The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
September 7, 2009 10:41 am In the News No CommentsIf there is one country on our pale blue dot that has done more over the centuries to wrassle its citizens’ drinking habits to the carpet and hog-tie ‘em, it’s Russia. And, time and again, no other country has failed more spectacularly.
Tsar Peter the Great, who himself had a monumental appetite for vodka but suffered from a Nixon-sized case of paranoia, tried to handcuff consumption in the hinterlands, where he worried that rebellion might arise at any second, by putting Russia’s entire vodka industry under royal control and meting it out to his untrustworthy subjects in carefully monitored doses. The people didn’t much care for Peter’s ham-fisted diktat. And where before the idea of rebellion had been little more than after-Pogrom chit-chat, it now ran amok through the countryside, and the people rose up in angry, sober swarms, demanding the Tsar to return their booze. And return it he did, in a big goddamn hurry.
A few decades later, the wacky duo of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin led many of those same people on a civic hayride into the Red Revolution, then thanked them for their support by—yep—declaring drunkenness incompatible with correct Soviet behavior, and taking control of the vodka business. Needless to say, the scheme didn’t work any better for the Reds that it had for Crazy Pete, and the State frantically gave the Workers back their cherished elixir. If they hadn’t, the Soviet utopia would’ve gone the way of Billy Beer before 1920. (Though they did manage to raze the original Smirnov—now Smirnoff—distillery, and erect a splendid Soviet-gray parking garage on the site. Bunch a twats.)
During the Perestroika years that preceded the USSR’s final whimpering collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev, as if he didn’t have, oh, like five gazillion bigger sturgeons to fry, once again starting fretting over Russia’s unquenchable thirst, and he came up with a plan to fix it. It was pretty much exactly the same plan as those undertaken by his predecessors, with one new 1990s-style twist—he claimed that his crackdown was born of his desire to protect Russian children. (I have no proof, but am nearly certain Gorby got that particular hair up his butt from watching M.A.D.D. commercials on illegal bourgeois television.) Unlike previous assaults on Russian morale, however, Gorby’s efforts met with a certain semblance of success. By the middle-90s alcohol sales had plummeted by 60 percent. But a few rough truths were lost in the resulting din of self-congratulatory caterwauling.
First, as anyone who had bothered to read a history book could’ve predicted, the people were pissed. The downturn in vodka production lead directly to lengthy waits on line for folks wishing to buy the stuff. Long bread lines were one thing. Long vodka lines, populated with cranky, bearded monsters looking for a little hair of the sobaka, were a whole other really scary and potentially dangerous deal. And then there was the fact that the decline in sales in no way indicated a decline in consumption. When faced with shortages, enterprising proles wasted little time assembling stills and making their own tipples right there in their homes (offices, schools). And since most of these nascent vodkamen didn’t have the first fucking clue what they were doing their product had a nasty tendency to blind or kill people. Some of the shit was so hazardous and foul, desperate inebriates started drinking cologne. Gorbachev probably saved lots of innocent Russian kids—by killing their parents.
Which brings us to last week and the plans announced by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev to curb per-capita consumption by at least 25 percent by 2012. But the funny thing is this: he’s trying to accomplish his mad goals by going after, not vodka, but beer. He wants to triple taxes on suds in the year 2010. His reasoning for focusing on beer? Well, beer, it seems, is a “gateway” alcohol that inevitably leads younger people to the horrors of vodka. (Sounds like the Medvedev government is being advised by the same pack of shameless logic-twisters who advise our leaders on marijuana.) So, naturally, if they price beer out of the range of most ordinary Russians, fewer will drink it, and fewer will succumb to that mind-warping formed by that dastardly potato juice.
Medvedev has another good reason for picking on beer instead of vodka, this one 100 percent political. Vodka is already taxed like a motherfucker in Russia, and a hefty share of those rubles go to governments in the outlaying regions of the country—the same regions, it turns out, that are home to a whopping-big number of vodka distilleries. If Medvedev hits vodka too hard, it’s the same as hitting those regional administrations. And he seems to know better than to tramp off down that road yet again.
Another way that this version of whack-a-mole alcohol policy differs from those that came before, is that this time, a disconnected Russian leader is joined in his jolly snipe hunt by groups of concerned, every-day Russian citizens (not that their ordinariness or, indeed, their concern, makes them any less goofy). These sorts of organizations have been popping up around Russia for the last couple of decades, but alcohol wasn’t always their primary concern. They cut their milk teeth during the Gorbachev years, when their rabble-rousing was centered almost entirely on cigarettes, and how to make Russians stop using them. Their tactics were positively freaky, man. Gangs of vigilantes prowled Moscow’s streets, and when they found a smoker they surrounded the poor prick and verbally abused him until he snuffed his smoke or found some other means of escape. I wonder if there are any statistics showing how often such meetings ended with one or more of the vigilantes getting an up close and personal introduction to the business end of a two-by-four? Doubt there are any such numbers, but I’ll tell you this: if they try the same shit on a table full of vodkinated steelworkers who haven’t been paid in 2 months, authorities will have to clean up those people with a shop-vac.
Watching how this story develops over the coming weeks and months is going to be interesting, and damn entertaining. History is not on Medvedev’s side. Shit, common sense is so far from his side it’s practically a concept from another dimension.
Oh yeah, I need to thank my good friend Lisa Hamilton for turning me on to Andrei Litvinov’s Newsweek article that inspired this little missive.
Keep checking back here, Dear Inebriates. Updates will be posted as they come (and I’m sober enough to use a keyboard.)
Cheers.
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