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Alexander Nikishin, a historian and writer, is convinced that a person who knows the history of Russian vodka has a better understanding of Russian history. He has been studying the history of the national drink for over a decade now, writing several books on the topic. A year ago, he founded a Museum of Russian Vodka. Not long ago, an exhibition of old photographs, entitled Russian Drinking Tradition, opened there. It turns out that Russian people have always liked being photographed sitting around a table laden with food and drink. To a researcher, such photographs offer a window on a bygone era with its customs and traditions. Even bottle labels can tell plenty.
MN: How did the idea of such an exhibition originate?
Nikishin: I have long been collecting everything that is somehow or other related to the history of Russian vodka - for example, bottles, which give a pretty good idea about the historical period in question. A few years ago, I took an interest in old photographs of people sitting around the table. To date, I have collected more than 5,000 photos. Such photos are now in great demand: there is an excellent collection at the Moscow House of Photography, directed by Olga Sviblova, while restaurants are buying them as part of their décor. Old daguerreotypes can sell for as much as $200-300 apiece.
It is fascinating to study what was on the table at different historical periods. I explore the pictures with a magnifying glass, discovering new names. For example, a bottle labels says "Bekman" or "Depre": it turns out that they were purveyors to the royal court. I can look at a bottle label and date it. Some researchers take a special interest in period costume, studying contemporary fashion. But my object of study is the table, complete with tableware, glasses, etc. Members of the elite drink wine, champagne. Army officers go for vodka: there are several bottles of beer and a glass of vodka on the table. Here is a group of Cossacks sitting around a table laden with vodka bottles, all of them holding pistols or swords, while one is with a Russian button accordion. The European part of Russia drinks Smirnoff, Popoff and Bekman. In Siberia, Pokrevsky Kozel holds sway.
MN: Pokrevsky Kozel, what an unusual name -
Nikishin: Its fate is also unusual. Almost nothing was known about it. It would be no stretch to say that I studied its history from bottle labels. I became interested in the name and started looking for information on this person in the archives. He was a Pole, banished to Siberia for his involvement in a plot against the tsar in 1860, in Warsaw. From every indication, he looked on the bright side of things and knew how to benefit from circumstances. He opened a distillery and then started making beer and soft drinks. He built an Orthodox church, becoming a cult figure in Siberia. All of his three sons remained in Russia, built dozens of plants and started producing gold and diamonds in Yakutia. One day, police, on a tip-off, searched one of his plants and discovered an arms cache there. He was preparing the weapons for the next uprising in Warsaw: once a Pole, always a Pole. They could have sent him to prison for that, but he was forgiven for his distinguished service to Russia. When the [1917 Socialist] Revolution began, even the Bolsheviks did not touch the family, allowing them to go to the United States.
Now here is Shustoff, a merchant who bought up all brandy distilleries in Russia. His brandy received a Grand Prix at a Paris exhibition in 1900. There was a big stir when it turned out (blind tasting procedure was used) that the Russians had won, not the French. There are many contemporary photographs featuring Shustoff brandy, especially in the artistic set. There is a bottle of the famous Nezhin ryabina in our museum. Here is how we came by it. Three years ago a bunch of homeless drifters found a boxful of Shustoff brandy in the attic of an old building. They got drunk and started a brawl. Police had to be sent to calm them down. One bottle miraculously remained. Later a friendly police officer, who knew that I was studying the history of alcohol beverages, called me and said: "Would you like to exchange it for a bottle of vodka?" After I came to pick it up, he asked me how much it might cost. I said frankly: if it was put up at a rare wines auction in London, the starting price could easily be 10,000 pounds sterling. He clutched his head: "Oh dear, that's 90,000!" "90,000 what?" "They drank away 90,000 pounds worth of it!"
MN: When one thinks about the history of Russian vodka, the question naturally arises: is it good for the country or is it evil, some sort of punishment for something?
Nikishin: According to one theory, vodka was invented more than 500 years ago by monks at the Chudov Monastery, located in the Kremlin, by diluting imported Arab alcohol with water. I, for one, think that mankind's greatest invention - vodka - fell into the wrong hands. The entire world knows vodka, and everyone associates it with Russia. We are the only nation that has been unable to find the right approach toward it, even though there are 350 synonyms to the word "drink" in Russian. No one can understand why a Russian downs a glassful of vodka in one go, while a non-Russian sips it slowly.
According to Zabelin, a historian (author of a unique study entitled "Domestic Life of Russian Tsars in the 16th-17th Centuries"), Byzantium with its idea of asceticism in everyday life is to blame for heavy drinking in Russia. The Orthodox Church rejected all mundane pleasures. Heavy drinking became a reaction to prohibitions and restraints. But what comes first in his history? Did the Church-imposed prohibitions push the people toward the bottle or on the contrary, did alcohol abuse cause the Church to impose all sorts of restrictions in a bid to save the souls of its stray flock?
The war between "teetotalers" and "alcoholists" (a 19th century term) has been ongoing on Russian soil since alcohol abuse began. This war has been proceeding with varying success - with abstainers losing and drinking becoming a norm of life (as under Peter the Great) or effective prohibition being imposed on the Russian people (as at the end of Nicholas II's reign).
MN: It seems that everything hinges on the personality at the head of the state?
Nikishin: All Russian rulers tried, somehow or other, to formulate a vodka policy. Under Peter the Great, drinking was pervasive in Russia. Kondratyev, a historian, writes that "ever since Peter the Great's era, home brewed beer and vodka have been a fixture of any celebration, wedding, funeral party, brawl, amicable settlement or heart to heart talk." Under Peter the Great, drinking reached a state level. He threw feasts in the course of which some people simply died from the inordinate amounts of alcohol beverages that they consumed. Then he became scared of that lifestyle and prohibited drinking at work.
Alcohol abuse had been common even before Peter. Domostroi, or Law of the Home, a manifesto on proper conjugal behavior, contained recommendations to desist from "the scourge of drinking." The first tavern appeared in Rus [Old Russia] during the Ivan the Terrible era. It was a kind of an officers' club for the oprichniki [members of the private military detachments under the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. - Ed.]: only they were allowed to go there. Then taverns mushroomed throughout the country, becoming a real curse, since patrons were prohibited from eating there: tavern keepers were interested in the people drinking as much as possible. Taverns were only closed in the late 19th century under a state wine monopoly. Tavern owners, who went out of business, moved to the United States - a total of 100,000, including their family members.
Nicholas II embraced the idea of sobering up the Russian people, introducing prohibition in 1914. True, it was largely a wartime measure. Whatever the case, as the story goes, "we wanted the best, you know the rest." Will Rogers said: "Communism is like prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work."
Lenin chose to not revoke the last emperor's act. That was done by Joseph Stalin, after Lenin's death. It is noteworthy that at first, the great leader of all times and all nations even backed sobriety societies, but when they encroached on the "holy of holies" - i.e., demanded that vodka not be sold at night - he immediately disbanded them. As a result, in 1925 through 1927, an average factory worker's family saw its budget increase by 19 percent, while the share of the family budget spent on vodka was up 40 percent.
MN: It is generally believed that the Russian people are unable to resist vodka and always surrenders itself unconditionally to its mercies. How justified is this view from a historian's perspective?
Nikishin: Writer Alexander Zinovyev once said: "Russia's hard drinking is not a purely physiological phenomenon - it is, rather, psychological and social. Drinking to the Russians is something like Buddhism to the Indians or Confucianism to the Chinese. It is a kind of a national religion."
MN: Indeed, [the late actor] Oleg Yefremov once suggested that Russian people drink "to tune up the harmony the soul."
Nikishin: In the Soviet era, vodka was a symbol of disobedience to Soviet power, a form of defiance. But I agree with Pyotr Smirnoff, the producer of the famous vodka brand, who used to say that a nation has an instinct for self-preservation, which evolved over centuries, and no authority has a right to break national traditions.
It's a myth that people in rural areas drink hard. They only drink when seasonal work is over, once the crops have been harvested. The impression of drunkenness was created by fringe elements who left the countryside but failed to find their niche in town. Remember Gorky's working class novels. The countryside has always been more healthy and wholesome: how can a person drink when he has a farm to look after. But when people lose jobs, they start drinking, as now.
Finance Minister Sergei von Witte, who had conducted the most effective vodka reform in Russia in many decades, wrote: "The general sobering of the people is only possible and conceivable through a broad dissemination of culture, education and financial well-being." All of this is still highly relevant today.
It should be recalled that the first temperance society in Russia was created in 1874, in the village of Deikanovka, the Poltava region. By 1911, there were 1,818 such societies in the country, uniting almost 500,000 members in their ranks. In the early 20th century, the so-called Gottenborg system (popular in Norway), in which rural communities received the right to restrict vodka sales in a given locality, gained ground. In the Ryazan Province alone, peasants voluntarily closed 17 pubs and taverns, as well as five beer houses. Seeing the danger, the government became seriously worried, and governors started vetoing alcohol sale restrictions imposed by communities, scrapping as many as 50 percent. As a result, the sobriety movement fizzled out.
It failed because state treasury interests prevailed, again: the state could not afford a fall in vodka revenues.
MN: It seems that there is no way that our state can do without vodka, or rather without revenues from its sales.
Nikishin: Vodka is a highly profitable commodity for the state. Furthermore, it is an ideal commodity: it does not go bad, the raw materials are cheap, while the value of the final product is tens of times higher. As historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin wrote, it there was no vodka, it should have been invented - not to feed the nation's drinking habit, but as an ideal means of indirect taxation. Vodka has always been a money-spinner. Under the tsars, vodka tax revenue accounted for 48 percent of the treasury, followed by revenues from commerce, banks, and railroads.
However, its production should have been kept under state control, but in the 1990s export regulation was effectively scrapped, and all sorts of counterfeit vodkas came flowing into the country. Meanwhile, Yeltsin privatized vodka production. As a result, thousands of vodka brands appeared, but which of them was real vodka? Of course, after Gorbachev's "dry law" there was no vodka in the country, and Yeltsin wanted to meet the shortage. But as a result, the national beverage has lost its international image. No one knows exactly which vodka brand is safe to drink. And this is in a supposedly civilized country. In the tsarist era, vodka did not have such a terrible image as it has today. Vodka production was personified, and producers assured the quality of the beverage with their name, their honor.
MN: So is the principal problem today that no one specifically is responsible for the quality of the national beverage?
Nikishin: I have noticed one strange thing: it seems that our vodka producers are ashamed of their business. I once talked with a group of women who had for years worked at a distillery. They admitted that they had always been ashamed to talk about their job, they were afraid that no one would marry them.
Even now vodka producers in Russia feel insecure, feeling as though they were doing something indecent. This may be because they do not know the subject, but one thing is certain: they do not associate themselves with the history of the beverage, do not put their heart into this business. I would not drink their vodka.
By Svetlana Smetanina
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