Excerpt from

RUSSIANS The People Behind the Power

by

Gregory Feifer Drinking

The passion for drinking is innate in Russia. Nikolai Leskov (183195) I dont like drunkards, but I dont trust those who dont drink. Maxim Gorky (18681936) However much vodka you buy, youll still have to run back for more. Russian saying

In 1961, my father, George, spent an academic year as a graduate exchange student at Moscow State University. Founded in the late eighteenth century by the renowned physicist Mikhail Lomonosova legendary polymath who discovered an atmosphere on Venus and helped shape the modern Russian languageMGU, as it was known, had recently moved to the largest of Stalins seven iconic neo-Gothic skyscrapers that loomed over the city from Sparrow Hills, then called Lenin Hills. Much had changed since Stalins death eight years earlier. Nikita Khrushchevs thaw had loosened restrictions on life and work, although it would be only three years until a group of oldguard conspirators would remove him from power. Their coup detat would end his campaign of de-Stalinization and replace him with Leonid Brezhnev, who was backed by countless cadres of Soviet officials whod been threatened by Khrushchevs boat-rocking reforms. Meanwhile, the year 1961, when the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the earth to make him the first man in space, was still deep in the Cold War era. When I was a teenager, my dad confidently assured me that sickness from drinking to excess is so unpleasant that Id never want to do it more than a few times in my life. Although Im still struggling with that lesson, my father apparently learned it for good from his experiences in Moscow. At work on a Columbia University dissertation about the Soviet legal system, he spent some of his days visiting courtrooms. He bunked with a humorless roommate in a single room of a dormitory that formed one of the sprawling university buildings wings. It went without saying that the roommate had been selected for his political loyalty, but other students my father befriended in the dormitory were far livelier and more interesting. Nevertheless, he made certain

to be out on the evening of the day they got their monthly stipends, and took pains to remain away at late as possible. That was to avoid being given a water glass full of vodka to drink, an inevitability if he arrived before his friends finished their evening in the usual way, passed out on their beds or the floor, often stacked like cordwood and stinking of vomit. Although the stipends were small, just over a ruble a day, the de rigueur party that followed featured sausage and cheese in addition to bottles of vodka. The revelry set the students back nearly half their stipends, forcing them to exist largely on free bread from the cafeteria for the last ten days of the month. They washed their meals down with white nights teahot water part of a diet so grim that when they got their next stipends, there was no question they would need to celebrate again by drinking themselves into oblivion. So it went, in the traditional Russian pattern that had startled Western visitors to Russia in the sixteenth century: famine broken by loud, drunken feasts. *** Despite the widespread public drunkenness, it was all but impossible to buy vodka in Moscow shops when I first visited in 1991, more than three years after Gorbachevs antialcoholism campaign had ended. The scarcity reflected the economys mortally crippled condition. Except for the little Beriozki stores that sold selected products to foreigners and privileged Soviets for foreign currency, which was illegal for most to possess, many shelves remained almost completely empty of everything that summer. (Outdoor markets, called rynki, were different. Part of a loosely regulated gray market run with the help of criminal groups, they sold fresh produce for higher prices.) The few shops that did stock at least some products were so foulsmelling from (I presumed) mold and rot that I barely managed the arduous task of actually buying something when I tried. It required jostling through weary crowds crammed around display cases to glimpse what happened to be on sale. Next you determined how much you wanted and multiplied the number or weight by the price shown. God forbid you would have to ask an invariably dour salesperson, who would shake her head before reluctantly scribbling the figure on a scrap of paper. Then you stood in line elsewhere in the store for a cashier using an ancient register to ring up a receipt that you would bring back to the original display. After more pushing and more waiting, a salesperson would eventually reluctantly cut the very inferior cheese or sausage youd chosen. Gorbachevs relaxation of the administrative coercion that had kept the Soviet economic system running, however wastefully, for seven decades was based on hope that freedom from the quotas and orders imposed by the state planning agency Gosplanwhich left not even the production of toothpicks up to supply and demandwould encourage factory managers and other lowerranking officials who oversaw production lines to run their own industries more efficiently. After all, the logic went, they knew what needed to be done better than their superiors. But reducing central control actually helped bring the system down. The government set artificially low prices; when available, products were very cheap. The result was that enterprises had little incentive to produce goods and stores had little more to sell them. However, there was huge incentive to stealthat is, to steal from the state.

Much of Muscovites time went into trying to guess where to get what they wanted or needed. For vodka, it was often restaurants because they still received supplies. I did best at the Rossiya Hotel, a huge, ghastly 1970s cube neighboring the Kremlin. Approaching the kitchens back entrance, which faced the Moscow River and where one or more waiters were invariably loitering, dragging on cigarettes, youd ask how much they would be willing to sell, then haggle over the price. A bottle cost roughly the equivalent of a dollar in rubles, several times more expensive than the official price. Pshenichnaia, or wheat vodka, was among the smoothest to be had, and you could often get several bottles. If a restaurant failed, youd try another or a stores back entrance. Foreigners had the option of frequenting one of a handful of seedy hard-currency bars, most of which were in hotels from which ordinary Soviets were barred. Burly KGB bouncers stood at the doors, stopping any locals bold enough to attempt to enter. Russians told me they could differentiate by looking at peoples eyes: those of foreigners werent dulled by weariness and resignation. Among the most popular haunts was the smoky bar in the basement of the 1970s Intourist Hotel near the Kremlin, now the site of the Ritz-Carlton. There, Western would-be entrepreneurs seeking business deals mingled with shady criminal types, prostitutes and foreign students. It wasnt a place where youd want to spend much time, but you could buy as many big cans of Lowenbrau beer as you wanted if you could pay for them in dollars. And some foreign embassies gave weekly parties. One of the most popular was held at the German embassy, where most foreign passports got you in and beers cost two dollars. Arriving in Moscow had transformed me from an impoverished college student into royalty. In addition to the relative wealth my few dollars conferred on me, stories of my life in the land of freedom and plenty made me interesting to Russians no matter how boring I actually was. Utterly cynical about their government and society and no longer afraid of punishment by the authorities, the young people I met were keen to snap up any bit of knowledge I could offer about the West. The collapse of the Soviet systems mores and strictures, which took place far more quickly than most people realized at the time, gave them a great sense of personal liberty. Free time was spent foraging for food and drink to serve at parties, which were usually held in the apartments of parents summering at their dachas. Their crumbling world made life a great adventure. Outside Moscow, alcohol was even harder to come by. Visiting nearby Zagorsk, the site of one of Russias four most important monasteries, I spent a day exploring the beautiful town before spotting a state restaurant that was miraculously open. I was with my friend Kolyathe young television correspondent with whom Id soon travel to Vilniuswho persuaded a dark-haired waitress to seat us, which she did grudgingly, although we were the only patrons. Then she disappeared, leaving us to pore over a menu filled with a long list of the usual dishes: beef entrecote, pilmeni (dumplings), bliny, borsch. Having made our choices, we waited ravenously for the waitressin vain. After some time, it emerged that she and the rest of the staff were busy carting crates of beer from the kitchen to a van outside. Finally persuaded to approach our table, she patiently listened to our orders before sternly informing us that all the menus dishes were unavailable. What about starters? we asked hopefully. Those too. Okay, what about two beers? Now irritation blazed from her eyes. There was no beer.

Pointing to a waiter who was wheeling another load of crates out the door, Kolya adopted his sweetest tone, free of his usual irony in such cases. Darling, cant we just have a couple of bottles? Weve traveled here all the way from Moscow; surely you wouldnt want us to leave with a bad impression of your town. His charm produced a compromise: two bowls of thin borsch grudgingly brought to our table. The following year, 1992, when price controls were lifted and inflation skyrocketed, a dollar went from being worth twenty-seven rubles to two hundred, and the value would continue rising into the thousands. But now you could buy bottles of Pshenichnaia vodka from any number of Muscovites, many of them elderly, who desperately crowded around the entrances to train stations, metro stations and pedestrian underpasses by the hundreds, hawking food, drink, used clothes, toothbrushes, anything they could sell to make a few kopeks.

If alcoholism was a Soviet nightmare, it approaches the level of Armageddon today. Like computer-chip capacities, Russians alcohol intake has almost doubled every decade since the 1970s. After years of talk about imposing a new state monopoly on spirits (which private manufacturers would be obliged to use for producing their liquor), the government announced plans in 2010 to quadruple the tax on vodka over the following three years, a hike that would double the minimum vodka price to about six dollars per half liter, roughly a pint. This time the aim appears to be less to fill the treasurys coffersfor which oil and gas are now far more importantthan to finally do something about the drinking thats helping drive the average male life expectancy down to a level lower than North Koreas at a time when recent tax increases on cigarettes have helped push the number of smokers to historic lows in the United States. However, few believe the authorities can withstand the centuries-old temptation to earn as much as possible from the new vodka taxes. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, long considered the governments leading liberal, recently encouraged his fellow countrymen to smoke and drink more, saying they were the best things they could do to help the economy emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis. Those who drink, he said, are giving more to help solve social problems [by] boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates. There may well be another major explanation for the governments failure to take effective measures to stop the rampage of alcohol: its unwillingness to face the crippling problem with anything like serious resolve or action. Or the authorities may believe, as Catherine the Great is said to have remarked, that its easier to rule a drunken public. In any case, higher prices prompted by the new taxesalong with restrictions on nighttime sales and advertisingare already driving more Russians to follow the old pattern of drinking dangerous and unregulated samogon and other poisonous liquor surrogates. Historian Alexander Nikishin is among those who maintain that establishing a monopoly is the only real way to fight the countrys crippling alcoholism. But Nikishin also believes the lack of enough honest people in government would make it impossible to exert real control over alcohol production and consumption. The more control there is in our country, he says, the more corruption there is.

Vodka can be your friend or enemy, depending on the authorities attitudes. You can make a killing from it and lose your people. But the government would have to do far more than simply control alcohol production and sales to seriously change the role drinking plays in Russia. Leaving aside the cold weather, that old justification for drinking to excess, alcohol abuse has partly been an easy escape from the individuals pawn-like role in society. More than just the physical difficulties of climate and geography, its the states crushing oppression, the corruption, the virtual lack of hope for change that are still contributing to Russias traditional fatalism and resignation. From the book RUSSIANS: The People Behind the Power. Copyright (c) 2014 by Gregory Feifer. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.