Vodka

If you were a History Buff like myself, you might have perhaps scoured and rummaged through history books. And inside those books you might find countless anecdotes, specifically on the role that alcohol and other addictive substances such as tobacco and drugs played in shaping societies throughout human history.

The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt paid their farm labourers in bread and beer. The British notoriously stipulated and monopolised the Qing Dynasty’s economy in the 19th century by illegally smuggling opium to its people. But no historic relationship between a society and an addictive substance is as iconic as Russia and vodka.

Russia has always been associated with vodka and vice versa. In fact, most Russian citizens would claim vodka as their national drink.


Despite their popularity, there is nothing special about vodka; it has no taste, nor flavour or smell. Chemically speaking, it is simply ethanol derived from wheat or rye, and later potatoes (40% alcohol, 60% water and other solvents). It is very cheap and so schematic and facile to produce; it enabled itself to be consumed en masse by millions of peasants, knights, and lords alike throughout Eastern Europe.

Legends say that vodka was first introduced into Russia in 1386 by Genoese ambassadors to Prince Dmitry Donskoy. They called it: ‘aqua vitae’, or the ‘water of life.’

At that time, the concept of a Russia did not exist; the landmass that is Eurasia were a set of small independent principalities and kingdoms until the infamous conquest by Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Ivan established a centralised, autocratic government based in the Grand Duchy of Moscow; an absolutist monarchy similar to that of the French Ancien Régime.

And as he built his state, the subject of the ever-increasing renown, of an inexpensive, intoxicating spirit was repeatedly brought up in his council. Vodka was all the rage, peasants lying on the streets of Moscow vomiting; serfs, workers, labourers and farmers remained constantly drunk and often rebelled against their masters.

Then.. he had an idea.

Ivan set upon an edict that banned all forms of production, manufacturing and sale of alcohol by peasants and declared it a royal privilege or restricted to noble houses loyal to the crown.

All alcohol was seized and now the property of the Tsardom. This meant that any acquisition of vodka or any sort of distilled spirits, had to come from the exclusive and direct purchase of said spirits from agents of the crown.

This was a guaranteed source of revenue for the Russian royal family; a monopoly on a commodity that everyone wanted/needed (at the time alcohol was household and very common, almost essential).

Throughout the centuries, the Tsars and Tsarinas maintained a syndicate or cartel, one that had total control and was essentially a spearhead in the command economy. They opened vodka-plant after vodka-plant pumping out cheap alcohol, whilst lining their own pockets.

This was a system so immensely profitable that even when Catherine the Great was rewarding lesser nobles for their service, she didn't reward them in land, serfdom, armies nor gold, but vodka. Yet, it wasn’t just the quantity of vodka, but also the exclusive licences and royal charters for its production and distribution. A monopoly that eventually evolved into an oligopoly which endured for nearly 428 years.

They meticulously controlled prices, ensuring a constant flow of cheap and readily available potato juice that kept the population drunk. The average citizen of the time wasted hard-earned money on vodka, became too intoxicated to contemplate their circumstances or organise protests. In their drunken state, they went home beating their spouses and children.

Obviously, you could see the red flags and the vicious cycle here. In the end, it is the peasant in service of ensuring the security of the regime they so blatantly despise.

And as much as this may sound like just a mere, little interesting historic piece on a long gone mercantile economic system. There is far more to it. Its effects still reverberate across Russia still to this day.

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“Alcohol is a poison
harmful to the soul and body
therefore it is a great sin to drink alcohol
and to offer it to others, and it is even a greater sin to produce and sell this poison”
-Tolstoy

Following the First Russian Revolution of 1905, Tsar Nicholas II rescinded his royal prerogative to an elected body. One of the first policies the newly inaugurated Russian Liberals and Social Democrats enacted was to combat the crippling alcoholism problems plaguing Russian society. The first step was to ask the famous and revered novelist to write a warning label to be printed on every single bottle of Vodka.

Alcoholism is a horrible disease; it increases blood pressure, inflamed and swollen blood vessels, kidney, pancreas, and liver failure that leads to an excess of fat cells creating deformed and abscessed abdomens. But far from trusty individual effects, alcohol is also part of a vicious social circle. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become an addict. Addiction is pre-conditioned on misery and despair. The alcoholic not only becomes more hopeless themselves; but will contribute to the misery and hopelessness of those around him. Perplexingly, addiction on the massive social scale creates social strife and misery while simultaneously disabling those affected by it to act against it.

This is why the drug trade today comes with violence, social decline, and disaffection of communities because it uses misery as an economic commodity.

It is because of this and largely forgotten today that the Russian Communist Party was in fact a Prohibitionist party, one that advocated for the banning of liquor. In early Soviet propaganda as well as in old Soviet movies, will you find this reflected in revolutionaries smashing liquor bottles as if they were chains that had constrained them.

Leninism was strictly prohibitionist, and proclaimed alcohol to be a vice by which the bourgeoisie subjugated and manipulated the proletariat. Consequently after the Bolshevik takeover, the vodka plants were all shut down and closed for a moment before Stalin seized power by purging & arresting an estimated 1.7 million people, and reopened them. He began production again and distributed them frugally amongst the national populace; he even ramped up production and ordered construction of new Vodka plants. Moreover, he also imported advanced brewing machinery from Nazi Germany. Stalin pretty much renovated the old Tsarist method of subsidised inebriation that the revolutionaries spent years to dismantle, renaming the main Vodka brand to the “People's Vodka”.

This series of events is commented on by George Orwell in his famous book, “Animal Farm” and an often overlooked scene. Where the animals in their revolution destroyed all the alcohol they found in the house of the Farmer Jones, except for Napoleon, who steals himself away with some liquor.

The newly rebranded Tsarist system lasted throughout the remaining 60 years of the Soviet Union’s existence. Its effects and repercussions were most overt and abysmal in the 1970s during the USSR’s exponential economic decline. There wasn’t much to work for, to celebrate and lionise over. Note that they were still fighting an already-lost war in Afghanistan; it was fundamentally a grim, hollow and disconsolate state. The once ideological, valorous zealots that were the Motherland’s citizens; were now forlorn and dejected.

And what happens when everyone in your country is depressed? That’s right! Sell more alcohol.

The recent HBO series Chernobyl did an excellent job at hinting to its audience, how by the late 1980s, the fractured Russian society had a deep-seated and systematic intemperance. The depictions of Stolichnaya Vodka bottles you see in the series were accurate to its real-life counterpart. You couldn't close them anymore once you’ve uncapped them; they were made that way because in production, the assumption was that the average Russian, once opening a Vodka bottle, would finish it in one sitting. Therefore, closing the bottle wasn't necessary.

The alcoholism problem reached such an extent that the Premier Gorbachev, in desperation, enacted a prohibition bill. Once again, it resulted in the mass closures of illegal vodka plants throughout the country; but later privatised and are owned by oligarchs who still sell the vodka at cheap prices. Some side-effects from this rash policy was the formation of countless, unregulated, underground bootlegging and moonshining distillation facilities across the country. Inevitably, several thousand Russians perished due to alcohol and heavy-metal poisoning.

Putin’s crony-ridden reign in specific, is a cabal and enterprise of scarce cherry-picked individuals who control entire sectors of the economy such as natural gas, electricity, machinery, farming, and of course alcohol production. And if one were to rebel against Putin, well… just look up Yevgeny Prigozhin. Currently, Russia's war against Ukraine has led to a surge in alcohol consumption in Russia, reaching a record breaking 2.3 billion litres in 2023.

From an autocracy, to monarchy, to aristocracy, to oligarchy, this virtually five-century old vicious cycle still persists and thrives to this day.

It is paramount to note that this is more than just a history lesson, let alone confined to Russia. Think of the ongoing opiate crisis in North America; the current response by medical professionals and large pharmaceutical corporations to social misery is to dish out pills to help people stomach through the days. If you have spent time exploring places like Los Angeles, San Francisco or Vancouver, you will know how effortless and quickly it is to find a Fentanyl dealer in the streets.