Vodka Politics (9 page)

Unlike Stalin’s ominously threatening toasts, Ivan often dealt with his detractors more swiftly and directly. On another occasion, tired of being forced to drink round after round, one imperial boyar, Mochan Mitkov, finally snapped. Flying into a rage, Mitkov wagged his finger and denounced the “damned” (
okayannyi
) tsar to his face. Infuriated, Ivan rose from his throne, grasped the
metal-tipped walking staff he kept by his side, and charged at Mitkov. Using the staff as a spear, the terrible Ivan ran him clean through, covering the banquet hall floor with blood. Collecting his wits and silently returning to his table, he left his henchmen to drag Mitkov’s disemboweled and broken frame outside to finish him off.
²⁵

Having witnessed such gruesome events firsthand, the straight-laced commander Kurbsky wisely fled for his life. It is fitting that four hundred years later, Sergei Eisenstein began his scathing indictment of Stalinist autocracy in his film
Ivan the Terrible II: The Boyar’s Plot
with Kurbsky’s defection. Centuries before Eisenstein and Khrushchev, Kurbsky was the first to highlight the pervasive use of alcohol in Russian autocratic government.

Even without violence, Ivan found drunkenness a terrific instrument of blackmail against his underlings. While his drunken boyars feasted, sang, and uttered slanderous and shameful things, Ivan often ordered his scribes to write down their words. The next morning Ivan would confront his normally erudite, hungover yes-men with the damning transcripts.
²⁶

Eisenstein was hardly alone in underscoring the “deadly parallels” between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. Both used terror as an instrument of state security and administration, both shared paranoid and homicidal personality traits, and both, it must be added, placed alcohol at the center of their statecraft as well as their personal lives.
²⁷
When in 1925 Stalin revived the imperial vodka monopoly to extract additional resources for the Soviet state, he was following a path blazed by Ivan’s monopolization of the
kabak
—or tsar’s tavern—in 1553. Ivan was perhaps the first to realize the tremendous potential of the liquor trade. As Englishman Giles Fletcher wrote in 1591, the annual rent from these drinking houses “yeeldeth a large rent to the Emperours treasurie” on the order of a few thousand rubles annually from each establishment.
²⁸
Their most effective use of alcohol, however, was keeping their rivals stupefied, suspicious, and divided.

As with Stalin, objecting to drinking was one of the offenses that drew Ivan’s ire, often ending in the gruesome death of the nobleman and even his family. To replace the scores of elites who met such horrific ends, Ivan promoted from the ranks of the lesser nobility flunkies who never dared cross him and instead encouraged his debauchery. Sycophants such as Alexei Basmanov, Ivan’s son Fyodor, Vasily Gryaznoi, and Malyuta Skuratov—who shared Ivan’s lust for torture—became his closest advisors and most reliable drinking companions.
²⁹
Together, these degenerate inebriates fed off one another, exploring new depths of drunkenness, cruelty, and depravity.

In the winter of 1564 Ivan suddenly and inexplicably abandoned Moscow, leaving to wander his lands aimlessly with his voracious, drunken entourage. After a long journey, they arrived at a small settlement north of Vladimir known
as Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where the paranoid Ivan ordered an unofficial capital constructed—hoping for safety behind fortified ramparts, moats, and high walls. No one could enter or leave without Ivan’s knowledge. At this new “court,” Ivan created a new inner circle—the
oprichniki
—led by Skuratov, Basmanov, and others known for their loyalty, cruelty, and capacity for alcohol. With ranks eventually swelling to over six thousand, the
oprichniki
were above the law: commissioned to hunt down and sweep away Ivan’s foes. Only the
oprichniki
could stand the piercing gaze of the tsar, and only with them did the demented Ivan finally feel at ease.
³⁰
Having kissed the cross and taken an oath “not to eat or drink” with the Muscovite boyars of old—even if they were relatives—the drunken marauders ravaged the Golden Ring territories northeast of Moscow. Noblemen were either executed or exiled along with their families; crops, forests, and entire villages were set ablaze; peasant men and children were tortured; women were raped and killed in alcohol-fueled orgies. Leading the
oprichniki
was the bloodthirsty Skuratov, who even strangled the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Philip II, to death with his own hands. No wonder the Skuratov character in Eisenstein’s
Ivan the Terrible II
was seen as such an obvious parallel to Stalin’s inebriate executioner and KGB head, Lavrenty Beria.

Behind the ramparts of Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar—together with his teenage son and heir, tsarevich Ivan—led the slaughter. A typical afternoon began with public beheadings followed by private sessions of excruciating torture. In the evening the tsar, tsarevich, and their thugs received the blessings of (terrorized) priests before yet another drunken dinner feast. Ivan the Terrible was pleased that he had so much in common with his eldest son: they got drunk together, swapped mistresses, and enjoyed the same hobbies: whipping and roasting educated men, pouring scalding wine on ambassadors, and unleashing wild bears on unsuspecting monks, all for sport.
³¹

While the thick walls of Ivan’s unofficial capital protected him from outsiders, they could not defend him from his own drunken neuroses. In the growth of his bloodthirsty and headstrong son Ivan saw a new rival—one who had much to gain from his demise. By 1581 Ivan had wholly convinced himself that his son was plotting against him. In a subsequent fight between the two, Ivan swung at his son with his pointed staff. The tsar recoiled in horror to find that his pike had pierced his son’s temple, which was gushing blood. Suddenly terrified to realize that he had just killed his son and the heir to the Russian throne, Ivan cradled the head of the tsarevich. For the last time regaining consciousness, the younger Ivan reportedly kissed his father’s hands, muttering, “I die as your devoted son and the most submissive of your subjects.”
³²

In the world-famous Tretyakov Art Gallery in downtown Moscow hangs Ilya Repin’s famed
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan
, which depicts the formidable tsar coddling the bloodstained and lifeless body of the tsarevich. In this moment, the eyes of the one who wrought so much horror on his people are themselves filled with dread, not simply for the death of a son—it is said—but also for the future and the end of the royal dynasty. When Ivan the Terrible met his inevitable end, the throne would now be left to his sickly and “weak-minded” son Fyodor, whom Ivan dismissed as “not fit to rule.”
³³
When Fyodor died without a male heir, the centuries-old Rurik bloodline died with him, ushering in Russia’s first “Time of Troubles”—marked by Polish invasions, civil war, economic chaos, peasant revolts, usurpers, and impostors.
³⁴
Of course it is doubtful that Ivan the Terrible foresaw such a collapse, but subsequent events highlight the importance of a strong leader as the linchpin holding together the political and economic institutions of the early Russian state. With the death of Ivan, that too was gone.
³⁵
Yet while the autocracy itself would be compromised, the primacy of alcohol within the autocracy would endure.

I
LYA
R
EPIN’S
I
VAN THE
T
ERRIBLE AND
H
IS
S
ON
. Oil on canvas. 1885. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

In March of 1584 the weary and demented tsar—fat from gluttony and aged beyond his years from drink—collapsed over a chessboard in his quarters. There was at once a great outcry: doctors called for vodka and
aqua vitae
to revive him while others called for marigold and rosewater. It was all for naught: Russia’s terrible drunken sadist was no more.
³⁶

Like all the grand dukes of Muscovy, the body of Ivan the Terrible is entombed in the Cathedral of the Archangel in the Kremlin. Yet unlike the graves of his predecessors, which litter the public sanctuary, Ivan’s tomb is hidden from public view behind the grand iconostasis, where he lies in seclusion alongside his sons Ivan and Fyodor. Yet perhaps the most fitting epitaph of Ivan’s life and reign is not on his grave, but in the writings of his confidant-turned-critic Andrei Kurbsky: “He did not force people to bring sacrifices to idols, but ordered them together with himself to be in concord with devils and forced sober men to drown in drunkenness, from which spring up all evil things.”
³⁷

4

Peter the Great: Modernization and Intoxication

In the hundred years following the death of Ivan and the end of the Rurik dynasty, Russia’s autocratic system plunged into chaos, only to slowly reemerge about a new royal family, the Romanovs. Through a succession of fragile leaders, Russia changed very little, before the late seventeenth century, when Peter the Great forcibly modernized Russia’s medieval cultural practices and byzantine political and economic institutions, turning Russia into a formidable European military power and a true multinational empire. Yet while many valorize Peter’s progressivism and modernism, one tradition that endured was the centrality of alcohol to Russian statecraft. In many ways, Peter had more in common with Ivan the Terrible and Russia’s medieval past than the popular “modernizer” image would suggest.

Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov, ruled for thirty of those tumultuous years (1645–1676). His major accomplishments consisted of quelling riots and rebellions across the country, including a series of tavern revolts in 1648. A quiet, pious, and temperate leader, even he utilized alcohol to coerce his courtiers into desired behavior. The English court physician Dr. Samuel Collins noted that while the tsar drank very little wine, he took great pleasure in seeing his boyars “handsomely fuddled.” From his throne in the banquet hall, Tsar Alexei “delivers out of his hand a
Chark
of treble or quadruble Spirits, which are able to take away his breath who is not accustom’d to them.”
¹
Those boyars who failed to attend morning prayer were unceremoniously “baptized”—dunked in water then forced to drink three draughts of vodka. Although the nobles detested, they rarely protested; instead they in turn made their foreign visitors and ambassadors as drunk as possible.
²

Tsar Alexei’s domestic tranquility was shattered by the death of his beloved wife Maria weeks after she bore him their thirteenth child. Understandably distraught, the tsar often left the cold, lonely palace to dine and drink at the
warm houses of his close friends. Maybe the alcohol had gone to his head, but at the estate of his advisor Artamon Matveyev, Tsar Alexei became enraptured by Natalia Naryshkina—Matveyev’s buxom servant who plied the sovereign with vodka and caviar.
³
In 1671 the two were wed, and the following year she bore him a son. While celebratory wines and fruits were distributed to military officers outside the Kremlin walls, inside the tsar himself poured the vodka for the nobles and officials, who toasted the health of the young Peter Alexeyevich Romanov.
⁴
An integral part of the alchemist’s wares, vodka was among the elixirs of health and vitality that the tsar took regularly, and he ensured that his wife and children imbibed it regularly as well.
⁵

With two older brothers—Fyodor and Ivan—ahead of him, it was unlikely that young Peter would ever ascend to the Russian throne. When the forty-seven-year-old Tsar Alexei died from a cocktail of ailments leading to kidney and heart failure, the nimble-minded, yet physically impaired Fyodor III was crowned tsar.
⁶
When he died at the age of twenty without a male heir, Russia was again thrown into crisis as the families of Alexei’s first and second wives vied for power, with much of the outcome determined by a disgruntled group of palace guards known as the
streltsy
, or “shooters.”

In the resulting Moscow Uprising of 1682, rival conspirators whipped up riots in the capital with rumors that the tsarevich Ivan had been strangled by the Naryshkin clan in order to place nine-year-old Peter alone on the throne. Joined by mobs of drunken peasants who rioted and looted Moscow, the
streltsy
mob burst into the Kremlin, slashing and hacking to death many powerful boyars, including his mother’s former guardian Artamon Matveyev as well as two of Peter’s uncles, who were butchered in the presence of the horrified tsarevich Peter. For days, Russia’s feuding royal families—and the entire Russian government—were held hostage by the rampaging
streltsy
.