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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was "vodka." In the vast but secluded expanse of Russia, vodka gives and vodka takes away. At the start of the twentieth century, a third of the Russian Army was supported by the excise duties paid on the Smirnov brand alone. At the same time, vodka has inflicted more suffering on the country than any war has. Some fourteen thousand Russian soldiers were killed during the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan, but more than thirty thousand Russians die of alcohol poisoning every year. The yearly consumption of alcohol is higher here than anywhere else in the world (almost four gallons of pure alcohol per capita, at least half of it in the form of vodka), and vodka has scarred virtually every family, just as the Second World War and the repressions of Stalin's regime did. (The only thing I know about my mother's father, for instance--other than that he divorced my grandmother soon after they were married--is that he was an alcoholic.) The very mention of the word "vodka" triggers unpredictable behavior in Russians. It seems to punch a hole directly into the subconscious, setting off a range of odd gestures and facial expressions. Some people wring their hands; some grin idiotically or snap their fingers; others sink into sullen silence. But no one, high or low, is left indifferent. More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god. And, in 2003, that god will celebrate his five-hundredth birthday.
One day in the early nineteen-seventies, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was travelling back to Moscow from his government dacha in the village of Zavidovo. His driver that day was Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party. The two leaders were alone in the car, and Gromyko felt able to broach a sore subject. "Leonid Ilyich," he said, "something has to be done about vodka. The people are turning into alcoholics."
Brezhnev didn't answer. Five minutes later, Gromyko was regretting having raised the issue when Brezhnev suddenly replied, "Andrei, there's no way the Russian people can do without it."
I heard this anecdote from Mikhail Gorbachev--who had heard it from Gromyko himself--when I paid him a visit, earlier this year, to talk about the vodka anniversary. We sat in his sombre, English-style office on Leningrad Prospect, as his late wife, Raisa Maximovna, gazed down at us from a large oil portrait.
As everyone in Russia knows, Gorbachev disagreed with Brezhnev, and he became the only Russian leader in the history of vodka to launch a relentless campaign to eradicate it. "The statistics were appalling," he told me. "Injuries in the workplace, falling productivity, diminishing life expectancy, accidents on the roads and railways. In 1972, they discussed the problem in the Politburo, but deferred it. It was impossible to solve, because the state budget itself was 'drunk'--it relied on the income from vodka sales. Stalin set it up that way--temporarily, but there's nothing as permanent as a temporary decision. In Brezhnev's time, the 'drunken' component of the budget increased from a hundred billion rubles to a hundred and seventy billion--that was how much profit vodka brought to the state." He went on, "In the course of my career, I saw massive drunkenness in the Party. Brezhnev drank, especially at the beginning. Yeltsin even used the fact that he drank to attract women--'He's just the same as we are!' Women couldn't keep their hands out of his pants. But in the West they were afraid--he had his finger on the nuclear button."
In May of 1985, just two months after Gorbachev became the Party's General Secretary, he issued a decree entitled "On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism." He began his war on vodka by testing the public's commitment, with a survey that was carried out in two hundred of the country's leading factories. The factory workers responded that they were against prohibition but...
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