Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on samogon supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The samogon flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.
The monopoly’s most ardent advocate? One Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Socialism can’t be built with white gloves,” he hectored diffident comrades at a 1925 Party congress. With no other source of capital, liquor sales could and should provide a temporary cash cow. The “temporary” ran on and on, financing the lion’s share of Stalin’s roaring industrialization, and later, military defense.
World War II descended; Russia boozed on. A classic fixture of wartime lore was the “commissar’s 100 grams”—the vodka ration for combatants (about a large glass) prescribed by Grandpa Naum’s Leningrad protector, the bumbling commissar of defense, Klim Voroshilov. On the home front, too, vodka kept flowing. Despite massive price hikes, it provided one sixth of state income in 1944 and 1945—the beleaguered empire’s biggest single revenue source.
By Brezhnev’s day our Rodina was in the collective grip of “white fever” (the DTs). Or, to use our rich home-brewed slang, Russia was
kak sapozhnik—“drunk as a cobbler”
v stelku—“smashed into a shoe sole”
v dugu—“bent as a plough”
kosaya—“cross-eyed”
na broviakh—“on its eyebrows”
na rogakh—“on its horns”
pod bankoy—“under a jar”
vdrebezgi—“in shatters”
By this time national drinking rituals had long been set, codified, mythologized endlessly. The seventies were the heyday of the pollitra (half-liter bottle), priced at 3.62 rubles, a number with a talismanic effect on the national psyche. There was the sacramental granenniy stakan (the beveled twelve-sided glass); the ritual of chipping in na troikh (splitting a pollitra three ways); the obligatory “sprinkling” to celebrate anything from a new tractor to a Ph.D.; and the “standing of a bottle” (a bribe) in exchange for every possible favor, be it plumbing or heart surgery.
Vodka shimmered in its glass as Russia’s poetry, its mythos, its metaphysical joy. Its cult, religion, and signifier. Vodka was a liquid cultural yardstick, an eighty-proof vehicle of escape from the socialist daily grind. And well, yes, a massive national tragedy. Just as significantly, before—and especially during—Gorbachev’s antialcohol push, the pollitra served as a unit of barter and currency far more stable than the ruble, which was guzzled away anyhow. Vodka as cure? From the common cold (heated with honey) to hypertension (infused with walnut membranes) to whatever existential malaise afflicted you. In the bottom of the vodka glass, Russians found Truth.
And this Truth Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was taking away.
To his credit, statisticians later established that male life expectancy rose during the mineral secretary’s temperance drive. Then it plummeted. Between 1989 and 1994, well into Yeltsin’s vodka-logged rule, death rates among males ages thirty-five to forty-four rose by 74 percent. But as Mayakovsky said: “Better to die of vodka than of boredom.”
Boredom meaning… the clutches of sobriety. At a research institute where Dad worked-slash-imbibed before he joined the Mausoleum Research Lab, he had a sobutilnik (“co-bottler,” the term for that crucial drinking buddy), a craggy old carpenter named Dmitry Fedorovich. After the first shot, Dmitry the Carpenter always talked of his brother. How this brother was near death from a kidney ailment, and how Dmitry Fedorovich had lovingly sneaked into the hospital with “medicine”: a chetvertinka (quarter liter) and a big soggy pickle.
The kidney sufferer partook and instantly died.
“And to think that if I hadn’t gotten there on time he’d have died sober,” the carpenter sobbed, shedding tears into his beveled vodka glass. His co-bottlers cried with him.
To die sober. Could a Russian male meet a more terrible end?
Like all Russian families, mine has its own entanglements with the green serpent, though by the Russian definition of alcoholism—trembling hands, missed workdays, full-blown delirium, untimely death—only my uncle Sashka truly qualified. As an alkogolik—a.k.a. alkash, alkanaut, alkimist—he was a figure of awe even among the most sloshed members of Moscow’s intelligentsia. His status derived chiefly from the Accident, which happened when Mom was four months pregnant with me.
One day, Dad, who’d been mysteriously disappearing, telephoned Mom from the Sklif, Moscow’s notorious trauma hospital.
“We wanted to spare you in your state,” he mumbled.
At the Sklif, Mom found her then twenty-two-year-old baby brother unconscious, every bone broken, a tube sticking out of his throat. The walls and ceiling were splattered with blood. She almost miscarried.
Several days before, Sashka had lurched up to the door of Naum and Liza’s fifth-floor Arbat apartment, blind-drunk. But he couldn’t find his keys. So he attempted the heroic route of alky bohemian admirers of Yulia, my femme fatale aunt. To win her heart they’d climb from the landing window to her balcony—a circus act even for the sober.
Not knowing that the busy balcony railing was loose, Sashka climbed out from the window.
My uncle and the railing fell all five floors to the asphalt below.
He landed right at the feet of his mother, who was walking my little cousin Masha. When the hospital gave Grandma Liza his bloodied clothes, the key was in his pocket.
After six horrific months at the Sklif, Uncle Sashka emerged a half-invalid—one leg shortened, an arm semiparalyzed, speech impaired—but with his will to drink undiminished.
When we moved to our Arbat apartment, Sashka would often be dragged home unconscious by friendly co-bottlers or kind passersby. Or Mom and Dad would fetch him from the nearby drunk tank. He spent nights in our hallway reeking so badly, our dog Biddy ran away howling. Mornings after, I sat by his slumped body, wiping blood from his nose with a wet rag, waiting for him to come to and teach me a ditty in his rich and poetic alcoholic vernacular.
I particularly remember one song charting the boozer’s sequence, its pungency alas not fully translatable.
From Dad I knew that two-hundred-proof industrial spirt (ethyl alcohol) was best drunk on the exhale, nostrils squeezed shut lest you choke on the fumes. Samogon I knew also from Dad, who sometimes distilled it in our small kitchen using Mom’s pressure cooker and high-tech lab paraphernalia pilfered from Lenin’s Mausoleum Lab. Politura (wood varnish) was clearly far grimmer stuff, and odekolon (cheapo eau de cologne) wasn’t exactly fruit compote either.