Vodka Politics (28 page)

10

The Pen, the Sword, and the Bottle

The sapient reader, to this point, has likely already discerned a particular affinity between the thesis that Russia’s feudal autocracy used vodka to both suppress and exploit the poor for the benefit of the state and the brash, anti-capitalist polemics of later generations of socialist revolutionaries. This begs the question: if vodka truly
was
how the imperial Russian state exploited its society, wouldn’t Karl Marx or some of his Russian followers have something to say about it? As it turns out, they did. In fact, just as it is difficult to discuss feudalism without Marxism, it is also tough to discuss both communism and the anti-tsarist literature of Russia’s “golden era” without the vodka that served as an unmistakable symbol of the corrupt autocracy itself.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” began German philosopher Karl Marx and his coauthor Friedrich Engels in their
Communist Manifesto
(1848).
¹
In its most basic form, Marxism argues that history can best be understood as conflict between the rich (bourgeoise) and the poor (proletariat), with the former exploiting the latter. In feudal societies—where the economic and legal power of a noble derived from the subjugation of his peasants—the links between exploiter and exploited were obvious. Marx argued that this exploitation continues into capitalist societies, where bourgeois landlords and factory owners owed their riches to the sweat and toil of the peasants and shop floor workers. As Marx’s theory of historical development metamorphosed into the political ideology of communism—promoting the overthrow of the bourgeois minority by the more numerous proletariat—the working classes would cast off those institutions that have long kept them under the boot of the rich capitalists.

Those institutions are many. Marx considered the state itself as merely a “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Even religion was an instrument of bourgeois domination: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” Marx said. “It is the opium of the people.”
²
The people had other opiates too, and alcohol was foremost among them. “Drink is the curse of the working classes” was a common rallying cry for both Marxists and temperance advocates,
who both preached abstinence as a cure for poverty. Others took a more tongue-in-cheek approach, instead siding with Oscar Wilde’s 1893 proclamation that “work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
³

Karl Marx never wrote much about Russia. Why would he? In his time, Eastern Europe was largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution and its inherent hardships and exploitations. Better to focus on places where capitalism and its abuses were most perverse—Britain, France, and Marx’s native Germany—where a working-class revolution seemed far more likely. Still, Marx did consider alcohol as one mechanism of subjugation. “The specific economic form in which unpaid labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude,” he wrote in
Das Kapital
, “as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production and hence all of its specific forms.”
⁴

Engels went further in
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
. His vivid, firsthand study describes the putrid residences and deplorable working conditions of Manchester and Liverpool and the resulting disease, decay, and immorality of urban capitalism. That the workers “drink heavily is to be expected,” Engels explained:

On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter.… And when their money is spent, the drunkards go the the nearest pawnshop [to] pawn whatever they possess.…When one has seen the extent of intemperance among the workers in England, one readily believes Lord Ashley’s statement that this class annually expends something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating liquor; and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic relations which follow may readily be imagined.
⁵

Not surprisingly, Engels lays the blame for drunken destitution solely with the system of capitalist exploitation that cares nothing for the enlightenment and happiness of the average worker. Along with Marx, Engels also highlighted the bourgeois state’s monopolization of the means of production—vodka production, in our case—as driving the dominance of the proletariat by the bourgeois state.
⁶
So even though Marx never wrote much specifically about Russia, many
educated eighteenth-century Russians read his general critiques of capitalism as describing the tsarist system to a tee.

In fact, an entire spectrum of opponents to absolute monarchy—from moderate liberals wishing for representative democracy to radical nihilists—all drew on Marx’s condemnation of capitalist domination. As opponents of tsarism, they likewise all suffered the heavy-handed wrath of Russia’s conservative autocracy. To sneak past government censors and avoid the suspicions of the
okhrana
—the tsar’s secret police—all manner of critics were forced to bury their anti-autocratic messages deep in their writing. Why do we still pour over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel about a double murder,
Crime and Punishment
? Partly because it is about much more than just a double murder! Literature could speak truth to power without the power necessarily hearing. This is why early revolutionaries—from Aleksandr Herzen to Nikolai Chernyshevsky—wrote both fiction and literary criticism. The “thick” literary journals in which social commentaries were published alongside fiction became conduits of revolutionary ideas. Indeed, Herzen’s journal
Kolokol
(
The Bell
) was the first to publish the
Communist Manifesto
in Russian, which unleashed a firestorm of debate in educated circles throughout the empire.
⁷

Just as literature provided a veil to criticize tsarism, highlighting lower-class drunkenness and exposing the corruption of the vodka administration constituted a frontal attack on the entire autocratic system. Not surprisingly, vodka politics was a popular theme in the “greats” of Russian literature.

In 1847, pro-Western Russian liberal Aleksandr Herzen emigrated from Russia, never to return. From self-imposed exile in London he became immensely influential as the first independent Russian political publisher. Believing political legitimacy lay with the people and that all oppression originated with the tsarist state, Herzen called for a genuinely democratic social revolution. Clandestinely smuggled and circulated in Russia, his journal
Kolokol
bashed the corruption of the tsarist system in general and the vodka tax bureaucracy in particular.
⁸

As was noted back in
chapter 8
, it was a series of scathing 1858–59
Kolokol
articles on the corruption radiating from the the vodka tax farm that made abolishing it a hot political topic. Just a few short years after the
Communist Manifesto
, the denunciation was unabashedly Marxist: “By tolerating and enabling the tax farmer, the government is consciously robbing the people—dividing up the spoils with the tax farmers and others who have participated in the crime.”
⁹

To be clear: it wasn’t just that the system bred corruption, but that the state actively promoted the poverty, drunkenness, and backwardness of its own people. “Upon closer inspection,” concluded the
Kolokol
exposé, “the treasury receives so little benefit in proportion to the losses of the people, that all would likely say with revulsion—was all of this worth the soiling of our conscience and honor?”
¹⁰
Even after such broadsides prompted the abolition of the medieval tax
farm system, writers of all political persuasions continued to use vodka as a call to reform the autocracy… or even overthrow it.

The Best, Worst Novel Ever

If Russians truly looked to literature for political cues, which writer was most influential? Leo Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Ivan Turgenev? Surprisingly, none of the above; arguably it was Nikolai Chernyshevsky and his novel
What Is to Be Done
?—“a book few Western readers have ever heard of and fewer still have read,” according to Stanford professor Joseph Frank. “No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, can compete with
What Is to Be Done?
in its effect on human lives and the power to make history. For Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s
Capital
, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.”
¹¹

An erudite revolutionary, Chernyshevsky coined the phrase “the worse, the better”—the worse the hardships and grinding poverty of the peasantry, the better were the prospects for socialist revolution. When it came to the serf question, for instance, Chernyshevsky advocated emancipation
without
land, resulting in “an immediate catastrophe” for the peasants and an instant crisis for the state.
¹²

Like Herzen, Chernyshevsky railed against the tsarist autocracy through his influential journal,
Sovremennik
(
The Contemporary
), which was read widely among Russia’s intelligentsia. Instead of writing from the safety of London, though, he worked in the Russian capital, within easy reach of the tsarist authorities. In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested on suspicions of subversion and tossed into solitary confinement in St. Petersburg’s island bastille—the famous Peter and Paul Fortress in the middle of the Neva River. The prison authorities saw no problem in granting his seemingly innocuous request for pen and paper to write a novel, and in four months, Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?
was done.
¹³

Perhaps “the worse, the better” described not only Chernyshevsky’s political philosophy but his literary merits as well, for the book has been universally panned—there is no real plotline or tension, and the environment and characters are stagnant. It has been called the worst novel ever written. Chernyshevsky himself even admitted that his novel contains neither talent nor art, but only “truth.”
¹⁴
Even Alexander Herzen, reading it years later, described it as an artistic failure: “What a worthless generation whose aesthetics are satisfied by this,” he wrote. “The ideas are beautiful, even the situations—and all this is poured from a seminarian-Petersburg-bourgeois urinal.”
¹⁵

On the surface,
What Is to Be Done?
is a stumbling narrative of a group of young Russians: the sympathetic Vera Pavlovna defies an arranged marriage to a man
of wealth and power to elope with a young medical student, Dmitry Lopukhov. Once freed from the patriarchal “tyranny” of the traditional Russian family, they adhere to strict equality between the sexes. Vera then falls for Lopukhov’s best friend, Kirsanov. True to his egalitarian principles, Lopukhov does not object and even fakes his own suicide so that Vera can marry Kirsanov, start a sewing commune, and secretly yearn for an even more bizarrely ascetic revolutionary, Rakhmetov. The end. That’s it.

The prison censor—apparently a less-than-sapient reader—leafed through the pages of Chernyshevsky’s dime-store romance, deemed it publishable, and turned it over to
Sovremennik
’s interim editor, who promptly lost the manuscript on a cab ride through the capital. Panicked, the editor took out an advertisement in St. Petersburg’s police newspaper pleading for its return, and in what must be the most incredible case of authoritarian-bureaucratic bungling, it was the detested tsarist police that not only found but also returned the most subversive, anti-government novel in Russian history.
¹⁶

The first installment of
What Is to Be Done?
appeared in
Sovremennik
in 1863 and was a smash hit. One revolutionary fan claimed there had been “only three great men in history: Jesus Christ, St. Paul and Chernyshevsky.” Georgy Plekhanov—founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia—asked “Who has not read and reread this famous work?” From his exile in London, the German Karl Marx taught himself Russian just to read the works of this “great Russian scholar and critic.”
¹⁷
High praise indeed.

“It had become the kind of book people who had given up all their other possession kept strapped to the inside of their peasant tunic,” explained one literary historian. Literary critics of Chernyshevsky’s day were baffled by the overwhelming popularity of such an awful book. They simply didn’t understand: “it wasn’t that the Chernyshevsky fans had bad taste in writing; it was that they didn’t care about writing. What they cared about was thinking, and thinking was what Vera Pavlovna and Chernyshevsky gave them.”
¹⁸