadvantaged orphans in Podolsk were truly life altering, as later chapters should make clear. Since many of the real victims of vodka politics are to be found in Russia’s beleaguered orphanage system, it is only appropriate that a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to ROOF.

  Last but far from least, like its predecessor, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, this book would not have been possible without all of the tremendous, hardworking people at Oxford University Press. Foremost among them is my editor, David McBride, who has shared my vision and faith in the viability of this project from the get-go. I’d also like to extend my most heartfelt appreciation to the slate of anonymous reviewers who slogged through every line and every footnote of the manuscript: the project is much improved for your efforts.

  Finally, it is necessary to say a thing or two about biases and motivations as a foreigner writing about a taboo subject like alcohol in Russia. I am certain that instead of confronting the arguments I put forth in the book some readers will jump to unfounded conclusions based solely on nationality. So let me clarify that my aim in writing this book is to promote the health, happiness, and prosperity of the Russian people, whom I have long admired and respected. My fascination with the topic grew even stronger while living in Moscow throughout the 1990s, when I first realized that an outsider’s perspective means being able to see the forest for the trees when it comes to alcohol and Russian statecraft.

  Others are sure to assume—again mistakenly—that my criticism of vodka’s role in Russian politics and society is motivated by a personal distaste for alcohol. Having lived (and drunk extensively) both in Russia and the United States, I’ll admit that I drink far more vodka than the average American and far more beer than the average Russian. This book ultimately may be criticized for many things, but it is certainly not a temperance tract by a puritanical teetotaler.

  VODKA POLITICS

  Introduction

  Nikita Khrushchev was an oddly disarming fellow: five-foot-three and nearly as wide, with a face that seemed to be made from putty. With only four years of formal education, this former peasant somehow rose through the Soviet commissariat to become the unlikely successor to the blood-soaked tyranny of Joseph Stalin. The pudgy Khrushchev was the embodiment of contradiction: alternatively shrewd and shortsighted, secretive and straightforward, unassuming and pompous, optimistic and apocalyptic.

  The world had never seen a Russian autocrat quite like Khrushchev. Before he rose to power in the early 1950s, Eurasia was ruled for centuries by commissars and emperors who were distant, cold, and inaccessible. Whether tsarist or communist, Russian leaders seemed omnipotent and actively supported an image of infallibility. Khrushchev, by contrast, was cursed with human frailty and imperfection, which were on full display for the world throughout the 1950s and 1960s.1 From crushing popular opposition in Eastern Europe to banging his shoe at the United Nations, and even pushing the world to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust over Cuba, Khrushchev blundered from one fiasco to another. So it was understandable that, in 1964, the Politburo deposed the all-too-human Khrushchev in favor of the dour Leonid Brezhnev, returning to the traditional cold and distant Russian autocrat.

  After being booted from power by his own Communist Party, “special pensioner” Khrushchev spent his autumn years in forced retirement at his dacha—a summer home west of Moscow. When not tending to his garden, or giving his guards the slip in order to stroll the banks of the nearby Moscow River in his telltale fedora and straining belt halfway up to his armpits, Khrushchev dictated his memoirs on a rudimentary tape recorder—providing invaluable perspectives from the only Russian autocrat to die peacefully out of office. Of the 1.5 million words that fell from Khrushchev’s aging, meaty lips onto hundreds of hours of four-track, reel-to-reel tapes, the most fascinating tell of the importance of alcohol to the intrigues of Stalin’s inner circle by one of the few who lived to tell the tale.2

  Joseph Stalin is conventionally portrayed as a brutal dictator who in the early 1920s seized the reins of absolute power in the Soviet Union by outmaneuvering and purging his political opponents; a paranoid tyrant who fostered an all-encompassing personality cult and ruled the Soviet Union through fear, repression, and intimidation. Under him, untold millions would perish in labor camps, forced deportations, crash collectivization and industrialization, genocide and famine—all before sacrificing twenty-four million souls to Nazi Germany in World War II.3 What must it have been like to be complicit in having the blood of millions on your hands? How do you walk the fine line between pleasing the master so that your head is not the next to roll and saving your sanity and your soul?

  Through those scratchy tapes, Khrushchev’s aging voice gives us a glimpse of life in Stalin’s inner circle where, in good times and bad, the most pressing political questions were decided at the great leader’s table. Early on in the 1930s Stalin was “simple and accessible.”4 Have a problem? Call Stalin directly. Or, better yet, go see him directly at his country dacha, where he’d sit out on the porch in the tepid summer air:

  They served soup, a thick Russian broth, and there’d be a small carafe of vodka and a pitcher of water; the vodka glass was moderate in size. You’d go in and say hello and he would say: “Want something to eat? Take a seat.” And “take a seat” meant grab a soup bowl (the soup kettle was right there), fill a bowl for yourself, as much as you want, sit down, and eat. If you want something to drink, grab a carafe, pour yourself a glass, and drink it down. If you want a second drink, you decide that for yourself. The soul knows its own measure, as the saying goes. If you don’t want to drink, you don’t have to.5

  But that was early on. Over time, the pressures of totalitarian dictatorship bore down on Stalin. In 1932, following a drunken public spat, his second wife died under mysterious circumstances, which sent Stalin into a bout of loneliness. The looming specter of war with Adolph Hitler—and the very real prospect of losing that war—sent him into ever gloomier depression.6 Stalin grew dark. He drank more and more. Even worse, he began to force others to drink for his pleasure. As Khrushchev recalled, “At that time there were no dinners with Stalin at which people did not drink heavily, whether they wanted to or not. He evidentially
wanted to drown his conscience and keep himself stupefied, or so it seemed. He never left the table sober and still less did he allow any of those close to him to leave sober.”7

  With the appointment of Stalin’s sadistic hatchet-man, Lavrenty Beria, to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD—precursor to the KGB), the once-pleasant Politburo dinners became steeped in terse competition to curry favor with the boss. Eternally suspicious of plots to do him in, Stalin used alcohol to keep his inner circle off balance: make his closest comrades (or potential rivals) drink to excess in order to draw out their honest opinions and lay bare their true intentions. If they were unable to control themselves, they would remain suspicious of one another and couldn’t collectively topple his reign. “Stalin liked this,” Khrushchev remembered. “He liked to set us against one another, and he encouraged and strengthened [our] baser inclinations.”8

  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s—from near-annihilation at the hands of the German Wehrmacht to boastful global superpower—Soviet high politics assumed the air of a college frat party with the devil. Either in the Kremlin or at Stalin’s dacha, political decisions were made over drinking games and toasts of Russian vodka, Crimean champagne, Armenian brandy, and Georgian wine, beginning with the late-evening dinner and ending only with the dawn. Before attending to their assigned duties in the morning—or, more often, early afternoon—the Soviet leadership staggered outside to vomit or soil themselves before being borne home by their guards. As Yugoslav partisan Milovan Djilas ruminated after his Kremlin visits: “It was at these dinners that the destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories, and, to a considerable degree, of the human race was decided. And even if the dinners failed to inspire those spiritual creators—the ‘engineers of the human spirit’—to great deeds, many such deeds were probably buried there forever.”9

  While Djilas didn’t appreciate was that the members of Stalin’s Politburo—the elite leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—were hardly willing participants in these dinners. Khrushchev’s gravelly voice recounted how the inner circle loathed meeting with Stalin—due mostly to the drunken bacchanals:

  Almost every evening the phone rang: “C’mon over, we’ll have dinner.” Those were dreadful dinners. We would get home toward dawn, and yet we had to go to work. I would try to reach the office by 10:00 a.m. and during the lunch break take a nap because there was always the danger that if you didn’t sleep and he called you again to come to dinner you would end up dozing off at his table. Things went badly for people who dozed off at Stalin’s table.10

  Foreign guests weren’t spared either. After slicing up Eastern Europe with Adolph Hitler through the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin treated the delegation of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to an elaborate twenty-four course state dinner in the sumptuous Grand Palace of the Kremlin. For many of the visitors, it was the most remarkable event they had ever experienced.11 But before anyone could eat, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed a round of toasts to each and every member of the two delegations—twenty-two in all. Stalin exchanged a few words with each guest and clinked glasses. Having so “honored” each guest in turn, the now-sauced Germans sighed with relief and finally turned to eat—that is, until a visibly inebriated Molotov declared: “Now we’ll drink to all members of the delegations who could not attend this dinner.”12 And on it went.

  Of that fateful night, Ribbentrop recalled that the brown pepper vodka they drank was “so potent it almost took your breath away”—yet somehow Stalin seemed steady and unaffected. Tipsy, Ribbentrop stammered toward Stalin to express his “admiration for Russian throats compared with those of us Germans.” The great dictator chuckled. Pulling the Nazi minister aside, Stalin revealed that his own cup held only a light Crimean wine, the same color as the “devilish vodka” he made everyone else drink.13

  Perhaps the saving grace for foreign dignitaries was that—unlike the Politburo members—they didn’t meet with Stalin regularly: the Nazi delegate Gustav Hilger later described the confrontation with Beria that erupted when Hilger refused to get drunk. “What’s the argument about?” Stalin interrupted, later joking, “Well if you don’t want to drink, no one can force you.”

  “Not even the chief of the NKVD himself?” Hilger pressed.

  “Here at this table,” replied Stalin, “even the NKVD chief has no more say than anyone else.”

  For the Germans, these confrontations underscored that the Soviet leadership was both unpretentious and unpredictable. Reflecting on how swiftly Stalin could swing from jovial to deathly serious, Hilger noted his “paternal benevolence with which he knew how to win his opponents and make them less vigilant.”14 Forcing others to drink until they lost touch with their senses was certainly useful for that.

  Whether entertaining Stalin’s erstwhile Axis allies at the outset of the war or his Allied allies during the war, alcohol was integral to high-level diplomacy. Three short years after the sodden Nazi delegation left Stalin’s court, in August 1942, British prime minister Winston Churchill’s delegation arrived only to endure the same treatment. These were the darkest days of World War II, and the British mission had intended to shore up relations with their new Soviet allies, who were then enduring the full force of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Churchill also broke the bad news that relief in the form of a second front in Western Europe would not be quick in coming. Having professed that the “drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them” was his “sacred rite,” Churchill seemed well prepared to confront the Kremlin’s drunken bacchanals on their own terms.15

  Still, the Soviets retained their home court advantage. “Nothing can be imagined more awful than a Kremlin banquet, but it has to be endured,” recalled the British permanent undersecretary at the foreign office, Sir Alexander Cadogan. “Unfortunately, Winston didn’t suffer it gladly.”

  Undaunted by the first banquet, before leaving Russia, Churchill requested a final audience with Stalin. At 1 a.m. on the morning of their departure, Cadogan was summoned to Stalin’s private Kremlin residence, where he found the two leaders, now flanked by Molotov, in high spirits—feasting on all manner of food, a suckling pig, already having downed countless bottles of alcohol. “What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.” Still, according to Cadogan, the goodwill forged in that night of heavy drinking solidified the grand alliance that ultimately laid low the Nazi juggernaut.16

  The Kremlin banquet scene was in full swing again when French president Charles de Gaulle arrived near the conclusion of the European war in December 1944. The jubilance of impending victory was tinged with unease over Stalin’s looming drunkenness, as the great dictator presented a series of toasts to his circle—thirty by de Gaulle’s count—each more chilling than the next.

  To his rear army commander Andrei Khrulev (whose wife had recently been arrested under suspicions of conspiracy): “He’d better do his best, or he’ll be hanged for it, that’s the custom in our country!” This was followed by a joyous clinking of glasses and an understandably awkward embrace.17

  To his air force commander Aleksandr Novikov: a “good Marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly, we’ll hang him!” (Two years later, Novikov would be stripped of his rank, arrested, and tortured by Beria before being sentenced to fifteen years in a hard-labor camp.)18

  Then there was Lazar Kaganovich, Khrushchev’s mentor and mastermind behind Stalin’s Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s that claimed millions of lives. During the prewar banquet with Ribbentrop, Stalin took special pleasure in making his Nazi guests squirm by celebrating a toast to the Jewish Kaganovich.19 But by the end of the war, both the guests and the toasts had changed. Stalin proclaimed of Kaganovich: “a brave man. He knows that if the trains do not arrive on
time—we shall shoot him!”

  Could the uncomfortable de Gaulle have known that Kaganovich had sacrificed his own brother, Mikhail, to Stalin’s bloodthirsty paranoia? “What has to be done must be done,” Lazar coldly shrugged once informed that his brother had roused Stalin’s suspicion. Mikhail was shot during the interrogation the following day. But that was at the outset of the war—like all the others, all Lazar could do now was endure such menacing toasts with a facade of good humor and an obedient clinking of the glasses.20

  For any normal observer, much less a foreign dignitary such as de Gaulle, this was simply shocking. Reading the displeasure on his guest’s face, Stalin put his hand on de Gaulle’s shoulder and smiled: “People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not horrible after all.”21

  On that evening, at least, Nikita Khrushchev avoided Stalin’s ire, but such was not always the case. On other nights, Stalin cleaned his burning pipe by knocking it against Khrushchev’s bald head before forcing the rotund, aging former peasant-turned-court-jester to drink glass after glass of vodka and perform the gapak, the traditional knees-bent Ukrainian folk dance, which caused him excruciating pain. Occasionally KGB chief Beria pinned the word prick to the back of Khrushchev’s overcoat, which he would not notice until the company burst into rollicking laughter. Others left ripe tomatoes on his chair for Nikita to sit on. A proud and temperate man by upbringing, as with all of his compatriots, Khrushchev became a prodigious drinker for no other reason than to please Stalin. Sometimes he got so drunk that Beria had to help him to bed, on which he would promptly piss. As later biographers would note: “Awful as these sessions were, it was better to be there than not, better to be humiliated than annihilated.”22