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00:00Russia, famously known for its vodka and its culture of extreme intoxication.
00:04But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians,
00:07it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics.
00:11That's right. In the book Vodka Politics, Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State,
00:16author Mark Lawrence Schradt explores original documents and archival evidence
00:20to analyze how vodka is hardwired into the Russian political system.
00:24And Mark joins us now live on set.
00:26You are also an assistant professor of political science at Villanova.
00:30We are so happy to have you here.
00:31I stumbled across this book a couple of weeks ago.
00:33It's absolutely fascinating.
00:35But you preface it by saying this is not about an ugly stereotype.
00:39This is not.
00:40And that's almost led to why people don't dive into how much of an issue this has been for decades.
00:46From czars to Medvedev, people have tried to tackle this problem and come up short.
00:50What's going on here?
00:51Right. And thank you for having me.
00:53Of course.
00:53It's a fascinating topic and obviously something that's observed a lot of my time since I was a student back
00:59in Russia in the 1990s
01:00when the economy was in the tank and, you know, and just living there for a long time.
01:06You're just like, OK, well, there's something about this stereotype.
01:09And we've all heard this stereotype.
01:11But then you're sort of living it and you're like, OK, there's a lot of alcohol going on right now,
01:16a lot of vodka.
01:17And so I kind of wanted to hammer at why, you know, rather than just sort of avoiding the unpleasantness,
01:26diving into it.
01:27You know, and a lot of the times it's just prefaced as some sort of cultural stereotype.
01:32Oh, Russians just love it.
01:33And they don't.
01:34Right. I mean, it's not like they're just like sipping a vodka and then going, oh, what a great aroma.
01:39No, having a hard time choking down just like anybody else.
01:43But actually, I think it has to be more of a legacy of political and economic decisions that are at
01:50the heart of autocratic statecraft,
01:53kind of putting the interests, the financial interests of the autocratic state ahead of the well-being of their own
01:58people
01:58for generations upon generations through the czars, through the Soviets, and unfortunately straight on through the present day.
02:05Explain that a bit more.
02:07So the level of consumption is huge, like 15 to 16 liters per person per year, I think, is what
02:12I read.
02:12So people are consuming an incredible quantity of hard alcohol.
02:17You know, in another country, that might be seen as kind of a public health issue or concern.
02:21There it's not.
02:23It was.
02:24So during a period of time between, you know, Putin's first two terms and then there was that interregnum where
02:30Dmitry Medvedev swapped positions for four years.
02:33Briefly.
02:33Yeah, well, one of his big initiatives was an anti-alcohol campaign because he acknowledged that this is horrible.
02:40This is decimating our society.
02:42It's decimating our ability to field troops.
02:45It's decimating our tax base and all those sorts of things.
02:50So they tried to clamp down beginning about 2009 on alcohol consumption using what I would say are fairly progressive
03:01policies, you know, informed by public decision or by public health professionals around the globe and, you know, very incremental
03:10approaches, very well thought out.
03:11Little did he know, though, perhaps, that on the other side was that his president, Vladimir Putin, had actually been
03:22buying up and taking control of, personally, a very large percent of the Russian vodka market.
03:28And so a lot of those public health initiatives ended up focusing in on putting higher taxes, not on vodka,
03:36but on beer, which is lower alcohol, probably better than quality vodka.
03:42So it's just completely upside down.
03:44So even the public health initiatives were pushing more vodka on people, which is just bizarro land.
03:50It's topsy-turvy.
03:51But that almost kind of fits with what you talk about in the book, and that's throughout its history, kind
03:55of due to the way this was set up with grain production and with the advent of the tavern, vodka
04:00was used as a tool of the state.
04:02It was a big financial boom.
04:03Can you explain how that works?
04:04I mean, so much so that Tolstoy was a teetotaler, which I didn't know, and the Bolsheviks were vehemently anti
04:10-booze because it was such a weapon of the state.
04:13Right.
04:13And this is something actually is not just, it started, you know, my interest started in Russia, but kind of
04:18expanded out globally in subsequent research.
04:21But it's fascinating how many people throughout history, including American history, are noteworthy prohibitionists.
04:29So Tolstoy, Lenin, in the United States, Frederick Douglass, I would say, Abraham Lincoln, you could say Thomas Jefferson was
04:38America's first prohibitionist.
04:39So it's fascinating because ultimately the key to understanding sort of that anti-alcoholism, and you definitely saw it in
04:47the autocratic regimes in Russia, was that this is how the, and it didn't take like a rabid Marxist to
04:54point this out.
04:55This is how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
04:58And so it was very easy.
05:00Because you couldn't trade for it, right?
05:01You had to pay for vodka in hard currency.
05:03Right.
05:03You had to, and it was strictly forbidden to make your own outside.
05:08This was part of the czar's monopoly on the tavern trade.
05:14And so the tavern keepers were known as Selivalnyki, which means the kissers.
05:19They kissed a cross to vow that they would not dilute, that they would not interrupt the revenues of the
05:26state that were going to the czar.
05:28And so that, they were sort of the main interference points, or point of interface, I should say, between sort
05:34of Russian society and the Russian government.
05:37And that's, you know, essentially how you paid money into this whole system.
05:42You wrote this book before, Russia's first incursion into Ukraine, and some years have passed since then.
05:47And here we are in the middle of this war.
05:49And I'm curious, through the prism through which you've written this book, sort of how you're looking at this current
05:53conflict and the difficulty that we've seen reported that Russia has kind of fielding its army to continue to fight
05:59this war.
06:00Through this lens, what can we glean or what can we learn just about the kind of state of the
06:04conflict itself and the way that they're able to recruit people to fight in it?
06:08Right.
06:09And it's been interesting to kind of sort of watch it through that particular lens.
06:15In the early years of the conflict, the Donbass War in particular, you had the Euromaidan revolution in Kiev and
06:20then, you know, obviously the annexation of Crimea and sort of this low-scale war in the Donbass region.
06:26It was sort of a study in contrast because the Ukrainian side, which also has afflictions with alcohol and sort
06:34of the vodka as part of that historical trajectory, but also has a lot more sort of European cultural influences,
06:44historical influences from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the areas around Lviv and so on.
06:49The protests that were going on there were very orderly.
06:52In fact, they had, you know, areas that were self-policing in terms of making sure that we have sobriety,
06:59we don't want anything going wrong here.
07:01By contrast, the sort of inauguration of these rebels republics in the Donbass region by these pro-Russian separatists were
07:09just drunken Bacchanals, you know, and you had, you know, reporters on the scene reporting how everybody's drunk, everybody's falling
07:19apart on these sorts of things.
07:21And so, yeah, it was kind of an interesting contrast.
07:24It's like, all right, we've got it very clearly here that these are not the same protests and they're bringing
07:29different sort of historical baggage in those cases.
07:33But at some point, I mean, it impacts the functioning of the state because when you look at military, it's
07:37got to impact readiness.
07:38And when you talk about historically, even a function of the Soviet state, you write about these insane dinner parties
07:45that Stalin used to have in which he used to insist his ministers, who had work to do, would stay
07:50very late into the night.
07:51They would fake drunkenness early so they could try to go home and salvage the rest of their day.
07:56Talk about the work of this as almost a statecraft in an internal monitoring system.
08:01Because what was the goal, getting people drunk enough that they would spill their secrets or they would tell them
08:05if they were a spy?
08:07Yeah, there was certainly an element to that.
08:09And I remember...
08:10David, don't do this to me.
08:11I'm not telling you my secrets if we go drinking.
08:13Just water in that book.
08:14I don't know.
08:14I don't know.
08:15Yeah.
08:15No, like the opening scenes of the movie, Death of Stalin.
08:18I don't know if you've seen it.
08:18That's kind of what I was thinking as I was reading the book, yeah.
08:20When I saw that movie, I was like, did they read the first chapters of this book?
08:24But literally, I talk about it in the book.
08:26It was like a frat party with the devil.
08:30I mean, he's forcing everybody to drink with the intention of maybe divulging some secrets if they were secretly plotting
08:38to overthrow him.
08:39You know, sort of loose lips sink ships kind of thing.
08:40So, yeah, so there was kind of this idea of keeping one's potential opponents off base a little bit, whether
08:49that's in the Kremlin.
08:50But also, if you want to project that out in terms of sort of state-society relations, there's something to
08:55be said about, you know, keeping the people sort of drunk and off base and unable to sort of mount
09:01a challenge to your own authority in that way.
09:03So it works a little bit both ways.
09:06In the last few minutes we have here, let me just take advantage of you being a scholar of Russian
09:10politics and just to ask you how you're thinking about or viewing Vladimir Putin at this moment in time.
09:14I think there are a lot of folks who see him as maybe getting closer to having his back up
09:17against the wall.
09:19And I'm curious, looking at that kind of in the complement of history, how you're thinking about him in this
09:23moment.
09:24Yeah, it's, you know, I can't claim to have a direct line to Vladimir Putin.
09:29And I'm very suspicious of anybody who does claim to have that.
09:32But one of the things I constantly notice, especially in sort of Western media coverage, is this notion of, I'm
09:38calling it, it's like a village literature on sort of the beginning of the end of Putin.
09:44Interesting.
09:46And I wrote a piece, I think, for foreign policy a number of years ago, kind of tracing these.
09:50And I was finding beginning of the end of Putin, you know, stories going back to the Kursk disaster in
09:562002.
09:57So, you know, you can go all the way back.
09:58Oh, COVID, this is the beginning of the end.
09:59Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
10:01It's the second time we've used that this hour.
10:03But I think my position was always like, well, as a betting person, you know, you can always say, well,
10:08this is the beginning of the end.
10:09This is the beginning of the end.
10:10Well, every time you're going to be wrong, except for once.
10:13So it's better to be and take the opposite approach and say, this is probably not the end of Putin.
10:18And that way you can only be wrong once, which is the one way to look at it there.
10:24But as you look at the drivers that have fomented change in the past, what finally gets it to that
10:29breaking point?
10:30There's so little opposition left in that country.
10:33Even if Putin falls, what replaces him?
10:35And could that be worse?
10:36Right.
10:37And that's the key, I think, to a lot of this is that I think we take, especially in the
10:40West, we kind of project our notions of popular sovereignty.
10:44The sovereignty lies with the people.
10:45And then we have to keep the people placated, at least, you know, some degree of public approval, maybe not,
10:51you know, expressed through, you know, direct democratic initiatives or whatnot.
10:56But there still is a sense that, well, you know, if we can't push the Russian people too far or
11:01else they're going to rebel, I think we've passed that point where we're, that sovereignty is linked to the will
11:07of the Russian people.
11:08So nowadays you're seeing these lines of cars, you know, lining up, queuing up for gas and now the attacks
11:15on other ones.
11:17And everybody's just saying, well, where's the Russian people's breaking point?
11:20I don't think the Russian people are going to break anytime soon.
11:23All right.
11:24We're going to have to leave it there.
11:24Thank you so much.
11:25The book is Vodka Politics.
11:27Mark Lordstrad, thank you so much for driving in.
11:29We appreciate it.
11:30We appreciate it.
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