Alcohol in Russia

‘ Shto éto fakóye ? ’ (What is that?)

‘Obyavléniye o mobilizátsii, bárin.’ (The proclamation of the mobilization, sir.)

‘Does it mean it’s up to you, too?'

‘Yes, sir, I must report to-morrow.’ And the blue-green Slavic eyes rested mournfully, yet calmly, on the fatal square of paper.

‘Are you married or single?’ I involuntarily spoke aloud.

‘ Zhená yest ’ (There is a wife), he replied, without removing his eyes from the notice. The speakers were a young Russian peasant and myself; the place, the door of the public baths in the small suburb of St. Petersburg where I was living; the time, July 28, 1914. I had finished the last extra edition of the paper after dinner, packed my towels and clean linen in my hand-bag, and started leisurely off for the baths. As I neared the entrance, a small group of people gathered round a notice nailed upon the door attracted my attention, and the dialogue described above took place.

I whistled as I passed into the disrobing room of the thirty-copeck division of the baths. On the sheeted benches a rather larger number of people than was usual for Tuesday evening were sitting and talking earnestly. The baths are always most crowded on a Saturday. Things began to look serious. Up to that time I thought that the war scare would blow over; I had lived through the Agadir excitement in Germany a few years before.

Picking out a promising and bushy bunch of birch twigs, I passed on into the sweating-room. On emerging, I caught the banshchík (bath-attendant), as he was hurrying by. ‘ Can you wash me, Ivan?’

‘Yes, bárin, but be kind enough to wash your own hair; I have to leave very soon.’

As I lay stretched out on the wooden bench and he was scraping my skin with a hempen motchálka, I threw him the question at hazard, — ‘What is your hurry?’

‘ I must pack my things so as to appear before the military authorities,’ he replied.

Arriving home, I discovered the maid in tears: her lover had just been in to say good-bye. He, too, was summoned.

I went to bed in a serious mood; the war seemed very near.

Three days in a peaceful Finnish village on a visit to friends followed the preceding dialogue. On my return to Petrograd the tingling excitement of the first days of the war overpowered me. No one did any work for the first month. Reading newspapers was the sole employment of the literate part of the population; being read to, the occupation of the uneducated. Surprises came thick and fast. The day after my return I happened to go into the buffet of the station to have a glass of kvass (cranberry soda) before the train started. Suddenly my jaw dropped. The little oblong brass tray on the counter, elevated above the rest of the dishes on slender legs, where the vodka glasses stood, was still there, polished to the last degree of brightness. Bottles and glasses, however, had vanished. Beermugs were absent from the scene, and the spigot was out of the beer-keg. A thirsty crowd surrounded the counter, but was comforting the inner man with soft drinks exclusively.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘No liquor of any sort is to be sold until further notice,’ the attendant replied, shortly.

I had somehow missed seeing the decree in the papers. Then it suddenly dawned upon me that on my walk that day from the station to the library I had not seen one drunken man: one usually met at least a dozen.

The news was stunning. To grasp its purport fully, one must remember that the oldest historian of the Russian people declares that the chief joy of his nation is to drink. This statement will receive the unqualified assent of any one who has ever visited the Muscovite realms. In every settlement, from the great capitals down to the most remote villages, the green sign of the kazyónka (vodka shop) formed a prominent, feature of the landscape. The clean, bare, whitewashed interior, with its grating of heavy wire netting, free of tables and chairs, its floor strewn with corks, its walls spotted with red wax where the seals had been ground off the bottles against the boards by the drinkers, left an indelible imprint on the mind of every observer.

These vodka shops were run by private individuals who got their license and their supplies from the government. That same habit, which was rotting the Russian race to the core, afforded one of the chief sources of public revenue, and supplied the funds which enabled the Empire to maintain those mighty masses of troops that made its western neighbors tremble. We must not, however, be too critical concerning the Russian administration in regard to this matter. The government monopoly of the manufacture and sale of vodka had been introduced by Count Witte, not only as a financial measure, but also with the intention of reforming the abuses which had crept in when private concerns and corporations had been allowed to dispose of their product more or less freely. The government sold its vodka at a certain fixed price, and guaranteed to the consumers a definite quality.

The Russian realized perfectly well the evil effect of the use of vodka upon his fellow countrymen. We must not share the belief, disseminated by the books of dilettante travelers, that everyone in Russia was a hard drinker. Far from it: certain very considerable sections of the population did not drink at all. Such were the Mohammedans, to whom the prophet of Allah had forbidden the juice of the grape; such were the sectarians among the orthodox, who refrained on principle. Many others as well did not indulge, either from distaste or from conscientious scruples. In fact, statistical evidence shows that the people of the Russian Empire consumed decidedly less alcohol per capita than the peoples of many other European countries.

What then, were the factors which complicated the problem in Russia, and increased the destructive power of the demon rum? I believe, in the first place, that the inherent characteristics of vodka itself had something to do with the way things developed. Vodka is a colorless fluid made from potatoes, which contains about forty per cent of alcohol. It is not a mixture of alcohol and water, which is very disagreeable to the palate, but weak spirit distilled to that particular degree of strength direct from the mash. Two qualities were

produced — the first grade about two thirds higher in price than the second. It was the national drink of Russia par excellence. One should not infer from this statement, that no other alcoholic beverages were in use in Russia: by no means. Vodka, however, headed the list as to the amount consumed, and formed the almost exclusive tipple of the peasantry.

The chief evil connected with the use of vodka was the excessive cheapness of the drink itself. A tchétvert (somewhat over a gallon) of the cheaper sort cost two rubles ($1.04). As its intoxicating power was about the same as that of whiskey (perhaps a bit less) it follows that a man could obtain in Russia for the same amount about four times as much strong drink as in America. This extreme cheapness stimulated the spread of the drinking habit, which found only too favorable a field among the lower classes. The ignorance and miserable conditions which one so often finds among the peasants irresistibly impelled them to seek forgetfulness and release from their squalid surroundings in the fumes of alcohol.

The prohibition of the sale of vodka at the outbreak of hostilities came like a bolt from the blue. One report has it that the Emperor himself was responsible for the decision: others make the Grand Duke Nicholas its sponsor. The original decree suspended the sale of vodka and other intoxicants during the period of the mobilization proper, that is, for about six weeks. At the expiration of this time, in response to the popular demand, the municipalities were allowed to decide whether they wished prohibition — partial or complete. In the country districts the decision was dependent on the will of the governor. The sudden cessation of the sale of liquor, combined with the excitement attendant upon the mobilization, led to vodka riots in some of the villages, where the kazyónki were plundered. These did not extend to the towns, where police control is stronger, but were local and episodic in their nature.

Many of the municipalities, filled with enthusiasm for the new movement, decreed total prohibition. Moscow forbade the sale of liquor from the very beginning of the war. Other places tried various systems of partial prohibition. In Petrograd, for example, they started by permitting restaurants of the first class only to sell spirituous liquors. After about a month of this, the stronger beverages, such as brandy and vodka, were struck from the list; a limit of eighteen per cent alcohol content was established. This period lasted for six weeks; then the city adopted total prohibition.

The Russian government deserves much credit for undertaking a step of such serious social and moral importance in the face of the economic troubles which were sure to result from it — at a time, moreover, when every surplus penny was urgently needed. As was pointed out above, the yearly income from the vodka monopoly was colossal (about $250,000,000 per annum), and formed the backbone of the military budget. This revenue ceased automatically, and a great number of distilleries and glass-blowing plants throughout the country were forced to close down and throw their men out of employment. None the less, the government made its decision and the great majority of the population of Russia heartily approved of it.

The immediate results of the prohibition legislation were most striking, even to the most casual observer. First and foremost was the speed and smoothness with which the mobilization of the army was carried out. The riotous scenes which marked the entraining of the troops at the outbreak of the RussoJapanese war were entirely absent on this occasion. Pictures of the soldiers are ineffaceably stamped on my memory: the streets, cars, and trains were full of them. Sometimes in full uniform, sometimes with only a khaki coat, sometimes with only a cockade in the cap, they went hither and thither, singing the swinging soldiers’ songs, with mothers, sisters, wives, sweethearts,and children hanging on their arms or trotting beside them. How many bitter partings took place in those few days! One could not go out on the street without seeing heartrending scenes. Every train which left the station was surrounded with tearful women, and the screech of the whistle was mingled with their wailing. What would these scenes have been had vodka maddened the crowd ?

I remember particularly one such parting, of which I was the unwilling witness. As I went out from the garden gate on the way to the near-by station, I chanced upon a group of three people. The young soldier, evidently a workman, with only the first signs of a moustache on his upper lip, was clasped in the arms of his old peasant mother, who was crying and sobbing bitterly. Beside them stood the father, a whitehaired old moujik holding his hat in his hand, the tears streaming down his furrowed cheeks. The boy disengaged himself from his mother’s arms, knelt, and the father made the sign of the cross over him twice, then kissed him upon either cheek and upon the lips. The mother did the same. At that instant the train came roaring into the station.

‘Run, hurry, Ványa! ’ said the father.

The boy embraced his mother once more, seized his bundle, and rushed blindly away. The bába’s moans rose to a shrill wail, but the old moujik took her in his arms. ‘God gave, and, if He wills, he will return,’ said he. As I gained the train, I saw the pair, immovable, watch the cars roll off.

The reduction of drunkenness on the streets was another matter which impressed everyone. It was the writer’s custom to walk through the centre of Petrograd each day, to reach the place of his employment. On this stretch of two miles, before the war, he would not fail to meet at least a dozen drunken men. But they were not the only characteristic phenomena. On the banks of the canals stood or leaned upon the railings scattered figures of loafers and vagabonds. They were not like the lazy American loafers of our middle western towns; they were not the cheerful semi-tropical lazzaroni of the Neapolitan alleys; neither were they the grave do-nothings of the cities of the Nearer East. They were a worn and listless tribe, in filthy garments, whose lined and colorless faces, inflamed eyes, and dull looks betrayed their unceasing worship at the shrine of Bacchus. Saying nothing to each other, doing nothing, they gazed at the sewage-flecked waters of the Móïka and the Fontánka or at the blank walls of the buildings, without thought and without initiative. They seemed to typify all the hopelessness and misery of the life of the lower classes in Russia.

At the outbreak of the war this floating population was either absorbed by the army or found some employment. The loafers and beggars disappeared from the streets. The cessation of drinking had a remarkable physical influence upon those bodies of new recruits who were called to the colors during the summer and autumn of the year 1914. The number of cases before the police courts of assault and battery, rowdiness, and drunkenness decreased to about one third of their former number. In the villages was registered a significant reduction in the number of fires, which have always been the scourge of the country settlements.

This preliminary stage of soberness lasted for about two months. The tremendous excitement of the first days of the war had keyed everybody’s nerves to such a point that even the drunkard did not feel the need of stimulants. It was as if the country had been suddenly plunged in cold water. Once, however, the first stimulus had died away, and the full gravity and import of the struggle had come to be recognized, people gravitated back to their old habits. At first sporadically, then regularly, drunken men began to appear on the streets.

The means to satisfy this craving were obtained either illicitly or through substitutes. Concerning the illegal traffic, little need be said here. If one needed liquor and knew how to get it, it could be obtained — at an exorbitant price. The police have done what they could, however, to suppress the trade, and have had a certain amount of success in their efforts.

The problem of the use of substitutes has proved much more difficult to deal with. The patent-medicine habit can never attain the degree of extension in Russia which it has in this country, because druggists’ preparations containing alcohol can be sold there only on a physician’s prescription, except in minimum quantities. Other and more deleterious compounds, however, have come in to fill the gap.

The three substitutes for vodka which are most widely used in Russia are eau de cologne, furniture polish, and denatured alcohol. Cologne is not very popular. In the first place, it is very expensive just now, and secondly, no matter what flavoring extracts are added to it, it is impossible to disguise the taste of the perfume. Furniture polish is more popular, but is much harder to obtain. It is impossible to buy it at present unless one presents a warrant from the police stating that the buyer really is a cabinet-maker or a carpenter. The polish is distilled so as to separate the alcohol; sometimes it is merely stirred with a flat stick until the shellac adheres to the latter.

Far more widely used and far more deleterious in its effect is the denatured spirit. This is not wood-alcohol, but pure spirit (95 per cent proof), with an admixture of wood-alcohol, acetone, ketone, and a dash of dye. The admixture amounts to about five per cent of the fluid volume, and is supposed to make it impossible of use for drinking purposes. The inventive Russian, however, gets around this very cleverly. I vividly remember a conversation which took place on a suburban train running out of Petrograd one cold night in December of last year. I was wedged in with three soldiers in the hard seat of a chilly third-class carriage. Just as the train started, in bolted a great sturdy fellow bearing in his arms a big bottle of denaturate, not of the usual pale blue color, but with a sea-green tinge.

‘Aha, brátsy,’ says he, ‘just slide your big feet out of the way, and let me slip this where it won’t be broken.’

We complied. He puffed for a while; then one of the soldiers asked, ‘How can you drink such rot?’ nodding at the bottle.

‘Oh,’ replied the other, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘ you ’ve got to know how. Only fools get hurt; a healthy man is benefited.’

Our skeptical expressions led to further explanations, and the big stranger launched out into a half-hour’s lecture on the preparation and consumption of hanja. This word signifies in Russian a pious hypocrite with concealed vices. He got his denaturate at a certain place in town, he told us, ‘because somehow it seems to taste better from there.’ Actually, I discovered, it was distilled by a private company, and probably contained less denaturating material than did the government product. This, he went on to say, is filtered through charcoal, which removes some of the admixture. It is then drunk in the form of a highball, with cranberry soda.

‘Of course,’ declared our informant, ‘you can take too much. Some crazy peasant will drink a glass of pure denaturate, and — it’s all up with him. Well, one less fool in the world. But look at me: two glasses a day’s my measure. I’m healthy. I make lots of money now. I spend far less and feel much better than when I drank vodka.’

He certainly did look healthy enough, but whether the credit was to be given to an unusually tough constitution, I cannot undertake to say. There are many others who are not so temperate as he. The absorbed attention with which the soldiers listened to the speaker seemed to show that they were much impressed.

The manufacture of this dangerous mixture is astonishingly widespread throughout the larger towns in Russia. One frequently sees in the newspapers that a fire occurred in the flat of such and such a workman, while the occupants were engaged in brewing hanja. Some ladies of the writer’s acquaintance had been very active in assisting the wives and families of the reservists who had been called to the colors. Finally, a small house was rented in which ten families were established at a nominal rental, while every effort was made to find employment for their members. One fine evening, some of the ladies on the committee decided to pay an unexpected visit to their charges. To their horror, they discovered no less than six out of the ten families engaged in the preparation of hanja. The police were summoned, and on making search, discovered letters from the husbands of the women commanding their wives to manufacture hanja as it is ‘ a very profitable business.’

I have touched thus far on some of the more immediate effects of the prohibitory legislation; now for some of the larger aspects of the problem.

The beneficial effect of the suppression of vodka is particularly apparent in the villages. Only those who have lived in the Russian villages, who have conversed with the men as they sit in the tea-houses of an evening, or with the girls as they take their noon-day repose under the hedges, who have lived with the peasants and shared their joys and sorrows — only these, I say, can really grasp what the cessation of the sale of vodka can mean to the villages as a whole. Before the war the peasant ‘drank up the harvest.’ Practically all of what he ate he raised himself (except tea and sugar), but the money which he received for the sale of his surplus grain he converted into alcohol at the vodka shop. Not only the old people had their dram, but the children too were given a piece of bread dipped in vodka at their meals.

Last year the writer had occasion to make a business trip through one of the northern governments. We came to a miserable little hamlet, where there were only twenty-three ‘ courts ’ (dvorý), that is to say, peasants’ houses with the outbuildings. Several families inhabit them, as married sons usually live with their parents. It came out in the course of the conversation that the income of the village kazyónka (vodka shop) for the year preceding the war had been 23,000 rubles ($12,060) — thus averaging over one thousand rubles per house!

The peasant realizes the advantages of prohibition perfectly well — even if he is a heavy drinker; and the bába (peasant woman) in particular prays that the vodka shop will never be opened again. Some unusually interesting statistics were published by the Moscow government zemstvó. They are particularly full and accurate, and give a reasonably good cross-section of the situation as it appears at the present time. Those villages which are located near the towns (especially Moscow) use the substitutes to a considerable extent. Those farther away brew beer (brága) for themselves. This latter habit, however injurious to the health its products may prove, at least does not have the same serious economic results as the consumption of vodka. Supposing the peasant does brew himself a keg of beer now and then, he does not utilize all his surplus cash in this manner. The shadow of the law hangs over him as well. The younger adult male population has been drafted for the army, which materially reduces the number of drinkers.

The increased productive and laboring powers induced by the cessation of drinking has made itself manifest in the ability which the women and old men have shown in planting and harvesting the crops. No doubt the communistic structure of the Russian village has aided the peasants by enabling the burden of the absent ones to be evenly distributed among those who remain, but the abolition of vodka has had its share in the work — and its share is not the least.

With the townspeople the case is somewhat different. For them the possibility of obtaining any one of the three substitutes is always present. It is a serious question whether the increased prosperity among the urban lower classes really compensates for the increase in the consumption of hanja and the other substitutes, with their toxic and demoralizing qualities. There can be no doubt that the workmen are putting in longer hours, that the productive power of the individual has been increased, and that a very considerable portion of the population is now putting money aside, which had never dreamed of saving in peaceful times. It is extremely hazardous, however, to assume that all this is due solely to the abolition of vodka: the altered circumstances of war-time have given rise to many other factors, which contribute toward this end.

As regards the thinking class (the intelligentsia), their feelings are mixed. They run in general exactly parallel to the opinions held about prohibition in this country. Some people look at the evil effects of the use of substitutes, and pronounce an unfavorable verdict. This is, up to a certain point, quite justifiable. The heavy drinker has not been reformed by a legislative decree; he has only had his task of obtaining liquor made more difficult for him. Others — to my mind the far-seeing ones — consider the benefits which the abstention has conferred upon the lower classes, and the rise in economic prosperity which has resulted from it. The most startling development in this line has been the increase in the amount of popular savings. The average rise per month during the war has been about five million rubles, which to a considerable extent explains the remarkable success of the internal loans raised by the Russian government.

To sum up the situation is a matter of considerable difficulty. Impressions vary with the person, and in such matters the available statistics are scanty and uncertain. Personal observation has led the writer to believe that on the whole the measure has been of great benefit to Russia. The peasant has been the gainer rather than the townsman. The latter has too many opportunities to get hold of the various substitutes, but the peasant’s condition is vastly improved. Even the city dweller has been benefited. While the steady drinker has continued to obtain his stimulant in one form or another, the occasional drinker has far less temptation now. The situation was better, in the writer’s opinion, when beverages with a low percentage of alcohol were allowed to be sold. Such is evidently the belief of the Duma, which has recently (July, 1916) passed a bill forbidding the sale of liquors containing more than twelve per cent of alcohol. This will give the steady drinker an opportunity to satisfy his thirst. Vodka, however, has disappeared, and the next generation stands a good chance of growing up without its corroding influence.